NEW LEAKS PROVE THE US GOVERNMENT IS ENGAGED IN INFORMATION WARFARE AGAINST US CITIZENS

For documentation, view here: https://archive.is/Ti7YC

"1. TWITTER FILES #20: The Information Cartel"

1. My name is Andrew Lowenthal. For almost 18 years, I was Executive Director of @EngageMedia, an NGO devoted to protecting digital rights and freedoms. In recent years, I watched with concern and then despair as a dramatic change swept through my field.

1. Organizations & peers began de-emphasizing freedom of expression, instead promoting surveillance & censorship to combat 'disinformation'. Here Automated Controversy Detection & the Center for an Informed Public boast of their online monitoring capabilities. Image

1. I knew things were bad. When I started work on the #TwitterFiles, I learned: they're far worse. The Files show an uncanny alliance of academics, journalists, intelligence operatives, military personnel, government bureaucrats, NGO workers and more. Some I know personally.

1. I had always understood "civil society" to mean "not the military." The former exists to check the latter. So I was shocked to see the depth of collaboration. For instance, "civil society" groups coordinating with Pentagon officials in an "election tabletop" exercise. Why? Image

1. Also startling: Twitter emails and Slack communications suggesting heightened levels of data access for the military. Or military contractors like Mitre being part of the Aspen Institute's "Information Disorder" report along with NGO and academic colleagues. ImageImage

1. In a functioning democracy there’s dynamic tension between government, civil society organizations, news media, and industry, all advancing their own interests, in theory keeping one another honest. In the #TwitterFiles we find them all working together, cartel-style.

1. In the #TwitterFiles, tech firms collaborate with each other, and the state. Companies organize "IndustrySynch," "Industry comms," "pre-sync," and "Multi-Party Information Sharing," collaborating on a "whole range" of subjects, from election security to state-media labeling.

1. Tech companies not only collaborate on content, they gather regularly for "private sector engagement" with the FBI, DOD, DHS, House and Senate Intel Committees, and others, each agency getting its own meetings

1. Here Twitter staff ask for Twitter General Counsel (& former FBI Deputy General Counsel) Jim Baker's blessing for EIP and Virality Project partner Graphika to "inform their partners in USG 3-5 days before publication" of a report detailing Pentagon disinformation operations.

1. Graphika receives money from the Pentagon, Navy, and Air Force, while simultaneously supporting human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Working with both the perpetrators & those representing the victims is very 2023.

1. During the War on Terror the DHS was harshly criticized by progressives for civil rights violations and targeting of Muslims. Now DHS sub-entities like CISA work closely with progressive tech. Here Twitter warmly welcomes a DHS/CISA staffer's job application.

1. Other DHS staff such as Matt Masterson become fellows at the Stanford Internet Observatory and work on the Virality Project's censorship of "true stories of vaccine side effects." The revolving door between academia, government, NGO's and BigTech is endless.

1. As reported by @shellenbergerMD, The Aspen Institute combined WaPo, NYT, Rollingstone, NBC, CNN, Twitter, Facebook, Stanford, and "anti-disinfo" NGOs like FirstDraft to practice an oddly prescient "hack and leak" exercise on the Hunter Biden laptop BEFORE its release.

1. When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke, the existence of the recent tabletop exercise became instant important news - but the journalists who’d attended stayed mum, perhaps granting off-the-record privileges to the organizers.

1. "We totally blew it on our Burisma tabletop this summer — we didn't have Trump announcing "Lock him up" until day nine of the Burisma information operation" writes Garret Graff, the Aspen Institute’s Director of Cyber Initiatives.

1. "LOL! Ok, off the record, what's our working theory here of what happened?" replies Noah Shachtman, current Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief.

1. Last week Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was alleged to have instigated the "Russian" "hack" letter signed by 50 former intel officials. At RightsCon, civil society's biggest digital rights event, Blinken spoke on 'disinformation' with Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa.

19. See how it works? The people accusing others of "disinformation" RUN the biggest disinformation campaigns themselves.

1. Anti-disinformation conferences teem with Beltway journalists - the same names from the Post, Times, Atlantic, and NBC, over and over - but these proto-censorship workshops are often off the record, like defense or intel confabs. Reporters are participants, not adversaries.

1. The scale of funding is similarly beyond shocking. Governments and foundations pour millions - one company alone reportedly won$979 million from the Pentagon - into "anti-disinformation" firms and NGOs.

1. Craig Newmark is reported to have given more than $200m to journalism projects, (by another estimate $338m) including the founding funds for the Stanford Internet Observatory.

1. Whether it's the ADL with election miscreants, the Alethea Group counting China-linked accounts "amplifying known right-wing figures," or the Atlantic Council monitoring "opposition activity" around the Iran deal, the NGOs make blacklists of wrongthinkers:

1. The #TwitterFiles are riddled with removal demands from opaque cut-out organizations like the Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose mysterious funding never troubles either Twitter execs or the reporters who transmit their demands.

1. Media forwards the blacklist demands to industry

1. Industry folds, and all the people from these groups - the same names, over and over - get together for hors d'oeuvres at cozy conferences with NATO STRATCOM, the Center for European Policy Analysis, the Carnegie Endowment, etc. One big club.

1. Here 12 Attorneys General ask Twitter to deplatform the 'disinformation dozen". Twitter jumps into action to help.

1. Nor was I prepared to read bluntly Orwellian communications like Twitter's cheery "Visibility Filtering Year in Review" Newsletter, boasting of new innovations in "soft intervention" and the "Visibility Filtering Library."

1. More surprising was the violation of commonly held privacy values. Meedan (one of Twitter’s 4 main 'anti-disinformation' partners on Covid) had an Omidyar funded project called CryptoChat that advocated peering into private, encrypted messages to weed out "misinformation".

1. In a similar vein The Algorthmic Transparency Institute (a core Virality Project partner) conducted Stasi-style “civic listening” and “automated collection of data” from “closed messaging apps” to hunt down "problematic content" through its Junkipedia initiative.

https://archive.is/Ti7YC

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1650954036009398277.html

>>18785860

more CAPS.

>>18785860

ARTICLE based on Twitter files.

An Insider's Guide to "Anti-Disinformation"

Andrew Lowenthal spent more than two decades defending digital rights, and watched as peers and partner organizations switched to an opposite mission called "anti-disinformation." An inside account

Apr 25, 2023

I knew things were bad in my world, but the truth turned out to be much worse than I could have imagined.

My name is Andrew Lowenthal. I am a progressive-minded Australian who for almost 18 years was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology. My resume also includes fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms.

[Read the accompanying #TwitterFile - The Informational Cartel]

In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation.”

Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing.

When Malaysian and Singaporean governments introduced “fake news” laws, EngageMedia supported networks of activists campaigning against it. We ran digital security workshops for journalists and human rights advocates under threat from government attack, both virtual and physical. We developed an independent video platform to route around Big Tech censorship and supported campaigners in Thailand fighting government attempts to suppress free expression. In Asia, government interference in speech and expression was the norm. Progressive activists in search of more political freedom often looked to the West for moral and financial support. Now the West is turning against the core value of free expression, in the name of fighting disinformation.

https://www.racket.news/p/an-insiders-guide-to-anti-disinformation