The origins of the censorship industry have been shrouded in mystery. Now, we have our first glimpses of how it all began.
In the wake of Brexit and Trump’s 2016 election victory, which shocked global elites and hardened them to take aggressive action, a network of shadowy researchers was formed to do nothing more than monitor the internet for disapproved narratives by the state
Michael Shellenberger, along with Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi, unearthed the disturbing trove of documents and attempted to unravel the nascent scheme to create the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”
THE CTIL FILES #1
Many people insist that governments are not involved in censorship, but they are. And now, a whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or surpassing the Twitter files and the Facebook files in scale and importance. pic.twitter.com/tqgSQjPIuT
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) November 28, 2023
Dubbing these CTIL files, Shellenberger said that “Many people insist that governments are not involved in censorship, but they are. And now, a whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or surpassing the files of Twitter and Facebook Files in Scale and Importance.”
Investigative reporters then connect the embryonic censorship plans to a trio of shadowy investigators in the US and UK.
Now, a trove of new documents, including strategy papers, training videos, presentations and internal messages, reveal that in 2019, US and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defender Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp. , developed the broad censorship framework. These contractors jointly led CTIL, which partnered with CISA in spring 2020.
In fact, the construction of the censorship industrial complex began even earlier, in 2018.
The documents reveal a budding nexus between the military, intelligence and CISA with the Department of Homeland Security and social media platform Facebook.
Internal CTIL Slack messages show Terp, his colleagues and DHS and Facebook officials working closely together on the censorship process.
The CTIL framework and public-private model are the seeds of what the US and UK would put in place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship of cyber security institutions and disinformation agendas; a strong focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressure social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.
In the spring of 2020, CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, including anti-lockdown narratives such as “all jobs are essential,” “we will not stay home,” and “open America now “. CTIL created a law enforcement channel to report content as part of these efforts. The organization also researched people posting anti-lockdown hashtags like #freeCA and kept a spreadsheet detailing their Twitter bios. The group also discussed requesting “takedown” and reporting website domains to registrars.
While the public-private partnership model has become a preferred method of circumventing constitutional protections for American citizens, it has now fully morphed into fascism, CTIL files show.
The CTIL group not only advocated censorship of state-disapproved narratives, but also advocated psychological warfare against domestic populations to manipulate public opinion.
CTIL’s approach to “disinformation” went far beyond censorship. The documents show the group engaged in offensive operations to sway public opinion, discussing ways to promote “counter-messaging,” co-opting hashtags, watering down disfavored messages, creating puppet accounts and infiltrating private invite-only groups.
In a suggested list of survey questions, CTIL proposed asking members or potential members, “Have you worked with influence operations (eg, disinformation, hate speech, other digital harm, etc.) before?” The survey then asked whether these influence operations included “active measures” and “psyops.”
The veteran independent journalists claim these files came from a “highly credible whistleblower” and were “able to independently verify their legitimacy through extensive cross-checking of information with publicly available sources.”
The report added that the whistleblower “said they were recruited to participate in CTIL through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by DHS,” explaining how investigators were able to obtain the files.
As has become typical for government agencies that don’t feel they owe the public an explanation, the report notes that the FBI, CISA, Terp and other key CTIL leaders did not comment on the report.
But one person involved, Bonnie Smalley, responded on Linked in, saying: “All I can comment on is that I joined the CTI league, which is not affiliated with any government organization, because I wanted to fight the nonsense of injecting bleach into line during covid…I can assure you we had nothing to do with the government,” Shellenberger commented.
Even left-leaning Politifact has debunked the skewed report that Donald Trump told people to drink or inject bleach in a “fact check.” So this “fact checker” apparently can’t even get the basic facts of the stories right.
Shellenberger’s report, however, states that “the documents suggest that government employees were contracted members of CTIL. A person working for DHS, Justin Frappier, was extremely active in CTIL, participating in regular meetings and leading trainings.”
It gets even worse. CTIL had ostensible ambitions to be part of the federal government, accompanied by taxpayer dollars, massive empowerment, and access to extensive data being collected on Americans.
The ultimate goal of CTIL, the whistleblower said, “was to become part of the federal government. In our weekly meetings, they made it clear that they were building these organizations within the federal government, and if you built the first iteration, we could assure you a job”.
The investigative report finds reason to believe that CTIL was largely able to achieve its goal of integrating itself into the government of the American people.
Terp’s plan, which he shared in presentations to information security and cybersecurity groups in 2019, was to create “Misinfosec communities” that would include the government.
Both public records and the complainant’s documents suggest that she succeeded. In April 2020, Chris Krebs, then director of CISA, announced on Twitter and in several articles that CISA was partnering with CTIL. “It’s really an information exchange,” Krebs said.
The documents also show that Terp and his colleagues, through a group called the MisinfoSec Working Group, which included DiResta, created a censorship, influence and anti-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT ). They wrote AMITT by adapting a cybersecurity framework developed by MITER, a major defense and intelligence contractor that has an annual budget of $1 billion to $2 billion in government funding.
Terp later used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization then used to “counter anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe”.
Terp then invoked the Orwellian term of “cognitive security,” ostensibly to mean the population’s worldviews that align with those of government narratives.
A key component of Terp’s work through CTIL, MisinfoSec, and AMITT was to insert the concept of “cognitive security” into the cybersecurity and information security fields.
The investigation paints a picture of a censorship industry that has gone completely out of control.
The sum total of the documents is a clear picture of a highly coordinated and sophisticated effort by the US and UK governments to build a domestic censorship effort and influence operations similar to those they have used in foreign countries. At one point, Terp openly referenced his “background” work on social media issues related to the Arab Spring. Again, the whistleblower said, he expressed his own apparent surprise that he would ever use such tactics, developed for foreign nationals, against American citizens.
As Shellenberger noted, referring to the whistleblower’s statements, approximately 12 to 20 active individuals involved in CTIL worked for the FBI or CISA.
“For a while, they had their agency stamps (FBI, CISA, whatever) next to your name,” the whistleblower said on the messaging service Slack. Terp “had a CISA badge that went missing at some point,” the whistleblower said.
This is by no means out of the norm. Dozens of former national security officials have gone to work for social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter after leaving government service. Social media has been thoroughly infiltrated by intelligence actors, which partly explains the hostility against Elon Musk’s relatively free-speech platform X after a partial purge of these state actors from Twitter.
Shellenberger, Taibbi and others will testify before the House Armaments Committee at 10 a.m. Thursday
🚨AUDIO NOTICE: @mtaibbi, @shellenberger, @rupasubramanya.
Thursday. 10:00 am ET. pic.twitter.com/UVa9HvRnTm
— Committee on Weaponization (@Weaponization) November 27, 2023
The disturbing report comes after a move by Congress to defund Newsguard, an alleged “fact-checker” that works unconstitutionally with the Defense Department and the State Department, which is led by the Alliance for the Freedom of Expression. The FSA is also seeking to pressure the government to end all operations with disinformation police such as Newsguard, CTIL and the Global Disinformation Index.
These narrative policers essentially blacklist independent journalists and center-right publishers and seek to remove them from advertisers’ lists.
Elon Musk’s X has also been targeted by Newsguard, prompting him to remark that it is “a propaganda shop that will produce the lies you want if you pay them enough money”.
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