Censorship for the Whole of Society

Mike Benz throws down.

Several years ago I used to be a regular at 2600. I should have never stopped going. You see when you’re a hacker, a security expert, you don’t have to worry about the quality of data fulfilling a purpose, you just determine who can or cannot control it. I’m a data guy by nature - I want my systems to be effective in helping people make decisions. For the entirety of my career, I never had any reason to assume that my customers were aiming to mislead themselves. It’s in the interest of businesses to never censor their own business intelligence systems. But the backbone of these systems on your company’s intranet are the same as that of the world wide web. A database is a database. Information is information.

You know I read spy books and you know I’ve been in scores of companies across the US working on their BI in one way or another. It’s almost an axiom that “You’d be surprised at how many companies run their finances on Excel”. But there are also companies who really have their data nailed down tight. But far and away the most capable companies are those whose algorithms and databases do well in predicting where money comes and goes on Wall Street. Even more, there are government agencies whose job it is to predict where tanks, ships and aircraft come and go on planet earth. Beyond that, they have capabilities to predict where conversations come and go in legacy and online social media. This is only being supercharged by AI like LLMs.

What if they decide to intervene?

Well, that’s what is expected. We understand that the US intelligence community has a legacy and purpose of defending US interests abroad. Ever since Donovan’s OSS we’ve been developing clever assets. Specifically, we use the assets of the CIA to spy, censor, pressure and generate propaganda in foreign countries hostile to America. So let’s play a game of slippery rhetoric, shall we?

Hostile Rhetoric
Hostile to America means hostile to democracy, right? Hostile to democracy means hostile to democratic institutions, right? Hostile to democratic institutions means hostile to the New York Times, right? Not only that, foreign countries means the information apparatus of foreign countries, right? And that means their spy agencies and propaganda, right?

Let’s say that you’re like me and you like to operate from first principles and because of this you don’t like the pendulum of populist politics. If you’re really like me, you simply abstain from populist politics, but you don’t intervene. But let’s say that you have been convinced that populist politics generates hostile rhetoric, and being so convinced, you must intervene. Exactly how would you go about doing so?

Well it turns out, according to Mike Benz, that the US intelligence community has made some moves in the past decade that provide all of the tools necessary to play that game against the US.

Wait what?

Detecting and tracking adversarial framing

A pilot project with Lockheed Martin ATL created an information operations detection technique based on the principle of adversarial framing - when parties hostile to U.S. interests frame events in the media to justify support for future actions. This research helps planners and decision-makers identify trends in real time that indicate changes in information operations strategy, potentially indicating imminent actions. A follow-on project funded by the Department of Defense expands techniques developed in the pilot project to additional countries; incorporates blog data into the framing analysis alongside known propaganda outlets; studies the transmediation of these frames to non-Russian, non-propaganda sources; and seeks to develop the ability to automatically detect adversarial framing as it occurs.

OK. Does that sound like Never Trump? Sounds like it to me.

The point isn’t Trump. The point isn’t COVID. The point isn’t Ukraine. The point isn’t Gaza. The point is all of that, and anything else that American voters disagree about in public on social media can and will be interpreted as adversarial framing. If you are engaged in adversarial framing, your social media providers will be targeted and pressured to identify you to the government.

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Garasimov Doctrine
That’s the small point. The bigger point is that there are a hefty number of government agencies and NGO cutouts for the CIA that are active in censorship of American voters and American institutions that cut their teeth on doing this in counterintelligence operations on foreign governments.

This is because of the operation of a principle called the Garasimov Doctrine. A decade ago, long before COVID the idea was floated about populist politics that China and Russia didn’t have this problem with adversarial framing. They had a top-down solution to “Hate Speech” and microaggressions and anything else that could be interpreted as hostile rhetoric against their institutions. Well, shucks. We can’t unleash the CIA against Americans who believe Trump is a Russian agent. So why not empower an NGO to do what the CIA cannot? That NGO is the National Endowment for Democracy. But it doesn’t stop there.

The attitude of the Garasimov Doctrine is that war is not simply a matter of tanks and drones, bullets and bombs. It’s not military communications that plant the seeds of national security threats, it’s civilian communications. Thus in order to counter those threats, the state must take a Whole of Society approach. Hybrid warfare.

As a modern political trope, whole of society dates to the Obama administration’s attempt to pivot in the “war on terror” to what it called CVE—countering violent extremism. The idea was that by identifying at-risk individuals and then engaging them, American officials could “get left of the boom” and intervene before extremism led to violence.

In concept, the strategy called for empowering “community-led interventions” as a method of conflict resolution. In practice, the White House paired its progressive efforts at community activism with an aggressive expansion of counterterrorist operations and drone strikes.

‘Whole of society’ is a totalizing form of politics. It discards the traditional separation of powers and demands political participation from corporations, civic groups, and other nonstate actors.

Pre-Crime. So who’s involved? Here is a tiny fraction. I don’t know how Benz has figured out the NED funding but here are some of the orgs building the software.

• Graphika Labs

• Arizona State U.

• Wisedex

• Hatelab

It of course makes sense to follow the universities and other agencies who are focused on misinformation and disinformation and the deployment of AI and powerful software to control elections.

Mike Who?
Mike Benz just popped into view for me because I get notifications from Eric Weinstein whom I’ve followed more or less since he started The Portal. I also follow some Milbloggers including Shawn Ryan (when he’s not hawking EDC) and he interviewed Benz recently.

Everybody is going to get their mind blown if they watch the full Joe Rogan interview with Benz. As much as I am disgusted by the Ivy Cabal, I was really not prepared to deal with these revelations. It has basically ruined my day. Not because I’m shocked at what the CIA does, but that postmodern rhetoric (at best) has turned the focus against the American voter. It’s not a culture war. It’s not liberals vs Progressives. It’s American institutions vs American elections, specifically against “Russian influenced” American voters.

Anyhow, I’m all about his new organization. I’m going to spend more time paying attention to this attack on free speech. Because it really comes down to this. I cannot stand the idea of the American empire working against Americans.

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Stoic Bottom Line
In support of reason, we need universities to provide disconfirmation. This aligns with Popper and the philosophy of science. In order to have democracy we need free speech whether or not ideas are sourced from foreign countries.

But if we censor microaggression, ‘hate speech’, disinformation and misinformation, we’re basically saying that it’s a crime to be stupid or insulting. Obviously it is stupid and insulting to Americans who are protected(!) by the first amendment to have AIs monitor our speech for adversarial framing and then provide blacklisting technology to social media networks.

Populists don’t trust government, legacy media and science. The answer is not to censor populists and those like them, but to provide better government, legacy media and science. The problem is not low-information voters, but high technology censors.