Internet Free Speech Was An Instrument Of Statecraft - Until It Wasn't....,

Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military rule," says Mike Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy." pic.twitter.com/hDTEjAf89T

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 16, 2024

UNREAL: The censorship technologies originally intended for terrorist organizations have been weaponized against the American people.

TUCKER CARLSON: “So you’re saying the Pentagon, our Pentagon, the US Department of Defense, censored Americans during the 2020 election cycle?”

MIKE BENZ: “Yes. The two most censored events in human history, I would argue, to date, are the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Benz calls artificial intelligence-based censorship technologies, which were created by DARPA to take on ISIS, “WEAPONS OF MASS DELETION.”

That technology, Benz says, has “the ability to censor tens of millions of posts with just a few lines of code.”

Benz detailed how the government-funded Virality Project identified 66 dissident narratives related to COVID-19, breaking them down into sub-claims for monitoring and censorship through machine learning models, aiming to control the spread of information harmful to official narratives or individuals like Tony Fauci.

“And whenever something started to trend that was bad for what the Pentagon wanted or was bad for what Tony Fauci wanted, they were able to take down tens of millions of posts. They did this in the 2020 election with mail-in ballots.”

What Geniuses Cobbled Together This Malarkey And Said "Let's Pretend That Biden Wrote It!"

WaPo  | Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make — including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East — will determine the direction of our future for generations to come.
What will our world look like on the other side of these conflicts?

Will we deny Hamas the ability to carry out pure, unadulterated evil? Will Israelis and Palestinians one day live side by side in peace, with two states for two peoples?

Will we hold Vladimir Putin accountable for his aggression, so the people of Ukraine can live free and Europe remains an anchor for global peace and security?

And the overarching question: Will we relentlessly pursue our positive vision for the future, or will we allow those who do not share our values to drag the world to a more dangerous and divided place?

Both Putin and Hamas are fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map. And both Putin and Hamas hope to collapse broader regional stability and integration and take advantage of the ensuing disorder. America cannot, and will not, let that happen. For our own national security interests — and for the good of the entire world.

The United States is the essential nation. We rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future. The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time. That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead. For if we walk away from the challenges of today, the risk of conflict could spread, and the costs to address them will only rise. We will not let that happen.

We have also seen throughout history how conflicts in the Middle East can unleash consequences around the globe.

We stand firmly with the Israeli people as they defend themselves against the murderous nihilism of Hamas. On Oct. 7, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people, including 35 American citizens, in the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust. Infants and toddlers, mothers and fathers, grandparents, people with disabilities, even Holocaust survivors were maimed and murdered. Entire families were massacred in their homes. Young people were gunned down at a music festival. Bodies riddled with bullets and burned beyond recognition. And for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released.

Joe Biden's Dusty "Lying About Lying" Ass Needs To Be Banned

jonathanturley  | Below is my column in The Messenger on the view of diplomats in the Biden Administration that the President is spreading “misinformation.” My interest in the story is less the merits than the allegation. The President is facing the same allegation of ignoring fact and spreading disinformation that has resulted in thousands being banned or blacklisted on social media. The Biden Administration has pushed for such censorship in areas where doctors and pundits held opposing views on subjects ranging from Covid-19 to climate control. The question is whether Joe Biden himself should be banned under the standards promulgated by his own Administration.

Here is the column:

An internal State Department dissent memo was leaked this past week, opposing the Biden administration’s position on the war between Israel and Hamas. What was most notable about the memo is that some administration staffers accused President Joe Biden of “spreading misinformation.”

It was a moment of crushing irony for some of us who have written and testified against the Biden administration’s censorship efforts. The question is whether, under the administration’s own standards, President Biden should now be banned or blacklisted to protect what his administration has called our “cognitive infrastructure.”

For years, the administration and many Democrats in Congress have resisted every effort to expose the sprawling government censorship program that one federal judge described as an “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.'” As I have written previously, it included grants to academic and third-party organizations to create a global system of blacklists and to pressure advertisers to withdraw support from conservative sites.

Most recently, a House Judiciary Committee report revealed another layer of this system, described as a “switchboarding” role for the censorship system by channeling demands for removal or bans from state and local officials. This switchboarding process was confirmed by Brian Scully of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), during prior court testimony. CISA’s director, Jen Easterly, previously declared the administration’s intent to extend its role over maintaining critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure” and combating not just mis- and disinformation but also “malinformation,” which CISA describes as “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

As a result, over the last four years, researchers, politicians, and even satirical sites have been banned or blacklisted for offering dissenting views of COVID measures, climate change, gender identity or social justice, according to the House Judiciary report. No level of censorship seemed to be sufficient for President Biden, who once claimed that social media companies were “killing people” by not silencing more dissenting voices.

Now, though, President Biden himself is accused — by some in his own administration — of spreading misinformation and supporting war criminals.

Chuck Schumer's AI Conference

 CTH  |  According to a recent media report, Senator Chuck Schumer led an AI insight forum that included tech industry leaders: Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Tesla, X and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, NVIDIA President Jensen Huang, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, technologist and Google alum Eric Schmidt, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Additionally, representatives from labor and civil rights advocacy groups which included: AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights President and CEO Maya Wiley, and AI accountability researcher Deb Raji. The group was joined by a list of prominent AI executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Notably absent from the Sept 13th forum was anyone with any real-world experience that is not a beneficiary of government spending. This is not accidental. Technocracy advances regardless of the citizen impact. Technocrats advance their common interests, not the interests of the ordinary citizen.

That meeting comes after DHS established independent guidelines we previously discussed {GO DEEP}.

DHS’ AI task force is coordinating with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on how the department can partner with critical infrastructure organizations “on safeguarding their uses of AI and strengthening their cybersecurity practices writ large to defend against evolving threats.”

Remember, in addition to these groups assembling, the Dept of Defense (DoD) will now conduct online monitoring operations, using enhanced AI to protect the U.S. internet from “disinformation” under the auspices of national security. {link}

So, the question becomes, what was Chuck Schumer’s primary reference for this forum?

(FED NEWS) […] Schumer said that tackling issues around AI-generated content that is fake or deceptive that can lead to widespread misinformation and disinformation was the most time-sensitive problem to solve due to the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

[…] The top Democrat in the Senate said there was much discussion during the meeting about the creation of a new AI agency and that there was also debate about how to use some of the existing federal agencies to regulate AI.

South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, Schumer’s Republican counterpart in leading the bipartisan AI forums, said: “We’ve got to have the ability to provide good information to regulators. And it doesn’t mean that every single agency has to have all of the top-end, high-quality of professionals but we need that group of professionals who can be shared across the different agencies when it comes to AI.”

Although there were no significant voluntary commitments made during the first AI insight forum, tech leaders who participated in the forum said there was much debate around how open and transparent AI developers and those using AI in the federal government will be required to be. (read more)

There isn’t anything that is going to stop the rapid deployment of AI in the tech space.  However, for the interests of the larger American population, the group unrepresented in the forum, is the use of AI to identify, control, and impede information distribution that is against the interests of the government and the public-private partnership the technocrats are assembling.

The words “disinformation” and “deep fakes” are as disingenuous as the term “Patriot Act.”   The definitions of disinformation and deep fakes are where the government regulations step in, using their portals into Big Tech, to identify content on platforms that is deemed in violation.

It doesn’t take a deep political thinker to predict that memes and video segments against the interests of the state will be defined for removal.

DoD Fitna Scrutinize You To Protect You In Ways You Didn't Even Know You Need!

CTH  | The US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has contracted New York-based Accrete AI to deploy software that detects “real time” disinformation threats on social media.

The company’s Argus anomaly detection AI software analyzes social media data, accurately capturing “emerging narratives” and generating intelligence reports for military forces to speedily neutralize disinformation threats.

“Synthetic media, including AI-generated viral narratives, deep fakes, and other harmful social media-based applications of AI, pose a serious threat to US national security and civil society,” Accrete founder and CEO Prashant Bhuyan said.

“Social media is widely recognized as an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning vulnerabilities and manipulate behavior through the intentional spread of disinformation.

“USSOCOM is at the tip of the spear in recognizing the critical need to identify and analytically predict social media narratives at an embryonic stage before those narratives evolve and gain traction. Accrete is proud to support USSOCOM’s mission.”

But wait… It gets worse!

[PRIVATE SECTOR VERSION] – The company also revealed that it will launch an enterprise version of Argus Social for disinformation detection later this year.

The AI software will provide protection for “urgent customer pain points” against AI-generated synthetic media, such as viral disinformation and deep fakes.

Providing this protection requires AI that can automatically “learn” what is most important to an enterprise and predict the likely social media narratives that will emerge before they influence behavior. (read more)

Now, take a deep breath…. Let me explain.

The goal is the “PRIVATE SECTOR VERSION.”  USSOCOM is the mechanical funding mechanism for deployment, because the system itself is too costly for a private sector launch.   The Defense Dept budget is used to contract an Artificial Intelligence system, the Argus anomaly detection AI, to monitor social media under the auspices of national security.

Once the DoD funded system is created, the “Argus detection protocol” – the name given to the AI monitoring and control system, will then be made available to the public sector.  “Enterprise Argus” is then the commercial product, created by the DoD, which allows the U.S. based tech sectors to deploy.

The DoD cannot independently contract for the launch of an operation against a U.S. internet network, because of constitutional limits via The Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States.  However, the DoD can fund the creation of the system under the auspices of national defense, and then allow the private sector to launch for the same intents and purposes.   See how that works? 

RESOURCES:

Using AI for Content Moderation

Facebook / META / Tech joining with DHS

Zoom will allow Content Scraping by AI 

AI going into The Cloud

U.S. Govt Going into The Cloud With AI

Pentagon activates 175 Million IP’s 👀**ahem**

Big Names to Attend Political AI Forum

Using Ken Klippenstein DoD Tries To Discredit David Grush By Leaking His Medical Records

theintercept  |  On Tuesday evening, Ross Coulthart, an Australian independent journalist who covers UFOs and has interviewed Grusch, posted a statement attributed to Grusch on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“It has come to my attention that The Intercept intends to publish an article about two incidents in 2014 and 2018 that highlights previous personal struggles I had with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Grief and Depression,” the statement reads. “As I stated under oath in my congressional testimony, over 40 credentialed intelligence and military personnel provided myself and my colleagues the information I transmitted to the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) and I took the leadership role to represent the concerns of these distinguished and patriotic individuals.”

Grusch’s wife, Jessica Grusch, did not respond to several requests for comment.

A former colleague of Grusch’s expressed shock that he retained his clearance after the 2014 incident, which was also documented in public records obtained by The Intercept.

“I think it’s like any insular group: Once you’re in, they generally protect their own,” said the former colleague, who asked not to be named because they feared professional reprisals.

The former colleague said that the 2014 incident was known to Grusch’s superiors, a claim that Coulthart appeared to confirm in an interview on NewsNation, a subscription television network owned by Nexstar Media.

“The intelligence community and the Defense Department clearly accepted there was no issue because he was allowed to keep his security clearance,” Coulthart told Chris Cuomo Tuesday night.

Two Republican members of the House Oversight Committee, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett, were tasked with organizing the July 26 hearing after Grusch’s whistleblower claims became public. Not all House Republicans are supportive of the effort. Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has taken a dim view of Grusch’s claims.

“Every decade there’s been individuals who’ve said the United States has such pieces of unidentified flying objects that are from outer space,” Turner said. “There’s no evidence of this and certainly it would be quite a conspiracy for this to be maintained, especially at this level.”

Grusch emerged as the hearing’s star witness, but his evidence was largely secondhand: When asked, Grusch said he hasn’t seen any of the recovered alien vehicles or bodies himself. While two former Navy fighter pilots alleged unidentified aerial phenomena, neither said anything about their provenance. Grusch was alone among the witnesses in attributing them to extraterrestrials.

“My testimony is based on information I have been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy,” Grusch said in his opening statement.

Shortly after The Intercept reached out to Grusch for comment for this story, Coulthart went on Cuomo’s show and said that The Intercept was planning to publish “confidential medical records” about Grusch that had been leaked by the intelligence community. Coulthart, an ardent defender of Grusch, told NewsNation that “Grusch believes the government may now be behind an effort to release his medical records in an effort to smear his credibility.”

“This is a document that would be, if the media had done the right thing, it would be in his police department file, in the file in the county sheriff’s office,” Coulthart said in his interview with Cuomo. “But Dave has checked today, because he assumed that the journalist had done his homework and just asked the local sheriff for the files. The sheriff has confirmed it did not come from him. The only other place that had this information is the intelligence community, Dave’s personal files inside the intelligence community, where quite properly, when anybody is security assist, things like this have to be looked at, and somebody inside the intelligence community leaked it.”

Coulthart went on to compare the purported leak to Richard Nixon’s attempts to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, who shared the Pentagon Papers with the New York Times.

“I think there should be an inquiry into the circumstances of how sensitive records pertaining to a decorated combat veteran’s file found their way to a journalist not through the proper channels,” Coulthart said. “This could’ve been requested under FOI, as is normal, but the county sheriff has confirmed that did not happen.”

Ken Klippenstein Wrote About The DoD Office Of Information And Perception Management (IPMO)

theintercept  |   While perception management involves denying, or blocking, propaganda, it can also entail advancing the U.S.’s own narrative. The Defense Department defines perception management in its official dictionary as “[a]ctions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning.” This is the part that has, historically, tended to raise the public’s skepticism of the Pentagon’s work.

The term “perception management” hearkens back to the Reagan administration’s attempts to shape the narrative around the Contras in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration sought to kick what his Vice President George H.W. Bush would later call the “Vietnam syndrome,” which it believed was driving American public opposition to support for the Contras. Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, directed the agency’s leading propaganda specialist to oversee an interagency effort to portray the Contras — who had been implicated in grisly atrocities — as noble freedom fighters.

“An elaborate system of inter-agency committees was eventually formed and charged with the task of working closely with private groups and individuals involved in fundraising, lobbying campaigns and propagandistic activities aimed at influencing public opinion and governmental action,” an unpublished draft chapter of Congress’s investigation into Iran-Contra states. (Democrats dropped the chapter in order to get several Republicans to sign the report.)

The Smith-Mundt Act, passed in 1948 in the wake of the Second World War, prohibits the the State Department from disseminating “public diplomacy” — i.e., propaganda — domestically, instead requiring that those materials be targeted at foreign audiences. The Defense Department considered itself bound by this requirement as well.

After the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon triggered backlash after U.S. propaganda was disseminated in the U.S. In 2004, the military signaled that it had begun its siege on Fallujah. Just hours later, CNN discovered that this was not true.

But in 2012, the law was amended to allow propaganda to be circulated domestically, under the bipartisan Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, introduced by Reps. Adam Smith, D-Wash., and Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, which was later rolled into the National Defense Authorization Act.

“Proponents of amending these two sections argue that the ban on domestic dissemination of public diplomacy information is impractical given the global reach of modern communications, especially the Internet, and that it unnecessarily prevents valid U.S. government communications with foreign publics due to U.S. officials’ fear of violating the ban,” a congressional research service report said at the time of the proposed amendments. “Critics of lifting the ban state that it may open the door to more aggressive U.S. government activities to persuade U.S. citizens to support government policies, and might also divert the focus of State Department and the BBG [Broadcasting Board of Governors] communications from foreign publics, reducing their effectiveness.”

The Obama administration subsequently approved a highly classified covert action finding designed to counter foreign malign influence activities, a finding renewed and updated by the Biden administration, as The Intercept has reported.

The IPMO memo produced for the academic institution hints at its role in such propagandistic efforts now. “Among other things, the IPMO is tasked with the development of broad thematic messaging guidance and specific strategies for the execution of DoD activities designed to influence foreign defense-related decision-makers to behave in a manner beneficial to U.S. interests,” the memo states.

As the global war on terror draws to a close, the Pentagon has turned its attention to so-called great power adversaries like Russia and China. Following Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, which in part involved state-backed efforts to disseminate falsehoods on social media, offices tasked with combating disinformation started springing up all over the U.S. government, as The Intercept has reported.

The director of national intelligence last year established a new center to oversee all the various efforts, including the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force and the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.

The Pentagon’s IPMO differs from the others in one key respect: secrecy. Whereas most of the Department of Homeland Security’s counter-disinformation efforts are unclassified in nature — as one former DHS contractor not authorized to speak publicly explained to The Intercept — the IPMO involves a great deal of highly classified work.

That the office’s work goes beyond simple messaging into the rarefied world of intelligence is clear from its location within the Pentagon hierarchy. “The Influence and Perception Management Office will serve as the senior advisor to the USD(I&S) [Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security] for strategic operational influence and perception management (reveal and conceal) matters,” the budget notes.

When asked about the intelligence community’s counter-disinformation efforts, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress this month, “I think DIA’s perspective on this, senator, is really speed: We want to be able to detect that and it’s really with our open-source collection capability working with our combatant command partners where this is happening all over the world — and then the ability to turn something quickly with them, under the right authorities, to counter that disinformation, misinformation.”

Don't Sleep On That Tablet Anti-Disinformation Grand Opus

racket  |  Years ago, when I first began to have doubts about the Trump-Russia story, I struggled to come up with a word to articulate my suspicions.

If the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law, either. New language would have to be invented just to define the wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to talk about it.

Around that same time, writer Jacob Siegel — a former army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest, The Scroll — was beginning the job of putting key concepts on paper. As far back as 2019, he sketched out the core ideas for a sprawling, illuminating 13,000-word piece that just came out this week. Called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.

It will escape no one’s notice that Siegel’s lede recounts the Hamilton 68 story from the Twitter Files. Siegel says the internal dialogues of Twitter executives about the infamous Russia-tracking “dashboard” helped him frame the piece he’d been working on for so long. Which is great, I’m glad about that, but he goes far deeper into the topic than I have, and in a way that has a real chance to be accessible to all political audiences.

Siegel threads together all the disparate strands of a very complex story, in which the sheer quantity of themes is daunting: the roots in counter-terrorism strategy, Russiagate as a first great test case, the rise of a public-private “counter-disinformation complex” nurturing an “NGO Borg,” the importance of Trump and “domestic extremism” as organizing targets, the development of a new uniparty politics anointing itself “protector” of things like elections, amid many other things.

He concludes with an escalating string of anxiety-provoking propositions. One is that our first windows into this new censorship system, like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, might also be our last, as AI and machine learning appear ready to step in to do the job at scale. The National Science Foundation just announced it was “building a set of use cases” to enable ChatGPT to “further automate” the propaganda mechanism, as Siegel puts it. The messy process people like me got to see, just barely, in the outlines of Twitter emails made public by a one-in-a-million lucky strike, may not appear in recorded human conversations going forward. “Future battles fought through AI technologies,” says Siegel, “will be harder to see.”

More unnerving is the portion near the end describing how seemingly smart people are fast constructing an ideology of mass surrender. Siegel recounts the horrible New York Times Magazine article (how did I forget it?) written by Yale law graduate Emily Bazelon just before the 2020 election, whose URL is titled “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation.” Shorter Bazelon could have been Fox Nazis Censorship Derp: the article the Times really ran was insanely long and ended with flourishes like, “It’s time to ask whether the American way of protecting free speech is actually keeping us free.”

Both the actors in the Twitter Files and the multitudinous papers produced by groups like the Aspen Institute and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center are perpetually concerned with re-thinking the “problem” of the First Amendment, which of course is not popularly thought of as a problem. It’s notable that the Anti-Disinformation machine, a clear sequel to the Military-Industrial Complex, doesn’t trumpet the virtues of the “free world” but rather the “rules-based international order,” within which (as Siegel points out) people like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich talk about digital deletion as “necessary to protect American democracy.” This idea of pruning fingers off democracy to save it is increasingly popular; we await the arrival of the Jerzy Kozinski character who’ll propound this political gardening metaphor to the smart set.

Why US Has 30 Biolabs Inside Ukraine Controlled By US Department Of Defense?

WaPo  |  The Kremlin’s disinformation casts the United States — and Ukraine — as villains for creating germ warfare laboratories, giving Mr. Putin another pretext for a war that lacks all justification. The disinformation undermines the biological weapons treaty, showing that Mr. Putin has little regard for maintaining the integrity of this international agreement. The disinformation attempts to divert attention from Russia’s barbaric onslaught against civilians in Ukraine. In 2018, the Kremlin may have been seeking to shift attention from the attempted assassination of former double agent Sergei Skripal in Britain, or from the Robert S. Mueller III investigation that year of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential campaign.

The biological laboratories are just one example of Russia’s wider disinformation campaigns. Data shared by Facebook shows Russians “built manipulative Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter pages, created pro-Muslim and pro-Christian groups, and let them expand via growth from real users,” says author Samuel Woolley in “The Reality Game.” He adds, “The goal was to divide and conquer as much as it was to dupe and convince.” During the pandemic, Russia similarly attempted to aggravate existing tensions over public health measures in the United States and Europe. It has also spread lies about the use of chemical weapons, undermining the treaty that prohibits them and the organization that enforces it. In the Ukraine war, Russia has fired off broadsides of disinformation, such as claiming the victims of the Mariupol massacre were “crisis actors.” Russia used disinformation to mask its responsibility for the shoot-down of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine in 2014.

The disinformation over Ukraine, repeated widely in the Russian media, plays well with social groups that support Putin: the poor, those living in rural areas and small towns, and those being asked to send young men to the front. Mr. Putin so tightly controls the news media that it is difficult for alternative news and messages to break through.

Disinformation is a venom. It does not need to flip everyone’s, or even most people’s, views. Its methods are to creep into the lifeblood, create uncertainty, enhance established fears and sow confusion.

The best way to strike back is with the facts, and fast. Thomas Kent, the former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has pointed out that the first hours are critical in such an asymmetrical conflict: Spreaders of disinformation push out lies without worrying about their integrity, while governments and the news media try to verify everything, and take more time to do so. Mr. Kent suggests speeding the release of information that is highly likely to be true, rather than waiting. For example, it took 13 days for the British government to reach a formal conclusion that Russia was behind the poisoning of Mr. Skripal, but within 48 hours of the attack, then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told Parliament that it appeared to be Russia, which helped tip the balance in the press and public opinion.

In Ukraine, when Russia was on the threshold of invasion, government and civil society organizations rapidly coordinated an informal “early warning system” to detect and identify Russia’s false claims and narratives. It was successful when the war began, especially with use of the Telegram app. In a short time, Telegram use leapt from 12 percent adoption to 65 percent, according to those involved in the effort

Also in Ukraine, more than 20 organizations, along with the National Democratic Institute in Washington, had created a disinformation debunking hub in 2019 that has played a key role in the battle against the onslaught of lies. A recent report from the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy identified three major efforts that paid off for Ukraine in the fight against Russian disinformation as war began. One was “deep preparation” (since Russia was recycling old claims from 2014, they were ready); active and rapid cooperation of civil society groups; and use of technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to help sift through the torrents of Russian disinformation and rapidly spot malign narratives.

Governments can’t do this on their own. Free societies have an advantage that autocrats don’t: authentic civil society that can be agile and innovative. In the run-up to the Ukraine war, all across Central and Eastern Europe, civil society groups were sharpening techniques for spotting and countering Russian disinformation.

Plain old media literacy among readers and viewers — knowing how to discriminate among sources, for example — is also essential.

Open societies are vulnerable because they are open. The asymmetries in favor of malign use of information are sizable. Democracies must find a way to adapt. The dark actors morph constantly, so the response needs to be systematic and resilient.

 

Why Didn't The House Select Committee Interview Officer Tarik Johnson?

Slate |  Carlson also made a big show of his “exclusive” interview with Tarik Johnson, a former Capitol officer who has actually been interviewed before by NPR. The House’s select committee on Jan. 6 did a fine job of connecting larger dots, drawing a straight line from the Stop the Steal rhetoric through to the insurrection. But though it interviewed Capitol police officers, it skipped an interview with Johnson, who was pictured that day wearing a MAGA hat. “The frontline officers and supervisors were not prepared at all,” Johnson said on the air. He told Carlson he asked leadership for direction after the Capitol was breached. “I got no response,” he said. (He said that he used the MAGA hat to avoid being assaulted by the crowds of rioters himself; the Capitol police have denied no one responded to Johnson.) Johnson offered seemingly sincere answers to Carlson’s leading and partisan questions, and gave Carlson’s audience a fair representation of the riot: “They focused on Donald Trump, not the failures of the Capitol police,” he said of the committee. “Some people there had planned on being violent. Some people may have turned violent after what they were going through. I think people wanted to support their president. Some of those people just wanted to support him, and some of those people didn’t commit violence, and some of those people didn’t plan on it.”

There Was A Time When I Believed RAND's Value Was As An Objective "Source Of Truth"

Rand  |  This week marks one year since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, igniting the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II.

RAND researchers have been analyzing the war from countless angles, providing insights on Russian and Ukrainian capabilities, the potential for diplomacy, refugee assistance, and much more.

What have we learned? And what might lie ahead?

We asked nearly 30 RAND experts to reflect on this grim anniversary by highlighting notable takeaways from the first year of Russia's all-out war—and sharing what they're watching as the conflict in Ukraine grinds on. Here's what they said.

What stood out in Year One

“The Russian military undermined its prewar advantages and amplified its disadvantages through a faulty invasion plan and withholding war plans from its force until the last minute. These mistakes collided with Ukrainian resolve and Western support.”

What to watch in Year Two

“Russia seems poised to resume limited offensives. Ukraine also seeks another successful counteroffensive. Yet both sides' capabilities are being worn down. Ukraine will need continued and predictable support as Russia digs deep into its reserves.”

Dara Massicot

Senior Policy Researcher

What stood out in Year One

“The trajectory of Russia-Ukraine negotiations seems odd in retrospect. The sides came closest to outlining the contours of a settlement in the first six weeks of the conflict. What was nearly agreed to then would be inconceivable now.”

What to watch in Year Two

“I will be watching closely to see if Russia is learning from its mistakes or just perpetuating them.”

Samuel Charap

Senior Political Scientist

What stood out in Year One

“Of the war's many takeaways, perhaps the most fundamental is that large, conventional wars are not just confined to history books. It's a lesson that many only half-believed until February 24, and one that the world must never forget going forward.”

What to watch in Year Two

“The big strategic question is whether the front lines will stagnate and eventually turn the war into a frozen conflict. The answer will ultimately come down to whether Western military aid or the ongoing Russian mobilization gains the upper hand.”

Raphael S. Cohen

Director, Strategy and Doctrine Program, RAND Project AIR FORCE; Senior Political Scientist

What stood out in Year One

“The strategic failure of the Russian leadership and the incompetence of the Russian military.”

What to watch in Year Two

“The evolving views of the Russian elite and the Russian populace toward Putin and the war.”

John Tefft

Adjunct Senior Fellow

Human Interaction Inevitably Toxifies General Purpose Chat Technology

NYTimes  |  Soon after ChatGPT debuted last year, researchers tested what the artificial intelligence chatbot would write after it was asked questions peppered with conspiracy theories and false narratives.

The results — in writings formatted as news articles, essays and television scripts — were so troubling that the researchers minced no words.

“This tool is going to be the most powerful tool for spreading misinformation that has ever been on the internet,” said Gordon Crovitz, a co-chief executive of NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation and conducted the experiment last month. “Crafting a new false narrative can now be done at dramatic scale, and much more frequently — it’s like having A.I. agents contributing to disinformation.”

Disinformation is difficult to wrangle when it’s created manually by humans. Researchers predict that generative technology could make disinformation cheaper and easier to produce for an even larger number of conspiracy theorists and spreaders of disinformation.

Personalized, real-time chatbots could share conspiracy theories in increasingly credible and persuasive ways, researchers say, smoothing out human errors like poor syntax and mistranslations and advancing beyond easily discoverable copy-paste jobs. And they say that no available mitigation tactics can effectively combat it.

Predecessors to ChatGPT, which was created by the San Francisco artificial intelligence company OpenAI, have been used for years to pepper online forums and social media platforms with (often grammatically suspect) comments and spam. Microsoft had to halt activity from its Tay chatbot within 24 hours of introducing it on Twitter in 2016 after trolls taught it to spew racist and xenophobic language.

ChatGPT is far more powerful and sophisticated. Supplied with questions loaded with disinformation, it can produce convincing, clean variations on the content en masse within seconds, without disclosing its sources. On Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI introduced a new Bing search engine and web browser that can use chatbot technology to plan vacations, translate texts or conduct research.

Academics Intentionally Making Up Shit Opportunistically Create Confusion

MIT  | Since 2014, viral images of Black people being killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020, nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest social movement in the history of the United States.² Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives.³ And others have called for abolishing the police altogether.⁴

Here is the article in which Harvard profs call for greatest expansion of militarized police surveillance bureaucracy in Western history. Below I discuss the flagrant ethical and intellectual problems and how elite academia can be so dangerous. https://t.co/Cq1fFCdWR2

— Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) November 3, 2022

It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious crime, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially poor, Black people. This is the so-called paradox of under-protection and over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since emancipation.⁵

The American criminal legal system is unjust and inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”

We defend this idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’s Wrong with Mass Incarceration. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the book. In the spirit of conversation and debate, in this essay we err deliberately on the side of comprehensiveness rather than argumentative rigor. One of us is a social scientist, and the other is a philosopher and legal scholar. Our primary goal for this research project, and especially in this essay, is not to convince readers that we are correct—but rather to encourage a more explicit discussion of the empirical and normative bases of some pressing debates about the American criminal legal system. Even if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we contribute can help illuminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound. In fact, because much of this essay (and the underlying book project) strikes a pessimistic tone, we would be quite happy to be wrong about much of what we argue here.

In the first part of this essay, we outline five comparative facts that contradict much of the prevailing way of thinking about what is distinctive about the American criminal legal system. In the second part, we draw out the normative implications of those facts and make the case for the First World Balance.

Carol Crawford Is The CDC's Censorship And Disinformation Czar

stevekirsch  |  Carol Crawford is the person at the CDC responsible for censoring misinformation spreaders.

In this video, I make a call to her to propose a way to end misinformation.

At the end of the call, I remind her that she is engaging in illegal acts by telling social media companies what content to censor. See page 7 for her message to Twitter showing them what to censor.

Twitter follows orders, even though Carol is breaking the law. They aren’t going to turn her in. On the contrary, they are in on it. This is collusion to censor free speech.

If you’d like to tell her you support my suggestion, you can reach her at ccrawford@cdc.gov.

I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear from you.

You Tube censored my video within minutes of posting

I also uploaded the video on YouTube, but it was censored after just 6 views! YouTube will censor anything that makes the government look bad. So if you document government corruption, YouTube is not the place to post it.

Truth Is Treason In An Empire Of Lies

caitlinjohnstone |  The empire has had mixed feelings about the internet since its creation. On one hand it allows for unprecedented surveillance and information gathering and the rapid distribution of propaganda, which it likes, but on the other it allows for the unprecedented democratization of information, which it doesn’t like.

Its answer to this quandary has been to come up with “fact checking” services and Silicon Valley censorship protocols for restricting “misinformation” (with “facts” and “information” defined as “whatever advances imperial interests”). That’s all we’re seeing with continually expanding online censorship policies, and with government-tied oligarchic narrative management operations like NewsGuard.

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.

Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.

This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard.

As journalists like Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley noted years ago, NewsGuard markets itself as a “news rating agency” designed to help people sort out good from bad sources of information online, but in reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against media who question imperial narratives about what’s happening in the world. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal outlined the company’s many partnerships with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and “chief propagandist” Richard Stengel as well as “imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund” when its operatives contacted his outlet for comment on their accusations.

 

 

I Never Imagined Having To Depend On Indian Media For The Truth

ukraina.ru  |  Opening the meeting, Alexei Pushkov , Chairman of the Federation Council Commission on Information Policy and Interaction with the Media , noted the importance that information policy has today. And he expressed a number of considerations as to what should be taken into account in its formation in the foreseeable period. According to Pushkov, we already live in a qualitatively changed world, we should not expect that after the end or settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, everything will return to normal.

“We see a big reformatting of the geopolitical space, geo-economic space, transport links, reformatting of energy supplies, etc. we are entering a qualitatively new world, ” the  politician said, emphasizing that we also see a geopolitical gap between Russia and the West: “these are no longer fluctuations, this is a different state of relations, and if this is less pronounced on our part, then the West clearly took the line on the maximum break in relations and contacts with Russia.

The politician noted that this big gap is accompanied by "a fundamental ideological and informational delimitation - at least it concerns the demarcation with the official line of Western states and the mainstream media, which determine the informational and propaganda agenda."

“This big gap was a matter of time, since Russia fully decided on its choice to develop as an independent center of power. This was not provided for in Western doctrine and Western policy,  ” Pushkov said.

He added that the doctrine of the “end of history”, which justifies the triumph of the Western liberal model of the world order, is unacceptable for Russia.

The vaunted pluralism is over, now the West has one doctrine that everyone must obey, and a number of tools are used to ensure this doctrine (cancellation culture, censorship, blocking objectionable resources, banning journalists, etc.). All this is well felt in the information field of Russia, which, of course, cannot be put up with.

The disengagement manifests itself in various forms - for example, the West has rejected the principle of equal security, is ready to impose its interests by force, imposes a "deliberately muddy" system based on rules that are constantly changing and have no logical justification - in fact, a new international law is being introduced, "the law de facto".

In this regard, the information policy of Russia faces a set of important tasks, the senator continued. There are several directions. This is, in particular, the development and approval of their own criteria for assessing what is happening in the world; gain an independent view of themselves; to reconsider the ideas of the superiority of the Western liberal model - “it turned out that the Soviet Union was not so bad”, and Western democracy, in its current form, clearly cannot be a model ...

In a word, in the Russian Federation “it is necessary to form a new information, educational, educational and cultural space in which the Western world will no longer be a subject of fetishization ... but also not a subject of rejection,” the politician said.

Nazis? What Nazis? These Are Heroic Ukrainian Nationalist Freedom Fighters...,

caitlinjohnstone |  Ahh, that’s much better. Problem solved.

British empire smut rag The Times has a new article out titled “Azov Battalion drops neo-Nazi symbol exploited by Russian propagandists,” which has got to be the most hilarious headline of 2022 so far (and I’m including The Onion and other intentionally funny headlines in the running).

“The Azov Battalion has removed a neo-Nazi symbol from its insignia that has helped perpetuate Russian propaganda about Ukraine being in the grip of far-right nationalism,” The Times informs us. “At the unveiling of a new special forces unit in Kharkiv, patches handed to soldiers did not feature the wolfsangel, a medieval German symbol that was adopted by the Nazis and which has been used by the battalion since 2014. Instead, they featured a golden trident, the Ukrainian national symbol worn by other regiments.”

Yeah that’s how you solve Ukraine’s Nazi problem. A logo change.

https://twitter.com/taseenb/status/1531324958776995840

Claiming it’s “Russian propaganda” to say the Azov Battalion uses neo-Nazi insignia, and is ideologically neo-Nazi, is itself propaganda. A month ago Moon of Alabama published an incomplete list of the many mainstream western outlets who have described various Ukrainian paramilitaries as such, so if it’s only “Russian propagandists” who’ve been saying the Azov Battalion is neo-Nazi then Silicon Valley social media platforms should immediately ban outlets like NBC News, the BBC, The Guardian, and Reuters.

Before this war started this past February it wasn’t seriously controversial to say that Ukraine has a Nazi problem except in the very most virulent of empire spinmeister echo chambers. Even in the early days of the conflict it was still happening with mainstream publications who hadn’t yet gotten the memo that history had been rewritten, like this NBC News article from March titled “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t.”

So plainly it is not “Russian propaganda” to highlight the established fact that there are neo-Nazi paramilitaries in Ukraine who are receiving weapons from the US and its allies. The change in insignia isn’t being made to correct a misperception, it’s being made to obscure a correct perception.

The change in insignia is a rebranding to a more mainstream-friendly logo, very much like Aunt Jemima rebranding to Pearl Milling Company due to the Jim Crow racism the previous branding evoked. The primary difference is that the corporate executives of Pearl Milling probably aren’t still interested in turning America back into an apartheid state.

As journalist Alex Rubenstein noted on Twitter, al Qaeda in Syria went through a similar rebranding not long ago for the exact same reasons: