The Government’s Plan to Criminalize Your Thoughts

While the load of propaganda seems to have eased up somewhat in current months, proof reveals there’s rather more to come back.

Documents acquired by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi from an nameless however “highly credible” whistleblower reveals new particulars on how the U.S. censorship-industrial complicated — a community of greater than 100 authorities companies, personal companies, academia and nonprofits — polices and criminalizes “wrong-think.”¹

Explosive Revelations

The new cache of paperwork, known as the “CTIL files,” which refers back to the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, have been launched by the three journalists in late November 2023.

“A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance,” the trio wrote on their Substack, “Public.”²

“They describe the actions of an ‘anti-disinformation’ group known as the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that formally started because the volunteer undertaking of information scientists and protection and intelligence veterans however whose ways over time seem to have been absorbed into a number of official tasks, together with these of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The CTI League paperwork provide the lacking hyperlink solutions to key questions not addressed within the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Combined, they provide a complete image of the beginning of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector, or what we have now known as the Censorship Industrial Complex.”

The paperwork describe how the trendy digital censorship packages have been created, and the varied roles of the army, U.S. intelligence companies, civil society organizations and industrial media.

They additionally describe the strategies and methods used, such because the creation and use of sock puppet accounts to spy on and steer on-line discussions and propagate desired narratives, the discrediting of dissenters, and the intentional weaponization of the monetary business towards the identical.

According to the whistleblower, CTIL was additionally concerned within the creation of a counter-disinformation undertaking to “prevent a repeat of 2016,” a reference to Brexit and Donald Trump’s shock election win — two conditions by which the democratic processes truly received out.

As famous by Jimmy Dore within the video above, this was not about stopping the circulation of false info. It was to make sure that no political outsider will ever have the ability to get into the Oval Office once more. The instruction to stop a repeat of 2016 was a direct name to undermine, if not eradicate, the method of free and honest elections.

Importantly, the paperwork admit that censorship efforts towards Americans should be finished by companions within the personal sector, as a result of the federal government does not have the “authorized authority” to take action.

The CTIL

The new cache of paperwork and movies reveal that 2019 was a pivotal 12 months for the censorship-industrial complicated. According to Public,³ that’s when “U.S. and U.K. military and intelligence contractors led by a former U.K. defense researcher, Sara-Jayne ‘SJ’ Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework.”

These contractors grew to become co-leaders of the CTIL, the unique founders of which included a former Israeli intelligence official, Ohad Zaidenberg, Microsoft safety supervisor Nate Warfield, Chris Mills, one other Microsoft safety officer, and Marc Rogers, the top of safety operations for the hackers conference, DEF CON.

According to media articles,⁴ these extremely expert and in-demand professionals made the altruistic determination to volunteer their companies to assist billion-dollar hospitals with their cybersecurity, freed from cost, no strings hooked up. It wasn’t a reputable cowl story then, and it positive hasn’t aged any higher.

Within one month of the CTIL’s founding in March 2020, this supposedly all-volunteer group had grown to 1,400 “by invitation only” members in 76 nations and formally partnered with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA). As reported by Public:⁵

“The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.”

Parallel Censorship Agendas

In the spring of 2020, CISA additionally created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) — a consortium made up by the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika (a social media analytics firm) — and outsourced what would in any other case be unlawful and unconstitutional censorship to it.

During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA labored with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) to affect and police political discussions on-line. The EIP coordinated the take-down of undesirable content material utilizing a real-time chat app that the DHS, EIP and social media corporations all share.⁶

At the identical time, the CTIL was monitoring and reporting anti-lockdown views on social media. A “law enforcement” channel was created particularly to spy on and observe social media customers who posted anti-lockdown hashtags. CTIL even stored a spreadsheet with particulars from their Twitter bios.

According to Public, the CTIL additionally “engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote ‘counter-messaging,’ co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups.” In February 2021, the EIP was rebranded because the Virality Project, at which level their focus of censorship shifted from elections to COVID-related issues.

Government Infiltration and Take-Over

While one CTIL member, Bonnie Smalley, replied to a question by Public saying the CTIL “had nothing to do with the government,” the proof reveals in any other case. At least a dozen of presidency staff who labored with the DHS, FBI and CISA have been additionally lively members of CTIL.

According to the whistleblower, the CTIL’s aim “was to become part of the federal government.” Terp’s plan was to arrange “MisinfoSec communities” that would come with the federal sector, and the paperwork present this purpose was achieved. In April 2020, Chris Krebs, then-director of CISA, additionally publicly introduced the company’s partnership with CTIL.

Public continues:⁷

“The paperwork additionally present that Terp and her colleagues, by means of a bunch known as MisinfoSec Working Group, which included [Stanford Internet Observatory research manager Renee] DiResta, created a censorship, affect, and anti-disinformation technique known as Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT).

They wrote AMITT by adapting a cybersecurity framework developed by MITRE … Terp later used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization then employed in ‘countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe.’

A key part of Terp’s work by means of CTIL, MisinfoSec, and AMITT was to insert the idea of ‘cognitive security’ into the fields of cybersecurity and knowledge safety …

The ambitions of the 2020 pioneers of the Censorship Industrial Complex went far past merely urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to place people on blacklists.

The AMITT framework requires discrediting people as a needed prerequisite of demanding censorship towards them. It requires coaching influencers to unfold messages. And it requires making an attempt to get banks to chop off monetary companies to people who manage rallies or occasions.”

Weaponization of Finance Sector Originated With CTIL

So, now we all know the place the weaponization of the monetary sector got here from. It originated with the CTIL, which expressly sought to get banks to “cut off financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events.”

Clearly, as evidenced by my very own case and lots of others, banks and on-line cost processors have additionally been enticed into reducing companies for individuals who merely expressed opposing views. It isn’t simply rally organizers which are being focused.

Under the Cover of Altruism

While CTIL officers have repeatedly pressured that the group was based on purely altruistic ideas, the clear aim of its leaders was to “build support for censorship among national security and cybersecurity institutions,” Public writes, they usually constructed that help by selling Terp’s thought of “cognitive security.”

The alternative of the time period “cognitive security” takes on a slightly sinister taste in gentle of Dr. Michael Nehls’ findings that there’s been what seems to be an intentional effort to destroy the autobiographical reminiscence operate within the brains of the general public over the previous 4 years, thereby facilitating mass indoctrination and inhibiting private will and important pondering.

He presents his thesis within the ebook “The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom,”⁸ revealed in mid-December 2023.

The whistleblower’s materials clearly reveal that subtle army ways have been turned on the American public, highly effective psychological instruments — the very instruments Nehls says can actually alter organic mind operate.

Public cites a MisinfoSec report by which “The authors called for placing censorship efforts inside of ‘cybersecurity’ even while acknowledging that ‘misinformation security’ is utterly different from cybersecurity. They wrote that the third pillar of ‘The information environment’ after physical and cybersecurity should be ‘The Cognitive Dimension.’”

Indeed, your thoughts — your cognition, your very potential to assume independently — is the battlefield of right this moment’s conflict, as Nehls proposes in his ebook. The scary half is that the instruments employed even have the facility to reprogram who you might be.

We are certainly “hackable animals,” as proposed by Yuval Noah Harari, and the censorship-industrial complicated has been hacking into the very mind construction of billions of individuals for the final 4 years already. Gutentag even touches on this in a December 3, 2023, article:⁹

“What was as soon as thought-about a ‘conspiracy theory’ that army and intelligence forces have been manipulating public opinion by means of inorganic interventions, has now been confirmed.

Our examine of the Censorship Industrial Complex has uncovered a far-reaching plan to subvert the democratic course of and have interaction in actions which have a foundation in army methods and that are tantamount to makes an attempt at thought or thoughts management.”

‘It’s Legal if We Can Get Away With It’

The CTIL recordsdata additionally present there was a transparent intent to avoid the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the personal and nongovernmental sector. According to the whistleblower:¹⁰

“The ethos was that if we get away with it, it’s legal, and there were no First Amendment concerns because we have a ‘public-private partnership’ — that’s the word they used to disguise those concerns. ‘Private people can do things public servants can’t do, and public servants can provide the leadership and coordination.’”

Good News, Bad News

The excellent news is that an increasing number of info is popping out concerning the U.S. authorities’s unlawful outsourcing of censorship, and with it, authorized challenges that throw up blocks towards this circumvention of the Constitution.

We’ve additionally had different victories. In August 2022, the DHS was pressured to terminate the Disinformation Governance Board attributable to public backlash. CISA has additionally deleted details about home censorship work from its web site, and has dismantled its Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation (MDM) subcommittee.

The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government can be persevering with its seek for fact, and can (hopefully) use no matter energy at its disposal to rein within the abuse. Its most up-to-date report, “The Weaponization of ‘Disinformation’ Pseudo-Experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech”¹¹ was revealed November 6, 2023.

Unfortunately, we even have a worldwide effort underway to not solely normalize but additionally legalize this sort of third-party censorship. In an August 1, 2023, video (beneath), Mike Benz¹² defined this technique.

Video Link

In brief, they’re making an attempt to restructure the censorship business “away from a top-down government-driven model” to a “competitive middleware model” the place “content curation” (learn censorship) is just outsourced to third-party organizations.

This method, a “legal” disinformation compliance market is created whereas authorities can declare it has nothing to do with the management of knowledge. Basically, what we’re taking a look at is the emergence of organized company censorship.

There’s no clear answer to this menace, apart from to proceed pushing again towards any and all efforts to legalize, standardize and normalize censorship. To vocally object, to refuse utilizing middleware like NewsGuard, and to boycott any firm or group that makes use of middleware or engages in censorship of any variety.