Information War on US (aka Cognitive Warfare)
With the recent Twitter Files showing how the government influenced social media in order to control the narratives of various matters of interest, and many now accepting this as true when once upon a time it was considered a conspiracy theory, I will attempt to explain how they developed the tools and infrastructure to do this, and how it was a done in tandem with the planning , development and coordination of Operation COVID.
The motivation for all this is the WEF/UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and the creation of a Multi-Polar World Government. You can accept this or not as its beyond the scope of my post today , but I just want to emphasize there is a motive beyond politics, power and money ( power and money are the icing on the cake).
Many of you who oppose the COVID Mandates and Jabs tend to lean right and many are big Trump Fans. Its no secret I don’t like Trump, but Trump is just a Front Man who served a purpose. For the sake of argument, as you read what follows, you can believe he was just duped, betrayed, not too bright, or in on the game. This is not about Trump or Politics, although both were used to set up the operation.
One of the keys to being able to set up the Information Warfare Apparatus was Russia Gate. Trump was key to being able to do this given his many business dealings with former Soviet Oligarchs/Mafia who used his Casinos and bough expensive real estate, and his affection for wives of East European descent . Russia Gate allowed the government a reason and gave them the funding to set up the infrastructure to combat Foreign Influence over Elections. After all, who could be against this. Whether your concern is Russia, China, Israel, WEF, nobody wants foreigners controlling what Americans think. However, this infrastructure was Dual-Use, meaning it could be turned on a Domestic audience.
Officially it was the allegation that Russia disinfo (FBI-Hunter lap top, CISA-elections and State Departments GEC-COVID) that was used to justify the escalation of censorship of censor social media in 2020.
This will be a two part post. This post will focus more on planning and development of the Information Control Program. The second part will detail OPERATION COVID . This will follow in a few days hopefully.
This post is too long for Email so you need to click on title to see it all.
I find Twitter Files 12 most interesting
I like to consider myself informed but I had never heard of Global Engagement Center before.
Russian Disinfo really has had a lot of legs. Pretty much any argument against any official narrative is Russia Disinfo that must be censored
Bringing China to the disinfo party
Remember, ex-CIA Director Mike Pompeo is Secretary State and GEC is in the state department
Promoting American interests (Belly laugh-Hear me Roar)
Less Trumpy. Cute.
Nice confirmation USG was getting Twitter to censor as early as 2017 based on “intelligence say so”
So anyways, i had to look into what is the GEC and found some interesting stuff.
2015, the Integrity Initiative set up as the central project of the Institute for Statecraft in UK (hold that thought, we will get to it)
2016-November 24, Washington Post drawing on the supposed “research” of a shadowy outfit calling itself PropOrNot.
The article claimed that 200 websites were pawns of the Russian government. This included just about every site in the United States opposing the Bush/Obama foreign adventures. 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.
2016, December The Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, introduced by Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, establishes the Global Engagement Center under the State Department which coordinates efforts to "recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United Sates national security interests."
Further, the law authorizes grants to non-governmental agencies to help "collect and store examples in print, online, and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda" directed at the U.S. and its allies, as well as "counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability" of the U.S. and allied nations.
The head of the center will be appointed by the president.
2019- it turns out that the GEC wasn’t really spending any of the money appropriated until Pompeo moved from the CIA to Secretary of State
Secretary of State Pompeo fully funded the State Department’s Global Engagement Center as stipulated in the 2016 NDAA.
So thats all interesting but nothing too exciting. However, around 2019 a Couple of articles came out linking GEC with a UK Military-Intelligence cutout named, you got it, Integrity Initiative
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.
Remember, this is 2019.
This led me to a Grayzone piece
The Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its network across the US,meddling in American politics and recruiting “a new generation of Russia watchers” behind the false guise of a non-partisan charity.
Moreover, the group has hired one of the most notorious American “perception management” specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of pundits and cultivate relationships with the media.
The Integrity Initiative claims to have already established a “simple office” in Washington DC, though it does not say where. It also boasts of partnerships with top DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, CNA, and close relationships with US officials.
A major hub of Integrity Initiative influence is the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, a de facto US government propaganda operation that was established by President Barack Obama to battle online ISIS recruitment, but which was rapidly repurposed to counter Russian disinformation following the election of Trump.
The Integrity Initiative has also recruited one of the most infamous American PR men to organize its clusters of journalists and political figures.
He is John Rendon, best known as “The Man Who Sold The War” — several wars, in fact, but most notoriously the Iraq invasion. Rendon was the self-described “information warrior” who planted fake news in the major US-UK media about non-existent WMD threats.
With deep ties to the CIA and other military-intelligence agencies, his PR firm was paid $100 million to organize and sell Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. In 2002, the New York Times exposed a Pentagon program using Rendon to plant “disinformation” — including “false stories” and “the blackest of black PR” — in media outlets around the world, in order to shape public opinion and sell the Iraq invasion.
Internal documents also refer to interactions between Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly and top Trump officials like Katharine Gorka, a vehemently anti-Muslim Department of Homeland Security official, as well as her husband, Sebastian, who earned right-wing fame during his brief tenure in Trump’s White House.
Donnelly was granted access to Pentagon officials like Mara Karlin, an up-and-coming neoconservative cadre, and John McCain Institute executive director Kurt Volker, another neoconservative operative who also serves as the US Special Representative for Ukraine. Numerous meetings with staffers inside the State Department’s Office of Global Engagement were also detailed.
Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal. Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, boasting of “20 years of countering disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends.” In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team member:
Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with “counter-propaganda,” the State Department’s Global Engagement Center has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. “My old job at the State Department was as chief propagandist,” confessed former Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”
At a Council on Foreign Relations forum about "fake news," former Editor at Time Magazine Richard Stengel directly states that he supports the use of propaganda on American citizens - then shuts the session down when challenged about how propaganda is used against the third worldAn Integrity Initiative memo states that the right-wing Smith Richardson Foundation has also committed to ponying up funding for its US network as soon as the group receives 501 c-3 non-profit status. The foundation has already provided it with about $56,000 for covert propaganda activities across Europe.
The Smith Richardson Foundation has old ties to the US intelligence community and controversial cold war influence operations.
Smith Richardson has funded a who’s who of the neoconservative movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War. “To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement,” wrote journalist Kelley Vlahos.
Besides Smith Richardson, the Integrity Initiative has stated its intention to apply for grants from the State Department “to expand the Integrity Initiative activities both within and outside of the USA.” This is yet another indicator that the US government is paying for propaganda targeting its own citizens.
An Integrity Initiative internal document argues that because “DC is well served by existing US institutions, such as those with which the Institute [for Statecraft] already collaborates,” the organization should “concentrate on extending the work of the Integrity Initiative into major cities and key State capitals [sic] across the USA.”
This December 10, the Integrity Initiative organized what it called its “main event” in the US. It was a conference on disinformation held in Seattle, Washington under the auspices of a data firm called Adventium Labs.
Together with the Technical Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, the Integrity Initiative listed Adventium Labs as one of its “first partners outside DC.”
Adventium is Minneapolis-based research and development firm that has reaped contracts from the US military, including a recent $5.4 million cyber-security grantfrom the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Well, there is a lot to take home there but its highly disturbing although not surprising that we seem to be partnering with a Foreign Agent to run Information Warfare campaign against American Citizens. Cecil Rhodes would be proud
Lets take a closer look at the Information War
A 2020 NATO-sponsored study of this new form of warfare clearly explained,
While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.
https://mronline.org/2021/10/13/behind-natos-cognitive-warfare-battle-for-your-brain-waged-by-western-militaries/
Cognitive warfare has universal reach, from the individual to states and multinational organisations. It feeds on the techniques of disinformation and propaganda aimed at psychologically exhausting the receptors of information. Everyone contributes to it, to varying degrees, consciously or sub consciously and it provides invaluable knowledge on society, especially open societies, such as those in the West. This knowledge can then be easily weaponised. It offers NATO’s adversaries a means of bypassing the traditional battlefield with significant strategic results, which may be utilised to radically transform Western societies.
[Don’t be fooled by the Projection. This is directed against you to transform society so you will accept the Technofascist Transhumanist Digital Gulag they are building ]
https://www.innovationhub-act.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/20210122_CW%20Final.pdf
“The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.”
Here is a bit of a Timeline
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."
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. Fifty users – ten sockpuppets per user with the following protections in place:
Special secure VPN that camouflages ability to locate source
Static IP addresses to protect government entities from being identified
Nine private servers to randomly route attempts to locate the source, and
Virtual machine environment whereby the posts are automatically deleted at a given point to protect against hacks
By definition, a sockpuppet is one who uses a fictitious online identity for the purposes of deception. By contrast, a BOT is an automated account that repeatedly makes the same statement. These types of accounts are now universal and encompass governments, corporations, NGO’s, and ‘nonintelligent’ intelligence agencies…
Ntrepid is based in Herndon Virginia – the CIA gauntlet – although registered in Florida. It’s CEO and Founder originally came from the CIA. It’s President is formerly DoD. It’s chief tech came from the FBI and then Microsoft. Without divulging who or which, Ntrepid claims to work with 50 different global governments. They have no board of directors.
Operation Earnest Voice was the brainchild of General Patraeus who claimed that it was ‘an effort to counter extremist ideology and propaganda’. Given that this is illegal in the United States, Patraeus pinky swore it would only be utilized outside of the country in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and ‘other Middle east countries. And CENTCOM as always stressed they never ever in a million years would do anything ‘against the law’.
When Mad Dog Mattis inherited this operation he decided to extend it to ‘regional bloggers’ targeting moderate voices – whipping them up and then flagging them as being hostile with corrosive content so that they would be removed by the media platform.
In the UK the website Operation Earnest Voice claims they: “specialise in engineering consent and influencing the public opinion”.
They list their services as:
Deep Deception
Production of News Websites With Automated Content
Personalized Propaganda
Clone Audiences
Look-a-like audiences
Mobilization & distribution of fake accounts for fake traffic, fake metrics, message amplification
Information Warfare
Initially created as a psyche operation, in essence, Operation Earnest Voice are the global information ‘distorters’.
Facebook estimates Sockpuppets account for roughly 27% of their online accounts. But that would be a FB definition – which is obviously faulted subject to its own affiliation with the sockpuppeteers, CIA and MI6. Accounts They Cannot Delete.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
https://helenaglass.net/2022/03/05/centcom-disinformation-propaganda/
2012-Facebook conducted a massive psychological experiment on 689,003 users, manipulating their news feeds to assess the effects on their emotions. The details of the experiment were published in an article entitled “Experimental Evidence Of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks” published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
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.
2014-The Trust Project is a complex international consortium involving approximately 120 news organizations working towards greater transparency and accountability in the global news industry, including The Economist, Folha de São Paulo, The Globe and Mail, the Independent Journal Review, Mic, Italy's La Repubblica, Il Sole 24 OREand La Stampa. The Project was started in 2014 by Sally Lehrman, a journalist and former director of Santa Clara University's journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and launched in November 2017. Richard Gingras, head of Google News is a co-founder. The Project is funded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s Philanthropic Fund, Google, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the Markkula Foundationand Facebook.
The Trust Project was created to "strengthen public confidence in the news through accountability and transparency". It is a consortium of news companies working collectively to develop and implement transparency standards that for users can see and machines can read in order to increase accountability in journalism.
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, in recognition of the fact that a booming crop of fact-checking initiatives could benefit from an organization that promotes best practices and exchanges in this field.
These organizations fact-check statements by public figures, major institutions and other widely circulated claims of interest to society.
Among other things, the IFCN:
Monitors trends and formats in fact-checking worldwide, publishing regular articles on the dedicated Poynter.org channel.
Provides training resources for fact-checkers.
Supports collaborative efforts in international fact-checking, including fellowships.
Convenes a yearly conference (Global Fact).
Is the home of the fact-checkers’ code of principles
The IFCN is led by Alexios Mantzarlis, who joined Poynter after co-founding and editing Pagella Politica, an
Italian political fact-checking website.
Poynter’s IFCN has received funding from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, the Duke Reporters’ Lab, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations and the Park Foundation.
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
On November 30, 2016, PropOrNot published a list of some 200 websites they classify as Russian propaganda based on "a combination of manual and automated analysis, including analysis of content, timing, technical indicators, and other reporting". The group's list includes Zero Hedge, Naked Capitalism, the Ron Paul Institute, Black Agenda Report, Truthout, Truthdig, antiwar.com, and many others, which the group suggests are "consistently, uncritically, and one-sidedly echoing, repeating, being used by, and redirecting their audiences to Russian official and semi-official state media".
PropOrNot has said there was a Russian propaganda effort involved in propagating fake news during the 2016 United States presidential election. PropOrNot has said it analyzed data from Twitter and Facebook and tracked propaganda from a disinformation campaign by Russia that had a national reach of 15 million people within the United States.
PropOrNot concluded that accounts belonging to both Russia Today and Sputnik Newspromoted "false and misleading stories in their reports," and additionally magnified other false articles found on the Internet to support their propaganda effort.
The purpose of PropOrNot has been to trick people into demanding that freedom of speech be rolled back. This was/is to be done by destroying fact-based media. If you read further, the entire plan is laid out starting from 2015 when it started coming together.
These people want reality shaped on what the perceived majority (louder) group believes to be true, regardless of what the facts are. Perception based reality is only a Facebook like away from killing one person or elevating another to hero status regardless of what they have done
people staffing PropOrNot are tied to The Interpreter Mag which is a product of the Atlantic Council. The Digital Forensics Research Lab has been carrying the weight in Ukrainian-Russian affairs for the Atlantic Council. Fellows working with the Atlantic Council in this area include:
Bellingcat – Aric Toler and Eliot Higgins- This linked article shows how an underwear salesman became one of the most important faces of the deep state. Don’t laugh, the image is really appropriate. Higgins’ insecurity runs so deep because of his failures that Higgins tries to get publications censured that question his author-i-tie.
Anne Applebaum – who has argued that Facebook should take responsibility for spreading fake news and help “undo the terrible damage done by Facebook and other forms of social media to democratic debate and civilized discussion all over the world.”
StopFake – Irena Chalupa – Chalupa is the sister to the same Alexandra Chalupa that brought the term Russian hacking to worldwide attention. Irena Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. She is also a senior correspondent at RFE/RL, where she has worked for more than twenty years. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the Atlantic Council, where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor for Ukraine’s propaganda channel Stopfake.org She is a Ukrainian Diaspora leader. The Chalupas are the first family of Ukrainian propaganda. She works with and for Ukrainian Intelligence through the Atlantic Council, Stopfake.org, and her sisters Andrea (EuromaidanPR) and Alexandra.
Dimitry Alperovich – CEO of Crowdstrike and the person who consulted a Ouija board and guessed Russia may have hacked something, somewhere, sometime.
The strand that ties this crew together is they all work for Ukrainian Intelligence. If you hit the links, the ties are documented very clearly. We’ll get to that point again shortly, but let’s go further:
PropOrNot -> Atlantic Council -> Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG)
Who are the BBG? The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is an independent agency of the United States government. According to its website, its mission is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” Its projects include Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Television Marti, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcast Networks.
The BBG’s bipartisan board was eliminated and replaced with a single appointed chief executive officer as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, which was passed in December 2016.
On January 1, 2016, the Interpreter became a special project of RFE/RL and under the oversight of the BBG. The Secretary of State had a seat on the board of the BBG until December 2016. Why the change?
During the 2016 election, the BBG developed a major conflict of interest. At least two BBG board members worked actively for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. These government officials were working against the president-elect after the election. It looks like it didn’t go unnoticed. In the following linked article, it shows that they should be investigated for their part in an attempted coup.
Bellingcat works directly for Ukrainian Intel and works with them and the Atlantic Council. Stopfake.org is a product of Irena Chalupa who works for RFE/RL, the Atlantic Council and the Ukrainian government. Stopfake.org works directly with them and is a product of the Ukrainian government. Crowdstrike has an ongoing relationship with Ukrainian Intel and these particular hackers. Is it possible that Crowdstrike conjured up Fancy Bear, the “hacker(s)” responsible for divulging internal Democratic Party emails that supposedly tipped the 2016 election in Trump’s favor? (“Fancy Bear,” by the way, is technically a set of tools, not a person.)
If so, this would mean that approval was given at the highest levels – presumably former Secretary of State John Kerry – for Ukrainian intelligence hackers to have access to servers inside a U.S. Government Agency because of PropOrNot and the Atlantic Council’s reliance on the hackers.
How are the Ukrainian hackers tied into PropOrNot at any level? James Miller isn’t shy about using their work. PropOrNot relies on the work of the Atlantic Council, Aric Toler, Aaron Weisburd, Clint Watts, and Joel Harding. The Ukrainian hackers work directly with InformNapalm and are the go-to resource for most of the people involved and all of the people just named.
As James Miller wrote at the Interpreter, “Below we have assessed the details of the reports from InformNapalm, and have expanded on their investigation.”
Who does the Atlantic Council work for? It’s the same people who staff RFE/RL and works closely with the Ukrainian World Congress, as explained here:
“On 29 January 2016 in Washington, U.S.A., Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) President Eugene Czolij and Atlantic Council President and CEO Frederick Kempe officially signed a Memorandum of Agreement to renew the cooperation between the UWC and the Atlantic Council, which began in September 2014.
“In accordance with this Memorandum, the UWC will continue its cooperation with the Atlantic Council on implementing the “Ukraine in Europe Initiative”, which aims to galvanize international support for an independent, sovereign and territorially integral Ukraine, including Crimea. This initiative is also intended to support reforms in Ukraine and its EuroAtlantic integration, and to counter Russian disinformation.”
The Ukrainian World Congress is represented in the U.S. Congress by the Ukrainian Caucus headed up by ISIS supporter and Nazi cheerleader Marcy Kaptur. Her Ukrainian Caucus represents people with political positions that scared Adolf Hitler in WWII.
n early March 2015, Ukrainian Information Policy designer Joel Harding laid out what to expect going forward in the following statements: “In military IIO [Inform and Influence Operations] center on the ability to influence foreign audiences, US, and global audiences, and adversely affect enemy decision making through an integrated approach. Even current event news is released in this fashion. Each portal is given messages that follow the same themes because it is an across the board mainstream effort that fills the information space entirely when it is working correctly.”
The purpose of “Inform and Influence Operations” is not to provide a perspective, opinion, or lay out a policy. It is defined as the ability to make audiences “think and act” in a manner favorable to the mission objectives. This is done through applying perception management techniques which target the audience’s emotions, motives, and reasoning.
These techniques are not geared for debate. It is to overwhelm and change the target psyche.
Using these techniques information sources can be manipulated and those that write, speak, or think counter to the objective are relegated as propaganda, ill-informed, or irrelevant.
While the above sounds gloriously overoptimistic, Harding, along with his little band of Kremlin Troll hunters personally started developing the idea of organizations capable of blackballing journalists and publications in a way that could not be construed as censorship.
From another March 2015 article – A “Disinformation Charter” for Media and Bloggers: “Top-down censorship should be avoided. But rival media, from Al-Jazeera to the BBC, Fox and beyond, need to get together to create a charter of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Vigorous debate and disagreement are, of course, to be encouraged – but media organizations that practice conscious deception should be excluded from the community. A similar code can be accepted by bloggers and other online influencers.”
This “Disinformation Charter” for responsible behavior (Ministry of Truth?) he describes is to fight “conscious deception” can only be weighed against how he describes Propaganda. “The word is frequently used to describe any news emerging one’s opponent,” according to Harding.
Journalists who need to be excluded are those “our side” label as propagandists or active measure agents.”
Harding’s connections in media are huge. Through his friend Matthew Armstrong, Harding had access to and the ear of the board of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, staffed by a who’s who of network and radio broadcast, print media and shortwave CEOs and heavy hitters. They are the ones behind RFE/RL.
On the other end of this in 2015, Joel Harding was assembling a group of miscreants to attack the social networks of different journalist and publications. The crude logic behind a direct assault was that by developing, training, and overseeing vast troll networks they could speak over their opposition (people that their employers wanted to be silenced) and subdue dissident online conversation and control the information.
Where this wasn’t feasible, they set up hack and harass attacks at various publications to get them to stop publishing hard-hitting journalists. This still hasn’t been entirely effective because it caused publishers to dig in and harden their internet properties instead.
The softer more indirect approach Harding pushed in March 2015 quickly developed into the unified media strategy he wanted for the U.S. and Europe. Control the information and don’t allow contradicting information or news into the media stream. When it does get in, call it propaganda.
Enter PropOrNot.
2017- DoD partners with Twitter
And intelligence agencies
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
2018, Biden co-founded the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity (TCEI), whichformally partnered with 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.
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.
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....”
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.
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
2018-April 6, In a job request posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website, the main contracting website used by the federal government,
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.”
2.0 SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS/TASKS
2.1 Tasks One: Online & Social Media Monitoring
Ability to track global online sources for coverage relevant to Washington and the six media hubs:
• Ability to track > 290,000 global news sources
• Ability to track online, print, broadcast, cable, radio, trade and industry publications, local sources, national/international outlets, traditional news sources, and social media
• Ability to track media coverage in > 100 languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Translation function to instantly translate these articles to English.
• Ability to create up to 20 searches with each unlimited keywords
• Unlimited coverage per search (no cap on coverage)
• Ability to change the searches at keywords at any given time
• Ability to create unlimited data tracking, statistical breakdown, and graphical analyses on any coverage on an ad-hoc basis
2.2 Task Two: Media Intelligence and Benchmarking Dashboard Platform
24/7 Access to a password protected, online platform for users to access:
• Overview of search results in terms of online articles and social media conversations
• Customized and Interactive Dashboard that provide real-time monitoring, analysis, and benchmark of media coverage.
• Ability to analyze the media coverage in terms of content, volume, sentiment, geographical spread, top publications, media channels, reach, AVE, top posters, influencers, languages, momentum, circulation.
• Ability to select time-period of analysis: per day, week, month, and selected dates
• Ability to build media lists based on beat, location, outlet type/size, and journalist role
• Automated weekly overview of these dashboards sent via email
2.3 Task Three: Email Alerts
Daily email alerts with new search results:
• Ability to customize these email alerts per user
2.4 Task Four: Access to Mobile app
24/7 Access to a password protected, mobile app for users to access:
• Overview of search results in terms of online articles and social media conversations
• Ability to view coverage written in Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Ability to access English translation of this coverage within the mobile app.
• Ability to set up push notifications to be alerted of new search results
• Ability to forward media coverage via email, sms or what’s app
2.5 Task Five: Media Engagement
24/7 Access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.
• Ability to browse the database based on location, beat and type of influencer
• Ability to perform ad-hoc searches on the database based on keywords, concepts, or using Boolean search terms
• Ability to perform searches in other languages including Arabic, Chinese and Russian, in order to find influencers that publish in these languages.
• 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
• Ability to create unlimited media lists for specific topics
• Ability to export the contact details of the media influencers per media list.
• Ability to send out unlimited press releases via the platform and to monitor the open-rate of the press releases send out.
• Ability to manage contacts
2018-On May 17th, Facebook announced it would be working with the Atlantic Council.
Often described by critics as the unofficial lobby group of NATO, the council is a bipartisan rogues’ gallery of senior military leaders, neocons and ex-spies. Former heads of the CIA on its board include Michael Hayden, R. James Woolsey, Leon Panetta and Michael Morell, who was in line to be Hillary Clinton’s CIA chief.
The council is backed financially by weapons-makers like Raytheon, energy titans like Exxon-Mobil and banks like JPMorgan Chase. It also accepts funds from multiple foreign countries, some of them with less-than-sterling reputations for human rights and — notably — press freedoms.
2018-The Atlantic Council in September 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 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.
Facebook’s latest purge of disinformation from its platforms highlighted the key role that cybersecurity outfits are playing in policing the pages of giant social media platforms. For all of their wealth and well-staffed security teams, companies like Facebook often rely on outside firms and researchers for their expertise.
The discovery of the disinformation campaign also represented a shift in the bad behavior that independent security companies are on the lookout for. Long in the business of discovering and fending off hacking attempts and all sorts of malware, security companies have expanded their focus to the disinformation campaigns that have plagued Facebook and other social media for the past few years.
Founded in 2004 in Milpitas, Calif., FireEye has a work force of about 3,000 people, a fraction of Facebook’s. But it employs security analysts with particular skills, including employees who are fluent in English, Arabic, Russian, French and Italian, helping them to identify and track misinformation around the world.
Lee Foster, the manager of FireEye’s information operations analysis team, described in an interview with The New York Times how his company spotted the Iranian disinformation campaign. He declined to say whether his research into the Iranian campaign was on behalf of a particular client because FireEye has a policy against naming who it is working with.
“It started with a single social media account or a small set of accounts that were pushing this political-themed content that didn’t necessarily seem in line with the personas that the accounts had adopted,” said Mr. Foster. Many of the fake accounts, which sprawled across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit, shared content from Liberty Front Press.
2018-Facebook’s October 11th sweep, which quickly became known as “the Purge” in alternative-media circles. After more minor sweeps of ostensibly fake foreign accounts over the summer, the October 11th deletions represented something new: the removal of demonstrably real American media figures with significant followings.
Another round of such sites would be removed in the days before the midterms, this time without an announcement. Many of these sites would also be removed from other platforms like Twitter virtually simultaneously.
The sites were all over the map politically. Some, like the Trump-supporting Nation in Distress, had claimed Obama would declare martial law if Trump won in 2016. Others, like Reverb and Blue State Daily, were straight-up, Democrat-talking-point sites that ripped Trump and cheered the blues.
Many others, like the L.A.-based Free Thought Project and Anti-Media, were anti-war, focused on police brutality or drug laws, and dismissive of establishment politics in general. Targeting the latter sites to prevent election meddling seemed odd, since they were openly disinterested in elections. “If anything, we try to get people to think beyond the two parties,” says Jason Bassler, a 37-year-old activist who runs the Free Thought Project.
2019, May 30- FBI stated Conspiracy Theories were motivating Domestic Terrorism Threats and linked conspiracy theorists to mental illnesses
2019-Secretary of State Pompeo has now fully funded the State Department’s Global Engagement Center as stipulated in the 2016 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.
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.
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
Feb 6,2020
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
September 2020 is exactly when CISA formally began its 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.
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).
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
As we approach the US 2020 elections, 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
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 its own 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
A bit more on DHS-CISA censorship. CISA appears to prefer 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 so I will end this here.
