Mike Benz
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The defining fact of the united states is freedom of speech. The extent this country is actually exceptional, it's because we have the first a moment to the world of rights. We have freedom of conscience.

We can say what we really think. There's no hate speech. Exception to that is because you hate what somebody else thinks. You cannot force that person to be quiet. Because where citizens, not slaves.

But that right, that foundational right, that makes this country what IT is that right from which all of the rights flow is going away at high speed in the face of censorship. Now, modern censorship, there's no resembles to previous censorship regimes in previous countries, in previous errors, our censorship is affected on the basis of fights against disinformation and mal information. And the key thing to know about these is there everywhere.

And of course, they have no reference at all to whether what you're saying is true or not. In other words, you can say something that is factually accurate and consistent with your own conscience and in previous versions of america, in an absolute right to say those things. But because someone doesn't like them, or because they're inconvenient to whatever plan the people in power have, they could be announced as this information and you could be strip to your right to express them either in person or online.

In fact, expressing these things can become a criminal act and is, and it's important, no, by the way, that this is not just the private sector doing this. These efforts are being directed by the U. S.

Government, which you pay for, at least theoretically own is your government. But they're stripping their rights at very high speed. Most people understand this intuitive ly, but they don't know how that happens.

How does censorship happen? What are the mechanics of IT? Mike bds is, we can say with some confidence, the expert in the world on how this happens.

Mike benz had the cyber a portfolio at the state department. He's now executive director of foundation for freedom online, and we're going to have a conversation with him about a very specific kind of censorship. But though we can't recommend stronger enough, if you want to know how this happens, mike bans B, E, N, Z is the man to read.

But today we just want to talk about a specific kind of censorship, and that censorship that emanates when the fabled military industrial complex from our defense industry in the foreign policy establishment in washington, that significant now because we're on the cusp of a global war. And so you can expect censorship to increase dramatically. And so with that, here is mike bds, executive director of foundation for freedom.

Unlike like thanks so much for joining us. And and I just can't overstate your audience how exhaustive and comprehensive your knowledge is on this topic. It's almost it's almost unbelievable. And so if you could just walk us through how the foregone policy establishment and defense contractors dd, in just a whole cluster, the conStellation of defense related publicly funded institutions, strip for us our freedom speech.

sure. You know, one of the easiest ways to actually start the story is really with the story of internet freedom, and IT switched from internet freedom to internet censorship, because free speech on the internet was an instrument of statecraft. Almost from the outset of the privatization of the internet in one thousand nine hundred and ninety one.

We quickly discovered through the efforts of the defense department, the state department in our intelligence services, that people were using the internet to congregate on blogs and forms, and free speech was champion more than anybody by the pentagon, the state department and our sof CIA cut out NGO blob architecture as a way to support dissident groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments, as they were sort of build essentially the internet, free speech allowed kind of instant regime change Operations to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishments state department agenda. Google is a great example. This google began as a darpa grant by Larry page and sergey brin when they were stanford phds.

And they they got their funding as part of a joint CIA nsa program to chart how, quote, birds of a feather flock together online through search engine aggregation. And then one year later, they launched google and then became a military contractor. Quickly thereafter, they got google maps by purchasing A A satellite software, essentially.

And the ability to track to use free speech on the internet is a way to circumvent state control over media over in places like central asia or all around the world, was seen as a way to be able to do what used to be done out of CIA station houses or out of embassies or consulates in a way that that was totally turbo charged. And all of the internet free speech technology was initially created by our national security state VPN virtual private networks to hire your I P address, tour the dark we B2Be abl e to buy and tra il sel l goo ds, anonymous ly and an encrypted chats. All of these things were created initially as darpa projects or as joint CIA nsa projects to be able to help intelligence back groups to overthrow governments.

That we're causing a problem to the clink administration of the bush administration, the obama administration. And this plan worked magically from about one thousand nine ninety one until about two thousand and fourteen, when there began to be in about face on internet freedom in its utility. Now the high water mark of the sort of internet free each moment was the area of spring in two thousand and eleven, two thousand and twelve, when you had this one by one, all of the adversary, governments of the obama administration, egypt, insist, all began to be topped in facebook revolutions and twitter revolutions.

And you had the state department working very closely with the social media companies to be able to keep social media online during those periods. There is a famous phone call from google jared coin to twitter to not do their scheduled maintenance so that so that the preferred opposition group in iran would be able to use twitter um to to win that election. So was an free speech, was an instrument of statecraft from the national al security state to be in with all of that architecture, all the gos.

The relationships between the tech companies and the national security state have been long established for freedom. In twenty fourteen, after the coup in ukraine, there was an unexpected countercoup where crime up and the don bass broke away, and they broke away with essentially a military backstop that nata was highly unprepared for at the time. They had one last hill, mary chance, which was the crimea anx ation vote on in in two thousand fourteen.

And when the hearts and minds of the people of crimea voted to join the russian federation, that was the last draw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the ice, nato is, they saw the fundamental nature of war changed at that moment. And nato, at that point, declared something that they first called the jassy of, during which is named after this russian military, a general who they claimed me to speech, that the fundamental nature of wars changed. You don't need to win military skirmishes to take over central eastern europe.

All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem, because that's what controlled elections. And if you simply get the right administration into power, they control the military. So it's infinitely cheaper than conducting a military war.

Conduction, organized political influence Operation over social media and legacy media and industry had been created that span the pentagon, the the british ministry defense, and brushes into a organized political warfare outfit, essentially infrastructure that was created, initially stationed in germany and essential eastern europe, to create psychological buffer zones, basically to create the ability to to have the military work with the social media companies to sensor russian propaganda or two sensor domestic lightning. Populist groups in europe who are rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis. So you had the systematic targeting by our state department, by our ic, by the pentagon, of groups like germany's afd, the alternative for dogs land there, and for groups in estonian label lithuania.

Now, when breaks had happened in twenty sixteen, IT was, that was this crisis moment where suddenly they didn't have to worry just about central nation erep anymore, was coming westward. This idea of russian control over hearts and minds. And so that was right.

That was due twenty, twenty sixteen, the very next month at the at the worse w conference, nato formally amended its charter to to expressly commit to hybrid warfare as there is this new nato capacity. So they went from basically seventy years of of tanks to this explicit capacity building for for censoring tweet that they were deemed to be russian proxies. And again, it's not just russian propaganda.

This was these were now braxy groups, or groups like matteo salvi in italy, or in greece, or in germany or in spain with the box party. And now at the time, nata was publishing White papers saying that the biggest threatening to faces is not actually a military, an invasion, russia. It's losing domestic elections across europe in two of these righting populous groups because they were mostly working class movements.

We're campaigning on cheap russian energy at a time when the us. Was pressuring this energy diversification policy. And so they made the argument after brags IT.

Now the entire rule base, international order would collapse unless the military took control over media because brags that would give rise to rax IT in france with marine le pen, just begs IT in spain with the box party to it'll x IT in in italy to greg IT in germany y to greg IT in greece, the e would come apart. So nato would be killed without a single bullet being a being fired. And then not only that, now that nato's gone, now there's no enforcement ARM for the international monti fund, the I M.

F for the world bank, so now the financial state kehoe ders, who depend on the battering rama, the central security state, would basically be helpless against governments around the world. So from their perspective, if the military did not begin to sense of the internet, every all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise the modern world after the world, world two would collapse. Ask the house. I told .

the remarkable .

story .

that never heard anybody explain, as useless and Christy as you just ted. But did anyone in nato or anyone in the state, partment pause woman, say with a second, we just identified our new enemy as democracy within their own countries. I think that's what you're saying. They they feared that the people, the citizens of their own countries, would get their way. And they went to war against that.

Yes, now there's a rich history of this dating back to the cold war. The cold war in europe was essentially a similar, a similar struggle for hearts and minds of people, especially in central eastern europe, in the sort of soviet buffer zones. And starting in thousand nine hundred and forty eight, the national security state was really established.

Then yeah, you had the. One thousand nine forty seven act, which established the central intelligence agency, you had this this new world order that had been created with all these international institutions, and you have the one thousand forty eight U. N.

Declaration on human rights, which forbid the territorial acquisition by military force, so you can no longer run a traditional military occupation government in the way that we could. In eighteen eighty eight, for example, when we took the Philippines, everything had to be done through a sort of political legitimizing process whereby there's some ratification from the hearts and and minds of people within the the country. Now often that involves simply public public politicians who had booed as emerging leaders by our state department.

But the battle for hearts and minds had been something that we had been giving ourselves a long moral license leash, if you will, since one nine hundred and forty eight, one of the godfathers of the CIA, George kennan, twelve days after we rigged the italian election in one thousand nine hundred and forty eight by stuffing ballot boxes and working with the mob, publish a memo called the inaugural organized political warfare, where he said, listen, it's a mean old world out there. We eat the CIA just rigged the italian election. We had to do IT because if the communist one, maybe they're never be another election.

Italy again. So, but it's really effective, guys. We need a department of dirty tricks to be able to do this around the world.

And it's essentially a new social contract we're constructing with the american people because this is not the way we've conducted diplomacy before. But we are now forbidden from using the war department one thousand nine hundred and forty eight. They also, we named the war department to the defense department.

So again, as part of this diplomatic on slot for political control, rather than IT looking like it's over military control. But essentially what end up happening there is we created this foreign domestic firewall. We said that we have a department of dirty tricks to be of the regulation tions, to be the control media, to be able to metal in the internal affairs of every other plot of dirt in the country.

But this sort of sacred dirt in which the american holland sits, will they are not allowed to Operate there. The state department, the defense department, the CIA, are all expressly forbidden from Operating on us soil. Of course, this is so far from the case.

It's not even funny, but but that's because of a number of laundry ing tricks that theyve developed over seventy years of doing this. But essentially there was no moral quality at first with respect to the creation of the censorship industry. When I started out in germany and and in lithuania and latvia and estonia, in in sweden and finland, there began to be a more diplomatic debate about IT after brags IT and then IT was IT became full role when trump was elected.

And what little resistance there was was washed over by the rise and saturation of russia gate, which basically allow them to not have to deal with the moral ambiguities of censoring your own people. Because if trump was a russian asset, you no longer really had a traditional free speech issue. IT was a national security issue.

IT was only after rush gate died in in july twenty nineteen, when Robert mother basically choked on the stand for three hours and revealed he had absolutely nothing. After two and five years of investigation that be foreign to domestic, switch eru took place where they took all of this censorship architecture, spanning dhs, the FBI, the CIA, the dod, the D, O, J, and then the thousands of government funded N. G, O.

And private sector mercenary firms, were all basically transition from a foreign vocat, from a foreign predicate, a russian disinformation predicate, to a democracy predicate, by saying that this information is not just a threat when IT comes from the russians. It's actually a trinities threat to democracy itself. And so by that they were able to wander the entire democracy promotion regime change tool kit just in time for .

twenty twenty election. I mean, it's it's almost beyond belief this has happened. I mean, my own father worked for the U.

S. Government in this business in the information war against the soviet union. And I was big part of that.

And the idea that any of those tools would be turned against american citizens by the U. S. Government was, I think, I want to think was absolutely unthinkable. And say, one thousand nine hundred eighty eight and you're saying that is there really hasn't been anyone who's raise objections and it's just it's absolutely turned in word to manipulate in real elections as we wouldn't say via yeah well.

as soon as the democracy predicate was established you had this professional class of professional regime change artists and Operatives. That is the same people who argued that we need to bring democracy to ugus lava to get, and that's the predict for getting rid of elosa, H. R, any, any other country around the world where we basically overthrow governments in order to preserve democracy.

Well, if if the democracy threat is home grown now, then that becomes, then suddenly these people all have new jobs moving on the on the U. S. side.

And I can go through a million examples of that. But one one thing on what you just mention, which is that you, from their perspective, they just weren't ready for the internet. Twenty sixteen was really the first time that social media have reached such maturity that IT began to eclipse legacy media.

I mean, this was a long time coming. I think folks saw this building from two thousand and six three, two thousand and sixteen. Internet, one point out, didn't even have social media. From nineteen ninety one to two thousand and four, there was no social media at all. Two thousand four, facebook came out.

Two thousand and five twitter, two thousand and six youtube, two thousand and seven the smart phone and so in in that initial period of social media, nobody was getting subscribe ships at the level where they actually competed with legacy news media. But over the course of being is so initially even these distant voices within the us. Um even though they may have been loud in moments, they they never reached thirty million followers.

They never reached a billion impressions a year. Type thing as a uncensored, mature ecosystem allowed citizens, journalists and independent voices to be able to outcompete legacy news media. This induced a massive Prices both in our military and in our state department and intelligence services. I give a great example of this in two thousand and nine meeting of the german Marshall fund, which is institution that goes back to the us.

Um basically um and I would say bride but but the essentially the soft power economic soft power projection in europe as part of the reconstruction of european governments after world two to be able to essentially pay them with martial fund dollars and then in return they basically were under arthmore in terms of how they reconstructed. But the german Marshall fund held the meeting in two thousand and nine. They held a million of these, Frankly, but where they were a four star general that got up on the panel and and said that that the what happens, he posed the question, what happens to the to the U. S.

Military, what happens to the national security state when the new york times is reduced? A medium sized facebook page. And he post this thought experiment as an example of of we've had these gatekeepers, we've had these bumper cars on democracy in the form of a of a century old relationship with legacy media institutions.

I me, our mainstream media is not in any shape and form even from its outset. Independent from the national security state, from the state department, from the war department. And you know you have the the initial, uh all of the initial a broadcast news companies, C A B C in cbs.

We're all created by office of more information veterans from the from the war department's effort, world war ii. You had at this Operation mockingbird relationships from the one thousand nine hundred and fifty one thousand nine hundred seventies. Those continued IT through the the use of the national demand for democracy in the privatization of intelligence capacity in the one thousand nine hundred navies under region.

There is all sorts of CIA reading room members. You can read even on CIA that gov. About those continued media relations throughout the ninety eighties. And so you always had this backdoor or relationship between the washington post, the new york times and all of the major broadcast media corporations. By the way, rupert murdoch and in fox are part of this as well.

Rupert murdoch was actually part of the national dance for democracy coalition in one thousand nine hundred and eighty three when I was formed as a way to product to do CIA Operations in an above board way after the democrats were so ticked off at the CIA for manipulating student movements in the thousand nine hundred and seventies. But essentially, there was no CIA intermediary to random citizen journalist. The council was no pending on backstop.

You couldn't get a story killed. You couldn't have this favors for favors relationship. You couldn't promise access to some rain person with seven hundred thousand followers who's got an opinion on syrian gas.

And so this induced, and this was not a problem for the initial period of social media from two thousand and six to two thousand and fourteen, because there were never distance groups that were big enough to be able to have A A mature ecosystem on their own. And all of the Victories on social media had gone in the way of the where the money was, which was on the state department, in the department, the intelligence services. But then as that maturity happened, you now had this this situation after the twenty sixteen election, where they said, okay, now the entire international order might come on done.

Seventy years of unified foreign icy from truman until trump are now about to be broken. And we need a the same analog control systems. We had to be able to put bumper cars on bad stories or bad political movements through legacy media relationships and contacts.

We now need to establish and consolidate within the social media companies. And the initial predicate for that was russia ate, but then, after a russia ate, died. And they use a simple democracy promotion predicate. Then IT gave rise to this multibillion dollar censorship industry that joins together the military industrial complex, the government, the private sector, civil society organizations, and then this vast cobweb of media allies and professional fact checker groups that that serves this sort of sentence class that surveys every word on the internet.

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know we have this state department outfit called the global engagement center, which was created by a guy named rick tankle who describe themselves as obama's propagandist chief. He was the undersecretary for public affairs, which is essentially the, which is the liaison office role between the state department and the mainstream media. So this is basically the exact nexus where government talking points about war or about diplomat acy your stay craft get synchronised with .

mainstream media. I add something to that. I know that he was at one point journalist um and rick tangle has made public arguments against the first amendment and against free speech .

and somebody role little book and publishing up and and a hole book on IT and he made the argument that that we just know when went over here that essentially the constitution was not prepared for the internet and we need to get rid of the first amendment accordingly and know he described himself as a free speech absolutely when he was the imaging edge of time magazine and even when he was in the state department under obama, he he started some of the global engagement center, which was the first government censorship Operation within the federal government.

But IT was foreign facing. So IT was okay now at the time they use the the congress ISIS predicate threat for this. And so IT was very hard to argue against the idea of the state department having this formal coordination partnership with every major tech platform in the us because the at the time there were these ISIS attacks that were and we were told that icy was were recruiting on twitter and facebook. And so the global engagement center was establish essentially to be a state department entanglement with the social media companies to basically put bomber cars on their ability to to platform accounts and to.

And one of the things they did is they created a new technology, which is, is a natural language processing IT, is a artificial intelligence machine, learning a ability to create meaning out of words in order to map everything that everyone says on the internet and create this vast topic topography of how communities are organized online, who the major influences are, what they're talking about, what narratives are emerging, are trending, and to be able to create this sort of network graph in order to know who to target and and how information through ecosystem. And so they began plotting the language you, the prefix is the sufism, the popular terms, the slogans that ISIS folks were talking about on twitter. When trump won the election in twenty sixteen, everyone who worked at the state department was expecting these promotions to the White house national security council under Hillary clinton, who I should remind viewers know was also secretary of state under a obama actually ran the state department.

But these folks were all expecting promotions on november eighteen, november eight, twenty sixteen. And we're unceremoniously put out of jobs by a guy who was a twenty to one underdog cording. The new york times the day of the election. And when that happened, these state department folks took their special set of skills covers ing governments to a to for sanctions, that the state department LED the the effort to sanctions russia over the crimea annexation in two thousand fourteen. These state department diplomats did an international road show to pressure european governments to pass censorship laws to sensor the rightful populist groups in europe, and as a boomerang impact, to sensor populist groups who were affiliated in the us.

So you folks, folks who went from the state department directly, for example, to the atlantic council, which which is this major facilitator, or between the government, between government to government censorship, the inland council is a group that was one of binders, biggest political backers. They build themselves as nato's think tank. So they represent the political census of nato in many respects.

When nato has civil society actions that they want to be coordinated to to synching ize with military action in region, the atlantic council essentially is deployed to consensus build and make that political action happen within the region of interest to nato. Now, the elected council of seven directors on its board, a lot of people don't even know that seven CIA directors are still alive, but alone all concentrated on the board of a single organization. That's kind of the heavy weight in the censorship industry.

They get annual funding from the department of defense, the state department and CIA cut outs like the national down for democracy, the atlantic council, in january twenty seventeen, moved immediately to pressure european governments to pass censorship laws to create a transatlantic flank attack on free speech in exactly the way that rick tangle essentially called for to have the us. Mimic european censorship laws. One of the ways they did this was by getting germany to pass when they called next DJ in August twenty seventeen, which was which was essentially kicked off the era of of automated censorship in the U.

S. What next gg required was unless, unless social media platforms want to pay fifty four million dollar fine for each instance of a speech, each post left up on their platform for more than forty eight hours that have been identified as hate speech, that they would be fine basically into background. Cy, when you agree, ate fifty four million over tens of thousands of posts per day and the the safe haven around that was if they deployed artificial intelligence based censorship technologies, which had been again created by darpa to take on ISIS to be able to scan and band speech automatically.

And this was, this gave you, I call these weapons of mass deletion. These are essentially the ability to sensor tens of millions of posts with just a few minds of code. And the the way this is done is by aggregating basically the field of censorship. Science fuses together two disparate groups of study, if you will. There's the sort of political and social scientists who are the sort of thought leaders of what should be censored.

And then there are the sort of quality as, if you will, these are the programmer, the computational data scientists, computational linguistics, every university, over sixty universities now, who get federal government grants to do this, censorship, the censorship work and the censorship preparation work, where what they do is they create these code books of the language that people use. The same way they did for ice is they did this, for example, with covet. They created these, these coveted lexicons of what directed groups we're saying about Mandates, about masks, about vaccines, about high profile individuals like tony fault I or or Peter dash c.

Or these are protected VIP and individuals whose reputations had to be protected online. They created these code books. They broke things down to into narratives. The atlantic council, for example, as a part of this, this government funded consortium, and they called the vary project, which which mapped sixty six different narratives that dissidents were talking about around, covet everything from copy origins to vaccine effect acy. And then they broke down the sixty six claims into all the different factual sub claims.

And then they plugged these into these essentially machine learning model to be able to have a constant world heat map of what everybody was saying about copy. And whenever something started trend that was bad for what the pentagon wanted, or was bad for what tony found he wanted, they were able to take down tens of millions of posts. They did this in the twenty twenty election with male and baLance. IT was asking.

i'm sorry, it's going to have this so much here and it's so shocking. So you're saying the pentagon, our pentagon, the U. S. Department of defense censored americans during the twenty twenty election cycle.

Yes, they did this. Oh, they did this through the so so there's the two most sensor events in human history, I would argue to date are the twenty twenty election and the cover in nineteen pandemic and explain how I arrive there. So the twenty twenty election was determined by melon baLance.

And I got i'm not went into the substance of whether melon ballots were or were not a legitimate or safe and reliable form of voting. That's a completely independent topic for my perfect than the censorship issue won. But the censorship of of male baLance is really one of the most extraordinary stories in our american history. I would argue what happened was, as you had this plot within the department of homeland security, now this gets back to what we were talking about with the state department's global engagement center, you had this group with in the atlanta council and the foreign policy establishment, which began arguing in twenty seventeen for the need for a permanent domestic censorship government office to service a quarterback for what they called a whole of society, counter misinformation, counter disinformation alliance, that just means censorship to counter mister info. But whole, the whole society model, explicit, proposed that that we need every single asset within society to be mobilized in the whole of society effort to stop misinformation on IT.

Was that much of an next essential try to democracy? And so but they they fixed in twenty seventeen that IT had to be centered within the government, because only the government would have the cloud and the coercive threat powers and the and the perceived authority to be able to tell the social media companies what to do, to be able to summit in a government funded ng OS form, to create that media surrounding sound, to be able to ARM in a in you, an extra trust army of a fact checkers, and to be able to the aid and connect all these different censorship industry actors into a cohesive, unified whole. And the atlantic council initially proposed with this blueprint called forward defense, not all fence, it's forward defense guys.

They initially proposed that running this out of the state department y's global engagement center, because they had so many assets there who were so affected at censorship under rectangle speed under the obama administration. But they said we were not able to get away with that because we don't really have a national security predicate and supposed to be far in facing can't really use that hook unless we have a sort of national security one. Then they contempt parking at the CIA.

And they say, well, actually there's two reasons we can do that. Cities, foreign ing. We can't really stablish a counter intelligence threat to bring home domestically.

Also, we're going to need essentially tens of thousands of people involved in this Operation, spending this whole society model. You can really run a cladel an Operation that way. So they said, OK, well, what about the FBI? They said, what the FBI would be great.

It's domestic. But the problem is that the I is supposed to be the intelligence ARM of the justice department. And weak.

And what we're dealing with here are not acts of law breaking. It's basically support for trump. Or if if if left elling populus had risen to power like bernie Sanders, we're jeramy carbon.

I have no doubt they would have done in the U. K. They, we've done the same thing to him there. They targeted jar jermy carbon and other levelling populist meos ticals groups in europe. But in the us, IT was IT was all trump.

And so essentially what they said is, well, the only other domestic intelligence equity we have in the us besides the FBI is the dh. So we are going to essentially take the cip wer to rig and bribe foreign media organizations, which is the power they've had since that they have. They were born in nineteen and forty seven.

And we're going to combine that with the power with the domestic juris ration of the FBI by by putting IT at the H. S. So dhs was basically deputized.

IT was empowered through this subscriber ybor security agency to have the combined powers that the cii has abroad with the jurisdiction of the FBI at home. And the way they did this, how to cyber and obscure the little cyber security agency get this power, was they did a funny little series of switcher rules. So this little thing called sisa, they called the disinformation governance board.

They didn't called the censorship agency. They gave him an scare of little name that no one would notice called the cyber security and infrastructure security agency, who is founder, said, we just security. We care about security so much as in our name twice, everybody sort of close the eyes and in the pretended, you know, that's what IT was. But IT was created by active congress in twenty eighteen because of the perceived threats that russia had, the twenty sixteen election had physically hacked. And so we had need, we needed the cyber security power to be able to, to be able to deal with that.

And essentially on the heels of a CIA memo on january six, twenty seventeen, in the same day, dhs executive world on january six, twenty seventeen, arguing that russia had interfered red in the twenty sixteen election in A D man date, saying that elections are now critical infrastructure, you had this new power within dh to say that cyber security attacks on elections are now are per view. And then they did two cute things, one they said, said, they said, miss this and more information online are a form of cyber security attack. They are a cyber attack because they are happening online and they said, well, actually rush in this information is what we're actually protecting, democracy and elections. We don't need to russian predicate after russia died. So just like that, you had the cybersecurity agency be able to legally make the argument that your tweets about male im allots if you undermine public faith and confidence in them as a legitimate form of voting was now you are now conducting a cyber er attack on us critical infrastructure by articulating misinformation on twitter and just like that and now what they .

did then is in other words, complaining about election fraud as the same as taking down our.

yes, you could literally be on your toilet seat at nine thirty on a thursday night and tweet I think that melon ballots are illegitimate and you were essentially then caught up in the cross hairs of the department of homeland security classifying you as conducting a cyber er attack on us critical infrastructure because you were doing misinformation online in the cyber and misinformation is a cyber attack on democracy when IT undermines public faith and confidence in in our democratic elections in our democratic institutions they would end up going far beyond that they would actually to find democratic institutions as being another thing that was a cyber security attack to to undermine in one behold.

The mainstream media is considered a democratic institution that would come later what ended up happening was in the dance of the twenty twenty election is starting in April of twenty twenty. Although this goes back before you had this essentially never trump ed, neocon republican dhs, working with essentially nato on the national security side and and essentially the dnc, if you will, to to use dhs as a launching point for a government coordinated mass censorship campaign, spending every single social media platform on earth in order to be sensor the ability to dispute the legitimacy of malon baLance. And here's how they did this.

They aggregated four different institutions, stanford university, the university of washington, a company of graphic up in the atlantic council. Now all four of these institutions, the centers within them, were essentially pana. Gon cutts, you had, you had at the stafford d internews.

A Victory. IT was actually run by microbic fall. If you know, Michael c. fall. He was the U. S. Ambassador to russia under the um under the obama administration and he personally authored a seven step playbook for how to successful ly orchestrate a color revolution that is in part of that involved have maintaining total control over media and social media producing up the civil society outfits, calling elections illegitimate in order to remind all of these people were professional rush gators and professional election d legitimizes in twenty sixteen and then all get sensex so so stanford university of the nominally the stanford arms over tory under Michael mmi k fall was run by alex demos, who was formally a facebook executive who coward needed with O D ni and the with respect to a russia gate taking down russian propaganda at facebook. So this is another liaison essentially to the national security state.

And under alexa as the same for an observer, tory was renate arrested, who started her career in the CIA and wrote the senate intelligence committee report on russian disinformation. And there's a lot more there than i'll i'll get to another time. But the next institution was was the university of washington, which is essentially the bill gates university in seattle, who is headed by kate starbird, who is is basically three generations of military brass who got our PHD and Prices informatics, essentially doing your social media surveilLance for the pentagon and getting your dark funding and in working essential with the national security state.

Then we purpose to take on male ballots. The third firm, graphics, got seven million dollars in pentagon grants and and got their start as part of the pentagon's nerval initiative. The nervous intiative is the psychological warfare research center of the pentagon. This group was was doing social media spying, a narrative mapping for the pentagon until the twenty sixteen election happened.

And then were we purpose into a partnership with the department of human security to sensor your twenty two million trumped tweet pro trump t tweet about male and ballots? And then the fourth institution is, I mentioned with the atlantic council, who's got seven cities rectors on the board. So one after another, IT is exactly what ben roads described IT during the obama air as the blob, the foreign icy establishment, the the french department, the state department, or the CIA, every single time.

And of course, this is because they were they were threatened by trump's foreign policy. And so, well, much of the censorship looks like it's coming domestically. It's actually by our foreign facing department of dirty tricks, color revolution blob, who are professional government top lers, who were then basically descended on the twenty twenty election.

Now they did this. They explicitly said the head of this election integrity partnership on tape and my foundation clipped them. And it's been played before congress and it's a part of them is already be biden lawsuit now.

But they explicitly said on tape that they were set up to do what the government was banned from doing itself. And then they articulated a multi step framework in order to converse, all detect companies, to take censorship actions. They said on tape, the tech companies would not have done, but for their pressure, which involved using threats of government force. Because they were the deputised ARM of the government, they had a formal partnership with the dhs. They were able to use dhs is for prieta domestic disinformation switchboard to immediately talk to top breast at all the tech companies for takeout wants.

And they brake on tape about how they got the tech companies to all systematically adopt a new terms of service speech violation ban called delegitimizing, which meant any tweet, any youtube video, any facebook post, any tiktok video, any disco post, any twitch video, anything on the internet that that undermine public faith in and confidence in the use of melon ballots or early voting drop boxes or or ballot tabulation is used on election day was a primary fashion. Terms of service violation policy under this new delegitimizing policy that they only adopted because of pass through government pressure from the election integrity partnership, which they bragged about on tape, including the grid that they used to do this in cy multi evensen, invoking threats of government breaking them up or or government stopping doing favorites for the tech companies unless they did this, as well as inducing crisis pr by working with their media allies. So, and they said the government, dhs couldn't not do that themselves.

And so they set up this, this basically conStellation of state department, pentagon and ic networks to run this prevents ship campaign, which by their own math, had twenty two million tweet on twitter alone. And I need this is on fifteen platforms. This is hundreds of millions of posts which were all scand and band or throttles that they cannot be amplified or they exist in a sort of limited state parga ory.

Or had these frictions a fix to them in the form of fact checking labels where you could actually click through the thing or you had up IT was as an inconvenience feel to share. Now they did this seven months before the election because at the time, they were worried about the perceived legitimacy of a buying Victory. In the case of a so called red merage blue shift event, they they know the only way that buying would be able to would would win mathematically was through the disproportionate democrat use of male baLance.

They knew there would be a crisis. Because I was going to look extremely weird if if trump look like he won by seven states and then three days later IT comes out actually the election swish, I mean that that would put the election crisis of the bush gore election on the level of steroid that the national security state said, well, the public will not be prepared for. So what we need to do is we need to in advance, we need to be sensor, the ability to even question legitimacy.

This took out, we wait. Let me ask you to post right there. So what you're saying is what you're suggesting is they knew the outcome of the election seven months before IT was held.

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IT looks very bad. Certainly what .

they yes, mike does look very bad um .

you know in especially when you combining this with the fact that this is right on the heals of the impeachment the pentagon LED, CIA, LED, peaching and IT was eric similar from the CIA and IT was the vin mins from the pentagon who LED the impeachment of trump in late twenty nineteen over an alleged phone call around with holding ukraine aid this same network which came straight out of the pentagon, uh hybrid warfare network, military censorship network created after the first you ukraine crisis in twenty fourteen, were the lead architects of the ukraine and peaceful in twenty twenty and then essentially came back on steroids as part of the twenty twenty election censorship Operation but from their perspective, I mean, IT certainly looks like the perfect crime.

These were the people dhs at the time had actually federalized much of of the national election interest uh a administration through this january six twenty seventeen h executive order from outgoing obama um D H S had jay Johnson, which essentially wrapped all fifty states up into a formal dhs partnerships. So dhs was simultaneously in charge of the administration of the election of many respects and the censorship of anyone who chAllenged the administration of the election. This is like, you know, putting essentially the defendant uh of a trial as the judge and jury of the trial.

But you're not describing democracy, and you're describing a country in which democracy is impossible.

When i'm essenic describing his military blue, I mean, this is, I mean, what's happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total invariance of the idea of democracy itself. Democracy sort of draws its legitimacy from the idea that IT is rule by consent of the people of the people being ruled that is it's not really being ruled by an overlord because the government is actually just or will express by our consent with who we vote for.

Um the whole push after the twenty sixteen election and after brakes IT and after a couple of other social media run elections that went the wrong way from what the state department wanted, like the twenty sixteen Philippines election, was to completely invert everything that we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society in order deal with the threat of free speech on the internet and what they essentially said is we need to read mine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the santin of democratic institutions and who are the the democratic institutions oh it's us. You know it's the military, it's nato, it's the I M. F in the world bank.

It's the mainstream media who IT is the ngos and of course these ngos are largely state department funded or ic funded. It's essentially all of the elite establishments um that were under threat from domestic the rise of domestic populism that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy because if you define democracy is being the strength of democratic institutions rather than to focus on the wheel of the voters than what you're left with is essentially democracy is just the consensus building architecture within within the democratic institutions themselves and from their perspective, that takes a lot of work. I mean, I mean the amount of work these people do, I mean, for example, mention the atlantic council, which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms for the whale and gas industry in the region, for the, for the finance and the jp Morgans, and in the black rocks in the region, for the ngos in the region, for the media, the region, all of these need to reach a consensus.

And that process takes a lot of time and takes a lot of work and a lot and negotiation from their perspective, that's democracy. Democracy is getting the NGO degree with black rock to degree with with the wall street journal to agree with the the community and activist groups who were on board with respect to a particular initiative, that is, the difficult vote building process from their prospect if the end of the day a bunch of, you know, populist groups decide that they like A A truck driver whose popular on tiktok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the nato military brass, well then from their perspective, you know, that is now in attack on democracy. And this is what this whole branding effort was.

And of course, democracy, again, has that magic regime change predict where democracy is, is our magic watch word to be able to overthrow governments from the ground up in a sort of color, revolution style whole of society effort to topple a democratic and elected government from the inside. For example, as we did ukraine Victoriana co, which was democratic, the elected by the ukrainian people like like a mahadei um have i'm not even issuing opinion there, but the fact this is we colour revolution amount of office, we january system out of office, to be Frank. I mean with respect to the you had a state department funded right sector dogs and you five billion dollars worth of civil society money pumped into this to overthrow democracy, elected government in the name of democracy, and they took that special set of skills home. And now it's here, perhaps potentially to stay. And this is fundamentally changed the the nature of american governance because of the threat of you, one small voice becoming popular on social media.

Me ask you a question, so into that that group of institutions that you say now defined democracy, the ngos um foremen icy center. You included the mainstream media now in twenty twenty one, the N S. A broken to my private text apps and read dom and then lead them to the york times against me. That just happened again to me last week. Um and i'm wondering how common that is for the intel agencies to work with so called mainly ream media like in new york times to hurt their opponents.

Well that is the function of these injustices. Al government funded non governmental organizations and think tanks, like, for example, we mentioned the atlantic council, which is nato, thank talk, but other groups like the asking institute, which draws the line share of its funding from the state department and other government encies, you know, the asian institute was posted doing the same thing with the hunter biden laptop censorship.

Now you had this strange situation where the FBI had advanced knowledge of the pending publication of the hunter biden laptop story. And then magically, the aspen institute, which is run by essentially former C I A, former N S A, former FBI, and then a bunch of sort of civil society organizations, all hold a mass, uh, stakeholder sim censorship simulation. A three day a conference. You know, this came out and you, roth was there. This is a big part the twitter file leagues and it's been mentioned in multiple congressional investigations but somehow the aspen institute um which is basically in the denim of the national security state uh got the exact same information that the national security state spied on journalists and political figures to obtain and not only leaked IT but then basically did they a joint coordinated censorship simulated in september two months before the election, in order, just like with the censorship of male ballots, to be in ready position to pay sensor anyone online apple fy a new story that had not even broken .

yet the aspin institute so I mean which is, by the way, I spent my life in washings kind of mean walter ix son for leave time magazine ran IT, former president of CNN um I had no idea IT was part of the national credited no idea it's funding came from the U. S. government. You this first member heard that but given assuming what you're saying is true, it's a little weird that walter Isaacs and left actions to write a biography of you on mask strange .

yeah you know I don't know. I haven't read that book. I from what i've heard from people, it's a relatively fair treatment. I just total speculation.

But I suspect that welfare isacson has struggled with this issue and may not even firmly fall in one particular place in the sense that all the islands and did a series of interviews of rx tangle um actually with the atlantic council in other settings where he interviewed rectangle specifically on the issue of of you the need to get rid of the first amendment and the threat that free speech on social media poses to democracy. Now at the time I was very concerned this was between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty. When he did these extansion le interviews.

I was very concerned because I and expressed what seemed to me to be a highly sympathetic view about the rick tangle perspective on killing the first amendment. Now he didn't formally endorse that position, but he left me very sketch about ice is but what I should say is at the time, I don't think very many people, in fact, I know virtually nobody in the country, uh, had any idea how deep the rabbit hole went when I came to the construction of the censorship industry and the how deep the tenco had grown within the military and the national security state in order to booi and consolidate IT. Much of that, Frankly, did not even come to public light until until even last year, Frankly, some of that was that vanished by ella musk acquisition and the twitter files and the republican turn over in the house that allowed these multiple investigations.

The law issues like misery in the discovery process there, in multiple other things, like the disinformation governance board, who, by the way, the interview head of that, the head of that nana jane, got her start in the censorship industry from this exact same clandestine intelligence community censorship. Netware, created after the twenty fourteen crime is situation a jank fits when her name came up in twenty twenty two, is part of disinformation governance board. I must fell out of my chair because I ve been tracking nanas network for almost five years at that point when her, when her name came up as part of the U.

K. In her cluster cell of a busted contestant Operation, the sense of the internet called the integrity initiative, which was created by the U. K. Foreign office and was backed by naos political affairs, a unit in order to to Carry out this thing that we talked about.

The beginning of this of this dialogue, the nato sort of psychological inoculation ah and the ability to kill so called russian propaganda or rising political groups who wanted to maintain energy relations with russia at a time when the us. Was trying to kill the lord dream and other another pipeline relation. Well they did that bring the pendent front mean jackets was a part of this this outfit.

And then who who is the head of the afternoon? And jackets went down. IT was Michael, and Michael churchill was running that the aspen institute cyber group and then and the aspirin institute, and goes on to be the censorship simulator for the hundred band latht story. And then two years later, church is then the head of the disinformation governance board, alterna.

forced to step down. Yeah, close friends.

of course, like total with the chairman .

at bay course.

Michael chertoff was the chairman. The the large military contractor in europe, ba military, is.

So teched, you've blown my mind so many times in this conversation that I needed named directly after it's done. So i've just got two more, two more questions for you. One short, one longer. Short is for people have made IT this far an hour in and want to know more about this topic and by the way, I hope you'll come back whenever you have the time um to explore different threats of the story but for people who wanted do research on their own, how can your research on this be found on the internet?

sure. So our foundation is foundation for freedom online 点 com。 Um we we publish all manner of of reports on every aspect of the censorship industry from from what we talked about with the role of the military industrial complex in the national security state to what the universities are doing to, I sometimes refer to as digital mk.

All right, there's just the field of basically the science of censorship and how and in the funding of these psychological manipulation methods in order to nudge people into different belief systems as they do with copied as they did with energy and in every sensitive policy issues, what they essentially had an ambition for. But so that my foundation for freedom online 点 com website is one way， the other way is just on x. My handle is at mike ben cyber, very active there and publish a lot of long form video and written content on all of this. I think it's one of the most important issues .

in the world today. So what certainly is and so that leads directly and seamlessly to my final question um which is about x and much just saying this because my post content there. But I think objectively, it's the last big platform that's free or sort of free or more free you post there too um but you know what's the very beginning of election year with couple of different wars unfolding simultaneously a in in twenty twenty four. So do you expect that, that platform can stay free for the duration of this year?

It's under an extraordinary traditionary amount of pressure, and that pressure is going to continue to mount as the election approaches. Elon mosque is a very unique individual and he has a unique buffer perhaps when IT comes to the national security state because the national security state is actually quite reliant on on elon mass properties, whether that's for the the electrical, these sort of the Green revolution which comes to tesla and the battery technology there when IT, when IT comes to space ex, the state department is hugely dependent on on space x because of its unbelievable sort of pioneers and saturating presence in the field of low earth orbit satellites that are basically how our telecomm system runs to things like star.

Like there are dependencies that the national security state has on elon must i'm not sure he'd have as much room to negotiate if he had become the world's richest man selling at a lemond stand. So there's there's if the the national security state goes too hard on him by invoking something like civil to sort of nationalized some of these properties, I think the shock wave that I would send the international investor community would be irrecoverable at a time when we're engaging great power competition. So they're trying to kill.

They are trying to say and do so. I think I sort of corporate regime change through a series of things involving a sort of death by a thousand paper cuts. I think there are seven or eight different um justice department or scc or ftc investigations in the elon must properties that all started after his acquisition of of x. But then what they're trying to do right now is what I call the transit landing plan attack two point o you know, we talk IT in this in this dialogue about how the censorship industry really got its start when a bunch of state department exiles who are respecting promotions took their special set of skills in coercing european countries to pass sanctions on themselves, to cut off their own leg despite themselves. In order to pass sanctions on russia, they ran back that same playbook with doing a road show for censorship.

Instead, for sanctions, we are now witnessing a transatlantic ltc, two point o if you will, which is because they have lost a lot of their federal government powers to do this same censorship Operation they've been doing from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty, in part because the house has has totally turned on them, in part because of the media, in part because misery biden, which one a slammed dunk case actually banning government censorship at the trial court nepal court levels is now between the before the supreme court. They've now moved into two strategies. One of them is is state level censorship laws.

California just passed a newbould w which the censorship industry totally drew from start to finish around require they call out transform platform accountability and transparency, which is basically forcing elan mask to give over the kind of narrative mapping data that these CIA conduits and pentagon cut outs we're using to create these weapons of mass lation, these abilities to just sensor everything at scale because they had all the internal platform data. Elan must took that away. They're using state laws like this new california lot to crack out.

But the major threat right now is the threat from europe with something called the the eu digital services act, which was choked up in tandem with folks like like news guard, which is run by which has has a board of Michael haden, head of the CIA nsa force star general rick tangle is on that board from the state department propaganda office time ridge is on that board from the from the department of holman security oin end's fog rasmuson is on the board he was the the general secretary of nato under the obama adminstration. So you have nato, the CIA b nsa, forstall, general dhs. In the state department working with the eu to craft the censorship laws that now are the largest x essential threat to x other than potentially advertiser broadcasts because there is now this information is now banned as a matter of law in in the eu and the e is a bigger market for x than the U.

S. There's only three hundred million some people in the us. There's four hundred fifty million in europe. X is now forced to comply with this brand news law that just got ratified this year where they either need to forfeit six percent of their global annual revenue to eu to maintain Operations there, or put in place essentially the kind of you CIA bumper cars, if you will, that I i've been describing over the course of this.

In order to have a internal mechanism to censor anything that the eu, which is just a ferao deems to be disinformation. And you can bet with sixty five elections around around the globe this year, you can you can predict every single time what they are going to define this information as. So that's the the main fight right now is, is dealing with the transit t like flying attack from europe.

I said this five times, but that's just born of the most markle stories have ever heard. And i'm grateful to you for bringing that to a mike bans executive director, the foundation for freedom online and hope we see again. thanks.