Facebook Takes Down Abreu Report at Indirect Behest of Dutch Prosecutors

As Abreu Reported on the 21st of January in our article -- Five Eyes Alliance Targeting Facebook Using "Cloaked" Accounts -- private companies were creating surreptitious Facebook accounts to steal a person's entire picture gallery, to gain intelligence about a targets' friends, movements, most frequented establishments, etc. 

After painstakingly deleting his nearly 1000 friends, one of our writers learned that it was not possible for him to delete 4 "cloaked" accounts. A source confirmed that the private companies targeting Facebook users kept these accounts inactive, only reactivating them when ready to steal information from an unsuspecting target. Mathematical analysis puts the odds of detecting these accounts during the brief period when active at 1 in the 1000s, meaning that a substantial number of Facebook users are friends with an espionage proxy account that they could never detect.

In our January 21st article, we specified that the source of our information came via New Zealand. In that article, we also clarified that the countries had been changed to protect our source.

One week after our article, the Canadian government, citing a massive data breach, temporarily stopped sharing some information with the Five Eyes Alliance. The Intercept reported that: 

Mutual sharing of intelligence
"Jean-Pierre Plouffe called out the electronic spying agency for risking Canadian privacy in his annual report. Plouffe wrote that the surveillance agency broke privacy laws when it shared Canadian data with its allies without properly protecting it first. Consequently, he concluded, it should precisely explain how Canadian citizens’ metadata — information about who a communication is to and from, the subject line of an email, and so on — can and can’t be used."
 
Once the Canadian government confirmed our writer's biggest fear, he promptly deactivated his account, transferring control of Abreu Report's Facebook page to another user. The person to whom the page was transferred activated her account nearly a decade ago, but yesterday, just one week after being given the task of managing our Facebook page, Mark Zuckerberg's team sent a message asking for an identity document to verify if our manager was using her real name.

The prospect of providing Facebook with her real name, address, and national identity number proved too invasive for our manager, and she deleted her Facebook account. Deciding that the risk to the privacy of our employees was too great, Abreu Report decided not to transfer the account to another employee, thereby terminating our relationship with the American social media giant.

Further, Abreu Report is currently the target of a campaign by police detectives in the Netherlands who have attempted to identify the writer(s) of two of articles on our newspage. In a 20-page investigation compiled by Amsterdam police detectives against our website and which may be used as part of an indictment by Dutch prosecutors, images alleged to be from a Google+ account affiliated to our newspage are used as evidence against our website.

This 20-page proto-indictment was made available to Abreu Report by Willem Jebbink, the lawyer of one of our editors, and it proves without a reasonable doubt that detectives have made substantial efforts to identify our writers through social media, efforts which no doubt have been redoubled as a result our continually-increasing investigative capacities.   

In Facebook asking the social media manager of our Facebook page to identify herself, they are essentially doing the job of Dutch detectives, and potentially leading our social media manager to be charged as the writer of the offensive, now-censored article that has caused extreme ire amongst Dutch investigators but has been fully ignored by the mainstream media. Mr. Jebbink is the top free-speech lawyer in the country, and has in the past summoned the King of the Netherlands to testify if he was insulted by the speech of his subjects; they know it's going to be very hard to legally suppress our investigative reporting. 
 
Thus, Facebook has essentially become the King's social media company, and is now busy in concert with Dutch prosecutors to suppress our website via channels other than legal. If you're not a regular reader of our newspage, you may believe that an "obscure" Reddit user broke the "conspiracy theory" about Oxitec's connection to Zika. 

However, if you compare the dates and the similarities to our articles, it becomes apparent that the mainstream media is completely suppressing the facts about where stories originated. Even our October, 2014 story about the Islamic State's plan to sink cruise ships in the Mediterranean has been recently rehashed by The Telegraph as if it were a new plot that they suddenly learned about via NATO channels, when it was in fact Abreu Report analysis of the terror group that led to the conclusion that ISIS' goal was to sink cruise ships as they expanded into Libya. 

Now ISIS is in Libya, the Canadian government admits that they overshare with the Five Eyes Alliance, and Facebook is cracking down on cloaked accounts, but most so-called "reporters" today are afraid of analyzing terrorist videos or doing research on Wikileaks, can't properly search Google or Reddit, and willingly swallow disinformation from their government sources and therefore give people only an partial picture of the "truth." 

Here at Abreu Report, however, we're not afraid of performing a very thorough search through all available means in our mission to get to the bottom of a story. We don't have the resources of the fat cats in the mainstream media, but when we research a story, we don't coward away from looking at all the sources so we can give our readers all the facts possible.

It's only a matter of time until Abreu Report is suppressed in other mediums, but that won't deter our investigative journalism.