Suppression/Propaganda in Media

[DrEvil]

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My primary concerns, as is often the case, are with the underlying drivers behind any substantive proposed policy changes/shifts rather than the front-facing talking points/attempted justifications.

I have minimal faith in either political party placing the interests of The People as a priority over other interests.

Indeed, more often than not underlying issues (that later inspire the clamoring for ‘change’) are at times intentional, part of larger/longer-term objectives that are generally (or exclusively) detrimental to the collective.

Variations of the Bait and Switch and/or Trojan Horse.

This is the worst kind of conspiracy thinking. It's all part of the plan, and anything that contradicts it is just a deeper level of the plan. It's impossible to argue with because anything can be twisted around to be part of the plan.

Anyway, a more nuanced take than the republican/telecom propaganda you and Grizzly posted:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... nd-prices/

Internet providers say the FCC should not investigate broadband prices

ISPs say anti-discrimination rule should cover only deployment, not prices.
Jon Brodkin - 11/8/2023, 9:57 PM

Internet service providers and their lobby groups are fighting a US plan to prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services. In particular, ISPs want the Federal Communications Commission to drop the plan's proposal to require that prices charged to consumers be non-discriminatory.

In 2021, Congress required the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules "preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin" within two years. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel last month released her draft plan to comply with the congressional mandate and scheduled a November 15 commission vote on adopting final rules.

The plan is likely to pass in a party-line vote as Rosenworcel has a 3-2 Democratic majority, but aspects of the draft could be changed before the vote. Next week's meeting could be a contentious one, judging by a statement issued Monday by Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr.

Carr described Rosenworcel's proposal as "President Biden's plan to give the administrative state effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US." He also objects to the Rosenworcel plan's statement that the FCC rules may apply to entities that are not broadband providers, such as landlords, if they "impede equal access to broadband Internet access service."

Consumer advocates generally support the proposal but say the planned system for handling complaints, ISP responses, and investigations is not transparent enough, reducing the system's potential to act as a deterrent. Consumer advocates also say Internet users who have already been harmed by discrimination may not get any relief because the proposed rules do not apply retroactively.

ISPs: Don’t investigate our prices

ISPs including Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon have held a flurry of meetings with FCC officials and commissioners in which they argued that the rules are too broad. The broadband firms are especially concerned about the FCC's plan to consider the prices consumers pay when determining whether an ISP practice is discriminatory. The industry wants the FCC to consider only the deployment of broadband, not other factors such as how much it costs.

In a meeting with Rosenworcel's staff, cable company executives "stated that the Draft Order would impose overbroad liability standards that impede further broadband investment and are legally vulnerable by adopting a disparate impact rather than a disparate treatment liability approach," according to an ex parte filing submitted yesterday by cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association. The meeting included executives from Comcast, Charter, and Cox.

The cable companies said the FCC "should define digital discrimination as disparate treatment and should limit the standard to policies and practices involving the deployment of broadband network facilities. It should not regulate rates or non-technical aspects of broadband service." The cable industry filing said "it is especially important for the Commission to exclude 'price' from the list of 'covered elements of service.'"

Similar arguments were raised by wireless industry trade group CTIA. "Evaluating matters such as pricing, deposits, discounts, and data caps is price regulation because the Commission may levy consequences based on the price per level of service that a provider chooses to offer," CTIA said. "Commission evaluation of price is unnecessary in the competitive wireless marketplace and may deter offering discounts and enticements to switch providers that consumers enjoy today."

More opposition came in filings submitted by AT&T, Verizon, and the USTelecom industry group. ISPs and their trade groups will likely sue the FCC if the rules are approved.

"The draft rules ignore the statute's clear focus on broadband deployment and instead cast a net so wide it would capture every business decision a provider makes concerning how to sell its product, with little regard to the reasonableness (or usefulness) of that decision," AT&T said. "This regulatory overreach will impose unnecessary regulation on broadband providers and divert attention and vital resources from broadband investment and deployment at this key juncture in the bipartisan Infrastructure Act's Broadband, Equity, Access & Deployment Program (BEAD)." That's a reference to a $42 billion grant program that will pay ISPs to expand their networks.

ISPs previously complained about an unrelated rule requiring them to list all their monthly fees, but the FCC rejected their complaints and issued the rule.

Defining discrimination

Rosenworcel's plan defines digital discrimination of access as "policies or practices, not justified by genuine issues of technical or economic feasibility, that differentially impact consumers' access to broadband Internet access service based on their income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin or are intended to have such differential impact."

The draft order says the new rules "do not set rates for broadband Internet access service and are not an attempt to institute rate regulation." Instead, the commission would investigate potential discrimination on a case-by-case basis.

Discrimination would not have to be intentional in order for the FCC to rule against an ISP. A fact sheet from Rosenworcel's office says the FCC would "investigate possible instances of discrimination of broadband access, work to solve and—when necessary—penalize companies for failing to meet the obligations defined in the rules." That applies to "policies and practices if they differentially impact consumers' access to broadband Internet access service or are intended to do so."

As noted earlier, the rules would not apply retroactively. The draft order concludes that the FCC does not have authority "to require covered entities to undertake remedial measures to eradicate the effects of conduct predating the effective date of our rules."

The proposed rules "apply to any lack of comparability in service quality." The plan says the "covered elements of service" that could be evaluated in FCC investigations include but are not limited to the following:

1. Deployment of broadband infrastructure, network upgrades, and network maintenance;
2. Service quality components and the terms and conditions on which broadband Internet access service is provided, including but not limited to speeds, capacities, latency, data caps, throttling, pricing, promotional rates, imposition of late fees, opportunity for equipment rental, installation time, contract renewal terms, service termination terms, and use of customer credit and account history;
3. Marketing, advertisement, and outreach; and
4. Technical service, onsite service, and other provision of customer service.

The draft order rejected a suggestion to allow disparities in broadband deployment and terms if those disparities can be "explained by differences in the profitability of serving the different areas." That approach "would limit the Commission to considering 'profitability' rather than 'issues of technical and economic feasibility,' and would appear to place primary weight on economic rather than technical considerations. Our adopted rule properly includes both technical and economic considerations," the draft says.

Chair defends pricing rule

Despite the FCC statement that it isn't regulating rates, cable companies argue that "the language of the Draft Order would, in fact, regulate rates."

"Regulation of price or non-technical elements, such as marketing, advertising, discounts, or credit checks, would represent a regulatory sea change for the Commission that is inconsistent with the statute," the cable companies' filing said. "Further, this exceptionally broad scope would make provider compliance with and Commission administration of the Draft Order nearly impossible."

Rosenworcel already rejected similar industry arguments that were raised by ISPs during a public comment period. "We reject arguments that we should limit the scope of covered elements of service to deployment practices or technical terms of service, or that we exclude certain terms, such as pricing," the chairwoman's proposal said.

The draft order said the law's "inclusion of 'other quality of service metrics' and 'comparable terms and conditions' in the definition of 'equal access' reflects Congressional intent and authorization that the Commission's digital discrimination of access rules cover any aspect of broadband Internet access service that impedes, impairs or denies 'equal access' to that service." The order goes on to say that "pricing is often the most important term that consumers consider when purchasing goods and services," and this "is no less true with respect to broadband Internet access service."

"Consequently, we do not believe it was necessary for Congress to specifically reference pricing in the definition of 'equal access' because the most natural reading of 'terms and conditions' includes pricing," the draft order said. "The Commission need not prescribe prices for broadband Internet access service, as some commenters have cautioned against, in order to determine whether prices are 'comparable' within the meaning of the equal access definition. The record reflects support for the Commission ensuring pricing consistency as between different groups of consumers."

The draft also points out that US law requires the FCC to prevent both "digital discrimination of access" and "deployment discrimination."

"Had Congress wished to limit the scope of section 60506(b) to 'deployment discrimination,' it would have done so explicitly," the draft plan says. "The use of two different terms ('digital discrimination of access' and 'deployment discrimination') in adjacent subsections of a one-page section of the statute clearly indicates that Congress intended the two terms to have different meanings."

Verizon's filing argued that "when Congress intends to grant authority over 'pricing' or 'rates'—as well as other terms and conditions—it includes those words explicitly. It did not do so in Section 60506."

"The importance of pricing to a customer's purchasing decision and Congress's decision to omit 'rates' or 'pricing' and use only 'terms and conditions' demonstrates that Congress did not want the Commission's digital discrimination inquiry to include prices," Verizon said.

Republican blasts “government control”

Carr objected to the long list of "covered elements of service," saying it "empowers the FCC to regulate every aspect of the Internet sector for the first time ever," and "is motivated by an ideology of government control that is not compatible with the fundamental precepts of free market capitalism."

Carr raised concerns about the plan applying to more than just ISPs. Rosenworcel's draft plan says the FCC "disagree[s] with arguments that our authority under 60506(b) extends only to providers of broadband Internet access service." For example, the draft order does not exempt local governments from the rules "based on their roles as right-of-way managers or franchise regulators," because "any entity that meaningfully affects access to broadband Internet service is subject to our digital discrimination of access rules."

Rosenworcel's plan mentions the scenario of a "landlord restricting broadband options within a building even if multiple providers are available," but is vague on exactly what kinds of companies that aren't ISPs would have to comply with the rules.

"While we reach no conclusion whether this, or other specific examples in the record would be covered by our rules, we are persuaded that there could be situations—now or in the future—in which non-providers could impede equal access to broadband Internet access service based on the listed characteristics," Rosenworcel's draft plan said.

According to Carr, "Landlords are now covered, construction crews are now covered, marketing agencies are now covered, banks are now covered, the government itself is now covered—all newly regulated by the FCC and liable for any act or omission that the agency determines has an impermissible impact on a consumer's access to broadband. Congress never authorized the FCC to regulate these industries or entities."

Carr also pointed to a portion of the FCC draft order that says, "in order to fully effectuate the goals of section 60506, we find that our rules must cover both actions and omissions, whether recurring or a single instance, concerning these aspects of service, that defeat comparability of service quality, terms, and conditions."

Carr's interpretation is that, "if you take any action, you may be liable, and if you do nothing, you may be liable. There is no path to complying with this standardless regime. It reads like a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university's Soviet Studies Department."

Consumer advocates’ complaints

Consumer advocacy groups mostly supported the rules but offered some criticisms. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) asked how the FCC "will address present conditions, given that the draft Order declined to impose 'retroactive liability' and will focus instead on preventing and eliminating digital discrimination of access that occurs after the effective date of the rules."

The NDIA urged the commission "to provide guidance articulating what evidence it will consider to evaluate ongoing behavior, such as the persistent gaps in AT&T's broadband technology and speeds offered to locations in higher and lower-income Census tracts in Cleveland."

Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge said the draft plan "is strong, and if rigorously enforced will prevent future inequality of access." But the proposed complaint process isn't transparent enough, the group said.

"First, the Commission does not propose to share any response by the ISP with the complainant," Public Knowledge wrote. "Indeed, the Commission does not propose to inform the complainant of the outcome of their complaint, what steps the Commission has taken, or in any way to communicate with the complainant after the filing of the complaint... Failure to communicate with the complainant on these matters will create a feeling of futility on the part of complainants and organizations representing complainants that will discourage the filing of meritorious complaints."

A requirement to send updates to complainants would "provide a necessary check on the Commission's discretion," Public Knowledge said. "Because the Commission has created a system that lies entirely within the Commission's discretion—including when and how the Commission will release aggregate or de-anonymized data—it will be impossible to verify whether and to what extent the Commission takes its responsibilities under [the 2021 discrimination law] seriously."

The FCC has what it calls informal and formal complaint processes, and it intends to use its informal process to handle discrimination complaints. Public Knowledge argues that the formal complaint process would be better because the "risk of public shaming supported by discovery by complainants and the ultimate adjudication of the Commission will cause ISPs guilty of digital discrimination to restrain their actions—or seek settlement quickly to avoid further embarrassment."

The group also urged the commission to "adopt rules that protect complainants from retaliation." Because complaints will be shared with ISPs, broadband providers "may retaliate against complainants to discourage future complaints," the group said.

The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation urged the FCC to establish a civil rights office and publish an annual State of Digital Discrimination Report that includes the FCC's "findings of digital discrimination, the steps the Commission has taken to facilitate equitable access to broadband in protected communities, and the final resolution of digital discrimination complaints."

[stickdog99]

[urhttps://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/has-neuroscience-found-the-key-to]Naomi Wolf: Has Neuroscience Found the Key to What Caused Zombie Nation? My Foreword to Bombshell New Book, ‘The Indoctrinated Brain’[/url]

Please enjoy - to the extent you can - my Foreword to ‘The Indoctrinated Brain’, by Dr Michael Nehls. The book, which explains the neuroscience of propaganda, will chill your soul, but may explain a great deal.

‘The fact that the brain is plastic—modifiable—has become much better understood by the public in the past few decades.

General readers understand by now that the human brain can be altered; and that experiences can modify its reactions and processes. We understand now for example that PTSD leaves lasting changes in brain functioning. It’s been established that motherhood changes the brain and that bonding itself is a chemical process modified by the brain.

We also understand, as general readers, that propaganda is real. Some of us have studied propaganda in the past. We have a working knowledge of Joseph Goebbels, and of the artistry and craft that underlay his manufacturing of National Socialist consent. The work of Edward Bernays, one of the earliest practitioners of what became the field of public relations, has been widely read in English. Decades-old bestsellers such as Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key exposed the fact that advertisers use every tool at their disposal to alter our reactions to their products—down to the level of the subconscious mind.

Modern general audiences also understand that governments use “messaging”—and often, heavy-handed propaganda—to lead us to take actions that can be against our interests or our better conscious judgments; to create prejudices and divisions that may not otherwise exist; to heighten fears and to trigger a sense of vulnerability in us, so that we can be better manipulated and guided to goals that are not our own.

But Dr. Michael Nehls’s thesis in this book is revolutionary because it brings together all of these fields of inquiry and proposes a set of questions so radical that they make the mysteries of the past three years fall into place. This is the indispensable book. In The Indoctrinated Brain, Dr. Nehls brings these areas of study together in a way that has never been done before. By applying neuroscience to the otherwise bizarre events of the recent past, he explains what has happened to humanity.

Many of us have noted that our loved ones and colleagues have changed. Post- mRNA injection rollout, we notice that people who were highly educated critical thinkers, have become unable to think outside of two simple binaries. We watch in astonishment as formerly sophisticated loved ones and friends regurgitate talking points with no self-awareness. We wonder why there is a sense of something inchoately missing when we sit with a vaccinated or COVID-fearful friend. We cannot fathom what has caused this sea change.

Dr. Nehls’s hypothesis can explain it. “The Indoctrinated Brain introduces a largely unknown, powerful neurobiological mechanism whose externally induced dysfunction underlies these catastrophic developments,” as the publisher notes.

Dr. Nehls argues that the spike protein, along with other COVID measures, represents an intentional attack on the human hippocampus—where autobiographical memory and individuality itself originate—and that “fear porn” keeps us from holding on to the autobiographical memories that encompass our former selves. As a result, humans have become deindividualized, more suggestible, more forgetful, more compliant, and less able to engage in critical thinking and creative reasoning. This argument utterly accords with what many of us are seeing, to our horror, every day. Dr. Nehls’s The Indoctrinated Brain is an indispensable book because it applies neuroscience to politics and especially to the politics of fascism. The need for that has existed for as long as modern fascism has existed.

Neuroscience should be applied to politics and to social change, but it is rare indeed when those fields of analysis meet. By bringing these fields of knowledge together and mapping neurological science against propaganda, and vice versa, Dr. Nehls brings vast new insights to the reader that would not have been attainable previously.

After you read The Indoctrinated Brain, you will think: Of course. Of course, the propaganda of the past few years must have been predicated upon intensive study of the brain and its reactions. Of course, the hundreds of millions of dollars that were recently spent and are currently being spent by the US and other governments on behavioral science and behavior modification would result in insights that would be applied by the US and other governments to making populations more tractable, less able to reason, less creative and more compliant. Why else would they so heavily have invested in such studies? Of course, the constant messaging, especially about fear, over the past three years, would have an effect that is not just about public health or perhaps not at all about public health—but that it is rather about making humans in free societies more tractable—with public health as the excuse, the proxy, for this deployment of life-altering and consciousness-altering fear. It is not the fear porn about the specific scary thing that matters, Dr. Nehls persuasively argues here: the fear itself is deliverable. The fear itself changes and indeed damages the brain.

I’ve long been interested in the psychiatric effects and, as I guessed, intentionalities behind “lockdowns” and “pandemic” messaging. But I did not have the neuroscientific background to understand exactly what was being done to people via “lockdowns” and the “fear porn” of the pandemic years related to the virus—to other human beings.

Through my study of the psychiatric effects of torture and isolation, that I took on for a book about closing democracies, I realized that isolation causes profound and sometimes permanent changes in the brain. I knew intuitively in the post-9/11, “Global War on Terror” years, that constant fear would wear down faculties needed for critical thinking. And I applied those insights to the isolation and fear messaging of 2020–22. But I did not have the complete picture.

This book provides it. It is the “aha” hypothetical for our time.

The Indoctrinated Brain provides the missing practical knowledge of neuroscience, that explains why isolating people creates a more befuddled, more easily manipulated population. It explains exactly why a message that closeness with other human beings can kill you, or you can kill others (especially your grandma) through physical closeness, might rewire the human brain to create the vulnerability to delusion and bad science and cultlike thinking, that many of us observed in formerly critically thinking loved ones and friends, post-2020. It even raises the question of whether the spike protein contributes to brain fog and to the erasure of a sense of an autonomous, resilient, individuated, and questing self.

If Dr. Nehls is right, his theory here will be as important as Dr. Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the subconscious, if not more so. If he is right, his theory explains why governments around the world mandated “lockdown” measures and mRNA injections, which would not ultimately then be about public health but about creating manipulable, passive citizens. If Dr. Nehls is right, it explains so many baffling features of the past three years—notably the fact that formerly thoughtful, highly individuated leaders of institutions, down to rank-and-file citizens, followed cultlike dicta without a murmur, and pursued nonsensical goals such as isolation, masking, and submission to vaccine mandates, without protest. Dr. Nehls’s thesis would explain the bizarre experience many of us are having of watching our formerly analytical loved ones, find themselves unable to keep two thoughts in their heads at the same time, unable to engage in calm debate without exploding emotionally, unable to maintain contact and connection with people with whom they disagree.

As I write, another global crisis is being spun up, this one in the Middle East. Within a day, highly educated and formerly skeptical loved ones of mine are repeating glaring legacy media talking points without any self-consciousness. It’s upsetting not to know why they would change in this way—and it is even more upsetting, though incredibly enlightening, to read Dr. Nehls’s argument and realize what the cause may be of their submissiveness to propaganda narratives. It makes it both easier and harder to contend with loved ones, friends, and colleagues who have been intellectually blunted in this way, to understand Dr. Nehls’s point of view and realize that this sad change in cognition might be simply physical—the spike protein—and neuropsychiatric: the repetition of fear messages and their impact on the brain.

In my social media feed today—on a day when the news has brought images of endless atrocities to our media streams, and when we are being told that this Friday will be a “Day of Jihad” with plenty of stabbings—someone wrote, “Protect your amygdala.” That meant, do not expose yourself to endless scenes of rape, murder, beheadings, atrocities, and horrors.

Dr. Nehls’s book is ultimately a hopeful one, since if we understand the damage to our brains from both spike proteins and fear pornography, we can find ways to prospect ourselves and our conscious minds. I appreciate the practical suggestions Dr. Nehls gives us to do just that.

It is scary that we are living in a time in which there is, as Dr. Nehls so powerfully points out, a war on our brains. But it must be less scary to understand what is being done to us, with Dr. Nehls’s help, so we can protect and strengthen our autobiographical memory and critical thinking, and so we can survive this onslaught with the full range of our intelligence—and our humanity—intact.‘

[stickdog99]

CTIL Files #1: US And UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan For Global Censorship In 2018, New Documents Show

Whistleblower makes trove of new documents available to Public and Racket, showing the birth of the Censorship Industrial Complex in reaction to Brexit and Trump election in 2016

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. 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 whistleblower's documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques.

"Lock your shit down," explains one document about creating "your spy disguise.”

Another explains that while such activities overseas are "typically" done by "the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense," censorship efforts "against Americans" have to be done using private partners because the government doesn't have the "legal authority."

The whistleblower alleges that a leader of CTI League, a “former” British intelligence analyst, was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a "repeat of 2016."

Over the last year, Public, Racket, congressional investigators, and others have documented the rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex, a network of over 100 government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that work together to urge censorship by social media platforms and spread propaganda about disfavored individuals, topics, and whole narratives.

The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship, with the National Science Foundation financing the development of censorship and disinformation tools and other federal government agencies playing a supportive role.

Emails from CISA’s NGO and social media partners show that CISA created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in 2020, which involved the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and other US government contractors. EIP and its successor, the Virality Project (VP), urged Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to censor social media posts by ordinary citizens and elected officials alike.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of government-sponsored censorship, it had yet to be determined where the idea for such mass censorship came from. In 2018, an SIO official and former CIA fellow, Renee DiResta, generated national headlines before and after testifying to the US Senate about Russian government interference in the 2016 election.

But what happened between 2018 and Spring 2020? The year 2019 has been a black hole in the research of the Censorship Industrial Complex to date. When one of us, Michael, testified to the U.S. House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex in March of this year, the entire year was missing from his timeline.

An Earlier Start Date for Censorship Industrial Complex

Now, a large trove of new documents, including strategy documents, training videos, presentations, and internal messages, reveal that, in 2019, US and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework. These contractors co-led CTIL, which partnered with CISA in the spring of 2020.

In truth, the building of the Censorship Industrial Complex began even earlier — in 2018.

Internal CTIL Slack messages show Terp, her colleagues, and officials from DHS and Facebook all working closely together in the censorship process.

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.

In the spring of 2020, CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as anti-lockdown narratives like “all jobs are essential,” “we won’t stay home,” and “open America now.” CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also did research on individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags like #freeCA and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios. The group also discussed requesting “takedowns” and reporting website domains to registrars.

CTIL’s approach to “disinformation” went far beyond censorship. The documents show that the group 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 one suggested list of survey questions, CTIL proposed asking members or potential members, “Have you worked with influence operations (e.g. disinformation, hate speech, other digital harms etc) previously?” The survey then asked whether these influence operations included “active measures” and “psyops.”

These documents came to us via a highly credible whistleblower. We were able to independently verify their legitimacy through extensive cross-checking of information to publicly available sources. The whistleblower said they were recruited to participate in CTIL through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by DHS.

The FBI declined to comment. CISA did not respond to our request for comment. And Terp and the other key CTIL leaders also did not respond to our requests for comment.

But one person involved, Bonnie Smalley, replied over LinkedIn, saying, “all i can comment on is that i joined cti league which is unaffiliated with any govt orgs because i wanted to combat the inject bleach nonsense online during covid…. i can assure you that we had nothing to do with the govt though.”

Yet the documents suggest that government employees were engaged members of CTIL. One individual who worked for DHS, Justin Frappier, was extremely active in CTIL, participating in regular meetings and leading trainings.

...

CTIL’s ultimate goal, said the whistleblower, ”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 secure a job for you.”

Terp’s plan, which she shared in presentations to information security and cybersecurity groups in 2019, was to create “Misinfosec communities” that would include government.

Both public records and the whistleblower’s documents suggest that she achieved this. In April 2020, Chris Krebs, then-Director of CISA, announced on Twitter and in multiple articles, that CISA was partnering with CTIL. “It’s really an information exchange,” said Krebs.

The documents also show that Terp and her colleagues, through a group called 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 MITRE, a major defense and intelligence contractor that has an annual budget of $1 to $2 billion in government funding.

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 component of Terp’s work through CTIL, MisinfoSec, and AMITT was to insert the concept of “cognitive security” into the fields of cybersecurity and information security.



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 the ones they have used in foreign countries. At one point, Terp openly referenced her work “in the background” on social media issues related to the Arab Spring. Another time, the whistleblower said, she expressed her own apparent surprise that she would ever use such tactics, developed for foreign nationals, against American citizens.

According to the whistleblower, roughly 12-20 active people involved in CTIL worked at the FBI or CISA. “For a while, they had their agency seals — FBI, CISA, whatever — next to your name,” on the Slack messaging service, said the whistleblower. Terp “had a CISA badge that went away at some point,” the whistleblower said.

The ambitions of the 2020 pioneers of the Censorship Industrial Complex went far beyond simply urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to put individuals on blacklists. The AMITT framework calls for discrediting individuals as a necessary prerequisite of demanding censorship against them. It calls for training influencers to spread messages. And it calls for trying to get banks to cut off financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events.

...

At every opportunity the men stressed that they were simply volunteers motivated by altruism. “I knew I had to do something to help,” said Zaidenberg. ”There is a really strong appetite for doing good in the community,” Rogers said during an Aspen Institute webinar.

And yet a clear goal of CTIL’s leaders was to build support for censorship among national security and cybersecurity institutions. Toward that end, they sought to promote the idea of “cognitive security” as a rationale for government involvement in censorship activities. “Cognitive security is the thing you want to have,” said Terp on a 2019 podcast. “You want to protect that cognitive layer. It basically, it’s about pollution. Misinformation, disinformation, is a form of pollution across the Internet.”

...

Breuer admitted in a podcast that his aim was to bring military tactics to use on social media platforms in the U.S. “I wear two hats,” he explained. “The military director of the Donovan Group, and one of two innovation officers at Sofwerx, which is a completely unclassified 501c3 nonprofit that's funded by U. S. Special Operations Command.”

Breuer went on to describe how they thought they were getting around the First Amendment. His work with Terp, he explained, was a way to get “nontraditional partners into one room,” including “maybe somebody from one of the social media companies, maybe a few special forces operators, and some folks from Department of Homeland Security… to talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way so that we can collaborate better, more freely and really start to change the way that we address some of these issues.”

The Misinfosec report advocated for sweeping government censorship and counter-misinformation. During the first six months of 2019, the authors say, they analyzed “incidents,” developed a reporting system, and shared their censorship vision with “numerous state, treaty and NGOs.”

In every incident mentioned, the victims of misinformation were on the political Left, and they included Barack Obama, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and Emmanuel Macron. The report was open about the fact that its motivation for counter-misinformation were the twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and the election of Trump.

“A study of the antecedents to these events lead us to the realization that there’s something off kilter with our information landscape,” wrote Terp and her co-authors. “The usual useful idiots and fifth columnists—now augmented by automated bots, cyborgs and human trolls—are busily engineering public opinion, stoking up outrage, sowing doubt and chipping away at trust in our institutions. And now it’s our brains that are being hacked.”

The Misinfosec report focused on information that “changes beliefs” through “narratives,” and recommended a way to counter misinformation by attacking specific links in a “kill chain” or influence chain from the misinfo “incident” before it becomes a full-blown narrative.

The report laments that governments and corporate media no longer have full control of information. “For a long time, the ability to reach mass audiences belonged to the nation-state (e.g. in the USA via broadcast licensing through ABC, CBS and NBC). Now, however, control of informational instruments has been allowed to devolve to large technology companies who have been blissfully complacent and complicit in facilitating access to the public for information operators at a fraction of what it would have cost them by other means.”

The authors advocated for police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship, across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved.

...

Terp’s view of “disinformation” was overtly political. “Most misinformation is actually true,” noted Terp in the 2019 podcast, “but set in the wrong context.” Terp is an eloquent explainer of the strategy of using “anti-disinformation” efforts to conduct influence operations. “You're not trying to get people to believe lies most of the time. Most of the time, you're trying to change their belief sets. And in fact, really, uh, deeper than that, you're trying to change, to shift their internal narratives… the set of stories that are your baseline for your culture. So that might be the baseline for your culture as an American.” ...

Breuer spoke freely, openly stating that the information and narrative control he had in mind was comparable to that implemented by the Chinese government, only made more palatable for Americans. “If you talk to the average Chinese citizen, they absolutely believe that the Great Firewall of China is not there for censorship. They believe that it's there because the Chinese Communist Party wants to protect the citizenry and they absolutely believe that's a good thing. If the US government tried to sell that narrative, we would absolutely lose our minds and say, ‘No, no, this is a violation of our First Amendment rights.’ So the in-group and out-group messaging have to be often different.”

...

CTIL also worked to brainstorm counter-messaging for things like encouraging people to wear masks and discussed building an amplification network. “Repetition is truth,” said a CTIL member in one training.

CTIL worked with other figures and groups in the Censorship Industrial Complex. Meeting notes indicate that Graphika’s team looked into adopting AMITT and that CTIL wanted to consult DiResta about getting platforms to remove content more quickly.

When asked whether Terp or other CTIL leaders discussed their potential violation of the First Amendment, the whistleblower said, “They did not… 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.’”

Despite their confidence in the legality of their activities, some CTIL members may have taken extreme measures to keep their identities a secret. The group’s handbook recommends using burner phones, creating pseudonymous identities, and generating fake AI faces using the “This person does not exist” website.

In June 2020, the whistleblower says, the secretive group took actions to conceal their activities even more.

...

Until now, the details of CTIL’s activities have received little attention even though the group received publicity in 2020. In September 2020, Wired published an article about CTIL that reads like a company press release. The article, like the Bloomberg and Washington Post stories that spring, accepts unquestioningly that the CTIL was truly a “volunteer” network of “former” intelligence officials from around the world.

But unlike the Bloomberg and Washington Post stories, Wired also describes CTIL’s “anti-misinformation” work. The Wired reporter does not quote any critic of the CTIL activities, but suggests that some might see something wrong with them. “I ask him [CTIL co-founder Marc Rogers] about the notion of viewing misinformation as a cyber threat. “All of these bad actors are trying to do the same thing, Rogers says.”

In other words, the connection between preventing cyber crimes, and “fighting misinformation,” are basically the same because they both involve fighting what the DHS and CTI League alike call “malicious actors,” which is synonymous with “bad guys.”

“Like Terp, Rogers takes a holistic approach to cybersecurity,” the Wired article explains. “First there’s physical security, like stealing data from a computer onto a USB drive. Then there’s what we typically think of as cybersecurity—securing networks and devices from unwanted intrusions. And finally, you have what Rogers and Terp call cognitive security, which essentially is hacking people, using information, or more often, misinformation.”

CTIL appears to have generated publicity about itself in the Spring and Fall of 2020 for the same reason EIP did: to claim later that its work was all out in the open and that anybody who suggested it was secretive was engaging in a conspiracy theory.

“The Election Integrity Partnership has always operated openly and transparently,” EIP claimed in October 2022. “We published multiple public blog posts in the run-up to the 2020 election, hosted daily webinars immediately before and after the election, and published our results in a 290-page final report and multiple peer-reviewed academic journals. Any insinuation that information about our operations or findings were secret up to this point is disproven by the two years of free, public content we have created.”

But as internal messages have revealed, much of what EIP did was secret, as well as partisan, and demanding of censorship by social media platforms, contrary to its claims.

EIP and VP, ostensibly, ended, but CTIL is apparently still active, based on the LinkedIn pages of its members.

[stickdog99]

The Cyber Threat Intelligence League, Sara-Jayne Terp, and the unbearably idiotic schoolmarms who have been unleashed to censor the internet

Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi have continued their reporting on the “Censorship Industrial Complex” with a new piece on an odious organisation called the Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) League. Their revelations provide fresh details about the early history of the public-private campaign to censor the internet in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, and I have to say that this is one of the most amazing and bizarre stories I have ever encountered.

The CTI League appear to be an organisation cobbled together in 2020 from two main factions. The first comprised a group of computer security experts and military/intelligence contractors put together by a (former?) Israeli intelligence official named Ohad Zaidenberg during the early months of the pandemic, originally (and allegedly) for the purposes of protecting hospital computer systems from security threats. They were soon joined by separate group around an eccentric “UK defence researcher” named Sara-Jayne Terp, who believes that social media “misinformation” campaigns were responsible for Trump’s election and that these campaigns have to be countered in the same way as cybersecurity threats. Terp developed an array of censorship strategies she called the “Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques” (AMITT) Framework. These were first applied by CTI League, and have since been rechristened “DISARM.” In this form, Terp’s tactics have been used for “defending democracy, supporting pandemic communication and addressing other disinformation campaigns around the world, by institutions including the European Union, the United Nations and NATO.”

That’s right, the NAFO Twitter scourge, lockdown-promotion bots, weird vaccinator social media propaganda and god knows what else, all look to be downstream of Terp, AMITT and the CTI League.

More:

The framework has helped establish new institutions, including the Cognitive Security ISAO, the Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg and OpenFacto’s analysis programme, and has been used in the training of journalists in Kenya and Nigeria. To illustrate, with one other specific example, DISARM was employed within the World Health Organization’s operations, countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe. The use of framework methodology enabled the coordination of activities across teams and geographies, and also – critically – across multiple languages, eliminating the need to translate text by matching actions to numbered tactics, techniques and procedures within the framework.

During the pandemic, the CTI League partnered with the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA), a division of the US Department of Homeland Security, to diffuse virus panic propaganda. CISA then folded Terp’s methods into the Election Integrity Project to ensure Biden’s re-election in 2020. As Shellenberger, Gutentag and Taibbi argue, the activities of the CTI League from 2020 represent an effort to circumvent First Amendment protections by laundering censorship through private organisations informally affiliated with the US government.

There is a lot one could say about all of this. I considered writing yet again about how instruments to constrain government power like the US Constitution merely encourage states to adopt devious workarounds that are arguably even more diffuse and harmful than a formal Ministry of Truth could ever be. I thought about exploring the hollow mythology of the “fourth estate” which the press propagates about itself – even as it collaborates openly with state actors and never once in recent memory prompted anything like the post-2016 censorship campaign that Shellenberger, Gutentag and Taibbi describe. Random Twitter and Facebook users have emerged as a vastly greater threat to state authority than the New York Times ever managed to be. Finally, I pondered exploring the censors’ strange and unusual concept of “misinformation,” and the remarkably conspiratorial inclinations of these committed opponents of conspiracy theories.

Then, I started looking more closely into Terp and this AMITT Framework specifically, and I decided all of that could wait for another day.



Obviously the insidious intent and scale of Terp’s tactics, and their clear violations of the United States Constitution, make all of this reprehensible. At the same time, the absolute hamfisted idiocy of AMITT and the entire “MisinfoSec” approach to internet censorship is a thing to behold. Our oppressors are dangerous, malign and powerful people who want nothing good for us, but they are also just some of the dumbest sods you can imagine.

What happened here is fairly clear: The American and British political establishments developed a new fear of social media following the great populist backlashes of 2016. Suddenly, they wanted very badly to do something about the malicious misinformation they imagined to be proliferating on Facebook and Twitter. A whole tribe of opportunist insects like Terp were eager to meet this demand, snag lucrative contracts, and perhaps even (in the words of the Shellenberger/ Gutentag/ Taibbi informant) “become part of the federal government.” To do this, they shopped about a bunch of transparently pseudoscientific graphs and charts, laden with obfuscatory jargon, and amazingly they weren’t laughed out of the room. You just have to imagine that everybody involved in this scene is a knuckle-dragging retard who knows exactly nothing about how social media works. We must be talking about soccer moms and geriatric index-finger typists who can barely log into Facebook. When they see an edgy internet meme with a lot of retweets their mind immediately goes to Russia, and when a global warming sceptic stumbles into their feed they assiduously reply with links to Wikipedia articles about the Scientific consensus on climate change. They can never figure out why everybody is always laughing at them. It must be Putin, that must be why.

Everything you read about Sara-Jayne Terp is either idiotic or wildly improbable. Her absurd Wired profile actually says she has purple hair and calls her a “warm middle-aged woman” who “once gave a presentation called ‘An Introvert’s Guide to Presentations’ at a hacker convention, where she recommended bringing a teddy bear.” After “working in defense research for the British government,” where she developed “algorithms that could combine sonar readings with oceanographic data and human intelligence to locate submarines,” she became a “crisis mapper.” This amounts to “collecting and synthesising data from on-the-ground sources to create a coherent picture of what was really happening.”

In 2018, Terp teamed up with US Navy Commander Pablo Breuer and a “cybersecurity expert” named Marc Rogers, who would later help found the CTI League. Back then, these three stooges were still very upset about the 2016 election, which they believed had been hijacked by “misinformation.” Apparently, cybersecurity experts compile knowledge bases of the tactics and techniques used by hackers to break into computer systems, and they wanted to build a similar knowledge base for the “MisinfoSec” threat, because as we all know human society functions exactly like a computer.

…Terp and Breuer swiftly got down to plotting their defense against misinfo. They worked from the premise that small clues—like particular fonts or misspellings in viral posts, or the pattern of Twitter profiles shouting the loudest—can expose the origin, scope, and purpose of a campaign. These “artifacts,” as Terp calls them, are bread crumbs left in the wake of an attack. The most effective approach, they figured, would be to organize a way for the security world to trace those bread-crumb trails …

Once they could recognize patterns, they figured, they would also see choke points. In cyberwarfare, there’s a concept called a kill chain, adapted from the military. Map the phases of an attack, Breuer says, and you can anticipate what they're going to do: “If I can somehow interrupt that chain, if I can break a link somewhere, the attack fails.”

The misinfosec group eventually developed a structure for cataloging misinformation techniques, based on the ATT&CK Framework. In keeping with their field's tolerance for acronyms, they called it AMITT (Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques). They’ve identified more than 60 techniques so far, mapping them onto the phases of an attack. Technique 49 is flooding, using bots or trolls to overtake a conversation by posting so much material it drowns out other ideas. Technique 18 is paid targeted ads. Technique 54 is amplification by Twitter bots. But the database is just getting started.

AMITT is one of those things that is so astronomically stupid, it is actually hard to explain. To get a better idea of how this cretinous shit came to be, you must consider first the ATT&CK Framework. As far as I can tell, this is a compilation of the various ways intruders gain access to systems, evade defences, and establish control. Beneath every intrusive action – “initial access,” “defense evasion,” “command and control,” and so on – there are lists of tactics and sub-tactics attackers are known to use.



Our crack MisinfoSec experts duplicated this approach for the social media sphere, listing the ways alleged trolls “develop [internet] persona[e]” and “networks,” gain “exposure,” “go physical,” and achieve “persistence.” This slide, which I grabbed from this incredibly mind-numbing YouTube presentation, illustrates the structure and content of AMITT as of 2021:



Here’s some of the “content” in their drop-down menus:



How do trolls cause trouble online? Let Terp count the ways. They can digitally alter images! They can recontextualise statements! They can selectively edit statements! Who cares if that is the same as recontextualising statements! If there’s not a lot of poorly defined random stuff in their lists nobody will take Terp’s MisinfoSec warriors seriously!

The Wired profile attempts to explain how all of this works on the ground, and it is so ridiculous I can hardly believe it is real. We read that when the pandemic started, Commander Beuer’s parents in Argentina sent him some Facebook video claiming that Covid-19 was a bioweapon. Immediately his newfound MisinfoSec expertise kicked in. He started “cataloging artifacts,” among them the fact that “the narration was in Castilian Spanish” and that it featured “patent numbers” that “didn’t exist.” He found that the video was being “shared by sock-puppet accounts on Facebook” and that it was guilty of “several misinformation techniques from the AMITT database.” It used technique 7, which is “Create fake social media profiles,” for example. It also used “fake experts to seem more legitimate,” which is technique 9. He debated within himself whether it might also be “seeding distortion” according to technique 44. In any case, he decided from these and other clues that it was “likely Russian” and that it may have been put together for the purpose of “undermining American food security.” Remember that these are exactly the people who accuse us of being conspiracy theorists.

As absurd as it is, the Wired profile presents a considerably cleaned-up version of the towering dumbassery that is AMITT. For more on its genesis, we go to Terp herself. This woman has penned a very long Medium post full of typographical errors where she tells how the AMITT foundations were laid.

The jargon is nearly impenetrable, but bear with me, I promise this is worth it:

On May 24, 2019, the CredCo MisinfoSec Working Group met for the day at the Carter Center in as part of CredConX Atlanta. The purpose of the day was to draft a working MisinfoSec framework that incorporates the stages and techniques of misinformation, and the responses to it. We came up with a name for our framework: AMITT (Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques) provides a framework for understanding and responding to organized misinformation attacks based on existing information security principles.

“CredCo” is how Terp refers to a defunct CTI League predecessor organisation she called the “Credibility Coalition,” because the way to sound like a hypercool elite cybersecurity expert is to stop writing words when you are a few letters into them. “CredConX” is what Terp calls the meetings of the “Credibility Coalition,” because when you add an “X” at the end that also makes you sound like a hypercool elite cybersecurity expert. For an internet schoolmarm offended at jokes on social media, this kind of marketing is very important.

The CredConX meetings, of course, were neither elite nor hypercool. They did, however, feature a lot of sticky notes. Here is a picture from CredConX Cambridge, which took place a month before the Atlanta meeting where AMITT was born:



First, Terp tells us about the project our CredCo MininfoSec WG warriors had arrogated to themselves:

The Credibility Coalition’s MisinfoSec Working Group (“MisinfoSec WG”) maps information security (infosec) principles onto misinformation. According to the The CredCo Misinfosec Working Group charter, our goal is to develop a tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) based framework that gives misinformation researchers and responders a common language to discuss and disrupt misinformation incidents.

The goal, Terp explains, is self-promotion “contributing to the evolution of MisinfoSec as a discipline.” She notes that her efforts are going well, “as we’re seeing an emergence of presentations with slides referring to TTPs, and people starting to talk about building ISAOs (Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations) and ISACs (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers).” It’s always heartwarming for the purple-haired Terps of the world, when other people start to use their unwieldy buzzwords.

Terp says that their project in Atlanta was to “to build upon … our team’s existing work.” By this point, they had already made substantial progress. For example, they had developed things like the “misinformation pyramid,” …



… “a mapping of marketing, psyops and new misinformation stage models against the cyber killchain,” …



… something called “Boucher’s list of techniques,” which have presumably so embarrassed Boucher that he has deleted them from the internet, …



… and “Ben Nimmo’s ‘5 D’s’ strategies,” which appears to consist only of 4 “D’s.”



Terp aimed to expand on this doubtful collection of slogans and meaningless diagrams “to build a framework of misinformation, stages, techniques and responses.” “Techniques” are the things that “Advanced Persistent Manipulators” use to hack into minds on social media, “stages” are the processes whereby they achieve this, and “responses” are “successful counteractions” that Terp and the rest of her MisinfoSec warriors can deploy against them.

They compiled a list of social media “incidents.” They studied these to learn what “techniques” the Advanced Persistent Manipulators behind them employed, and they wrote these techniques down on hundreds of colour-coded sticky notes. Techniques from incidents associated with Russia went onto “blue” sticky notes (actually they look turquoise to me) and techniques of “non-Russia attribution” went onto fluorescent yellow sticky notes. Terp explains their room was “like our lab for the day,” so we can presume that she imagines writing stuff on sticky notes is what science must be like.

To further this sciencing, Terp’s crack MisinfoSec team stuck all these notes on the wall …



… and added additional pink sticky notes to mark which “stage” of the social media attack each technique belonged to. Some of these notes started to fall off so they had to be reattached with bits of tape:



Throughout this scientific exercise, Terp assures us that “we didn’t forget the ‘boom,’” which is “a term borrowed from the military meaning the moment before a bomb explodes.” The idea is that by adopting a “left-of-boom” tactical focus, the internet police can disrupt social media munitions before they explode into something like the 2016 election of Donald Trump. They spelled out the “BOOM!” on five yellow sticky notes just to make it super clear:



It really pays to read these techniques, by the way. Technique “0009” is using the spelling “experb” to refer to experts. It is on a blue sticky note so it is Russian. Technique “0033” involves “fabricated social media comments” and it is on a yellow sticky note so I guess that is not something Russians do. Technique “0006” is “create hashtag” and technique 0017 is “click bait.” Literally every last one of these techniques is idiotic in its own distinct way.

Now, there is a real idea, if a rather homely and unpresentable one, behind all this nonsense. This is the proposition that the social media content which Terp and her fellow schoolmarms don’t like must be the result of processes coordinated by malicious attackers, who organise the “campaigns” at the top of her misinformation pyramid. MisinfoSec “defenders” have to work upwards from the obnoxious posts to the campaigns themselves, to have any hope of disrupting them. That social media posts may spread organically and on their own strength with no consistent coordination is not something people like Terp ever seem to consider. She is, after all, a silly woman who only ever talks to people who share her views of things.

What Terp, the CTI League and their various affiliates have achieved, is not the development of seriously dangerous and effective censorship tactics. Their success is very real, but it proceeds entirely from the state power they have amassed for their project. If anything, AMITT and its DISARM successor are clumsy overcomplicated hindrances to the manipulation of public discourse. They represent an entire field of pseudoexpertise, which Terp and her colleagues developed to reconstruct censorship as a cybersecurity enterprise. In this awkward new framing, the censors not only get to be the virtuous defenders of the democratic order; they also have to be trained and potentially even credentialed. They get to conduct “MisinfoSec research,” write papers, give talks and go to conferences, all of which means that universities and the broader apparatus of academia can host them. And all of it is just so, so irretrievably stupid.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

I sense this latest barrage of "antisemitism" accusations are being used, in part, as yet another divisive tool, and eventually to inspire rhetoric from both the 'Left' and the 'Right' to subscribe to blatant forms of thought/speech suppression.

It's almost satirical to observe the tactical precision by which factions [additional dividing lines] are now being created within tribes/ideology over the current military operations in Gaza/Palestine. Many of those that opposed repressive/totalitarian covid restrictions are ardent/blind supporters of Isreali govt/IDF operations, and conversely, those that were fully supportive of covid restrictions are fervently against ethnic cleansing (and related) operations in Palestine. There are subsets within each tribal affiliation that are now splitting off from their larger tribes due to this Current Thing.

I share the below in this thread as it involves the 'Ivy League'/Highly Educated demographic.

@ggreenwald

Many of the claims of campus genocidal speech are people chanting about Israel: from the river to the sea, etc: nothing to do with US Jews yet has still punished.

These administrators said they don't know of cases of people saying "kill all Jews!" but it's protected either way

@ggreenwald

@JonHaidt

As a professor who favors free speech on campus, I can sympathize with the "nuanced" answers given by U. presidents yesterday, about whether calls to attack or wipe out Israel violate campus speech policies.

What offends me is that since 2015, universities have been so quick to punish "microaggressions," including statements intended to be kind, if even one person from a favored group took offense. The presidents are now saying: "Jews are not a favored group, so offending or threatening Jews is not so bad. For Jews, it all depends on context." We might call this double standard "institutional anti-semitism."

University presidents: If you're not going to punish students for calling for the elimination of Israel and Israelis, it's OK with me, but ONLY if you also immediately dismantle the speech policing apparatus and norms you created in 2015-2016. Please read The Coddling of the American Mind.
@glukianoff and I laid out exactly where the oppressor/victim frame came from (ch. 3), how it spread out of a few departments to gain power over administrators and campus culture (chapters 4 and 5), and how it drove the creation of the bureaucratic structures and processes that now have us all teaching and learning on eggshells (ch. 10). In chapter 13 we offer advice to leaders on how to to return universities to their academic mission and regain public trust.

@BillAckman

The presidents of
@Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn were all asked the following question under oath at today’s congressional hearing on antisemitism:

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] code of conduct or rules regarding bullying or harassment?

The answers they gave reflect the profound moral bankruptcy of Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth.

Representative @EliseStefanik was so shocked with the answers that she asked each of them the same question over and over again, and they gave the same answers over and over again.

In short, they said:

It ‘depends on the context’ and ‘whether the speech turns into conduct,’ that is, actually killing Jews.

This could be the most extraordinary testimony ever elicited in the Congress, certainly on the topic of genocide, which to remind us all is:

“the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group”

The presidents’ answers reflect the profound educational, moral and ethical failures that pervade certain of our elite educational institutions due in large part to their failed leadership.

Don’t take my word for it.

You must watch the following three minutes. By the end, you will be where I am.

They must all resign in disgrace.

If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour.

Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world?

Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context.

To think that these are the leaders of Ivy League institutions that are charged with the responsibility to educate our best and brightest.

On the bright side, our congressional leaders deserve accolades for showing tremendous leadership and moral clarity in their statements, by the questions they asked, and the respectfulness with which they conducted the hearing.

It was a masterclass of how our government and democracy should operate.

If you have time, please watch the entire hearing. Throughout the hearing, the three behaved like hostile witnesses, exhibiting a profound disdain for the Congress with their smiles and smirks, and their outright refusal to answer basic questions with a yes or no answer.

This is exactly it.

These university professors were simply saying they don't punish students for pure political speech. If you target a specific student, that's harassment, but op-eds/speeches are protected.

The problem is they've regularly violated this with views they hate:

https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1732429 ... 16071?s=20

...

[stickdog99]

I long for the halcyon days when "all because of those damn Jews at the ACLU!" was used by carping bigots furious that they couldn't ban flag burning or Nazi marches without a Constitution amendment.

'Twas a far more rational world way back then, when principle would occasionally trump political tribal affiliation (at least among my own tribe).

[Belligerent Savant]

.

I sense this latest barrage of "antisemitism" accusations are being used, in part, as yet another divisive tool, and eventually to inspire rhetoric from both the 'Left' and the 'Right' to subscribe to blatant forms of thought/speech suppression.

...

@ggreenwald
·
This is been the single best week in years for the cause of limiting free expression and free discourse at colleges.

Anyone who claims they believe in free speech - while they cheer the union of hedge fund billionaire and DC politicians to impose speech limits - is a fraud.

@theblaze
Democrat Senator Kirsten Gillibrand says presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn should resign: "Their statements were abhorrent."

[Video at link]

...

@ggreenwald
·
Here's how authentic free speech defenders respond to the attempt to have these University Presidents fired for their testimony.

This is the group the has spent a decade defending right-wing students' free speech rights when few others would:

@TheFIREorg

Tonight, @Penn President Liz Magill signaled that one of our nation's most prestigious institutions is willing to abandon its commitment to freedom of expression.

“For decades, under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn’s policies have been guided by the Constitution and the law,” explained Magill in a video posted to X.

But now, she continued, the university “must initiate a serious and careful look at our policies,” a process to start “immediately.”

This is a deeply troubling, profoundly counterproductive response to yesterday's congressional hearing on “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.”

Were Penn to retreat from the robust protection of expressive rights, university administrators would make inevitably political decisions about who may speak and what may be said on campus.

Such a result would undoubtedly compromise the knowledge-generating process free expression enables and for which universities exist.

To be clear: Universities will not enforce a rule against "calls for genocide" in the way elected officials calling for President Magill's resignation think they will.

Dissenting and unpopular speech — whether pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, conservative or liberal — will be silenced.

Conservatives like Rep. Elise Stefanik should ask themselves:

Do you honestly believe this rule won’t be weaponized to ban an Israeli cabinet official from speaking at Penn? An Israeli Defense Force soldier?

The power to censor always invites abuse and never stays cabined.

FIRE was founded in the wake of the infamous 1993 “Water Buffalo” incident at Penn.

In that case, Israeli-born Jewish student Eden Jacobowitz was charged with harassment for shouting “Shut up, you water buffalo” at a group of rowdy sorority students outside his dorm room window.

The sorority students were black, and the argument was that “water buffalo” was a racial epithet.

But it was not.

Jacobowitz, who speaks Hebrew, explained that water buffalo is a rough English translation of “behema,” a Hebrew slang term for a loud, rowdy person.

The story captured headlines, and Penn was widely condemned for its persecution of Jacobowitz.

FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors, a history professor at Penn, helped advise Jacobowitz.

The charges were eventually dropped and the story would go on to serve as the opening chapter of “The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses” — the book that launched FIRE.

Over the years, Kors and FIRE helped Penn get past the water buffalo debacle.

The school reformed all of its speech codes and was one of the first universities to earn FIRE’s highest, “green light” rating for speech-protective policies.

But in recent years, Penn has backtracked.

It’s no longer a green light school.

It adopted new harassment policies that are ripe for abuse.

And what free speech and academic freedom protections remain, it doesn’t consistently follow.

Now President Magill suggests an institutional willingness to abandon free expression altogether.

This will not end well.

Vesting administrators like Magill with more power to police speech will result in more Jacobowitzes.

The intended targets for these codes will not be the actual casualties — and Penn students, faculty, alumni, and donors will come to regret the day they ever entrusted campus bureaucrats with the power to police speech on campus.

Dec 8, 2023

....

@LoxxArms

I normally agree with you - but you’re way off base here. They were protecting the calls for genocide of a race of people - while preventing the free speech that might be “misgendering” simultaneously…. They needed to lose jobs

@TrapperrKeeper
·
No they weren’t. There were no “calls for genocide”. The only genocide is the one being committed by Israel on the people of Gaza. Just amazing the people more offended by warped interpretations of calls for liberation in another country than the actual atrocity being committed

@1amRosario

The question was, whether calls for genocide of Jews WOULD constitute bullying and harassment.
So theoratically.
THAT question should have been easy to answer: yes

Whether or not those calls for genocide were actually made is another matter

@ApertaAria
·
Among other things, this distracts attention away from actual Crimes Against Humanity being committed in Gaza right now. Free Speech is clearly an important topic, but the timing of this is a misdirection.
..though at the same time it's purposeful as it will further curtail free expression/act as yet another form of suppression promotion.

https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1733124 ... 72427?s=20

https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1733123 ... 17039?s=20

[Belligerent Savant]

[stickdog99]

This might be the weirdest and creepiest bit of propaganda I have seen since 2020.

Santa Claus will die unless you get another injection!

[Grizzly]

https://nitter.uni-sonia.com/danluu/sta ... 34139692#m

"Unfortunately, a recent social media post was not acceptable. Your vehicle cannot be driven. Please call customer support."

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/priva ... r-privacy/
It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... e-privacy/
Five big carmakers beat lawsuits alleging infotainment systems invade privacy
Cars downloading text messages from phones doesn't violate state privacy law.

12 Days of Vehicle Forensics
https://berla.co/12-days-of-vehicle-forensics/

[Elvis]

Yes, and the ISPs are totally unnecessary for citizens to access the Internet. Like healthcare, the Internet (an invention funded by the public), has been financialized, with the ISPs inserting themselves between the Internet and our right to access it.

Getting on the Internet should be like getting on the Interstate freeway—you bring your gear (automobile, modem), head onto an on-ramp, and drive. Nobody's charging you $30 or $60 a month to use that public infrastructure, like the ISP middlemen do for our Internet access.

We should be able to move into a new place and plug into an outlet and be on the Internet—not spend five hours on the phone talking to a dozen different "representatives" (as I recently did) who each have to have the problem explained to them again, all while the monopolist ISP is trying to dick you with dodgy billing practices*—so more hours on the phone, now with threats of bringing in the state attorney general. This is when we want government to be coercive—when they're enforcing our property rights, lol.

I won't shame the company here, but its initials are X.F.I.N.I.T.Y.

Large ISPs in the US are some of the biggest pieces of shit around, and the above "regulations" (If you read the proposal it's a list of things that can impact consumer's ability to access internet services. "The aspects of service that could affect a consumers’ ability to receive and effectively utilize broadband internet access service include, but are not limited to..." https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments ... 7997A1.pdf ) are an attempt at getting them to behave like normal people and not the raging fucking psychopaths they currently are.

The reason it's gotten so bad in the first place is the fucking republicans (remember Ajit Pai? Brendan Carr was his aide on the FCC before being appointed by Trump to be a commissioner. He used to be a telecoms lawyer before that) who are now freaking out about it.

* With logic expressed in forceful harangues, I did get a $100 credit to my account.

[DrEvil]

My "favorite" is their (not limited to US telecoms) attempt at triple-dipping. Why get paid for your service once when you can get paid thrice? First they charge you for the connection, then they charge the high-traffic websites for prioritized access to their network, then they get the government to tax content providers to help them pay their shareholders more money and give themselves bigger bonuses fund new infrastructure (the same infrastructure they already got billions of dollars in subsidies to build, and didn't).

And did you notice how, during the pandemic when everyone lived on the internet for two years, they removed their data caps and nothing happened. It's almost as if the caps are there to fleece the customers and nothing else.

ISPs really should be treated like a public utility by now.

[Grizzly]

This Is The Most Terrifying Graph In The World

[stickdog99]

[Grizzly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g4eoOhI2aA