This post is about the CTI League, again. In my Dec. 9th blog post, I referenced a September 15, 2020 Wired article, One Data Scientist’s Quest to Quash Misinformation, which explained Sarah-Jayne Terp’s odyssey in her quest to quash misinformation. I understand that quests require a certain determination that what you’re doing is right and that it matters. For me, defending free speech in America matters and so does protecting The Constitution.
One of the bits of human interest in that Wired piece was that Terp likes buying half-completed cross-stitch pieces at second-hand shops and finishing them. I used to be addicted to counted cross-stitch, watching the stitched design appear on the blank cloth, by following a gridded chart on paper. As I stitched more years, I began to make changes to patterns sometimes, changed recommended colors, even occasionally combined different patterns together or designed my own pattern on graph paper.
However, I would never want to finish other stitchers half-completed needlework, because so many don’t keep the back of their needlework neat and tidy. I want the back of my needlework to look as neat as the front, so I’d end up having to pull out all the mess and redo that too. Much more enjoyable, for me, to start with a clean slate, so to speak, rather than cleaning up someone else’s mess.
I also love doing jigsaw puzzles for the same reason, watching the picture appear as I connect more and more pieces together. When my kids were young and doing puzzles that fit into frames, to make it more challenging, I encouraged them to dump the pieces from several puzzles together on a pile in the middle, as they sat on the floor with the frames. The older ones often had two or three frames, while the younger two had one frame. They had to work together to put all those puzzles together and that’s the thing as problems become more complicated – it takes a lot of teamwork to solve them. America is facing some very complicated problems and there’s no teamwork among our political leaders, that’s for sure.
I came across another Wired article, this one from September 29, 2020, The Cyber-Avengers Protecting Hospitals From Ransomware: As medical facilities strain amid the pandemic, they’re especially vulnerable to cyberattacks. A global coalition of volunteer experts has stepped into the breach. This article explains the formation of the “all-volunteer” Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or at least this is the public narrative. Ohad Zaidenberg, an Israeli intelligence researcher, Marc Roger, a British information security expert and Nate Warfield, an American Microsoft security manager contacted each other and decided to band together during the pandemic and on March 14, 2020, the Cyber Threat Intelligence League was founded to fight ransomware attacks against hospitals.
According to this Wired article, after the trio formed, Rogers was seeing “any number of tall tales circulating on the internet” and of course, in a time of global crisis, who ya gonna call? “So Rogers pinged a data scientist he’d been working with over the past couple years. “Hey,” he wrote. “How busy are you?”
He called Sarah-Jayne Terp.
The Wired article continues, explaining that Terp was very busy, running two groups working to adapt tools of cybersecurity to dealing with misinformation (cognitive security is this new field). And she’d been on the road sorting butterflies from moths “spending the previous nine months criss-crossing the US on a one-woman quest to better understand how misinformation affects middle America.”
The British data collector spent nine months trudging across America studying those MAGA moths. What a task to try to understand ordinary Americans’ viewpoints, as opposed to the elite butterflies among the left.
Again, this Wired article was September 29, 2020 and the mission had expanded from protecting hospitals from ransomware attacks in March 2020 to by September 2020:
“”Rogers tells me the league’s misinformation team had recently started tracking campaigns targeting the George Floyd protestors. They’d seen posts saying that antifa was causing riots and that were trying to bait Black Lives Matter supporters to attend protests intentionally scheduled to conflict with second amendment rallies. It was a bit far afield from the league’s original mission, but the volume of misinformation was so great and the potential for harm—both viral and violent—so high. “You have sophisticated groups who are doing this, who have great attention to detail,” he says. “Protests can create life-threatening situations.”
Clearly, their mission had shifted from protecting hospitals into partisan politics.
Imagine if those MAGA moths thought George Floyd was a fentanyl addict, resisting arrest and didn’t buy the entire liberal media narrative – how unacceptable is that… Or what if they noticed the glaring double standard that the people who protested lockdowns were spun up by liberal media as evildoers threatening public safety, who should be stopped, while the George Floyd protestors taking to the streets were cheered as heroic champions for justice by that same liberal media. Now, that would be totally unacceptable…
Again the Twitter File journalists claim: “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.”
The idea that you’re protecting people by controlling what information they’re allowed to see or what they can say is vastly different than protecting people, businesses, organizations, government computer systems from malicious cyberattacks. In America people have the right to believe whatever the heck they want, even disinformation and misinformation. They also have the constitutionally-protected right to free speech – especially political speech. The alleged Obama tasking – to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a “repeat of 2016,” seems bolstered by these two Wired articles. It’s one thing to have eyes outward to hostile foreign information operations and try to counter that disinformation/misinformation than targeting Americans’ free speech. It would take finding a lot of go-arounds to get around our 1st Amendment free speech protections.
So, if the quest began being tasked in 2017 by Team Obama to stop a “repeat of 2016” to 2018 brainstorming in Tampa with Pablo Breuer, the military director of the Special Operations Command Donovan Group (2018 link : “Pablo Breuer is currently the director of US Special Operations Command Donovan Group and senior military advisor and innovation officer to SOFWERX”), while Trump was president and the objective is to stop a “repeat of 2016,” I wonder if anyone in Trump’s national security team was aware of their work and I wonder how much government money was funding it. Did anyone in Congress know about their work or have any oversight?
Then by March 2020, it’s COVID “Cyber-Avengers” to the rescue and by September 2020, they were tracking misinformation targeting those “mostly peaceful” George Floyd protestors, who were victims of being baited… as they burned the police precinct down in Minneapolis, ripped down statues, looted stores, etc. What the hell…
Nothing to see here, at all. Sure, I completely believe these Wired narratives of the genesis of “cognitive security” and the CTI League as just noble volunteers… on a quest to protect our beliefs from being hacked… (my eyes have already rolled back into my head).
Here’s a Washington Examiner article worth a read: Top Republicans throw support behind major Biden ‘censorship’ lawsuit by conservative media. It appears the Republicans weren’t in the loop on any of these new censorship regimes that the Obama crowd in the Biden White House set-up and I think it’s a safe-bet, no one in the Trump administration had been involved in that information loop.
The Twitter Files piece, CTIL Files #1: US And UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan For Global Censorship In 2018, New Documents Show, mentioned CTI League “volunteers” who were actively serving in the FBI and other agencies being involved in this effort:
“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.”
I hate that ranting about a “deep state” that Trump did, but geesh, he might have been completely right.
All I know for sure is Democrats and the liberal media will become an impenetrable wall of “nothing to see here” and it will be the same Dem spin playbook as usual – their time-tested admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations… rinse, repeat.
12/14/2023: Adding a note here, because with using my snarky tone, I minimized what the Wired article said about Rogers concern about two groups with opposing views being manipulated online into showing up at the same location to protest could lead to violence. I let my disgust with FBI director, Wray, testifying under oath to Congress about Antifa not being an organization and being dismissive of Antifa being any sort of threat, despite Antifa’s history of violence in Portland and Seattle. There were numerous reports of Antifa being present at some of the BLM rioting in 2020, but I wanted to clarify that what Rogers appeared to be mentioning could be a cause for concern
There was a report of an event like this happening in TX several years ago. In that event no groups had actually scheduled protests and someone or some group was just posting messages trying to incite supporters of two competing causes to show up at the same location. The 2017 article cites federal lawmakers blaming Russian facebook pages, but considering how dubious claims of Russian disinformation have turned out to be, who knows… the Clinton campaign paid and had the bogus Steele dossier created, alleging Trump-Russian collusion, Dem operatives and Silicon bigwigs created fake Russian bots in a 2017 Senate race to smear a Republican Senate candidate as being supported by Russia, the dubious track record of the Hamilton 68 dashboard set up to identify Russian disinformation online, and the US Senate report on Russian social media operations being written by a company where the CEO was one of the participants in that Dem false flag operation creating fake Russian bots in 2017.
In general someone or some group online trying to create confrontations between competing groups in the real world could be dangerous. However, that doesn’t mean I want a “cognitive security” force policing speech in America.
I interpreted The Wired article as being sympathetic to BLM. BLM was a radical group started by self-avowed Marxists and they were pushing “defund the police” in 2020, which created mayhem in many urban police departments. There was a great deal of violence associated with the BLM organized George Floyd protests in 2020 and I believe the mainstream media tried to spin that away – “mostly peaceful protestors” one CNN reporter reported, as buildings were burning in the background.
“A report from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project estimated that between May 26 and August 22, 93% of individual protests were “peaceful and nondestructive”[40][41] and research from the Nonviolent Action Lab and Crowd Counting Consortium estimated that by the end of June, 96.3% of 7,305 demonstrations involved no injuries and no property damage.[42] However, arson, vandalism, and looting that occurred between May 26 and June 8 caused approximately $1–2 billion in insured damages nationally, the highest recorded damage from civil disorder in U.S. history, and surpassing the record set during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.[6][43]“
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