(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Much reporting has been done this year on the “censorship-industrial complex”—a cabal of government-sponsored groups that pressured social media companies to censor information about COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election.
According to reporter Michael Shellenberger, the shadowy network of censors originated from the military.
Citing an unnamed whistleblower, Shellenberger reported on Tuesday that a group of “former” military and intelligence officials formed a group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, and began devising a plan for censoring the internet soon after Donald Trump won the 2016 election.
“The whistleblower alleges that a leader of [CTIL], 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,’” Shellenberger wrote.
That “former” British intelligence analyst, Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, formed CTIL with a “former” Israeli intelligence official, Ohad Zaidenberg; a Microsoft “security manager,” Nate Warfield; and the head of sec ops for DEF CON, a hackers convention, Marc Rogers, according to Shellenberger.
Scattered media articles from early 2020 reported on how CTIL purportedly combated cybercrime such as the hacking of hospitals amidst, but internal messages show that the group was heavily pushing censorship, according to Shellenberger.
“They tracked posters calling for anti-lockdown protests as disinformation artifacts,” he wrote.
“CTIL also worked to brainstorm counter-messaging for things like encouraging people to wear masks and discussed building an amplification network.”
CTIL started working with Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, or CISA, in 2020, Shellenberger wrote. CISA was one of the main U.S. agencies to push internet censorship in 2020 on the grounds of combating “misinformation.”
As has been reported, CISA pushed internet censorship by spearheading the “Election Integrity Project,” or EIP, which was a consortium of “disinformation” academics that worked directly with DHS and the State Department to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election.
The EIP would generate “misinformation reports,” which the DHS would then present to social media companies to encourage them to censor certain content.
Conservatives were most impacted by this DHS-funded scheme, according to a recent House Judiciary Committee report. Those affected include Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie—all having their social media accounts censored at some point during 2020.
The House Weaponization Subcommittee is set to have a hearing about the censorship-industrial complex on Thursday, and Shellenberger is on the list of witnesses to testify.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
