by Dr. Joseph Mercola, Mercola:
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Documents received by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi from an anonymous but “highly credible” whistleblower reveals new details on how the U.S. censorship-industrial complex — a network of more than 100 government agencies, private firms, academia and nonprofits — seeks to police and criminalize “wrong-think”
- The documents describe how the modern digital censorship programs were created, and the various roles of the military, U.S. intelligence agencies, civil society organizations and commercial media
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- They also describe the methods and techniques used, such as the creation and use of sock puppet accounts to spy on and steer online discussions and propagate desired narratives, and the discrediting of dissenters “as a necessary prerequisite of demanding censorship against them”
- The documents show that the weaponization of the financial sector originated with the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), which expressly sought to get banks to “cut off financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events”
- The CTIL files also show there was a clear intent to circumvent the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private and nongovernmental sector. According to the whistleblower, “The ethos was that if we get away with it, it’s legal”
While the weight of propaganda appears to have eased up a little in recent months, evidence shows there’s much more to come.
Documents received by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi from an anonymous but “highly credible” whistleblower reveals new details on how the U.S. censorship-industrial complex — a network of more than 100 government agencies, private firms, academia and nonprofits — polices and criminalizes “wrong-think.”1
Explosive Revelations
The new cache of documents, referred to as the “CTIL files,” which refers to the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, were released 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 activities of an ‘anti-disinformation’ group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Combined, they offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex.”
The documents describe how the modern digital censorship programs were created, and the various roles of the military, U.S. intelligence agencies, civil society organizations and commercial media.
They also describe the methods and techniques used, such as the creation and use of sock puppet accounts to spy on and steer online discussions and propagate desired narratives, the discrediting of dissenters, and the intentional weaponization of the financial industry against the same.
According to the whistleblower, CTIL was also involved in the creation of a counter-disinformation project to “prevent a repeat of 2016,” a reference to Brexit and Donald Trump’s surprise election win — two situations in which the democratic processes actually won out.
As noted by Jimmy Dore in the video above, this was not about preventing the circulation of false information. It was to ensure that no political outsider will ever be able to get into the Oval Office again. The instruction to prevent a repeat of 2016 was a direct call to undermine, if not eliminate, the process of free and fair elections.
Importantly, the documents admit that censorship efforts against Americans must be done by partners in the private sector, because the government doesn’t have the “legal authority” to do so.
The CTIL
The new cache of documents and videos reveal that 2019 was a pivotal year for the censorship-industrial complex. 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 became co-leaders of the CTIL, the original founders of which included a former Israeli intelligence official, Ohad Zaidenberg, Microsoft security manager Nate Warfield, Chris Mills, another Microsoft security officer, and Marc Rogers, the head of security operations for the hackers convention, DEF CON.
According to media articles,4 these highly skilled and in-demand professionals made the altruistic decision to volunteer their services to help billion-dollar hospitals with their cybersecurity, free of charge, no strings attached. It wasn’t a credible cover story then, and it sure hasn’t aged any better.
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 countries and officially 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 also 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 company) — and outsourced what would otherwise be illegal and unconstitutional censorship to it.
During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) to influence and police political discussions online. The EIP coordinated the take-down of undesirable content using a real-time chat app that the DHS, EIP and social media companies all share.6
At the same time, the CTIL was tracking and reporting anti-lockdown views on social media. A “law enforcement” channel was created specifically to spy on and track social media users who posted anti-lockdown hashtags. CTIL even kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios.
According to Public, the CTIL also “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 as the Virality Project, at which point their focus of censorship shifted from elections to COVID-related matters.
