Part 2 Whistleblower Bombshell: US government, led by Obama, created a psy-op to influence American elections

PART TWO OF A TWO-PART SERIES

The first part of this series delved into documents provided by a whistleblower to the individuals who released the “Twitter Files” and the “Facebook Files.” These documents show an effort between the federal government, big tech, and NGOs to conduct an influence operation to affect future elections. Part Two continues looking at that report.

The report in Part One suggested putting censorship efforts inside of “cybersecurity” even though they knew “misinformation security” is vastly different from cybersecurity. This “pillar” would be referred to as “The Cognitive Dimension,” an attempt to “preemptively inoculate a vulnerable population against messaging”; in other words, a psyop. 

How would this be accomplished? In part, it was suggested that the DHS-funded Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) be used to orchestrate the public-private censorship and would be used to “promote confidence in government,” Shellenberger wrote. 

It was here where the Election Integrity Project (EIP) and Virality Project (VP) ideas were hatched: “While social media is not identified as a critical sector, and therefore doesn’t qualify for an ISAC, a misinformation ISAC could and should feed indications and warnings into ISACs.” 

Sara Jayne Terp’s opinion of disinformation, however, was purely political. 

In a 2019 podcast, Terp said, "Most misinformation is actually true but set in the wrong context.” 

She elaborated, “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.” 

Terp and Pablo Breuer, another leader of the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), described the “public-private” model of censorship laundering that DHS, EIP, and VP would go on to embrace. 

Breuer suggested modeling information and narrative control after the Chinese government, tailored 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.” 

Does this sound familiar? Do you remember the narratives pushed during the pandemic, including by Joe Biden, who famously called COVID “the pandemic of the unvaccinated?” Masks and the jab were being done to “protect the citizenry.” 

“SJ [Terp] allied us the ‘Hogwarts school for misinformation and disinformation,’” said the whistleblower. “They were superheroes in their own story. And to that effect, you could still find comic books on the CISA site.” 

To implement a censorship campaign, CTIL “needed programmers to pull apart information from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For Twitter, they created Python code to scrape.” 

CTIL records provided by the whistleblower outline how the organization operated and tracked so-called “incidents” and what was considered “disinformation.” To counter the “we won’t stay home” narrative, CTIL members wrote, “Do we have enough to ask for the groups and/or accounts to be taken down or at a minimum reported and checked?” and “Can we get all troll on their bums if not?” 

In addition, they tracked posters that called for anti-lockdown protests as disinformation artifacts. 

“We should have seen this one coming,” they said of the protests. “Bottom line: can we stop the spread, do we have enough evidence to stop superspreaders, and are there other things we can do (are there contermessagers we can ping, etc).” 

CTIL also worked a counter-messaging psyop to encourage people to wear masks and discussed “building an amplification network.” “Repetition is truth,” said a CTIL member in one training session. 

According to the whistleblower, neither Terp nor other CTIL leaders discussed flirting with violations of the First Amendment. 

“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 some leaders expressing confidence in the legality (and constitutionality) of their activities, some members of CTIL took “extreme measures,” Shellenberger wrote, “to keep their identities secret.” For example, the group’s handbook recommends members use “burner phones,’ create pseudonymous identities and generate fake AI faces using the “This person does not exist” website. 

The whistleblower identified June 2020 as a date when the group took action to conceal their activities more thoroughly. 

In July 2020, four months before the presidential election, “SIO’s director, Alex Stamos, emailed Kate Starbird from the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Public, writing, ‘We are working on some election monitoring ideas with CISA, and I would love your informal feedback before we go too far down this road…[T]hings that should have been assembled a year ago are coming together quick this week,” Shellenberger wrote. 

During the summer of 2020, CISA created a group called the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force, “which has measures that reflect CTIL/AMITT methods,” including a “‘real fake’ graphic novel the whistleblower said was first pitched within CTIL.” 

Shellenberger noted the so-called “DISARM” framework, inspired by AMITT, “has been formally adopted by the European Union (EU) and the United States as part of a ‘common standard for exchanging structured threat information on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference.

While the activities of CTIL have flown under the radar, the group did receive some positive publicity in September 2020 from Wired, which parroted the notion that the organization was a “volunteer” network of “former” intelligence officials from around the world, an article that Shellenberger said, “reads more like a company press release.” 

That said, the article does dance around CTIL’s “anti-disinformation” work. While the report doesn’t quote any critics of CTIL’s “work,” the article does suggest that some might see something wrong with it. 

“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,” Shellenberger wrote, “the connection between preventing cyber crimes and ‘fighting misinformation’ is 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,” Wired explained. “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 went on a public relations crusade of sorts in the Spring and Fall of 2020 that mirrored what EIP eventually did…to claim its work was transparent. Anyone who suggested otherwise was guilty of engaging in a conspiracy theory. 

“The Election Integrity Partnership has always operated openly and transparently,” EIP said 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 [by academia] academic journals. Any insinuation that information about our operations or findings were secret up to this point is disproved by the two years of free, public content we have created.” 

Internal messages, however, show that much of what EIP did was done in secret, and its partisanship toward one particular party and demand of censorship from social media platforms of content that didn’t follow the preferred narrative flies in the face of those transparency claims. 

As Shellenberger wrote, EIP and VP have apparently gone away; however, CTIL is apparently still active, according to the LinkedIn pages of several of its members. 

As summarized in a blog called The Kennedy Beacon, the report by Shellenberger should terrify and anger anyone who believes in the foundations of our Republic. 

“The report by Shellenberger, Gutentag, and Taibbi exposes yet another terrifying chapter in America’s undemocratic separation from the Constitution. As one of CTIL’s main figures privately admitted, the techniques employed by the censorship industrial complex are those honed in wars and espionage operations overseas. To say that the war against the First Amendment is hypothetical or exaggerated negates the importance that America’s founders placed on this lodestone of constitutional law.”