THE BLOBS INFORMATION WAR
We are living in the Information Age, and have been since the Military’s DARPA PROJECT , that we now call the Internet, was handed to private corporations to connect us all to each other digitally.
Thus was born Silicon Valley and the Technolibertian Cyperphunks and Neoreactionaries. I will discuss them in a separate post. But all you really know is they promote Freedom to eliminate or minimize the State so that Big Corporations can take over and end Democracy. Thats going to take more explaining than I have time for in this post though, so lets keep it simple
For now I would like to focus on Information Warfare and how it ties in with Russia Gate that was used to build the Censorship Industrial Complex exposed by Mike Benz and Matt Taibi
But first, it is important to understand that Information War is a Means to an End. The goal is the destruction of American and European Culture which is the essence of Western Civilization and the End of Freedom and Democracy. It is in fact a War on Culture with Weaponized Information and Memes while silencing opposition through Censorship
The basic unit in a message in culture jamming is the “meme.” The term was coined and first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), to describe how ideas spread across cultures. The inference is that, by analogy, memes are for culture what genes are for humans. Memetics is therefore analogous to genetics, where memes can be generated or manipulated to alter human culture.
Cultural DNA is made of Memes rather than Genes. Human DNA contains Virus DNA, while Memes are also found in Media Viruses as “replicating information patterns: ways to do things, learned elements of culture, beliefs or ideas” . These are created in Information Warfare Laboratories to spread rapidly in the Cybersphere, so as to Memetically modify or destroy remnants of our culture that was created in the Enlightenment and replace it with the Dark Enlightenment and the elimination of Freedom and Democracy
Very few people have immunity to these Weaponized Memetic Viruses transmitted via the Media, although they can be convinced they are by hiding out in one of the Sorcerers Circles created to trap those fleeing from the Chaos of a disintegrating Culture. Within these circles is a safe Fake Reality with likeminded people that poses no threat to the Techno-ELITE Engineers, since each Circle is at war with Other Circles who think differently, oblivious to the Reality of their world and seeing only what their hyper-reality (fake reality) allows them to see.
https://pete843.substack.com/p/the-sorcerers-circlegnosis-and-hermeticism
They seek to erase the State and Democracy and establish a Technocracy with ELITE MONARCHS ruling over their designated Kingdom and Serfs much like in the DARK AGES. Technology allows them to bring forth a Dark Enlightenment, tailored to each Techno-Monarchs Taste, from a Digital Orwellian 1984 to Huxleys Brave New World
The Dark Enlightenment will be no more peaceful than the last Renaissance, as each Techno-Monarch seeks more Power over the other
Those who can control the Information will Rule the World and like Sauron will seek to end Humanity and replace us with Transhumans and genetically modified sub-human species and robots to serve them . The Cyberworld is the Battleground for the Information War that will lead to this Dystopia
Even before the Internet concepts like Mind War were already considered as part of Psychological Warfare
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino joined the original Church of Satan in 1969, becoming one of its chief officials by 1975 when he founded the Temple of Set
He was in Military Intelligence, U.S. Army, and qualified as a Special Forces officer, Civil Affairs officer, and Defense Attaché.
Michael Aquino and another U.S. Army colonel, Paul Vallely, were co-authoring an article for Military Review.
The article, titled "From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory," allegedly endorsed some of the ideas published in a 1980 Military Review article by Lt. Col. John Alexander, an affiliate of the Stanford Research Institute, a hotbed of Tavistock Institute and Frankfurt School "New Age" social engineering.
Aquino and Vallely called for an explicitly Nietzschean form of warfare, which they dubbed "mindwar." "
And what is "mindwar?" For Aquino, "mindwar" is a permanent state of strategic psychological warfare against the populations of friend and foe nations alike.
"In its strategic context, mindwar must reach out to friends, enemies and neutrals alike across the globe ... through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth. These media were, of course, the electronic media—television and radio. “
Aquino argues, mindwar must target the population of the United States, "by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest.... “
Rather it states a whole truth that, if it does not now exist, will be forced into existence by the will of the United States."
Aquino would later be caught up in a series of pedophile scandals involving the sexual abuse of hundreds of children, including the Franklin scandal, and children of military personnel serving at the Presidio U.S. Army station in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In 2016 Michael Aquino published a book titled Mind War. He is also author of Temple of Set. He died in 2019 a month after Kary Mullis.
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-War-Michael-Aquino/dp/1635241294
Back to the Internet.
To start off the Internet was all about Freedom. Pretty much anything was available. There was little censorship. As the Internet spread to other countries, authoritarian countries sought to control Information. The USG played a leading role in developing tools to make the Internet Free in these countries, such as VPN , Tor, Cyberlockers and Secure Mobile Communication
The USG and their Global Partners took an interest in knowing who was discussing what so decided to focus domestically on Surveillance rather than Censorship.
The problem was Americans had this funny idea about Freedom and Privacy which were linked, and laws prevented them from surveillance without a warrant. So they needed to create a threat that would get them the support needed to change the laws and allow mass surveillance
The War on Terror provided the justification and Support. Thanks to the Patriot Act, much of which was drafted in the wake of the OKC bombing by Biden and others, the door to all communications was open to the USG
The USG decided it needed Total Information Awareness.
They needed something like Sauron’s All Seeing Eye and a Palantir whose users would see only what Sauron wished them to see.
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This is what the goal was for the Internet, but we were a long way from that in 2004 , when a few things happened to change that.
In an attempt to build on these two post-9/11 objectives simultaneously, the US national-security state attempted to institute a “public-private” surveillance program so invasive that Congress defunded it just months after its creation due to concerns it would completely eliminate the right to privacy in the US.
Called Total Information Awareness (TIA), the program sought to develop an “all-seeing” surveillance apparatus managed by the Pentagon’s DARPA. The official agreement was that invasive surveillance of the entire US population was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, bioterrorism events, and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks before they could take place.
The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Reagan’s National Security Advisor during Iran-Contra and being convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal. Poindexter, during the Iran-Contra hearings, had famously claimed that it was his duty to withhold information from Congress.
In regard to TIA, one of Poindexter’s key allies was at the time the chief information officer of the CIA, Alan Wade. Wade met with Poindexter in relation to TIA numerous times and managed the participation of not just the CIA but all US intelligence agencies that had signed on to add their data as “nodes” to TIA and, in exchange, gained access to its tools.
The TIA program, despite the best efforts of Poindexter and his allies such as Wade, was eventually forced to shut down after considerable criticism and public outrage. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that the surveillance effort would “kill privacy in America” because “every aspect of our lives would be catalogued,” while several mainstream media outlets warned that TIA was “fighting terror by terrifying US citizens.”
Though the program was defunded, it later emerged that TIA was never actually shut down, with its various programs having been covertly divided among the web of military and intelligence agencies that make up the US national-security state.
While some of those TIA programs went underground, the core panopticon software that TIA had hoped to wield began to be developed by the very company now known as Palantir, with considerable help from the CIA and Alan Wade, as well as Poindexter.
At the time it was formally launched in February 2003, the TIA program was immediately controversial, leading it to change its name in May 2003 to Terrorism Information Awareness in an apparent attempt to sound less like an all-encompassing domestic surveillance system and more like a tool specifically aimed at “terrorists.”
The TIA program was shuttered by the end of 2003
The same month as the TIA name change and with a growing backlash against the program, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. Thiel, however, had begun creating the software behind Palantir months in advance, though he claims he can’t recall exactly when.
Thiel, Karp, and other Palantir cofounders claimed for years that the company had been founded in 2004, despite the paperwork of Palantir’s incorporation by Thiel directly contradicting this claim.
Also, in 2003, apparently soon after Thiel formally created Palantir, arch neocon Richard Perle called Poindexter, saying that he wanted to introduce the architect of TIA to two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp.
According to a report in New York Magazine, Poindexter “was precisely the person” whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon,” that is, TIA. During that meeting, Thiel and Karp sought “to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.”
Soon after Palantir’s incorporation, though the exact timing and details of the investment remain hidden from the public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel became the company’s first backer, aside from Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million. In-Q-Tel’s stake in Palantir would not be publicly reported until mid-2006.
Thiel named the company after the crystal ball used by evil lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings.
Palantir is alleged to be the principal company behind the design of software used for the NSA’s PRISM program.
PRISM’s existence was revealed when The Washington Post and The Guardian published leaked documents by Edward Snowden, which exposed the involvement of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, AOL, Skype and Apple.
A source told the Post that with PRISM, the NSA can “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”
So around 2004 after Peter Thiel set up his company Palantir he then funded Zuckerbergs Facebook which was a privatized version of DARPA’s Lifelog, and Google which was created out of a joint CIA NSA program went public.
After a few years of surveillance and Big Data Analysis they realized it was time to take the next big step and actually control the Information, and this meant eliminating information that presents a threat to them.
The growth in Social Media provided new opportunities. From 1991 to 2004, there was no social media at all. 2004, Facebook came out. 2005, Twitter 2006, YouTube, 2007, the smartphone dominated by Apple (ios) and Google
The problem was that while they now had the legal means of surveillance, censorship was technically against the First Amendment and off limits beyond what private platforms chose to censor on their own which was not insignificant (eg 9/11, holocaust, hate speech, etc).
This was not too big a problem since as Mike Benz said in his Tucker interview most people still got the news from legacy media which they still controlled thanks in part to media concentration in the hands of 5-6 corporations and Operation Mockingbird (never disappeared).
….we've had these bumper cars on democracy in the form of a century old relationship with legacy media institutions. I mean, our mainstream media is not in any shape or form, even from its outset, independent from the national security state, from the state Department, from the War Department. All of the initial broadcast news companies, NBC, ABC and CBS, were all created by Office of War Information Veterans from the War Department's effort in World War II. You had these operation Mockingbird relationships from the 1950s through the 1970s. Those continued through the use of the National Endowment for Democracy and the privatization of intelligence capacities in the 1980s under Reagan. There's all sorts of CIA reading room memos you can read even on CIA Gov about those continued media relations throughout the 1990s. And so you always had this backdoor relationship between the Washington Post, the New York Times and all of the major broadcast media corporations. By the way, Rupert Murdoch and Fox are part of this as well. Rupert Murdoch was actually part of the National Endowment for Democracy Coalition in 1983 when it was formed as a way to do CIA operations in an above board way, after the Democrats were so ticked off at the CIA for manipulating student movements in the 1970s.
They would need to create a Threat that would given them support to censor and moderate content on Social Media, especially as after 2014 there were some media influencers getting more views than legacy media. What could it be? Certainly nobody would deem Al Qaeda or ISIS a threat in the Information Arena sufficient enough to disregard the First Amendment. It would need to be a credible State Actor.
Big problem, because only China and Russia were credible threats, and we had fairly good relations with both. That would need to change. We needed China because they supplied Wal-Mart and made all our junk, so Russia was designated as the Enemy to be. So we proceeded to make them an enemy.
I rely on Ordo Ab Chao Volume 6 by David Livingstone and Levines Surveillance Valley for much of what follows regarding Assange, Applebaum and Tor.
While Assange, Applebaum and Tor stand for Freedom in many peoples minds, they also served, perhaps inadvertently , as tools of the BLOB who want to remove Freedom from the Internet
The BLOB means different things to different people. To me they go beyond government agencies and extend to private corporations and Democratic Institutions. An extension of the Military Industrial Complex to the Military Industrial Everything Complex
No longer is it just the Military, Big Oil Intelligence and Defense Industries as it was in the 1950’s but Financial, Pharma, Academia, Media, Think Tanks, Political Parties Big Tech, Agribusiness, Entertainment, Medical and Health Industries have been drawn in as well , along with the Government Agencies that regulate them. With interlocking boards and revolving doors they might best be described , as Whitney Webb did, as The Blob
https://pete843.substack.com/p/military-industrial-everything-complex
Mike Benz has recently popularized its use as well.
Another look at it in the form of a Global Public Private Partnership presented by
Ian Davis
https://iaindavis.com/what-is-the-global-public-private-partnership/
Public Private Partnerships are the essence of Corporatism , aka Mussolini’s Fascism
So anyways, Russia Gate begins with the “Russia Bad” Psyops began in 2009 with the death of Bill Browders Accountant, Magnitsky in prison They used Bill Browder, the American exile who found a home in the City of London and British intelligence operations—together with Jonathan Winer of the State Department and U.S. Senators John McCain and Ben Cardin—to ultimately create the Magnitsky Act in 2012 which permitted financial sanctions against Russian individuals
Around this same time Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame was arrested in 2010. In November 2010, a request was made for Assange’s extradition to Sweden, where he had been questioned months earlier over allegations of sexual assault and rape. Assange denied the allegations, but surrendered himself to UK police on 7 December 2010, and was held for ten days before being released on bail.
A few days after Assange was arrested on sexual assault charges, Kremlin officials emerged among his most vocal supporters. The Moscow Times reported that Putin himself had condemned Assange’s arrest, stating, “If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in prison? That’s what, democracy?”
The Moscow Times article also recounted how the Russian Reporter, a Putin-friendly publication, had gained “privileged access” to “hundreds of [American diplomatic] cables containing Russia-related information.”
Assange ultimately ended up in asylum inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Ecuador has a long-standing diplomatic relationship with Russia. Ecuador and the Soviet Union had established diplomatic relations in 1969, but it was not until 1972, when Ecuador joined OPEC, that the Soviets showed much interest in country.
In April 2012, Assange launched a half-hour political TV show, eventually named “The Julian Assange Show” on Russia Today.
So here we have Assange, a hero among libertarians being tied to Russia.
I think its important to go over some of Assanges history
Cypherpunks . A mailing list was started in 1992 by Tm May, John Gilmore and Eric Hugues, for radical libertarians who called themselves cypherpunks. Gilmore was a member of the WELL, and one of the founders of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The cyberpunks hoped and believed their endeavors would eventually bring about an economic, political and social revolution.
The list included Julian Assange, who shared the list’s libertarian principles.
Assange and two others founded International Subversives magazine, offering tips on "phreaking" – how to break into telephone systems illegally and make free calls.
In the spring of 1991, the three hackers found an exciting new target: MILNET, the US military's secret defence data network. Quickly, Assange discovered a back door. He got inside. "We had total control over it for two years," he later claimed.
It wasn't until 1994 that he was finally charged, with the case only being heard in 1996. He pleaded guilty in Melbourne's Victoria County Court to 24 counts of hacking.
Assange got off with a slap of the wrist because the judge said he was not after personal gain. That raises a lot of red flags with me because it suggests Assange made a deal. You don’t hack into the Pentagon and get off that easily
Assange launched WikiLeaks in 2006, to put his libertarian ideas into practice.
He told potential supporters about his secret new plan: "This is a restricted internal development mailing list for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g. Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to 'WL'."
On 9 December 2006, an email signed "WL" also arrived out of the blue for Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower of Vietnam war renown.
For people who dont know Daniel Ellsburg worked for the Rand Corporation . The Pentagon Papers were the result of a study commissioned in
1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had become disillusioned by the futility of the war and wanted future historians to be able to determine what had gone wrong.
One of the scholars called in early to help guide the project was Harvard’s Henry Kissinger.
Ellsburg spent 2 years working for General Edward Lansdale as a member of the State Department. Lansdale was a top CIA agent.
Its leak was likely sanctioned by higher ups. Ellsburg was saved from prosecution by the CIA conveniently and ineptly breaking into Ellsburgs psychiatrists office. The whole thing has a bit of a whiff to it, if you know what I mean
Jacob Appelbaum and Julian Assange had met in Berlin sometime in 2005, just as the mysterious Australian hacker was getting ready to set WikiLeaks in motion.
Also a Libertarian Applebaum allegedly once said
“I am of the eliminate-the-state crypto world. I want to get rid of the state. The state is dangerous, you know,”
Appelbaum watched as Assange slowly erected WikiLeaks from nothing, building up a dedicated following by trawling hacker conferences for would-be leakers. The two became good friends, and Appelbaum would later brag to journalist Andy Greenberg that they were so close, they’d f*ck chicks together.
Both would later be charged with sexual assault.
As Assange went public for the first time about WikiLeaks, he travelled to Nairobi in Kenya to set out their stall at the World Social Forum in January 2007.
He was so exhilarated by what he called "the world's biggest NGO beach party" that he stayed on for much of the next two years in a Nairobi compound with activists from Médecins Sans Frontières and other foreign groups.
It was Kenya that gave WikiLeaks its first journalistic coup. A massive report about the alleged corruption of former president Daniel Arap Moi had been commissioned from the private inquiry firm Kroll. But his successor, President Mwai Kibaki, who commissioned the report, subsequently failed to release it, allegedly for political reasons.
"This report was the holy grail of Kenyan journalism," Assange later said. "I went there in 2007 and got hold of it."
Kroll Associates, the consultancy firm hired to lead the investigation, eventually traced over $1.3bn in cash and assets spread out in nearly 30 countries. The report, which provided a rare comprehensive look at the scale of the looting, was submitted to the Kenyan government in 2004, by which time the Kibaki government had not only lost the appetite to fight corruption, but was itself deeply engaged in “gluttonous eating“. So, the report was buried.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2019/4/18/assange-and-wikileaks-a-view-from-kenya
So Assange was handed a “Krolls “‘Report in Kenya which was crawling with CIA Agents, and I dont need to tell you of Krolls own CIA connection
The CIA’s covert programme in Kenya began in 2004
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-08-28-revealed-the-cia-and-mi6s-secret-war-in-kenya/
The Tor Project hired Applebaum in 2008 to promote Tor among privacy activists, cryptographers, and, most important of all, the radical cypherpunk movement that dreamed of using encryption to take on the power of governments and liberate the world from centralized control. In 2010, he got Julian Assange hooked on Tor
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-american-wikileaks-hacker-238019/
Using Tor’s hidden service feature, which hid the physical location of WikiLeaks servers and in theory made them much less susceptible to surveillance and attack. From then on, the WikiLeaks site proudly advertised Tor: “secure, anonymous, distributed network for maximum security.”
Appelbaum did his best to be Assange’s right-hand man. He served as the organization’s official American representative
Assange gave Appelbaum and Tor wide credit for helping WikiLeaks. “Jake has been a tireless promoter behind the scenes of our cause,” he told a reporter. “Tor’s importance to WikiLeaks cannot be understated.”
Tor was deployed in 2004 after being developed by the DARPA FUNDED Naval Research Laboratory. Although privatized the Tor Project was still funded by DARPA and the navy. They Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which gave Tor almost a quarter million dollars
EFF even hosted Tor’s website. To download the app, users had to browse to tor.eff.org, where they’d see a reassuring message from the EFF: “Your traffic is safer when you use Tor.”
EFF was only a decade old at the time, but it already had developed a history of working with law enforcement agencies and aiding the military. In 1994, EFF worked with the FBI to pass the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which required all telecommunications companies to build their equipment so that it could be wiretapped by the FBI.
EFF’s support for Tor was a big deal. The organization commanded respect in Silicon Valley and was widely seen as the ACLU of the Internet Age. The fact that it backed Tor meant that no hard questions would be asked
In 2002, a few years before it funded Tor, EFF cofounder Perry Barlow admitted that he had been consulting for intelligence agencies for a decade.
So to me, thats all interesting, but then along comes Edward Snowden and it gets even more interesting.
On May 20, 2014, Snowden fled Hawaii with hard drives full of NSA material and arrived in Hong Kong, where he was joined by Greenwald and his associate, the filmmaker and activist Laura Poitras who revealed him to the world as the NSA “whistle-blower.”
In February 2014, Greenwald and Poitras became editors of The Intercept, which was founded by First Look Media. The news organization was created by billionaire eBay co-founder and PayPal owner Pierre Omidyar, in a $250 million deal, to report on the documents released by Snowden in the short term, and to “produce aggressive, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues” in the long term.
The Omidyar Network also has ties with Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden’s former employer. When accusations surfaced that documents withheld by Greenwald included information that connected PayPal to the NSA, he responded on Twitter, “I don’t doubt PayPal cooperates with NSA—that this is in the docs that we’ve been paid to withhold are total lies.”
From within the Ecuadorian Embassy, Assange also praised Edward Snowden as a “hero.”
In time, Assange would disclose that WikiLeaks was paying for Snowden’s travel and lodgings and providing him with legal counsel.
On June 21, 2014, according to a report in the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Snowden took up residence at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong.
Two days later, he and by Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks boarded an Aeroflot flight for Moscow. Reports vary about who exactly steered Snowden to the Russians. But WikiLeaks has claimed credit, tweeting that it had helped to arrange for Snowden to gain “political asylum in a democratic country.”
Izvestia divulged that the Kremlin and its intelligence services, in collaboration with WikiLeaks, had arranged Snowden’s escape.
Ecuador was one of the countries that offered Snowden political asylum while he was in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.
It turns our Laura Poitras was Applelebaum’s sometimes-lover . Poitras tapped Appelbaum’s knowledge of Internet systems to come up with a list of questions to vet Snowden and to make sure he really was the NSA technician he claimed to be.
In October 2013, four months after Edward Snowden came out of hiding and endorsed Tor, a twenty-nine-year-old native Texan by the name of Ross Ulbricht was arrested in a public library in San Francisco. He was accused of being Dread Pirate Roberts and was charged with multiple counts of money laundering, narcotics trafficking, hacking, and, on top of it all, murder.
The internal communications and diaries recovered by investigators from Ulbricht’s encrypted laptop showed that he believed he was fully protected by Tor. He believed in Tor’s claims that were backed up by Edward Snowden and promoted by Jacob Appelbaum. He believed that everything he did in the murkiness of the dark web would have no bearing on him in the real world—he believed it so much that he not only built a massively illegal drug business on top of it but also ordered hits on anyone who threatened his business.
Starting in March 2013, Silk Road was hit with multiple attacks that crashed the Tor hidden server software that enabled it to be on the dark web. Over and over the site’s real IP address leaked to the public, a mission-critical failure that could have made it trivial for law enforcement to track down the real identity of Dread Pirate Roberts.
During his trial, it came out that the FBI and DHS had infiltrated Silk Road almost from the very beginning. A DHS agent had even taken over a senior Silk Road administrator account, which gave federal agents access to the back end of Silk Road’s system, a job for which Ulbricht paid the DHS agent $1,000 a week in Bitcoins.
Meaning, one of Ulbricht’s top lieutenants was a fed, and he had no idea.
OK, so this brings us to the most important part of the “Russia Bad” Psyops that will set up Russia Gate during and following the 2016 Election. That was the 2014 Maidan Coup of Ukraine that led Russia annexing Crimea and the start of the Civil War in the Donbas and persecution of ethnic Russians by Ukraines neo-Nazis. I wont elaborate further, you should know the history.
Mike Benz during his Tucker interview mentioned the following
And when the hearts and minds of the people of Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the Internet. In the eyes of NATO as they saw it, the fundamental nature of war changed at that moment.
And NATO at that point declared something that they first called the Gerasimov doctrine, which is named after this russian military general who they claimed made a speech that the fundamental nature of war has changed. You don't need to win military skirmishes to take over central and eastern Europe. All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem, because that's what controls elections. And if you simply get the right administration into power, they control the military.
That is what you call Projection by NATO. Gerasimov was actually warning about the US doing this, but of course, the US and NATO do this Projection all the time , blaming others for trying to do what they are doing. This gets them funding to support countering it, and then the use the funds to execute what they are pretending to counter (be it Drugs, Terrorism or Fake Information/Censorship)
So anyways, all of this set up conditions for what we will call Russia Gate. But they needed one more thing. A suitable candidate who had ties to Russia who they could claim Russia had an interest in winning. That man was Trump. One can certainly argue that Trump had no ties with Putin, but it can not be denied he had ties with many Russian and FSU Oligarchs who laundered money through his Casinos and bought his Real Estate. Plus he had multiple trips to Moscow over the years for the purpose of Real Estate or Beauty Pageants. His business partners in the early 2000’s at Bayrock were from the FSU, and Felix Sater was an intelligence asset whose father worked for Semion Mogilevich, a head of the Russian Mafia and boyhood friend of Trumps lawyer
Trump was perfect for Operation Russia Gate from which the Censorship Industrial Complex Infrastructure could be built that would allow for the execution of Operation COVID and the 2020 Election , where anyone who questioned either could be labelled as an Enemy of the BLOB
Assange was also involved in the events of 2016
In an interview on June 12, 2016, just weeks prior to the publication of the DNC hack, Assange told a British television host, Robert Peston of the ITV network, that his organization had obtained “emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication,” which he described as “great.”
After it published the DNC emails in July 2016, WikiLeaks did not reveal its source, but Guccifer 2.0 claimed responsibility for the attack. Guccifer 2.0 was also leaking documents directly to The Observer, a publication owned by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Senior White House Adviser.
While Poitras is no fan of Hillary Clinton, she does question the timing of the Podesta emails (John Podesta was chairman of Clinton’s election campaign), thought to have been hacked by the Russians and published by WikiLeaks in October/November 2016 just before the election. Clinton partially blamed her defeat on WikiLeaks.
https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2017/jun/29/laura-poitras-wikileaks-film-risk-julian-assange
Assange received more than 80 visitors in the seven weeks leading up to the release of hacked DNC emails by WikiLeaks, including two journalists from RT, the documentary film-maker Michael Moore, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek and a German hacker.
Assange’s visitors also included well-known WikiLeaks supporters such as the designer Vivienne Westwood, the journalist John Pilger and the German hacker Andy Müller-Maguhn.
Among his guests were senior staff members from RT. A declassified US intelligence assessment released in January 2017 singled out RT and referred to it as a “partner” of WikiLeaks. Visits by RT’s London bureau chief, Nikolay Bogachikhin, who is Russian, and Afshin Rattansi, a British citizen and an RT journalist who has been a staunch defender of both Assange and Putin’s government.
Adam Waldman, a longtime US lobbyist for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska visited Assange nine times at the Ecuadorian embassy in 2017, according to visitor logs seen by the Guardian. Waldman, who also represents other clients including Hollywood stars, also served as a counsel for Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
Now you can say that who visits Assange is irrelevant , but it does set up a narrative where Wikileaks is being used by Russia to get Trump elected. Thats all the BLOB wanted. Russia Gate. Assange was a patsy.
But there was even more going on with the 2016 Election involving Facebook, Palantir, Cambridge Analytics and Israeli Companies Black Cube and PsyGroup all feeding nicely into Russia Gate, but I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds here as this will already be way too long
Anyways, 2016 ended the Internet Freedom Movement, at least for Americans, although there are some Controlled Opposition today pretending to fight for you so they can get your support to turn the focus from Russia as an Enemy to China
Yasha Levine sums up the past nicely
If you stepped back to survey the scene, the entire landscape of the Internet Freedom privacy movement looked absurd. Cold War–era organizations spun off from the CIA now funding the global movement against government surveillance? Google and Facebook, companies that ran private surveillance networks and worked hand in hand with the NSA, deploying government-funded privacy tech to protect their users from government surveillance? Privacy activists working with Silicon Valley and the US government to fight government surveillance—and with the support of Edward Snowden himself?
Surveillance Valley, Levine
What follows is Timeline of the building of the Science and Infrastructure for the Censorship Industrial Complex
2005- The Central Intelligence Agency was a big and early fan of what it called “open source intelligence”—information that it could grab from the public Web: videos, personal blogs, photos, and posts on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+.9 In 2005, the agency partnered with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to launch the Open Source Center, dedicated to building open-source collection tools and sharing them with other federal intelligence agencies. Through its In-Q-Tel venture capital fund, the CIA invested in all sorts of companies that mined the Internet for open-source intelligence. It invested in Dataminr, which would one day bring access to Twitter data and analyze people’s tweets to spot potential threats. It backed “a social media intelligence” company called PATHAR that monitored Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts for signs of Islamic radicalization. And it supported a popular product called Geofeedia, which allowed its clients to display social media posts from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram from specific geographic locations, down to the size of a city block. Users could watch in real time or wind the clock back to earlier times. All these CIA-backed companies would pay Facebook, Google, and Twitter for special access to social media data—adding another lucrative revenue stream to Silicon Valley.
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-investments-social-media-mining-looms-large/
2005- Memetics: A Growth Industry in US Military Operations, Michael Prosser, now a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps, proposed the creation of a “Meme Warfare Center.” Prosser noted that memes were not acknowledged or accepted components of military strategy at the time, but that, “under the rubric of Information Operations and Strategic Communications both currently offer a multi-faceted meme generation and transmission capability to US military commanders.”
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA507172
https://governamerica.com/documents/2006_memetics-a-growth-industry-in-us-military-operations.pdf
2006 -Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War,, Keith Henson defined memes as “replicating information patterns: ways to do things, learned elements of culture, beliefs or ideas.”
https://mankindquarterly.org/archive/issue/46-4/3
2006, DARPA commissioned a four-year study of memetics by Dr. Robert Finkelstein, founder of Robotic Technology Incorporated.
The term “meme” as later appropriated by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff—a leading cyberpunk, friend of Timothy Leary and a teacher at Esalen—who claimed memes were a type of media virus.
Activists count on the use of a meme to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournement in the Situationist sense. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action.
There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger – are believed to be the catalysts for social change.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyvwdk/meme-warfare
2007
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
"Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it is a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.
"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".
SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
"Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next....
"The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides," said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.
Chaturvedi directs Purdue's laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS - the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc.
SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as icons set against geographical maps.
Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi. Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among its private sector clients.
The US government appears to be Simulex's number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science Foundation to develop SEAS.
Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security, where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens.
https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/
2008, Cass Sunstein, a law professor who would go on to become Obama's information "czar," co-authored a paper entitled "Conspiracy Theories," in which he wrote that the "best response" to online "conspiracy theories" is what he calls "cognitive infiltration" of groups spreading these ideas.
"Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action. In one variant, government agents would openly proclaim, or at least make no effort to conceal, their institutional affiliations. [...] In another variant, government officials would participate anonymously or even with false identities."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585
2011 DARPA created the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC)
The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. In particular, SMISC will develop automated and semi‐automated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion to accomplish four specific program goals:
1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.
With the spread of blogs, social networking sites and media‐sharing technology, and the rapid propagation of ideas enabled by these advances, the conditions under which the nation’s military forces conduct operations are changing nearly as fast as the speed of thought. DARPA has an interest in addressing this new dynamic and understanding how social network communication affects events on the ground as part of its mission of preventing strategic surprise.
The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. Through the program, DARPA seeks to develop tools to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information, reducing adversaries' ability to manipulate events.
https://time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/fact-sheet-7-9-14.pdf
2011 CENTCOM awarded a $2.8 million contract to a company, Ntrepid, for the purpose of creating “sockpuppets” to spread pro-American propaganda on social media networks
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-user-news-feeds-to-create-emotional-contagion/
2012- EMBERS (Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates) was the product of a contest organized by Jason Matheny, an associate director of the government’s Office for Anticipating Surprise and a program manager at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).
The independent contractor that measures the accuracy of EMBERS’s forecasts is a nonprofit research facility called MITRE, a collection of government-funded research centers. MITRE, for its part, has deep connections to the nation’s defense, security and intelligence apparatus. According to MITRE, Terry Reed, the information systems engineer in MITRE’s Homeland Security Systems Engineering and Development Institute, represents the Department of Homeland Security’s information security chief on a committee within the National Security Systems Working Group focused on policy issues related to classified information systems.
EMBERS conducts what is called Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), collecting data for intelligence purposes from “overt” or publicly available sources, like social media, satellite imagery and more than 200,000 blogs. It mines up to 2,000 messages a second and purchases open-source data such as Twitter’s “firehose,” which streams hundreds of millions of real-time tweets a day. “Anytime you tweet or post on Facebook, you are becoming a part of the big data economy,” says Ramakrishnan. According to Ramakrishnan, “A lot of analysts can give you forecasts for the coming year, but when we do forecasts, we’re talking about specific dates.”
Since EMBERS inception in April 2012, an average of 80 to 90 percent of its forecasts have turned out to be accurate. The project was first put to work examining open-source data streams in Latin America. It accurately predicted the impeachment of Paraguay’s president in 2012, the World Cup protests in Brazil in 2013, and the 2014 violent student protests in Venezuela. The program monitors 20 countries in Latin America and is beginning to venture into the Middle East and North Africa, covering Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Libya.
https://dac.cs.vt.edu/research-project/embers/
2013, Obama signed legislation that changed the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, also known as the Smith-Mundt Act. The amendment made it possible for some materials created by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the nation’s foreign broadcasting agency, to be disseminated in the U.S.
2015-The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) is a forum for fact-checkers worldwide hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.It launched in September 2015,
2016-Portman-Murphy Countering Foreign Propaganda Act passed which will fund media organizations willing to spread the feds’ preferred propaganda.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_Foreign_Propaganda_and_Disinformation_Act
March 2016 Obama-era Executive Order establishing what was called the “Global Engagement Center”, or “GEC.” And when the funding and the E.O. came together to begin “operations,” if fiscal year 2017 the GEC was run by interests tied to the Department of Defense, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and others.
2016-November, Prop or not goes online. Promoted by National Media. A weapon subsequently used by social media for censorship
The PropOrNot organization involves Polygraph (a government-funded Voice of America outlet), the Interpreter (the Institute for Modern Russia’s magazine), the Center for European Policy Analysis, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Research Lab
2017- DoD partners with Twitter
2017 March, the Omidyar Network provided the “critical seed capital” need to launch the ADL’s “new Silicon Valley center aimed at tackling this rising wave of intolerance and to collaborate more closely with technology companies to promote democracy and social justice.”
That Omidyar-funded ADL center allowed the ADL to team up with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft — all of whom also collaborate with the Trust Project — to create a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab. Since then, these companies and their subsidiaries, including Google’s YouTube, have relied on the ADL to flag “controversial” content.
2017-The Trust Project launched after 3 years of development is a complex international consortium involving approximately 120 news organizations working towards greater transparency and accountability in the global news industry. It would later work closely with Newsguard which would use its developed indicators
2018 -The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2019 P.L. 115- 232 tasked the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts....”
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10771/9
2018-The Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a sub-committee within the DHS that is responsible for “routing disinformation concerns” to private platforms, which can take the form of sending emails to platforms like Twitter to take certain accounts under “consideration,” and is a key part of the agency’s quiet efforts to curb speech it finds problematic, according to The Intercept.
It was established on November 16, 2018, when President Donald Trump signed into law the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_and_Infrastructure_Security_Agency_Act_of_2018
2018, Biden co-founded the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity (TCEI), whichformally partneredwith the Atlantic Council in 2019 to use “rapid response” counter-disinformation teams to scrub targeted voices off of Ukrainian social media. Incredibly, EIP, of which the Atlantic Council is a part, bills itself as a “rapid response” counter-misinformation team to do the same to US social media as was done to Ukrainian social media — but partnered with DHS instead of Biden's group, TCEI.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/insight-impact/foreign-interference-in-ukraines-election/
2018, DOD issued a Joint Concept for Operations in the Information Environment. According to this document, the IE comprises and aggregates numerous social, cultural, cognitive, technical, and physical attributes that act upon and affect knowledge, understanding, beliefs, world views, and, ultimately, actions of an individual, group, system, community, or organization. The IE also includes technical systems and their use of data. The IE directly affects and transcends all operating environments.
https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/concepts/joint_concepts_jcoie.pdf
June 2018-DisinfoPortal had just been created by the Atlantic Council, working directly with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and 23 participating organizations for censoring election narratives ahead of 2019's European elections.
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/news-and-notes-14/
October 2018-Chris Krebs gave a talk to the Atlantic Council titled “Protecting The US Election” , just one month before Krebs was made the founding director of the newly created CISA. That same month before he got the CISA job, Krebs made a video to DisinfoPortal explaining why disinformation is important to him.
December 2018-Senate Intelligence Committee report alleging Russia undermined the integrity of the 2016 election. In its report, Graphika claimed to have uncovered “unusually rich detail the scope of Russia's interference not only in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but also in our day-to-day democratic dialogue.”
Graphika has historically been funded by government grants from DARPA and from the Defense Department's Minerva Initiative (which effectively focuses on psychological
https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/senate-reports-russian-disinformation-social-media-trump.html
2018-April 6, In a job request posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website, the main contracting website used by the federal government,
https://web.archive.org/web/20180407150852/
https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=d9457031df47f06feec110d18dfbc7ef
As part of its "media monitoring," the DHS seeks to track more than 290,000 global news sources as well as social media in over 100 languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian, for instant translation into English. The successful contracting company will have "24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc." in order to "identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event."
"Any and all media coverage," as you might imagine, is quite broad and includes "online, print, broadcast, cable, radio, trade and industry publications, local sources, national/international outlets, traditional news sources, and social media."
The database will be browsable by "location, beat and type of influencer," and for each influencer, the chosen contractor should "present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer."
One aspect of the media coverage to be gathered is its "sentiment."
DHS says the "NPPD/OUS [National Protection and Programs Directorate/Office of the Under Secretary] has a critical need to incorporate these functions into their programs in order to better reach Federal, state, local, tribal and private partners."
NPPD's mission is “to protect and enhance the resilience of the nation’s physical and cyberinfrastructure."
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Earlier this week, announced the social networking site would remove "more than 270 pages and accounts operated by a Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency" in an effort "to protect the integrity of elections around the world."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michellefabio/2018/04/06/department-of-homeland-security-compiling-database-of-journalists-and-media-influencers/
• For each influencer found, present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer
2018-The Atlantic Council in February put out a paper insisting media producers had a “duty of care” to not “carry the virus” of misinformation. Noting bitterly “the democratization of technology has given individuals capabilities on par with corporations,” the council warned that even domestic content that lacked “context” or “undermines beliefs” could threaten “sovereignty.”
2018-On May 17th, Facebook announced it would be working with the Atlantic Council.
https://fortune.com/2018/05/17/facebook-atlantic-council-election-propaghanda/amp/
2018-Facebook’s October 11th sweep, which quickly became known as “the Purge” in alternative-media circles. The October 11th deletions included media figures with significant followings. Many of these sites would also be removed from other platforms like Twitter virtually simultaneously.
2018-March 2018, Brill and fellow veteran journalist and entrepreneur, Gordon Crovitz, again partnered to form a new company, NewsGuard,which fights fake news by providing reliability ratings for over 7,500 U.S. websites to help online readers distinguish between legitimate news sources and those allegedly designed to spread misinformation. NewsGuard was launched on August 23, 2018.
NewsGuard is also announcing that Microsoft Corp. will sponsor its news literacy program, and that it's adding seven charter members of its advisory board, including Tom Ridge, Richard Stengel, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, Don Baer, Elise Jordan, John Battelleand Jessica Lessin.
https://www.axios.com/2018/08/22/newsguard-launches-first-product
NewsGuard,, was awarded nearly $750,000 from the Department of Defense in 2021 according to publicly available records.”
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA864921P1569_9700_-NONE-_-NONE-
2018 Aug 23-FireEye, a cybersecurity company that has been involved in a number of prominent investigations, including the 2016 attack on the Democratic National Committee, alerted Facebook in July that it had a problem.
Security analysts at the company noticed a cluster of inauthentic accounts and pages on Facebook that were sharing content from a site called Liberty Front Press. It looked like a news site, but most of its content was stolen from outlets like Politico and CNN. The small amount of original material was written in choppy English.
FireEye’s tip eventually led Facebook to remove 652 fake accounts and pages. And Liberty Front Press, the common thread among much of that sham activity, was linked to state media in Iran, Facebook said on Tuesday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/technology/facebook-political-influence-midterms.html
2019, May 30- FBI stated Conspiracy Theories were motivating Domestic Terrorism Threats and linked conspiracy theorists to mental illnesses
https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-documents-conspiracy-theories-terrorism-160000507.html
2019-Secretary of State Pompeo has now got the State Department’s Global Engagement Center fully operational as stipulated in the 2016/2018 NDAA. The Integrity Initiative claims that it is now fully engaged with State’s GEC. Todd Leventhal is a duel staffer at State and the Integrity Initiative. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative is also working with the Center for Naval Analysis and the Center for European Analysis. It has also worked extensively with the State Department/Ukrainian intelligence collaboration known as StopFake. It is working with far-right groups in Ukraine and the Baltics and mapping a full-scale attack on the Russian Orthodox Church, according to the documents posted by Anonymous.
The Integrity Initiative is a network of UK military and intelligence operatives, academics and journalists spreading anti-Russia information and news. It includes “specialist Army Reserve units” linking to “very senior civilian experts” including “hedge fund managers” and “senior bankers” who have volunteered as “patriots.”
The Initiative is run under the Institute for Statecraft, a British NGO which receives 95% of its funding from the British government, NATO, and the U.S. State Department
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2019-000092_EN.html
October 2019-Then-head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner (D-VA), had a panel discussion with Chris Krebs at a DHS-CISA conference in DC.
In that panel, SenatorWarner boasted to Chris Krebs that he had just had dinner with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg the night before the CISA panel. For that dinner, Senator Warner claimed he assembled fellow Senate Intelligence Committee to effectively threaten Mark Zuckerberg with heavy-handed regulation if Zuckerberg didn't do what was expected of him — especially on “content moderation” (read: censorship) on the platform
October 2019-P.L. 116-92 created a Principal Information Operations Advisor within DOD to coordinate and deconflict its operations with the Global Engagement Center in the State Department, who is the lead.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10771/6
The U.S. Department of Defense named the undersecretary of defense for policy as the point person for information operations to counsel the defense secretary on information operations.
Report issued on “Information Operations: DoD Should Improve Leadership and Integration Efforts” that was mandated by Congress
The report is classified.
December 2019, Krebs, then head of CISA, traveled from Washington, DC to California (when Stamos's Stanford lab was just three months old) for a personal roundtable with Stamos and his new “misinformation” team at Stanford (they specifically discussed “election security” for the 2020 election, which includes “misinformation”).
January 2020 , National Security Council (NSC), which advises the president on security issues, ordered that all high level meetings regarding COVID BE CLASSIFIED Orders reportedly came directly from the White House
April 6,2020 -In the face of COVID-19, social media platforms are adopting various approaches to govern their users’ behaviors. Most platforms are carrying on with typical response techniques they believe to be effective, like blocking users, removing content, or using automated enforcement for bulk removal. However, some progressive platforms are taking pro-social approaches to address COVID-19.
https://law.yale.edu/justice-collaboratory/collab-action-cia/pro-social-media-and-covid-19-disinformation
MAY 2020-Cisa Warning
Taking Vit C for COVID is dangerous disinformation
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CISAInsights-COVID-19_Disinformation_Activity_508.pdf
August 2020, GEC Russian COVID disinformation REPORT
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-Russia%E2%80%99s-Disinformation-and-Propaganda-Ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf
Much of what follows is taken from Mike Benz and his Foundation for Freedom Online, linked to below
September 2020 is exactly when CISA formally beganits censorship partnership with EIP.
September 2020-Atlantic Council's “Forward Defense” / “Future Of DHS” blueprint report formally posited DHS transition from a counterterrorism focus to a focus on “non-kinetic” threats such as social media misinformation.
CrowdTangle is making it easier to track public content on Facebook and Instagram through a new US Elections Hub. The US Elections Hub is comprised of more than 25 Live Displays and is publicly available for anyone to use (not just CrowdTangle users) to provide more transparency into the public content driving conversation around the upcoming election.
https://www.crowdtangle.com/blog/election2020hub
October 2020, the Atlantic Council hosted a livestream discussion of this new proposed domestic censorship role for DHS with three former DHS Secretaries (and that discussion has some remarkable moments).
Virtually every senior figure at CISA and across the other EIP entities involved in censoring the 2020 election has directly participated in Atlantic Council events, tying the networks together personally and professionally.
October 2020-DHS Homeland Threat Assessment
COVID-19 Influence Narratives
Russian online influence actors are advancing misleading or (what they perceive as) inflammatory narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic probably to stoke fear, undermine the credibility of the U.S. government, and weaken global perceptions of America. Moscow probably will study the American public’s reaction to its COVID-19 disinformation to improve future influence campaigns aimed at shaking public confidence in Washington, which it can unleash opportunistically during a crisis, hostilities, or a period of degraded relations.
• Russian online influence actors have claimed that the U.S. President is incapable of managing the COVID-19 crisis and sought to exacerbate public concerns by amplifying content critical of the U.S. response to the public health crisis and the economic downturn. In contrast, the actors highlighted China’s and Russia’s alleged success against the COVID-19 outbreak and praised
President Putin’s COVID-19 plan and Russia’s ample supply of tests.
• Russian online influence actors spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19, claiming it is a U.S.-engineered biological weapon that U.S. military officials spread in China.
Chinese operatives probably are waging disinformation campaigns using overt and covert tactics—including social media trolls to shift responsibility for the pandemic to other countries, including the United States. China might increase its influence activities in response to what it views as anti-China statements from the U.S. Government over China’s role in the pandemic.
• Since August 2019, more than 10,000 suspected fake Twitter accounts have been involved in a coordinated influence campaign with suspected ties to the Chinese Government. Among these are hacked accounts from users around the world that post messaging and disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and other topics of interest to China.
• China’s Foreign Ministry, state media, and official Twitter accounts promote overt narratives claiming the coronavirus may have originated in the United States, criticize the U.S. pandemic response, and publicize China’s COVID-19-related medical assistance to U.S. cities and states. China has doubled the number of official government posts disseminating false narratives about COVID-19 and has carried out persistent and large-scale disinformation and influence operations that correlate with diplomatic messaging.
• China most likely will continue amplifying narratives supportive of its pandemic response while denigrating U.S. official criticism that Beijing views as tarnishing its global image.
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/2020_10_06_homeland-threat-assessment.pdf
November 2020-after the 2020 election, EIP changed its name and re-branded as an entity called the “Virality Project” (VP).
A bit more on DHS-CISA censorship. CISA preferred to use private entities to make censorship requests. In 2020 it was the Election Integrity Project (EIP) for Election matters and then transitioned to the Vitality Project (VP) for COVID
Both are interesting in their naming. Integrity as in “Integrity Initiative” perhaps?. And Virality. VIRALITY is
“The state or condition of being viral; tendency to spread by word of mouth.”
Suggesting that words are a virus to be eradicated. People must be inoculated against the truth (censored)
Here is the Virality Project Report. Interesting reading.
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:mx395xj8490/Virality_project_final_report.p
Both EIP and VP are basically run by the same folks : Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika
Each of the four entities is also deeply connected to the US military and foreign policy establishment. These four institutions further came into the 2020 election cycle with deep pre-existing connections to the major social media companies' content moderation teams,having worked together on censorship issues since the field first began developing in 2017.
There are a lot of fascinating details here. Mike Benz has done a good job exposing it
https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/11-9-22.html
December 3, 2020, Facebook announced it would “start removing false claims about these vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts.” Twitter, Google, TikTok, and Nextdoor all up- dated their policies in quick succession to explicitly address misleading information about the COVID-19 vaccine.
December 2020-When Chris Krebs was terminated from CISA after the 2020 election, Chris Krebs immediately started a two-man business consultancy firm with Stamos in January 2021 called Krebs-Stamos Group. Krebs the government side, Stamos the private sector side.
December 2020, CDC officials started regularly communicating with personnel at Twitter, Facebook, and Google over "vaccine misinformation." At various times, CDC officials would flag specific posts by users on social media platforms such as Twitter as "example posts."
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/how-the-cdc-coordinated-with-big-tech-to-censor-americans/
January 2021, DHS’s “Countering Foreign Influence Task Force” was renamed to the generic, domestic catch-all, “Mis-, Dis- and Malinformation,”
FEBRUARY 2021-CrowdTangle
Latest report (1/27-2/10)
Suggesting this was active in 2020
Launching CrowdTangle COVID-19 Vaccine Live Displays
https://business.facebook.com/gpa/blog/launching-crowdtangle-covid-19-vaccine-live-displays
April, 2021-Krebs's seat at the head of CISA is now occupied by Jen Easterly, a former military intelligence official who was deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA) for counterterrorism. She appears to be taking her military intelligence experience squashing foreign terrorists from Tehran and using it to squash American populists on Twitter.
July 2021, Jen Psaki’s July remarks that senior White House staff are “in regular touch” with Big Tech platforms regarding posts about COVID. She also said the surgeon general’s office is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread.”
https://nypost.com/2021/09/06/federal-government-using-social-media-giants-to-censor-americans/
October 2021, Easterly and Krebs held a 30-minute taped discussion for CISA's “Cybersecurity Summit 2021: Continuity of Excellence” summit, in which they mutually agreed that Krebs's construction of a “counter-misinformation” conglomerate with the private sector was among the top structures to preserve and expand at DHS going forward.
December 2021, with Jen Easterly at CISA's helm, Stamos was directly made a member of CISA's private sector advisory committee, where he has regular meetings with CISA brass.
February 2023, Maj. Gen. Matt Easley, who most recently served as director of cybersecurity and chief information security officer at the U.S. Army, has taken on a new assignment as deputy principal information operations adviser at the Department of Defense.
Atlantic Council sure pops up a lot in that timeline, doesnt it.
Atlantic Council is classified as a think tank, widely said to represent NATO's collective foreign policy interests. It is therefore a “transatlantic” institution, rather than one strictly concerned with the interests of US citizens.
However, the Atlantic Council represents a powerful faction of the US foreign policy establishment, in the diplomacy, defense and intelligence spheres. It has seven (7) former CIA directors currently serving on itsown board of directors (Michael Hayden, James Woolsey, Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, Michael Morrell, William Webster and Robert Gates).
Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff — Chris Krebs's old boss when he worked for DHS under the Bush Administration — is also an Atlantic Council director, as are several other major DHS figures. Chertoff was the interim head and review authority for DHS's Disinformation Governance Board after it was initially put on “pause” for review. It was the Atlantic Council's “Forward Defense” / “Future Of DHS”blueprint report in September 2020 that formally posited DHS transition from a counterterrorism focus to a focus on “non-kinetic” threats such as social media misinformation.
I write a bit on Atlantic Council a while back
Atlantic Council Ukraine Connections
https://pete843.substack.com/p/atlantic-council-ukraine-connections
Conclusion: Much like the Pentagon Papers, CIA Leaks in the 1970’s (Operation Mockingbird, MKULTRA, etc) , Snowden and Wikileaks, the Censorship misdeeds of the USG comes to light for a purpose.
First and foremost it discredits the State and Democracy. This is what they want. Nobody gets punished, they just move from one arm of the BLOB to the other. Laughing all the way.
Second, it stops nothing. Wars continue, CIA just outsourced its work to NGO’s, illegal (for government) surveillance is done by Corporations or Five Eyes Intelligence partners who share or sell the information to government, and Censorship will continue through non-government actors of the BLOB or through censorship laws passed by non-US entities like the EU that Global Media Companies will follow for content that is accessible to EU citizens, which will be denied for US citizens as well
