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by Dr. Joseph Mercola
June 11,
2023
from
Mercola Website
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Story at-a-glance
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The
Internet was likely not intended to remain free forever.
The intention for it to be used as a totalitarian tool
was baked in from the start
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-
Google started as a DARPA grant and was part of the
CIA's and NSA's digital data program, the purpose of
which was to conduct "birds of a feather" mapping online
so that certain groups could be neutralized
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-
All
of the early Internet freedom technologies of the '90s
were funded by the Pentagon and the State Department.
They were developed by the intelligence community as an
insurgency tool - a means to help dissident groups in
foreign countries to develop a pro-U.S. stance and evade
state-controlled media. Now, these same technologies
have been turned against the American public, and are
used to control public discourse
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In
the past, censorship was a laborious task that could
only be done after the fact. Artificial intelligence has
radically altered the censorship industry. AI programs
can now censor information en masse, based on the
language used, and prevent it from being seen at all
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One
of the most effective strategies that would have
immediate effect would be to strip the censorship
industry of its government funding. The House controls
the purse strings of the federal government, so the
House Appropriations Committee has the power to end the
funding of government-sponsored censorship
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How the Censorship Industry
Works,
and How We Can Stop It
Internet
freedom was born in the early 1990s,
but now it's
appearing that the national security state
had other ideas
for its use right from the start.
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The most
effective social engineering tool ever conceived,
the Internet
could be used against those
who became
dependent upon it...
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In this below video,
I interview Mike Benz, executive director for the
Foundation
for Freedom Online.
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Benz started off as a
corporate lawyer representing tech and media companies before
joining the Trump administration, where he worked as a speech writer
for Dr. Ben Carson, the former U.S. Secretary of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD) and President Trump.
He also advised on economic development policy. He then joined the
State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International
Communications and Information Technology.
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There, he ran the cyber
desks at state, meaning all things having to do with
the Internet
and foreign policy.
"This is toward the
end of 2020, which was a really fascinating time to witness the
merger, in many respects, of big government and big tech
companies themselves," he says.
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"I had grown up, I
think, like many Americans, with a belief that the First
Amendment protected you against government censorship.
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The terms of
engagement that we had enjoyed from 1991, when the worldwide web
rolled out, until 2016, the election in the U.S. and Brexit in
the U.K., which is, really, the first political event where the
election was determined, in many respects, by momentum on the
Internet.
There was that 25-year golden period where the idea of being
censored by a private sector company, let alone the government,
was considered something, to me, very deeply anathema to the
American experience.
What I witnessed at the State Department - because I was at the
desk, basically, that
Google and
Facebook would call when they
wanted favors abroad, when they wanted American protection or
American policies to preserve their dominance in Europe, or in
Asia or in Latin America.
And the U.S. government was doing favors for these tech
companies while the tech companies were censoring the people who
voted for the government.
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It was a complete
betrayal of whatever social contract typically underlies the
public-private partnership."
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The Internet
Was Founded by the National Security State
Ostensibly, the rapid expansion of censorship started post-2016, but
you can make a strong argument that the Internet was never intended
to remain free forever.
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Rather, the intention for
it to be used as a totalitarian tool was likely baked in from the
start when the national security state founded it in 1968.
The worldwide web (www), which is the user interface, was launched in
1991, and my suspicion is that the public Internet was seeded and
allowed to grow in order to capture and make the most of the
population dependent upon it, knowing that it would be the most
effective social engineering tool ever conceived.
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Benz comments:
"I totally agree...
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A
lot of people, in trying to understand what's happening with the
net censorship, say,
'We had this free
Internet, and then suddenly there was this age of censorship
and the national security state got involved at the
censorship side.'
But when you retrace
the history, Internet freedom itself was actually a national
security state imperative.
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The Internet itself
is a product of a counterinsurgency necessity by the Pentagon to
manage information during the 1960s, particularly to aggregate
social science data. And then, it was privatized.
Opening it up to all comers in the private sector, it was handed
off from
DARPA [the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency] to the National Science Foundation,
and then went through a series of universities on the
infrastructure side.
And then, right out of the gate in 1991, you had the Cold War
coming to an end, and then simultaneously, you had this
profusion of Pentagon-funded Internet freedom technologies.
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You had things like
VPNs, encrypted chat, TOR.
All of the early Internet freedom technologies of the '90s were
funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, and developed by
the intelligence community, primarily, as a way of using
Internet freedom as a means to help dissident groups in foreign
countries be able to develop a pro-U.S. beachhead, because it
was a way to evade state-controlled media.
This was, basically, an insurgency tool for the U.S. government,
in the same way that Voice of America and Radio Free Liberty,
and Radio Free Europe were tools of the CIA in the Cold War, to
beam in, basically, pro-U.S. content to populations in foreign
countries in order to sway them towards U.S. interests.
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It was a
way of managing the world empire...
The Internet served the same purpose, and it couldn't be done if
it was called a Pentagon operation, a State Department or CIA
operation.
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But all of the tech
companies themselves are products of that. Google started as a
DARPA grant that was obtained at Stanford by Sergey Brin and
Larry Page.
In 1995, they were part of
the CIA and
NSA's [National Security
Agency's] massive digital data program.
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They had their
monthly meetings with their CIA and NSA advisers for that
program, where the express stated purpose was for the CIA and
NSA to be able to map so-called 'Birds
of a feather' online... so that they could be
neutralized."
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How It All
Began
As noted by Benz, the idea of having the intelligence community map
political "Birds of a Feather" communities in order to either
mobilize or neutralize them was (and still is) justified in the name
of counterterrorism.
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Nowadays, as we've seen
during the 'pandemic' (Covid-19), it's used to control public discourse, suppress
truth, and promote propaganda angles.
The technology used to control public discourse is an artificial
intelligence (AI) technique called natural language processing
(NLP).
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It's a way of aggregating
everyone who believes a certain thing online into community
databases based on the words they use, the hashtags, the slogans and
images.
"Emerging narratives,
all manner of metadata affiliations, all that can be aggregated
to create a topographical network map of what you believe in and
who you're associated with, so that it can all be turned down in
a fast, precise and comprehensive manner by content moderation
teams, because they're all birds of the same feather,"
Benz explains.
"The fact that this grew out of the U.S. National Security
state, which is running the show, essentially, today, to me says
that there's a continuation between the Internet freedom and
Internet censorship.
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They simply switched
from one side of the chess board to the other."
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What Is the
National Security State?
For clarity, when Benz talks about the "National Security State,"
what he's referring to are the institutions that uphold the
rules-based international order.
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Domestically, that
includes,
-
the Pentagon
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State Department
-
Department of
Homeland Security (DHS)
-
certain aspects
of the Department of Justice (DOJ)
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the 17
intelligence agencies...
Of those, the Pentagon,
State Department and the intelligence community (IC) are the three
central ones that have managed the American world empire since the
1940s.
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None of them are supposed
to be able to operate domestically, but in a sense their power has
expanded so much that they essentially control domestic affairs.
As explained by Benz, the Pentagon, State Department and IC are not
supposed to be able to operate domestically.
"But in a sense, they
really control domestic affairs, because their power has
expanded so much that they've developed an extraordinary
laundering apparatus to be able to fund international
institutions that then boomerang back home and effectively
control much of domestic political affairs, including discourse
on the Internet."
As for the CIA, it was
created in 1947 under the National Security Act.
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It was created as a
cloak-and-dagger mechanism, to do things the State Department wanted
done but couldn't get caught doing due to the diplomatic
repercussions, things like,
-
election rigging
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assassinations
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media control
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bribery,
...and other subversion
tactics.
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The Birth of
Hybrid Warfare
Benz continues his explanation of how and why Internet censorship
emerged when it did:
"So, there's the U.S.
National Security State, and then there's the transatlantic one
involving NATO.
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The story of Western
government involvement in Internet censorship really started
after the 2014 Crimea annexation, which was the biggest foreign
policy humiliation of
the Obama era.
Atlanta's School of Foreign Policy was deeply inflamed by this
event and blamed the fact that there were these breakaway
Russia-supporting entities in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea on a
failure to penetrate their media, and this idea that hearts and
minds were being swung towards the Russian side because of
pro-Russian content online.
NATO then declared this doctrine of so-called hybrid warfare -
this idea that Russia had won Crimea not by a military
annexation, but by winning, illicitly in a sense, the hearts and
minds of Crimeans through the use of their propaganda.
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And the doctrine of
hybrid warfare, born in 2014, was this idea that war was no
longer a kinetic thing.
There hadn't been a kinetic war in Europe since World War II.
Instead, it had moved sub-kinetic into the hearts and minds of
the people.
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In fact, NATO
announced a doctrine after 2014 called 'From tanks to tweets,'
where it shifted its focus, explicitly, from kinetic warfare to
social media opinions online.
Brexit, which happened in June 2016... was blamed on Russian
influence as well.
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And so all of these institutions that argued
for control over the Internet in Eastern Europe said,
'Well, it needs
to come now. Now it's an all-of-Europe thing.'
When Trump was then
elected five months later, explicitly contemplating the breakup
of NATO, all hell broke loose.
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This idea that we
need to censor the Internet went from being something that was
touchy and novel, in the view of Pentagon brass and State
Department folks, to something that was totally essential to
saving the entire rules-based international order that came out
of World War II.
At the time, the reasoning was, Brexit, in the U.K., was going
to give rise to Frexit, in France, with Marine Le Pen and her
movement there.
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Matteo Salvini
was going to cause Italexit in Italy, there'd be
Grexit in Greece, Spexit in Spain, and the entire
European Union would come undone, just because these right-wing
populist parties would naturally vote their way into political
power.
They would vote for working-class, cheap energy policies that
would make them more closely aligned with Russia naturally,
because of the cheaper oil prices, or cheaper gas prices.
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Then, suddenly,
you've got no EU, you've got no NATO, and then, you've got no
Western military alliance.
So, from that moment, after Trump's election, immediately, there
was this diplomatic roadshow by U.S. State Department officials,
who all thought they were getting promotions in November 2016.
They thought they
were going to get promoted from the State Department to the
National Security Council.
Turns out, they all
got fired, because someone with a 5% chance of winning ended up
winning that day.
So, they took their international connections, their
international networks around,
...and they did this
international roadshow, starting in January 2017, to convince
European countries to start censoring their Internet ...
Out of that came NetzDG [Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, the
Network Enforcement Act] in Germany, which introduced a
necessity of artificial intelligence-powered social media
censorship.
All of that was, essentially, spearheaded by this network of
State Department and Pentagon folks who then used their own
internal folks in the government to procure government grants
and contracts to these same entities.
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Eventually, they all
rotated into those tech companies to set the policies as well."
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Threat From
Within
So, to summarize, the infrastructure for worldwide Internet
censorship was largely established by IC veterans who were forced
out by the
Trump administration, and that infrastructure was
then used to catalyze the international censorship response during COVID in late 2019, early 2020.
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Benz continues:
"Right. And those
veterans were not alone.
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The full story is not just the shadow
security state and exile. The fact is this. The Trump
administration never had control of its own defense department,
State Department or intelligence community.
It was the intelligence community that, essentially, drove his
first impeachment, that drove a two-and-a-half year special
prosecutor investigation that rolled up 12 to 20 of Trump's
closest associates.
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You had a chief of
staff there who was hiding the military figures from the
government. The careers at state threatened the political
appointees from the inside. I experienced that myself...
This permanent aspect of Washington, with unfireable careers in
high places, combined with a turf war in the GOP [Republican
Party] between the populist right and the neo-conservative
right, with the neo-conservative right having many well-placed
Republicans in the Defense Department, State Department, in IC,
to thwart the previous president's agenda there, allowed this
political network and exile, on the censorship side, to work
with their allies within the government to create these
censorship beach heads.
So, for example, that's how they created the Department of
Homeland Security's... first permanent government censorship
bureau in the form of this entity called
CISA [the Cybersecurity
and Infrastructure Security Agency, founded in November 2018],
which is supposed to just be a cybersecurity entity.
It was done because of media and intelligence community
laundering of a never-substantiated claim that Russia had
potentially hacked the 2016 election, hacked the election
machines or voting software, or might be able to do so in the
future, and so we need a robust armed-to-the-teeth DHS unit to
protect our cybersecurity from the Russians.
It's the mission creep of the century.
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After the
Mueller
probe ended in June 2019, this unit, CISA, within DHS
[Department of Homeland Security] - which had set up all of
this, and which is only supposed to do cybersecurity - said,
'Well, if you
squint and look at it, discourse online is a cybersecurity
threat because if it undermines public faith or confidence
in our elections, and it's done using a cyber nexus, i.e.,
social media post, then that's a form of cybersecurity
threat, because democracy is essential to our security.'
And so you went from
this cybersecurity mission to a cyber censorship bureau, because
if you tweeted something about mail-in ballots in the 2020
election, that was deemed to be a cyber attack on critical
infrastructure, i.e., elections.
When they got away with that in 2020, DHS then said,
'Well, if you
squint and look at it, public health is also critical
infrastructure.'
So, now, DHS gets to
direct social media companies to censor opinions about COVID-19.
Then they worked their way into saying the same thing about,
financial systems, financial services, about the Ukraine war,
about immigration...
It got to the point
where, by late 2022, the head of CISA declared that cognitive
infrastructure is critical infrastructure."
Cracks only appeared
after Republicans got a majority in the House of Representatives in
November 2022 and Elon Musk acquired Twitter.
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Public support for
government also dwindled as Musk's release of the
Twitter Files
revealed the extent of government's involvement in the censoring of
Americans.
So far, though, public awareness hasn't changed anything.
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The very entities that
once stood for Internet freedom, like the National Science
Foundation, are still actively funding and furthering government
censorship activities.
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AI Gives
Censors God-Like Powers
Benz first became "gripped by the stakes of what was happening on
the Internet" in August 2016, after reading a series of papers
discussing the use of NLP to monitor, surveil and regulate the
distribution of information on social media based on the words used.
"DARPA provided tens
of millions of dollars of funding for this language processing,
this language chunking capacity of AI in order, ostensibly, to
stop ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter," Benz says.
"As part of the predicate for putting military boots on the
ground in Syria, there was a lot of talk about ISIS coming to
the U.S., and they were recruiting on Facebook and Twitter.
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And so the Pentagon,
DARPA and the IC developed this language spyware capacity to map
the dialectic of how ISIS sympathizers talk online, the words
they use, the images they share, the prefixes, the suffixes, all
the different community connections.
And then, I saw that this was being done for purposes of
domestic political control instead of foreign counterterrorism,
and the power that it has. It is what totally changed the
Internet forever.
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Before 2016, there
was not the technological capacity to do mass social media
censorship. That was the age of what censorship insiders like to
call the whack-a-mole era. Censorship was reactive.
It was done by forum, by moderators, essentially.
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Everything had to be
flagged manually before it could be taken down, which meant
millions of people had already seen it, or it had already gone
viral, it had already done its damage, so to speak, and you were
just cutting off the backend with an act of censorship.
You could never have a permanent control apparatus in that
setting, because there would always be a first mover advantage
to whoever posted it.
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What AI censorship
technology breakthroughs enabled after 2016 was a kind of
nuclear weapon, if you will, on the censorship side, to be able
to end the war immediately.
You don't need a standing army of 100,000 people to censor COVID.
�
You need one good
developer, working with one manic social scientist who spends
her entire life mapping what Dr. Mercola says online, and what
he's talking about this week, what his followers are saying,
what they're saying about this drug, or what they're saying
about this vaccine, or what they're saying about this
institution.
All of that can be cataloged into a lexicon of
how you talk. And
then, all of that talk can just be turned down to zero.
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At the same time,
they can super amplify the language that they themselves are
doing.
So it gives a God-like
control to a tiny, tiny, tiny
minority of people who can then use that to control the
discourse of the entire population.
What's also so terrifying about the National Security State's
involvement in this is,
when they discovered the power of this
by mid-2018, they began to roll it out to every other country in
the world for purposes of political control there - to the Ghana
desk, to the Ecuador desk, to Southeast Asia, all over Europe."
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Can We Get Out
of the Grip of Censorship?
At the time of this writing, we're in a lull.
�
The COVID 'pandemic' has
been declared over and aside from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, there
are no major political crises going on that warrant heavy
censorship.
�
The networks and
technologies for radical suppression are already in place, however,
and can be turned up at a moment's notice.
We've also recently seen just how easy it is for alternative media
to be infiltrated and upended, so the fact that there are
alternative platforms doesn't guarantee that future censorship
efforts will fail.
"There are so many
threat vectors," Benz says.
�
"There are a lot of
questions about what's going on, for example, at Project Veritas,
with how quickly it ousted James O'Keefe after releasing the
most viral video ever,
on Pfizer.
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It was about one week later -
after their biggest accomplishment, perhaps, ever - that it was
totally overthrown.
A similar thing has happened with Fox News with [the firing of]
Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable TV host in the country -
the guy who gets three times more concurrent viewership than
CNN, in the opposing spot.
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Institutions can absolutely be
penetrated and co-opted when enough pressure is applied."
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Transatlantic
Flank Attack 2.0 Underway
As mentioned earlier, the U.S. censorship really began with NATO.
Benz refers to this as
the transatlantic flank attack...
Basically, when U.S. intelligence
want to impact the Internet domestically, they first work with their
European partners to enact regulatory changes in Europe first.
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This then ends up
spilling into the U.S. market, and the IC appears to have had
nothing to do with it.
The first transatlantic flank attack took place in early 2017 with
the NetzDG. We're now under transatlantic attack again, through the
Digital Markets Act.
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This law, Benz says, will
make it very difficult for Rumble and other free speech platforms to
maintain that posture during the next 'pandemic'.
�
Once these platforms are
forced to comply with the Digital Markets Act on the European side,
the changes will be felt everywhere.
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Cause for
Cautious Optimism
While Benz remains hopeful that solutions to global censorship will
present themselves, he still recognizes that the forces at play are
enormous and the risks are high.
"It's one of these
things where the more you see what we're up against, the more
sobering it becomes.
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I think you need to
maintain hope in order to maintain energy, to maintain momentum.
With momentum, weird things can happen, even if you're not
supposed to win.
Strange things break,
or take a life of their own, or resurface.
All the little weaknesses of the system get tested, simply by a
momentum here and there.
For example, Elon
Musk's acquisition of Twitter is probably the reason that the
GOP got over the hump in doing all of these congressional
investigations into the government's role in censorship.
They felt like they had an ally at Twitter, that they had
billionaire backing. There was a waterfall, cascade impact. So,
I am hopeful. DHS is on the run right now.
�
They purged their
website of all their domestic censorship operations that they
listed and were loud and proud about for two whole years after
the catastrophe of the disinformation governance board in April
2022.
They already had a Ministry of Truth at DHS. They just gave one
hypothetical board the wrong name.
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They didn't call it the CISA.
�
They made the mistake of calling it by the right name, and
that's what ended the entire political support for the
underlying apparatus.
So, the importance of an Orwellian name is essential for
maintaining the political support.
But I guess what I'm
trying to say is, I'm hopeful, and I'm honored to be a part of
this rebel fleet of folks trying to take on the empire behind
the censorship situation.
But having seen, in so many iterations the toolkit they use, it
is a medieval torture toolkit that can do strange things.
Pressure can do strange things, even to great people.
�
And so I'm cautiously
optimistic."
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Essential
Internet Backbone Is Not Politically Neutral
In my view, Internet decentralization is one key innovation that
could break the grip of censorship.
�
That said, other aspects, such
as cybersecurity, must also be reinvented...
CloudFlare, for example, a content delivery and cloud cybersecurity
service, basically controls the Internet because they protect online
businesses and platforms from hackers using Denial-of-Service (DoS)
attacks.
�
Without it, you cannot
survive online if you're a big business.
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Even with a decentralized
Internet, CloudFlare might still be able to exert control by leaving
sites open to DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.
Disturbingly, CloudFlare got political for the first time after
2016, when it decided to remove protection from a site called Kiwi
Farms, which expressed anti-transgender views.
�
As a result, the site
had to move over to a Russian server to get back online.
Basically, U.S. citizens had to look for Internet freedom in Russia
because their architecture could not be supported in the U.S. - all
because a government-integrated backbone of the Internet made a
political decision, likely at the behest of the IC.
"If there is another
'pandemic', for example, and there's a push for certain medical
interventions or countermeasures that certain sites don't go
along with, the CloudFlare, absolutely, could be a weapon in
that respect," Benz says.
"One of the things I found so troubling is that CISA, this DHS
censorship agency, after the 2020 election set up a private
sector liaison subcommittee for mis- and disinformation policies
in the private sector.
�
It was a seven-person
subcommittee, with all of the top censorship experts at the
University of Washington and Stanford. Vijaya Gadde, the
former head of censorship at Twitter, was a part of this board.
�
I thought it was very
troubling that the CEO of CloudFlare was also one of the seven
people on the DHS censorship board."
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Major
Challenges to a Decentralized Internet
Benz continues:
"To proceed to the
various challenges to a decentralized Internet, when you move up
the stack of censorship... they can move up to cloud servers, to
payment processors, and even to things like CloudFlare and your
infrastructure protection.
In the early era of censorship, there was a rebuttal by
censorship advocates that if you don't like what private sector
companies are doing, start your own social media companies.
�
Build your own
Google, build your own YouTube, build your own Facebook, build
your own Twitter.
And then, what started to happen as censorship got completely
insane, when it went from being troubling to disturbing, to
saturating... you started to see these alternative social media
platforms like Gab and Parler... that tried to escape the
content moderation policies with Big Tech.
�
But what started to
happen is, those social media companies, like Parler, were
completely destroyed.
Parler was de-platformed from, basically, the entire Internet,
when the president had just moved there, after being kicked off
Twitter.
�
That was a very
instructive moment, and one that censorship insiders have
reflected on, I should say, many, times as a moment of,
'Should we have
done that? We did it, but it costs us a lot of political
capital.'
Parler was kicked off
of Amazon Web Services.
�
They were kicked off
of all of the banks. They were banned from email providers. They
could not hook to the Internet, essentially, to even maintain
the ability to post anything there.
�
So, it went from
build your own social media company to build your own bank.
Now,
you need to build your own bank and get a banking license
for the payment processors.
�
You need to build your own email
distribution.
�
You need to build your own cloud servers.
You need to build your own software service providers.
And,
eventually, are you going to need to lay your own subsea cables
across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans?
�
The social media
companies didn't invent the Internet.
�
They are superimposed
on Pentagon infrastructure."
�
The House
Needs to Defund the Censorship Industry
Without doubt, there will be another crisis, whether it be another
'pandemic' or war or something else, that will send the censorship
machine into full gear yet again.
�
Right now we're in a
lull, so this is the time to think ahead and get prepared.
�
The question is,
What can we do?
�
How do we prepare and
fight back?
According to Benz, one of
the most effective strategies that would have immediate effect, and
could be done right now, would be to strip the censorship industry
of its government funding.
�
He explains:
"Right now, there's a
Republican controlled House.
�
The advantage of the
House is that it controls appropriations, the purse strings of
the federal government.
�
If the House
Appropriations Committee took seriously the government
subsidization of censorship networks in the private sector, you
could defund the speech police, even though, on the AI side, it
only takes one good coder to be able to take out an entire
political philosophy.
The fact is, they can only do that job because of an army of
social science folks across 45 different U.S. colleges and
universities who get paid.
�
There are tens of
thousands of them who are paid through the National Science
Foundation, through DARPA grants and State Department grants, to
map communities online as a matter of social science, and then
provide that to the computer scientist to censor it.
My foundation, the Foundation for Freedom Online, has detailed
$100 million, just in the past 18 months, that have gone from
the federal government institutions directly into social media
censorship insiders.
�
Censorship is not an
act anymore, it's an industry, and you can cripple their
capacity building.
When you pump it full of money, you go from having a couple of
people do it, to tens of thousands of people doing it. The
censorship capacity is built on an infrastructure of an industry
that relies on government to pay for it, and it relies on
government to spearhead their penetration into the institutions.
Right now, there are about eight different congressional
committees trying to solve this problem from different aspects.
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I've personally
briefed eight different congressional committees... But only a
few of those committees are taking it seriously enough to pursue
the issue deeply, and where that will shake out remains
uncertain.
CISA worked with dozens of social media companies and private
sector cutouts to launder censorship from the government into
the private sector, but the institution I worked with more than
anyone was the University of Stanford, the Stanford Internet
Observatory in particular.
Jim Jordan's Weaponization Subcommittee just
subpoenaed Stanford for what I call the perfectly preserved
First Amendment crime scene.
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Stanford meticulously kept logs of
all of its censorship activities with government officials for
the COVID-19 'pandemic', and for two election cycles.
They detailed 66 narratives that they censored online, having to
do with everything about vaccines, efficacy of masks, opposition
to lockdown mandates.
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And then, they had a
fourth category for conspiracy theories, basically anything that
someone said about the World Economic Forum (WEF), or
Bill
Gates.
They're now refusing to comply with that subpoena.
But the stakes
keep getting escalated, because who's going to enforce that
subpoena?
Steve Bannon,
regardless of your opinion of him, just got indicted for not
complying with a subpoena,
but is this Justice Department
going to pursue criminal penalties against Stanford, for
withholding congressional subpoena for their government?
This is for their
government, because they were the formal partners.
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They had a formal
partnership with the DHS. That stuff should be FOIA-able, first
of all. You shouldn't even need a subpoena for it. The only
reason you can't FOIA it is because they laundered it through
Stanford. Standord holds the records rather than DHS.
I tried to FOIA that from DHS, and DHS says,
'We don't have
it, even though they were our communications.'
So this is the way
the CIA structures in an operation, through a web of cutouts and
offshore banks, so you can never really get transparency.
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They're now doing
that for the censorship industry at home ...
Whether they will continue to raise the stakes is now a
terrifying open issue.
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And the fact that
it's the inside guys who are running the censorship situation
means there may be other tactics that need to be pursued here,
which is why I talked about, simply, going to the appropriations
committee and zeroing it out, so you don't even need to enforce
subpoenas, necessarily."
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Building a
Whole-of-Society Solution
As explained by Benz, the censorship industry was built as a
so-called whole-of-society effort.
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According to the DHS,
misinformation online is a whole-of-society problem that requires a
whole-of-society solution. By that, they meant that four types of
institutions had to fuse together as a seamless whole.
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Those four categories and
key functions are:
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Government
institutions, which provide funding and coordination
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Private sector
institutions that do the censorship and dedicate funds to
censorship through corporate-social responsibility programs
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Civil society
institutions (universities, NGOs, academia, foundations,
nonprofits and activists) that do the research, the spying
and collecting of data that are then given to the private
sector to censor
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News media/fact
checking institutions, which put pressure on institutions,
platforms and businesses to comply with the censorship
demands
What the Foundation
for Freedom Online is doing is educating people about this
structure, and,
-
the ways in which legislatures and the government can
be restructured
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how civil society institutions can be established
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how news media can be created to support and promote freedom
rather than censorship...
To learn more, be sure to check out
foundationforfreedomonline.com.
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You can also follow his
very active Twitter account
Benz on Twitter.
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