Newly leaked documents have revealed a secretive initiative by U.S. and UK military contractors to establish a global censorship framework in 2018, according to a new report by journalists behind the Twitter Files.

The CTIL documents fill gaps left by previous disclosures, painting a detailed portrait of the so-called “Censorship Industrial Complex.” This network, comprising over 100 government agencies and NGOs, has been instrumental in pushing for censorship on social media platforms and spreading targeted propaganda. The documents include detailed accounts of digital censorship programs, military and intelligence community involvement, partnerships with civil society organizations and media, and the deployment of covert techniques like sock puppet accounts.

A sock puppet is a false online identity used for deceptive purposes.[1] The term originally referred to a hand puppet made from a sock. Sock puppets include online identities created to praise, defend, or support a person or organization,[2] to manipulate public opinion,[3] or to circumvent restrictions such as viewing a social media account that a user is blocked from. Sock puppets are unwelcome in many online communities and forums.

Netanyahu’s historically controversial and unpopular government was barely clinging to power at the time of the attack, the target of unprecedentedly intense and large protests. Bibi himself was on the verge of imprisonment on corruption charges. An excuse to wage what could be framed as an “existential” war and remain in power indefinitely — which has since transpired — was seemingly the only way to remain for Netanyahu and his hardline allies to remain in office and out of prison. This objective necessarily would have required ignoring actionable intelligence.

Another explains that while such activities overseas are "typically" done by "the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense," censorship efforts "against Americans" have to be done using private partners because the government doesn't have the "legal authority."

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."

Information warfare

Misinformation, disinformation, and the platforms that incentivized to boost half-truths and lies are forms of information warfare that can be used to confuse, intimidate, or deceive voters.[16] When misinformation and disinformation is amplified by the laundering of foreign money through domestic nonprofit organizations or other allied domestic actors, charges of treason can be brought against these actors for colluding with a foreign power.[17]

Common examples include undermining journalism, academia, political speech and other fundamental exchanges of ideas and information. Free or low-cost sources of information, such as through libraries, schools, nonprofits, public media, or open-source projects (like Wikipedia), have historically supported this key democratic prerequisite. For example, two-thirds of U.S. college students in one study cited a lack of information as a reason for why they did not vote.[2]

The sum total of the documents is a clear picture of 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. At one point, Terp openly referenced her work “in the background” on social media issues related to the Arab Spring. Another time, the whistleblower said, she expressed her own apparent surprise that she would ever use such tactics, developed for foreign nationals, against American citizens.

According to the whistleblower, roughly 12-20 active people involved in CTIL worked at the FBI or CISA.

The ambitions of the 2020 pioneers of the Censorship Industrial Complex went far beyond simply urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to put individuals on blacklists. 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.

What’s more, the techniques and materials outlined by CTIL closely resemble materials later created by CISA’s Countering Foreign Intelligence Task Force and Mis-, Dis-, and Maliformation team.

Pablo Breuer...is a former US Navy commander. According to his bio, he was “military director of US Special Operations Command Donovan Group and senior military advisor and innovation officer to SOFWERX, the National Security Agency, and U.S. Cyber Command as well as being the Director of C4 at U.S. Naval Forces Central Command.”

...Breuer admitted in a podcast that his aim was to bring military tactics to use on social media platforms in the U.S.

In every incident mentioned, the victims of misinformation were on the political Left, and they included Barack Obama, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and Emmanuel Macron. The report was open about the fact that its motivation for counter-misinformation were the twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and the election of Trump.

The Misinfosec report focused on information that “changes beliefs” through “narratives,” and recommended a way to counter misinformation by attacking specific links in a “kill chain” or influence chain from the misinfo “incident” before it becomes a full-blown narrative.

The report laments that governments and corporate media no longer have full  control of 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 would have cost them by other means.”

The report flagged the need for a kind of pre-bunking to “preemptively inoculate a vulnerable population against messaging.”

Terp’s view of “disinformation” was overtly political. “Most misinformation is actually true,” noted Terp in the 2019 podcast, “but set in the wrong context.” Terp is an eloquent explainer of the strategy of using “anti-disinformation” efforts to conduct influence operations. “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.”

Breuer spoke freely, openly stating that the information and narrative control he had in mind was comparable to that implemented by the Chinese government, only made more palatable 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.”

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If people haven't realized they've been subject to IO's in most forms of media for quite a while now, then I'm not sure what more can be said.

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These files are practically a Rosetta Stone:
https://public.substack.com/p/ctil-files-1-us-and-uk-military-contractors

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Screen names?

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Yep.  Steele was MI6.  America is at war with UK.  Apparently the Brits didn't learn after April 19, 1775, Battle of Kings Mountain or The Battle of New Orleans