Whistleblower: The US government, led by Barack Obama, created a psy-op to influence American elections- Part one

This is part one of a two-part report outlining the existence of a psyop involving coordination between the US government, social media companies, and NGOs to influence and interfere in future elections. 

WASHINGTON, DC- Stunning testimony from author and former California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger before a congressional committee appears to show an illegal psyop was created by former president Barack Obama to interfere in future elections. Some of those plans took hold during the 2020 election cycle, Shellenberger testified. 

During his testimony about the “Twitter files,” Shellenberger said the following:

“Two days ago, my colleagues and I published the first batch of internal files from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), which show US and UK military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed abroad against the American people. 

“Many insist that all that we identified in the Twitter files, the Facebook files, and the CTI files were legal activities by social media platforms to take down content that violated the terms of service. Facebook, X, formerly Twitter, and other big tech companies are privately owned, people point out, and free to censor content. And government officials are free to point out wrong information, they argue. But, the First Amendment prohibits the government from abridging freedom of speech. 

“The Supreme Court has ruled that the government may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish, and there’s now a large body of evidence proving that the government did precisely that. 

“What’s more, the whistleblower who delivered the CTIL files to us says that its leader, a quote, unquote former British intelligence analyst, was, quote, unquote in the room at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter disinformation project to, quote, stop a repeat of 2016.” 

That year–2016–was the year that Donald Trump quite unexpectedly beat Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House. 

In a piece for The Hill in 2017, John Solomon, now of Just the News, wrote a piece revealing the National Security Agency and FBI violated the civil liberties of American citizens during the Obama administration. 

Those violations included “improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts.” That information results from a FOIA request filed by the ACLU and contained in newly declassified memos released subject to that request. 

“Americans should be alarmed that the NSA is vacuuming up their emails and phone calls without a warrant,” said Patrick Toomey, an ACLU staff attorney in New York who was instrumental in pursuing the FOIA litigation. “The NSA claims it has rules to protect our privacy, but it turns out those rules are weak, full of loopholes, and violated again and again.” 

As it turns out, that was the least of what Obama was up to—according to the whistleblower referred to by Shellenberger, US and UK military contractors worked in partnership to create a “sweeping plan” for global censorship in 2018 in response to both Trump’s election in 2016 and Brexit in the UK, according to information entered into the Congressional record. 

That information included research conducted by Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi and was published in a Substack called “Public.” 

According to the whistleblower, the CTIL was initially a volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans; however, it was absorbed into official US government projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security. The CTIL documents “fill in the blanks” not addressed in either the Twitter files or Facebook files. 

The documents released by the whistleblower outline a concerted attempt to skirt the First Amendment by having any censorship efforts undertaken by private companies because the US government doesn’t have the “legal authority” to do so. 

The operation, along with others closely aligned, has been referred to as the Censorship Industrial Complex, a “network of over 100 government agencies and nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] that work together to urge censorship by social media platforms and spread propaganda about disfavored individuals, topics, and whole narratives.” 

Agencies involved included the DHS through its Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA), which “has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship,” along with the National Science Foundation, which financed “the development of censorship and disinformation tools,” while other government agencies played a supporting role. 

Emails obtained show that CISA created the so-called “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.” 

One odd detail that had come about in looking into CIS is referred to as a “black hole,” where the entire year of 2019 was missing from available data. 

However, a new trove of documents was retrieved, “including strategy documents, training videos, presentations, and internal messages,” and in 2019, US and UK military contractors developed a large-scale censorship network. “These contractors co-led CTIL, which partnered with CISA in the spring of 2020.” 

The censorship psyop swung into high gear in 2020 when the COVID pandemic sprang to life. According to whistleblower documents, 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.’” 

The anti-disinformation campaign wasn’t designed merely to censor so-called “wrong facts.” Still, it was intended to stop disfavored narratives, with a pressure campaign mounted against social media companies to take down information or take other action to prevent disfavored narratives from going viral. 

Moreover, CTIL’s approach to “disinformation” showed a concerted effort to go on the offensive 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.” 

CTIL developed a survey to screen potential organization members, asking questions such as “Have you worked with influence operations (e.g., disinformation, hate speech, other digital harms, etc) previously?” The survey then questioned if the influence operations included “active measures” and “psyops.” 

Shellenberger and his team contacted the FBI and CISA for comment, neither of which responded. One person involved in the operation, however, Bonnie Smalley, responded over the social media app LinkedIn and denied government involvement between CTIL and the government (copied exactly from the message, including errors): 

“...alll  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.” 

However, her statement appears to fly in the face of the truth. The documents obtained through the whistleblower show that “government employees were engaged members of CTIL,” specifically one individual who worked for DHS, Justin Frappier. According to Shellenberger, he “was extremely active in CTIL, participating in regular meetings and leading trainings.” 

The whistleblower said the ultimate goal of CTIL “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.” 

One former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, was one of the leaders of CTIL. In 2019, she shared a plan to create “Misinfosec communities,” including government. Both public records and whistleblower documents show that she was able to achieve them, where in April 2020, Chris Krebs, then-director of CISA, published a Twitter post and wrote in numerous articles that CISA was entering a partnership with CTIL, which he referred to as “an information exchange.” 

Terp, along with her colleagues, developed a “censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT). That strategy was aided in no small part by MITRE, “a major defense and intelligence contractor” that receives “an annual budget of $1 to $2 billion in government funding.” 

The World Health Organization also used AMITT to deploy a program to counter anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe.

According to Shellenberger, the documentation obtained from the whistleblower shows 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.” 

In fact, Terp admittedly once referenced her operations “in the background” on social media during the “Arab Spring” uprisings in the Middle East. The whistleblower said Terp had expressed “surprise” that such tactics, developed for foreign adversaries, would be used against American citizens. 

The whistleblower also revealed that at least “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, the whistleblower said. Terp “had a CISA badge that went away at some point,” the whistleblower continued. 

Those who founded the so-called “Censorship Industrial Complex” were not satisfied with Twitter simply putting warning labels on Twitter or merely blacklisting individuals. 

“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.” 

Much of the known information on CTIL started in 2020, when several media outlets, including the Washington Post, Bloomberg, and others, posted stories claiming CTIL was a group of volunteer cybersecurity experts” who would be helping “billion-dollar hospitals on their own time, and without pay” to determine so-called “vulnerabilities in healthcare institutions in more than 80 countries.” 

The media outlets gushed that the group had blossomed to “1,400 vetted members in 76 countries spanning 45 different sectors,” which had “helped to lawfully take down 2,833 cybercriminal assets on the internet, including 17 designed to impersonate government organizations, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization.” 

One so-called volunteer, former Israeli intelligence official Ohad Zaidenberg, stressed he was simply trying to “help.” 

“I knew I had to do something to help,” he said. 

“There is a really strong appetite for doing good in the community,” Marc Rogers, head of security operations for DEF CON, a hacker’s convention, said. 

It all sounded very altruistic. However, the goal of CTIL’s leaders, Shellenberger wrote, “was to build support for censorship among national security and cybersecurity institutions.” To accomplish that, they pushed the idea of “cognitive security” as a basis 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.” 

CTIL was stacked with individuals with military backgrounds and who served as military contractors. Terp and Pablo Breuer, another CTIL leader, worked for SOFWERX, “a collaborative project of the U.S. Special Forces Command and Doolittle Institute.” Doolittle transfers Air Force technology through the Air Force Resource Lab to the private sector. 

Terp and Breuer met during a ten-day military exercise organized by the US Special Operations Command in 2018, where they discussed modern disinformation campaigns on social media, according to Terp. During that meeting, according to Wired, they concluded that “Misinformation…could be treated the same way: as a cybersecurity problem.”

That led them to create CogSec along with David Perlman and Thatteus Grugq. Terp co-chaired the Misinfosec Working Group within CogSec. 

Individuals involved with CTIL didn’t appear to hide what they were trying to do. Breuer admitted during a podcast that he planned to bring military tactics to bear on social media platforms. 

Breuer even explained how they were trying to get around the First Amendment by getting “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 [the] 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.” 

A report issued by Misinfosec advocated for “sweeping government censorship and counter-misinformation,” noting that during the first six months of 2019, they analyzed so-called “incidents,” developed a reporting system, and shared their vision of censorship with “numerous state, treaty, and NGOs.” 

The interesting part of that report was that for every incident mentioned therein, the so-called “victim” came from the political left: Barack Obama, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and French President Emmanuel Macron. Moreover, the report didn’t try to hide the basis for its motivation–the aforementioned election of Donald Trump and Brexit. 

“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 useful idiots and fifth columnists–now augmented by automated bots, cyborgs, and human drolls–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 report then focused on information that “changes beliefs” through so-called “narratives” and said so-called misinformation could be countered by targeting specific links in a “kill chain” or influence chain from the misinformation incident before it becomes a full-blown narrative,’ Shellenberger wrote. 

The report took mainstream media to task, claiming they no longer control 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 could have cost them by other means.” 

In a chilling recommendation given CTIL’s ties to the government, the authors pushed for “police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved,” Shellenberger wrote. 

The report advocated for immediate implementation of AMITT, writing, “We do not need, nor can we afford, to wait 27 years for the AMITT (Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques) framework to go into use.” 

We will cover the rest of the whistleblower’s information given to Shellenberger in Part Two of this report.