Last week, an expert told Congress we had spread "conspiracy theories" about censorship, but we hadn't. And now, yet another whistleblower has come forward with new files showing direct US Defense Department involvement in a mass censorship scheme. They're explosive.
Pentagon Was Involved In Domestic Censorship Scheme, New CTIL Whistleblower Files Show
Slack messages show direct involvement of FBI, DOD, and DHS employees in a mass online censorship scheme deliberately misrepresented as “cybersecurity”
by @galexybrane
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testifes before the Senate on October 31, 2023 (Photo by Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty Images)
Last week, Public and Racket published the first CTIL Files, which revealed the origins of the Censorship Industrial Complex in offensive tactics developed by US and UK military contractors.
Now, a second whistleblower has come forward with Slack messages showing far greater government and military involvement in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) than we had previously discovered.
The CTIL Slack “disinformation” channel and the “law enforcement escalation” channel included current and former FBI employees, as well as personnel from the Michigan Cyber Command Center, the US Defense Digital Service (DDS), and at least one European government.
DDS is headquartered in the Pentagon and was founded by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in November 2015. DDS’s website states, “The Department of Defense has a secret weapon.”
The Department of Defense told Public that it combined DDS with other agencies. “DDS merged with three other organizations to form the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) back in Feb 2022. CDAO is not currently involved with CTI and we do not have situational awareness on project participation which predated that merger,” a spokesperson said.
As for the CTI League, it claimed to serve an essential function, cybersecurity, protecting hospitals and healthcare systems from serious threats.
However, according to the new whistleblower, “The essential function of CTI League was largely duplicative of other free and paid threat services available to health care defenders.”
Justin Frappier, who worked for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), wrote on his profile, “The opinions expressed here are my own as an analyst, and not those of CISA, or the US Government unless otherwise stated.”
But Frappier put the CISA seal as his profile image and was an eager participant in the CTI League. When he first joined CTIL, he asked if the group was “consolidating a list of disinformation resources to validate.” A CTIL member replied, “Yes, we are working on that. There is a whole Disinfo gathering [and] analysis operation happening in another group connected to CTI-League, which we’re working to incorporate as a threat stream.”
Responded Frappier, “That’s awesome, I think it’s amazing to see this happening at scale, long overdue but massive effort.”
Note: we redacted the files to protect identities of individuals who did not appear to play a leadership role.
These messages suggest that a government employee explicitly sought out a way to use the group for anti-disinformation activities and initiated access to these activities. Frappier contributed 573 messages to the “disinformation” channel of the Slack group.
CTIL’s disinformation team referred to using the “law enforcement escalation” channel. This channel had an FBI Cyber Crime employee and Montana’s Chief Information Security Officer (who now works as a Director at the Center for Internet Security, a CISA-funded non-profit that manages information sharing for DHS). It is unclear how often CTIL’s disinformation league sent escalations to this channel.
One member of the disinformation team, Andras Iklody, worked for a Luxembourg government computer security initiative at the time of CTIL’s activities, according to his LinkedIn. Iklody previously worked for NATO. Iklody appears to have set up a disinformation channel for CTIL in the Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP) that he helped develop.
MISP is funded and sponsored by the European Union, and the Covid disinformation channel CTIL used was vetted by MISP. According to Sara-Jayne Terp, a leader of CTIL’s disinformation team, the Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT) framework was added to MISP. The group, Terp said, was also inputting the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Lab’s disinformation taxonomy.
When Terp explained that the group would be using MISP, Frappier responded, “I can’t tell you how exited [sic] I am that we got this up and running. I am really looking forward to what this is going to be. I think it has been long over due, and many as you said are working on similar issues, however tying it into MISP is INGENIOUS. I can’t believe I never thought of it before, and have been working with MISP for like 5 years.”
The new whistleblower’s files provide insight into the group’s inner workings, which Terp described as a “parallel effort.” Neither we nor the whistleblower know what the “parallel effort” refers to.
In these new files, Eric Brogdon, a cybersecurity director for a private firm, and others appear to have attempted to interfere with physical gatherings, with Brogdon implying that he had the ability to get social media users suspended.
When one member shared news about a call for anti-lockdown protests, Brogdon responded, “Let me see if I can get the Facebook user suspended.”
When asked about the incident, Brogdon sent to Public an XKCD comic strip, which argues that the First Amendment does not prevent private Internet companies from censoring speech.
But if Facebook took action on this post, it could have been a direct violation of the user’s free speech rights, and perhaps even right to assembly, given the involvement of government officials in CTIL.
Other files previously obtained by Public showed that Tom Sear of the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Joint Special Operations University was also a member of the disinformation team.
No other leading participants in the CTIL responded to our requests for comment.
Once again, we are confronted with the question: what was really going on with CTIL?
Why were individuals associated with foreign governments, Special Operations, NATO, and DOD all participating in an operation to censor and influence US citizens?
Please subscribe now to support our award-winning investigative reporting and to find out!
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The mainstream media insist governments didn't censor us, but they did. Not only that, military & intelligence agencies waged disinformation and psychological operations against us on Covid's origins, vaccines, Hunter Biden's laptop, etc. Counterterrorism became counterpopulism.
Here is the proof that the US and UK militaries and intelligence agencies, fearing populism, turned the tools of counterterrorism against people in the US, Britain, and around the world:
US and UK military and intelligence agency, agent, and asset involvement in mass censorship was illegal, which is why they tried to hide it as "cybersecurity."
World leaders say they care about climate change, but they don't. If they did, they wouldn't be shutting down nuclear plants and blocking natural gas production. In truth, they're in the grip of an anti-human ideology and profit from keeping energy scarce & expensive.
John Kerry says he wants to shut down coal plants to reduce carbon emissions, but doing so will force Africans, Indians, and others to burn wood and dung, which is far worse than coal. What's more, he opposes cheap natural gas, even though it's what reduces carbon emissions
US emisisons declined 22% between 2005 - 2020, with 61% of the reduction from the switch from coal to natural gas.
Natural gas reduced carbon emissions too much, so "environmentalists" fought to stop it.
The question of whether emissions rise or fall depends on natural gas
Global leaders say they care about climate change, but they don't. They fly private jets while making energy expensive. And now, a new study finds environmental activism is strongly associated with narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.
Climatism Has Gone From Virtue-Signaling To Vice-Signaling
Hypocrisy is how weak leaders flex their power
The world is making great progress in transitioning away from fossil fuels, but more must still be done, world leaders and the news media agree. The urgency comes from climate change, which is worse than ever. And nobody cares more about climate change than world leaders and the news media.
That’s all nonsense, of course. Fossil fuel use overall has steadily risen, while the largest part of the 22% reduction in carbon emissions by the United States from 2005 to 2020 came from a fossil fuel, natural gas, replacing coal. Carbon emissions peaked and declined in rich nations decades ago and were flat, globally, over the last decade.
Climate change is real, caused mainly by humans, and something we should seek less of, all else being equal. True sustainability requires leaving fossil fuels behind one day. And many, if not most, of the people attending this week’s climate summit are well-intentioned.
But climate change is neither the end of the world nor our most serious environmental problem. Transitioning from fossil fuels to nuclear will take 50 to 100 years at a minimum. And while many of the people attending climate talks are sincere, they are also pursuing an agenda that is making energy scarcer, more expensive, and more environmentally destructive, given the rejection of low-carbon nuclear power and the embrace of wood-burning by Germany and other European nations.
Nuclear makes electricity cheap, and renewables make it expensive. Average household electricity prices in the European Union in the first half of this year increased from €25.3 to €28.9 per 100 kWh compared with the same period last year, while natural gas prices rose from €8.6 to €11.9 per 100 kWh — the highest prices ever. Nuclear-heavy France has significantly lower electricity prices (€23.2 per 100 kWh), while nuclear and hydro-heavy Sweden had smaller price increases than the rest of Europe.
During last year’s climate talks, there were over 300 private jet trips, while this year, German Chancellor Scholz, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and Vice President Kamala Harris all traveled by private jet, with Sunak, his foreign secretary, and King Charles taking individual planes.
Flying on private jets to a climate conference to announce plans to make energy even more expensive for working people is bread-and-circuses, except there’s no bread, and the circus consists of rich people celebrating their wealth, morality, and superiority.
Consider a recent New York Times real estate article celebrating the virtues of a millionaire couple who bought a second home, a beach home, and demolished it so they could build a larger, $7 million one.
Needless to say, their environmental impact would have been far smaller had they simply kept, and better-insulated, the older house. The best part? The New York Times published the article in the “Living Small” section.
The moral of the story is that it’s no longer good enough for the New York Times to celebrate the ruling class for being rich. The Times now celebrates the rich for being moral, too. “Everything you hate about climate change virtue signaling in the most absurd story you'll read this year” is how Alex Berenson describes the piece.
Except it’s not virtue-signaling, it’s vice-signaling. We have gone from lamenting climate hypocrisy to celebrating it.
A new study in the peer-reviewed journal, Personality and Individual Differences of 839 German environmental activists suggests we shouldn’t be surprised. It found a strong association between environmental activism and “the dark triad traits,” which are Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism, as well as left-wing authoritarianism (i.e., antihierarchical aggression, anticonventionalism, top-down censorship).
“Most of these associations,” wrote the author, “remained significant after controlling for Big Five characteristics, demographic characteristics, political orientation, and right-wing authoritarianism. These findings suggest that environmental activism, in addition to its potential positive outcomes, may also have a dark side in terms of activists' personality.”
Even Greta Thunberg is acting out. In 2019, she melodramatically told U.N. delegates, “How dare you?” accusing them of virtue-signaling. Last summer, someone posted this video of her making fun of that speech.
Please subscribe now to push back against climatism and to read the rest of the article!
Many people insist that governments aren't involved in censorship, but they are. And now, a whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance.
CTIL Files #1: US And UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan For Global Censorship In 2018, New Documents Show
Whistleblower makes trove of new documents available to Public and Racket, showing the birth of the Censorship Industrial Complex in reaction to Brexit and Trump election in 2016
by @shellenberger @galexybrane @mtaibbi
US military contractor Pablo Breuer (left), UK defense researcher Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp (center), and Chris Krebs, former director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS-CISA)
A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Combined, they offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the “anti-disinformation” sector, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex.
The whistleblower's documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques.
"Lock your shit down," explains one document about creating "your spy disguise.”
Another explains that while such activities overseas are "typically" done by "the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense," censorship efforts "against Americans" have to be done using private partners because the government doesn't have the "legal authority."
The whistleblower alleges that a leader of CTI League, a “former” British intelligence analyst, was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a "repeat of 2016."
Over the last year, Public, Racket, congressional investigators, and others have documented the rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex, a network of over 100 government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that work together to urge censorship by social media platforms and spread propaganda about disfavored individuals, topics, and whole narratives.
The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship, with the National Science Foundation financing the development of censorship and disinformation tools and other federal government agencies playing a supportive role.
Emails from CISA’s NGO and social media partners show that CISA created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in 2020, which involved the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and other US government contractors. EIP and its successor, the Virality Project (VP), urged Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to censor social media posts by ordinary citizens and elected officials alike.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of government-sponsored censorship, it had yet to be determined where the idea for such mass censorship came from. In 2018, an SIO official and former CIA fellow, Renee DiResta, generated national headlines before and after testifying to the US Senate about Russian government interference in the 2016 election.
But what happened between 2018 and Spring 2020? The year 2019 has been a black hole in the research of the Censorship Industrial Complex to date. When one of us, Michael, testified to the U.S. House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex in March of this year, the entire year was missing from his timeline.
An Earlier Start Date for the Censorship Industrial Complex
Now, a large trove of new documents, including strategy documents, training videos, presentations, and internal messages, reveal that, in 2019, US and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework. These contractors co-led CTIL, which partnered with CISA in the spring of 2020.
In truth, the building of the Censorship Industrial Complex began even earlier — in 2018.
Internal CTIL Slack messages show Terp, her colleagues, and officials from DHS and Facebook all working closely together in the censorship process.
The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.
In the spring of 2020, CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as anti-lockdown narratives like “all jobs are essential,” “we won’t stay home,” and “open America now.” CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also did research on individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags like #freeCA and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios. The group also discussed requesting “takedowns” and reporting website domains to registrars.
CTIL’s approach to “disinformation” went far beyond censorship. The documents show that the group engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote “counter-messaging,” co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups.
In one suggested list of survey questions, CTIL proposed asking members or potential members, “Have you worked with influence operations (e.g. disinformation, hate speech, other digital harms etc) previously?” The survey then asked whether these influence operations included “active measures” and “psyops.”
These documents came to us via a highly credible whistleblower. We were able to independently verify their legitimacy through extensive cross-checking of information to publicly available sources. The whistleblower said they were recruited to participate in CTIL through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by DHS.
The FBI declined to comment. CISA did not respond to our request for comment. And Terp and the other key CTIL leaders also did not respond to our requests for comment.
But one person involved, Bonnie Smalley, replied over Linked in, saying, “all i can comment on is that i joined cti league which is unaffiliated with any govt orgs because i wanted to combat the inject bleach nonsense online during covid…. i can assure you that we had nothing to do with the govt though.”
Yet the documents suggest that government employees were engaged members of CTIL. One individual who worked for DHS, Justin Frappier, was extremely active in CTIL, participating in regular meetings and leading trainings.
CTIL’s ultimate goal, said the whistleblower, ”was to become part of the federal government. In our weekly meetings, they made it clear that they were building these organizations within the federal government, and if you built the first iteration, we could secure a job for you.”
Terp’s plan, which she shared in presentations to information security and cybersecurity groups in 2019, was to create “Misinfosec communities” that would include government.
Both public records and the whistleblower’s documents suggest that she achieved this. In April 2020, Chris Krebs, then-Director of CISA, announced on Twitter and in multiple articles, that CISA was partnering with CTIL. “It’s really an information exchange,” said Krebs.
The documents also show that Terp and her colleagues, through a group called MisinfoSec Working Group, which included DiResta, created a censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT). They wrote AMITT by adapting a cybersecurity framework developed by MITRE, a major defense and intelligence contractor that has an annual budget of $1 to $2 billion in government funding.
Terp later used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization then employed in “countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe.”
A key component of Terp’s work through CTIL, MisinfoSec, and AMITT was to insert the concept of “cognitive security” into the fields of cybersecurity and information security.
The sum total of the documents is a clear picture of a highly coordinated and sophisticated effort by the US and UK governments to build a domestic censorship effort and influence operations similar to the ones they have used in foreign countries. At one point, Terp openly referenced her work “in the background” on social media issues related to the Arab Spring. Another time, the whistleblower said, she expressed her own apparent surprise that she would ever use such tactics, developed for foreign nationals, against American citizens.
According to the whistleblower, roughly 12-20 active people involved in CTILworked at the FBI or CISA. “For a while, they had their agency seals — FBI, CISA, whatever — next to your name,” on the Slack messaging service, said the whistleblower. Terp “had a CISA badge that went away at some point,” the whistleblower said.
The ambitions of the 2020 pioneers of the Censorship Industrial Complex went far beyond simply urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to put individuals on blacklists.
The AMITT framework calls for discrediting individuals as a necessary prerequisite of demanding censorship against them. It calls for training influencers to spread messages. And it calls for trying to get banks to cut off financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events.The timeline of CISA’s work with CTIL leading up to its work with EIP and VP strongly suggests that the model for public-private censorship operations may have originated from a framework originally created by military contractors. What’s more, the techniques and materials outlined by CTIL closely resemble materials later created by CISA’s Countering Foreign Intelligence Task Force and Mis-, Dis-, and Maliformation team.
Over the next several days and weeks, we intend to present these documents to Congressional investigators, and will make public all of the documents we can while also protecting the identity of the whistleblower and other individuals who are not senior leaders or public figures.
But for now, we need to take a closer look at what happened in 2018 and 2019, leading up to the creation of CTIL, as well as this group’s key role in the formation and growth of the Censorship Industrial Complex.
“Volunteer” and “Former” Government Agents
Bloomberg, Washington Post and others published credulous stories in the spring of 2020 claiming that the CTI League was simply a group of volunteer cybersecurity experts. Its founders were: a “former” Israeli intelligence official, Ohad Zaidenberg; a Microsoft “security manager,” Nate Warfield; and the head of sec ops for DEF CON, a hackers convention, Marc Rogers. The articles claimed that those highly skilled cybercrime professionals had decided to help billion-dollar hospitals, on their own time and without pay, for strictly altruistic motives.
In just one month, from mid-March to mid-April, the supposedly all-volunteer CTIL had grown to “1,400 vetted members in 76 countries spanning 45 different sectors,” had “helped to lawfully take down 2,833 cybercriminal assets on the internet, including 17 designed to impersonate government organizations, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization,” and had “identified more than 2,000 vulnerabilities in healthcare institutions in more than 80 countries.”
At every opportunity the men stressed that they were simply volunteers motivated by altruism. “I knew I had to do something to help,” said Zaidenberg. ”There is a really strong appetite for doing good in the community,” Rogers said during an Aspen Institute webinar.
And yet a clear goal of CTIL’s leaders was to build support for censorship among national security and cybersecurity institutions. Toward that end, they sought to promote the idea of “cognitive security” as a rationale for government involvement in censorship activities. “Cognitive security is the thing you want to have,” said Terp on a 2019 podcast. “You want to protect that cognitive layer. It basically, it’s about pollution. Misinformation, disinformation, is a form of pollution across the Internet.”
Terp and Pablo Breuer, another CTIL leader, like Zaidenberg, had backgrounds in the military and were former military contractors. Both have worked for SOFWERX, “a collaborative project of the U.S. Special Forces Command and Doolittle Institute.” The latter transfers Air Force technology, through the Air Force Resource Lab, to the private sector.
According to Terp’s bio on the website of a consulting firm she created with Breuer, “She’s taught data science at Columbia University, was CTO of the UN’s big data team, designed machine learning algorithms and unmanned vehicle systems at the UK Ministry of Defence.
Breuer is a former US Navy commander. According to his bio, he was “military director of US Special Operations Command Donovan Group and senior military advisor and innovation officer to SOFWERX, the National Security Agency, and U.S. Cyber Command as well as being the Director of C4 at U.S. Naval Forces Central Command.” Breuer is listed as having been in the Navy during the creation of CTIL on his LinkedIn page.
In June, 2018, Terp attended a ten-day military exercise organized by the US Special Operations Command, where she says she first met Breuer and discussed modern disinformation campaigns on social media. Wired summed up the conclusions they drew from their meeting: “Misinformation, they realized, could be treated the same way: as a cybersecurity problem.” And so they created CogSec with David Perlman and another colleague, Thaddeus Grugq, at the lead. In 2019, Terp co-chaired the Misinfosec Working Group within CogSec.
Breuer admitted in a podcast that his aim was to bring military tactics to use on social media platforms in the U.S. “I wear two hats,” he explained. “The military director of the Donovan Group, and one of two innovation officers at Sofwerx, which is a completely unclassified 501c3 nonprofit that's funded by U. S. Special Operations Command.”
Breuer went on to describe how they thought they were getting around the First Amendment. His work with Terp, he explained, was a way to get “nontraditional partners into one room,” including “maybe somebody from one of the social media companies, maybe a few special forces operators, and some folks from Department of Homeland Security… to talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way so that we can collaborate better, more freely and really start to change the way that we address some of these issues.”
The Misinfosec report advocated for sweeping government censorship and counter-misinformation. During the first six months of 2019, the authors say, they analyzed “incidents,” developed a reporting system, and shared their censorship vision with “numerous state, treaty and NGOs.”
In every incident mentioned, the victims of misinformation were on the political Left, and they included Barack Obama, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and Emmanuel Macron. The report was open about the fact that its motivation for counter-misinformation were the twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and the election of Trump.
“A study of the antecedents to these events lead us to the realization that there’s something off kilter with our information landscape,” wrote Terp and her co-authors. “The usual useful idiots and fifth columnists—now augmented by automated bots, cyborgs and human trolls—are busily engineering public opinion, stoking up outrage, sowing doubt and chipping away at trust in our institutions. And now it’s our brains that are being hacked.”
The Misinfosec report focused on information that “changes beliefs” through “narratives,” and recommended a way to counter misinformation by attacking specific links in a “kill chain” or influence chain from the misinfo “incident” before it becomes a full-blown narrative.
The report laments that governments and corporate media no longer have full control of information. “For a long time, the ability to reach mass audiences belonged to the nation-state (e.g. in the USA via broadcast licensing through ABC, CBS and NBC). Now, however, control of informational instruments has been allowed to devolve to large technology companies who have been blissfully complacent and complicit in facilitating access to the public for information operators at a fraction of what it would have cost them by other means.”
The authors advocated for police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship, across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved.
The report proposed a plan for AMITT and for security, intelligence, and law enforcement collaboration and argued for immediate implementation. “We do not need, nor can we afford, to wait 27 years for the AMITT (Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques) framework to go into use.”
The authors called for placing censorship efforts inside of “cybersecurity” even while acknowledging that “misinformation security” is utterly different from cybersecurity. They wrote that the third pillar of “The information environment” after physical and cybersecurity should be “The Cognitive Dimension.”
The report flagged the need for a kind of pre-bunking to “preemptively inoculate a vulnerable population against messaging.” The report also pointed to the opportunity to use the DHS-funded Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) as the homes for orchestrating public-private censorship, and argued that these ISACs should be used to promote confidence in government.
It is here that we see the idea for the EIP and VP: “While social media is not identified as a critical sector, and therefore doesn’t qualify for an ISAC, a misinformation ISAC could and should feed indications and warnings into ISACs.”
Terp’s view of “disinformation” was overtly political. “Most misinformation is actually true,” noted Terp in the 2019 podcast, “but set in the wrong context.” Terp is an eloquent explainer of the strategy of using “anti-disinformation” efforts to conduct influence operations. “You're not trying to get people to believe lies most of the time. Most of the time, you're trying to change their belief sets. And in fact, really, uh, deeper than that, you're trying to change, to shift their internal narratives… the set of stories that are your baseline for your culture. So that might be the baseline for your culture as an American.”
In the fall, Terp and others sought to promote their report. The podcast Terp did with Breuer in 2019 was one example of this effort. Together Terp and Breuer described the “public-private” model of censorship laundering that DHS, EIP, and VP would go on to embrace.
Breuer spoke freely, openly stating that the information and narrative control he had in mind was comparable to that implemented by the Chinese government, only made more palatable for Americans. “If you talk to the average Chinese citizen, they absolutely believe that the Great Firewall of China is not there for censorship. They believe that it's there because the Chinese Communist Party wants to protect the citizenry and they absolutely believe that's a good thing. If the US government tried to sell that narrative, we would absolutely lose our minds and say, ‘No, no, this is a violation of our First Amendment rights. So the in-group and out-group messaging have to be often different.”
A Stanford group said the government didn’t fund it to censor anyone. But it did. Newly released files show that Twitter, pre-Musk, censored Republicans at the request of Stanford Internet Observatory, and that US taxpayers funded it, adding insult to injury. We have the proof.
After we testified before Congress, Stanford Internet Observatory denied everything. That was a mistake. After months of refusing to turn over key documents, Congress finally forced them to do so. They proved that what we had said was true, and that they had lied.
A US government-funded group at Stanford said its work was "nonpartisan," but it wasn't. A newly released tranche of files, exclusive to Public, show that it demanded censorship of Republican elected officials, but not of Democrats, for making equivalent claims of election fraud
Government-Funded Stanford Group Successfully Urged Censorship Of Republicans But Not Democrats For Equivalent Claims
Both Republicans and Democrats claimed election fraud, but Stanford Internet Observatory and Twitter only sanctioned Republicans
by @shellenberger & @galexybrane
Stanford Internet Observatory Founding Director Alex Stamos (left) and Research Manager Renée Diresta (right)
The US government-funded Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) claims that its 2020 Election Integrity Project (EIP) and its 2021 Virality Project (VP) were “non-partisan research coalitions.” They did not discriminate against Republicans or conservatives, SIO insists.
But a new tranche of SIO files subpoenaed by the House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, Mark Green (R-TN), and Homeland Security Subcommittee for Oversight Chairman Dan Bishop (R-SC) reveal that SIO singled out Republicans for censorship, even though Democrats engaged in similar kinds of inaccurate or misleading speech.
One member of Congress singled out for censorship was alarmed to learn of the pattern. “In striving to silence duly elected Congressmen and prevent them from communicating with constituents,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Public, “this government-funded censorship network has shown itself to be a far greater threat to our representative democracy than any foreign nation.”
Representatives from Stanford Internet Observatory did not respond to a request for comment.
To see the pattern of partisan behavior, we have to go back to November 2020, when the EIP was well underway.
At 5:58 am, November 4, 2020, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-SC) tweeted, “The Silicon Valley Cartel is in on the STEAL! Censoring our President while DEMOCRATS work overtime to STEAL THIS ELECTION! I need you to join me in the fight to STOP THIS.!”