Is this the death of the censorship industrial complex?
Getting the private sector to do what the government isn't supposed to isn't working out quite as well as expected.
Edit: fixing typos and errors.
Back on November 6th, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH 4th District)(@Jim_Jordan), the chairman of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee (@JudiciaryGOP) and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (@Weaponization) released a TwiX thread on the censorship industrial complex (CIC), detailing a complex domestic surveillance & censorship operation dependent on public-private partnerships.
The EIP “Experts”
“The Election Integrity Partnership was founded in 2020 as a non-partisan coalition to empower the research community, election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, social media platforms, and others to defend our elections against those who seek to undermine them by exploiting weaknesses in the online information environment.
Our work, led in 2022 by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, focuses on a narrow scope of topics that are demonstrably harmful to the democratic process: attempts to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters, or delegitimize election results without evidence. We are interested in these dynamics both during the election cycle as well as after the election, when public perceptions of its legitimacy continue to be formed.”
US elections are decentralized: almost 10,000 state and local election offices are primarily responsible for the operation of elections. Dozens of federal agencies support this effort, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security, the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense.
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“Increasingly pervasive mis- and disinformation, both foreign and domestic, creates an urgent need for collaboration across government, civil society, media, and social media platforms.“
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Who We Are: EIP and Its Members
The Election Integrity Partnership was formed to enable real-time information exchange between election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, social media platforms, the media, and the research community. It aimed to identify and analyze online mis- and disinformation, and to communicate important findings across stakeholders. It represented a novel collaboration between four of the nation’s leading institutions focused on researching mis- and disinformation in the social media landscape:
The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO)
The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP)
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab)
Executive Summary, The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election, EIP.
CISA
Founded in 2018, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (@CISAgov) operates from within the Department of Homeland Security (@DHSgov). According to Jordan’s report, the EIP was created at CISA’s request.
We lead the National effort to understand, manage, and reduce risk to our cyber and physical infrastructure. Our multi-faceted mission is home to more than 15 career fields including business administration, cybersecurity, program management, communications, data science.
What We Do
We connect our stakeholders in industry and government to each other and to resources, analyses, and tools to help them build their own cyber, communications, and physical security and resilience, in turn helping to ensure a secure and resilient infrastructure for the American people.
CISA's 2023-2025 Strategic Plan
Easterly has a very colorful history. She served as an Army intel officer in the ‘90s, an assistant professor at West Point, and a senior policy advisor to the National Security Council (NSC) before returning to the Army in the mid-2000s.
She worked under the NSA and US Cyber Command, later becoming a deputy director for the NSA. She was a special assistant to Obama and the senior director for Counterterrorism under the NSC.
After Donald Trump’s election, she left for the private sector. She worked for Morgan Stanley for nearly 5 years before returning to government as CISA director in 2021. Further, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow with the Aspen Institute.
By the way, just so you know, CISA is committed to promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).
DEI Strategic Action Plan 2022 - 2026
”Individuals may belong to more than one underserved community and face intersecting barriers.” Hmm, a hint of intersectionality, I think?
Some more names stuck out.
Graham Brookie
Brookie is the VP of Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) and Senior Director of its Digital Forensic Research Lab (@DFRLab). He’s a former adjunct professor at Georgetown University SFS and a former advisor to the Carnegie Endowment. He’s also a former advisor to the National Security Council & APHSCT (Lisa Monaco) under the Obama White House. I suspect he and Easterly first met sometime around here.
Alex Stamos
Alex Stamos is a cybersecurity expert who just ended his job as the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory (IOP). He now works as the CTO for SentinelOne and a part-time computer science lecturer for Stanford. He has previously served as Facebook’s CSO and Yahoo’s CISO.
The Stanford Internet Observatory is a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies, with a focus on social media. Under the program direction of computer security expert Alex Stamos, the Observatory was created to learn about the abuse of the internet in real time, to develop a novel curriculum on trust and safety that is a first in computer science, and to translate our research discoveries into training and policy innovations for the public good.
The Global Engagement Center (@TheGEC) is an agency within the Department of State (@StateDept). It started off as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) in 2011, before being rebranded to the GEC in 2016. Over time, thanks to legislative and executive action, this state agency has accumulated power and influence.
Mission: To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.
Vision: To be a data-driven body leading U.S. interagency efforts in proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine U.S. interests using disinformation and propaganda.
Establishment of the Global Engagement Center: GEC’s founding traces back to 2011 and Executive Order 13584, which established within the Department of State the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) for the purpose of “supporting agencies in Government-wide public communications activities targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations.”[1] Executive Order 13721 in 2016 transformed the CSCC into the Global Engagement Center but left its counterterrorism mission largely unchanged.
GEC’s mission expanded upon enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 to include the authority to address other foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation activities. The John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 further refined this mission, and endowed it with a mandate, as reflected in GEC’s mission statement.[2]
#DigitalSherlocks
Our Mission
To identify, expose, and explain disinformation where and when it occurs using open source research; to promote objective truth as a foundation of government for and by people; to protect democratic institutions and norms from those who would seek to undermine them in the digital engagement space.
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Understanding Disinformation
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) has operationalized the study of disinformation by exposing falsehoods and fake news, documenting human rights abuses, and building digital resilience worldwide.
Building Digital Resilience
We continually track global disinformation campaigns, fake news stories, covert military developments, and subversive attempts against democracy while teaching the public skills to identify and expose attempts to pollute the information space.
The DFRLab has hosted numerous trainings on open source methodologies and tools necessary to report on mis- and disinformation with civil society, activists, journalists, researchers, and students across Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. Realizing that the many forms of disinformation affect everyone differently, the DFRLab prioritizes regional nuance in all trainings.
In 2019, the DFRLab published over 250 case studies on disinformation globally, trained over 1,000 individuals across dozens of countries.
How the sausage gets made
It took some arm-twisting by Rep. Jordan and the rest of his team to get the necessary records from Stanford.
Prominent public figures such as Donald Trump, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Senator Thom Tillis were targeted by the EIP. Journalists and commentators like James O’Keefe, Dave Rubin, and Tom Fitton were included. Even The Babylon Bee, a satirical news outlet was targeted.
Michael Shellenberger’s testimony on the CIC
Earlier this year, journalist Michael Shellenberger testified before Congress. He began his Congressional testimony by quoting from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address. Shellenburger has become a firm believer in Eisenhower’s warning to Americans. His Twitter Files reporting helped expose a rabbit hole of deep state government-corporate collusion to monitor and censor speech.
Eisenhower’s fears were well-founded. Today, American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy. I am grateful for the opportunity to offer this testimony and sound the alarm over the shocking and disturbing emergence of state-sponsored censorship in the United States of America. The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits, and investigative reporters have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on a range of issues, including on the origins of COVID, COVID vaccines, emails relating to Hunter Biden’s business dealings, climate change, renewable energy, fossil fuels, and many other issues.
Shellenburger called out those same organizations and elaborated on the nature of their deeds.
The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika all have inadequately-disclosed ties to the Department of Defense, the C.I.A., and other intelligence agencies. They work with multiple U.S. government agencies to institutionalize censorship research and advocacy within dozens of other universities and think tanks.
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Rather, they are creating blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists.
The Virality Project was an initiative undertaken jointly by Big Tech, universities, and NGOs to combat “anti-vaccine misinformation.” SIO responded to Taibbi’s Twitter Files by claiming that his findings were “inaccurate and based on distortions of email exchanges in the Twitter Files.”
But new evidence shows that Stanford lied about the scope of the Virality Project and that its censorship efforts were undertaken on behalf of the US government.
As Public reported on Tuesday, new documents shared by the House Judiciary Committee revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created the Virality Project’s predecessor, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), to censor protected speech. Explains the committee, “EIP reconstituted as the Virality Project” and continued working with the federal government. The Twitter Files also found that the Project partnered “with several government agencies,” including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Office of the Surgeon General, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Still, Stanford and the mainstream media insist that “disinformation” experts were merely conducting research, and not involved in actual censorship.
Now, an investigation by Public has uncovered clear evidence that the Project was directly and deliberately involved in successful censorship efforts. Public analyzed a trove of newly released Jira system tickets, the Virality Project’s tipline to social media companies. These tickets overwhelmingly contradict Stanford’s assertion that it did not try to get content censored.
Establishment news media have responded to the efforts to expose and end the censorship industrial complex.
Wray didn’t elaborate, but sources familiar with the matter told NBC News that all the FBI’s interactions with tech platforms now have to be pre-approved and supervised by Justice Department lawyers.
The FBI told the House Judiciary Committee that, since the court rulings, the bureau had discovered foreign influence campaigns on social media platforms but in some cases did not inform the companies about them because they were hamstrung by the new legal oversight, according to a congressional official.
“This is the worst possible outcome in terms of the injunction,” said one U.S. official familiar with the matter. “The symbiotic relationship between the government and the social media companies has definitely been fractured.”
The FBI declined to comment.
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Beyond the FBI briefings, other coordination efforts have folded after facing pressure from conservatives. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees federal election cybersecurity and has become a favorite target of Republicans, has "halted its outreach to Silicon Valley, and the Department of Homeland Security has shuttered a board designed to coordinate its anti-disinformation programs.
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Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee who had vocally pushed for election security coordination after 2016, told NBC News he had “grave concerns” about the setbacks of the system that defends against social media and election manipulation.
“We are seeing a potential scenario where all the major improvements in identifying, threat-sharing, and public exposure of foreign malign influence activity targeting U.S. elections have been systematically undermined,” Warner said.”
This is the very same Senator Mark Warner who introduced the RESTRICT Act, by the way. Senator Rand Paul is helping Jim Jordan push back against the CIC. They’ve co-authored a free speech bill that would strip power from the government.
Additional reporting
The Euro Politico Pre-Puff Piece
Back in September, Mark Scott (@markscott82), Chief Technology Correspondent at POLITICO, wrote an article discussing the CIC. Long story short, he dismissed it as an unproven conspiracy theory pushed by the likes of Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi), Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger), and Russell Brand (@rustyrockets). Shocking.
Frankly, it reads like a reporter with a very European-centric (wishy-washy) attitude on free speech attempting to maintain a positive reputation with prominent players in the CIC. Piss off the wrong people and a lot of open doors will start closing for him, know what I mean? It’s part of his bread and butter after all. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t be surprised, but who knows? I could be wrong. As always, judge for yourself.
Why the concept of the so-called Censorship Industrial Complex is so appealing (but wrong) to those searching for answers about social media.
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“Yet where some see conspiracy, others see accountability. It’s a legitimate argument to question if too much content is removed from social media (albeit material that breaches these firms’ terms of service). It’s another to suggest a mass conspiracy to undermine free speech and democracy. In my years of reporting, I have rubbed shoulders with many of the officials, tech executives and outside groups that are allegedly part of the Censorship Industrial Complex. Almost all are honest, hardworking and trying to quell a surge in hateful and harmful online content. But few (to use a British-ism) would be able to organize a piss-up in a brewery, let alone an international conspiracy.
But it’s true Taibbi, Shellenberger and Brand make an intoxicating argument — but one that should be taken with a massive pinch of salt. No one likes to be told their views are hateful. No one wants to be called a conspiracy theorist. But the ideas behind the unproven Censorship Industrial Complex are gaining ground within political circles. That could have serious consequences during next year’s global election cycle if social media giants, government officials and outside monitoring groups are unable — or unwilling — to call out potentially harmful content out of fear (ironically) of being accused of unfairly hampering people’s free speech.”
With each passing year, America’s internal security is threatened further by government agencies that aspire to surveil and censor Americans who go against establishment narratives via private sector proxies. Every expose of these kinds of activities further erodes the public’s already abysmally low trust in government and spurs calls for radical populist change. It’s only a matter of time before a Trumpian figure takes a hatchet to the CIC and the rest of the administrative state.
Thanks for reading.