After some time trying to learn a bit more about the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, it’s mission, when it was formed, who was involved, how it is funded, etc., I still have more questions than answers. Most of all I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around the term “cognitive security,” which comes with a whole new language, loads of military-type acronyms and borrowing military terms and applying them to information operations within the United States and abroad. This new field of cognitive security is reportedly being developed to identify threats and combat misinformation.
The Taibbi, Schellenbeger, Gutentag, Substack article asserts: “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.”
I haven’t come across any information to corroborate this British intelligence analyst in the Obama WH in 2017, but the British CTI League person is Sarah-Jayne Terp.
Here’s a September 2020, Wired article, One Data Scientist’s Quest to Quash Misinformation, which explains the work of British data scientist, Sarah-Jayne Terp, who has a long career, including as a defense researcher for the British government and her work in developing the field of “cognitive security.” This article goes through how in 2018 Terp was invited by Pablo Breuer, who was the military director of the Special Operations Command Donovan Group, NSA advisor and Cyber Command, to participate in an exercise the US military was hosting in Tampa. At this event, a third person, Marc Rogers, a cyber-security expert discussed the growing problem of misinformation. This paragraph in the Wired article explains how it began:
“Terp spent the day in Florida brainstorming how to fool a modern foe, though she has never seen the results. “I think they instantly classified the report,” she says. But she wound up at dinner with Pablo Breuer—the Navy commander who had invited her—and Marc Rogers, a cybersecurity expert. They started talking about modern deception and, in particular, a new danger: campaigns that use ordinary people to spread false information through social media. The 2016 election had shown that foreign countries had playbooks for this kind of operation. But in the US, there wasn’t much of a response—or defense.”
Breuer, Terp, and Rogers met again and this began their work at creating this whole new cognitive-security field. I have no idea how much government money has flowed into setting up these private efforts (military contractors?), what the US military and intelligence role is in their efforts, or what type of government oversight exists.
So, the Taibbi, Schellenberger, Gutentag article with a whistleblower alleging a 2017 meeting in the WH to come up with a counter-disinformation program to stop a repeat of 2016, I wonder what a “repeat of 2016” even means. Then in 2018 besides this war-gaming exercise where Terp, Breuer and Rogers in Tampa reimagined D-Day in the present day, they were dreaming up “cognitive security” ideas.
From the Wired article, Terp apparently believes people’s beliefs can be hacked: ““Beliefs can be hacked,” Terp says. If you want to guard against an attack, she thought, you have to identify the weaknesses in the network. In this case, that network was the people of the United States.”
The rest of this post is a rant – fair warning:
C’mon, the military experts spent decades telling us that the key to “winning” in Afghanistan was “winning the hearts and minds,” but now we’re supposed to buy into policing speech is necessary in America to protect Americans from having their “beliefs hacked,” by malignant ideas and misinformation. What about trying to win their hearts and minds with better ideas? The way to combat misinformation is to build trust within communities and with people and talk more, not less.
The free flow of information and ideas is the best antidote to misinformation, not some data experts and brain-hacking gurus deciding who to put on more government watch lists. There, I saved us billions of dollars on how to combat misinformation – encourage more free speech and sharing ideas.
The best way to dispel darkness is more light and conversation. All these policing speech efforts end up isolating people and making people hesitant to speak freely – it quells what makes America free and vibrant. Watching that video of an older woman who talks about gardening trying to be careful about what words she used a couple days ago was painful to watch, but this has been happening for years on college campuses, with progressive agendas being crammed down our throats, where you’re attacked if you don’t use the politically-correct words, and hate speech is defined and dictated by progressive gatekeepers. It’s also been happening online for years, where the gatekeepers are almost always liberals.
Democrats and these experts would likely never admit that Democrats have operated a spin information war since the 1990s, sending out talking points and buzz words to media talking heads to repeat ad nauseum, orchestrating smear campaigns, and trying to marginalize right-wing Americans as backward, religious zealots and then they wonder why right-wingers won’t listen to them anymore.
I do know the Clinton political machine initiated their brand of “spin information warfare” in the 1990s to advance their political agenda. They bragged about their spin war constantly. Their spin war relied on mass media (liberal-dominated) to run their spin war – aggressive repetitive messaging operations, replete with loads of buzzwords, marginalizing dissenting views, demonizing anyone who got in the way of their orchestrated smear campaigns.
I know they tried to silence people who posted online, because of what happened to me in 1998 during the Clinton impeachment, when I countered their spin messaging crapola during impeachment on the Excite politics message boards. Not going to rehash all of my own experience again, but I realized then that if someone, with not even a speeding ticket, could become a target of an illegal intimidation effort, it could happen to anyone. Can’t prove anything – don’t know any powerful people and anyone in the Clinton crowd is above the law – that’s the reality.
As the Dem spin war in the liberal media intensified over the years, the right-wing media sphere grew in response, largely fueled by right-wing talk radio and FOX News. The burgeoning crowd of right-wing celebs (many grifters) often jump on the bandwagon of every crazy conspiracy theory imaginable, from the 90s to today. Of course, there’s now a large right-wing online sphere too. So, yes there is a misinformation problem on the right too, and for decades I’ve wondered how much hostile foreign information operations effort goes into fueling the American right vs. left battles and also inflaming various other racial and ethnic controversies.
With the Dems and liberal media, well, it went off the rails completely with the #Resist effort born when Trump won the election in November 2016 and then 4 years of non-stop efforts to destroy Trump. A 2017 Obama WH meeting, with a Brit intelligence analyst in the room, would have had to have been in those 20 days in January. Trump was inaugurated January 20, 2017. I remember well the media and Dem hysteria about “military parades” and Trump wanting to be a military dictator.
When a “respected” historian is blabbering about Melania’s Rose Garden renovation and the liberal media elites are tweeting about it being “an authoritarian design,” despite her Rose Garden plans being widely reported in liberal media before the renovation occurred and those plans were going back to the Jackie O design, it seems to me the Twitter Democrat/liberal media spin crowd lost their minds. Melania put together a team of professionals and historical experts who handle those sorts of projects in Washington. The crazy went so far as to some nuts ranting on Twitter about so many white roses in the new design being racist. Those were JFK tea roses.
There were so many attacks against Trump that were completely nuts- but the Steele dossier was a Clinton dirty trick, which was fed into the US State Department and FBI – public corruption of a level that’s hard to fathom and Dems and the liberal media have been crickets about all that. And then the liberal experts wonder why right-wingers buy into anti-government conspiracy theories…
I can immediately say that if this “cognitive security” stuff was hatched within the Obama administration, I will never trust any part of it. Then again, I think the Patriot Act should be buried too. “Security” programs that take wings in a crisis atmosphere lead to mass overreactions and fear and panics about security can lead to people buying into terrible ideas – like lockdowns and worse.
In 2020 with COVID, I believe it was former Clinton Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich who tweeted, advocating sending COVID anti-vaxxers to camps. Perfectly normal… But, hey, around the same time, Democrats and liberal media were selling “Defund the Police” and making excuses for rioting thugs and criminals. Rioters burned down a police precinct in Minneapolis and prominent Democrats were fund-raising to post the criminals bail… You can’t make this stuff up.
Yes, things went just a tad too far during COVID and this cognitive security field blossomed, all in the name of public health and protecting us from having “our beliefs hacked.” There were epidemiologists and vaccine experts in the field, who were banned on social media, for daring to hold opinions that differed from the Fauci edicts. People were fired for refusing the COVID vaccine, soldiers were booted out of the military. Now we’ve had Biden railing about dangerous “MAGA Extremists” and the US military hunting down “white nationalists” in the ranks and a Chairman of the JCS blabbering about “white privilege” for a couple years. So much for focusing on warfighting…
I don’t want to see another list or labeling exercise from elitists, in the government or funded by the government, where it’s all liberals who are grouping Americans and labeling them as threats. I came across a piece on Terp’s training, with all the different types of “threats” (people’s online messaging and behaviors) and labeling them into groups. When the whole Dem/liberal media “Russian disinformation everywhere” hysteria ensued, there was some effort to protect us – the now defunct Hamilton 68 database, which was putting together lists of online accounts who were supposedly “Russian bots.”
Yet, amazingly, there was no big liberal media furor over Democrat operatives and billionaire Democrat Silicon Valley execs. creating a false flag operation, fielding fake Russian bots supporting Roy Moore, then running a media messaging attack alleging Moore was supported by Russians, in the 2017 AL Senate race: Liberal billionaire apologizes for funding ‘false flag’ effort to link Kremlin to Republican in Alabama Senate race. To take this Russian disinformation farce to the max, well, leave it to Dems. One of those Silicon Valley execs involved, ran an internet security firm the US Senate relied on for their report about Russia’s social media operations:
“One participant in the project reportedly was Jonathon Morgan, the chief executive of New Knowledge, a firm that wrote a report – released by the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this week – about Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election and its efforts to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.” https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democratic-operatives-created-fake-russian-bots-in-alabama-race-designed-to-link-kremlin-to-republican-roy-moore.
Now tell me how seriously we’re supposed to take that Senate report on Russia’s social media operations…
The biggest problem is Americans largely reside in ideological bubbles, in real life and online. Getting people to step outside their bubbles more and talk to each other might lead to people beginning to build some bridges of trust in America. A bunch of elites studying us like we’re insects, awaiting being pinned into categories on a board and trying to find ways to control information flows in America will only make matters worse.
Update: 12/10/2023, I forgot the most famous Dem. claim of Russian disinformation, which came about right before the 2020 election, when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke. Here’s a 10/19/2020 Politico story: Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say, “More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
There was a social media effort banning the New York Post story reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop and banning anyone else from circulating that story on social media.
Well, it’s now clear the Hunter Biden laptop was real; we know the FBI had the laptop in their custody too.
Here’s a quote from an April 23, 2023 FOX News story, Biden campaign, Blinken orchestrated intel letter to discredit Hunter Biden laptop story, ex-CIA official says:
“Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell testified before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, and revealed that Blinken was “the impetus” of the public statement signed in October 2020 that implied the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was disinformation.”
Another story from the April 25, 2023 story in the Washington Examiner, Hunter Biden investigation: Ex-CIA head hosted Blinken on podcast before leading laptop letter:
“An ex-CIA head who testified that he was influenced by then-senior Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken to coordinate signatories for an influential letter falsely claiming Russian involvement with the Hunter Biden laptop twice hosted the now-secretary of state on his podcast — including just before the letter was published.”
On August 5, 2016, Morrell was spinning about Trump before that election too, with an op/ed in the New York Times, I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.:
“Two strongly held beliefs have brought me to this decision. First, Mrs. Clinton is highly qualified to be commander in chief. I trust she will deliver on the most important duty of a president — keeping our nation safe. Second, Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.”
Yes, the same crowd who was in the 2017 Obama WH, when allegedly a Brit intelligence analyst was present, as they brainstormed the creation of a counter-disinformation project to prevent another 2016, is the same crowd, who orchestrated that former intel officials letter right before the 2020 election. It’s the same crowd who was spinning up the Trump-Russia Collision hysteria with the Steele dossier, orchestrated by the Clinton campaign in the 2016 election, and leaked by Buzzfeed on January 10, 2017 (while the Dem/media spin frenzy was in high-gear to #Resist and interfere in Trump’s inauguration).
All these experts are all about patterns… well, there sure seems to me, a person on the receiving end of the Clinton spin information war effort decades ago, to be a glaringly obvious one with Dem/liberal media efforts to manipulate and control information in America… That 1990sClinton spin information war model expanded through the entire Democrat/liberal media sphere of media/social media influence.
I promise my next blog post won’t be about Dem spin information war, which should have ended when Gore lost the 2000 election, but God help America, we’re heading into another presidential election year and it’s hard to imagine what spin war nightmares await us.
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