EXPOSED: America's Secret Censorship-Industrial ComplexU.S. government officials, agencies, and contractors are violating the First Amendment
Friends — Over the last three months, a small group of independent journalists, including Leighton and I, have, thanks to the Twitter Files, exposed the ways in which social media platforms have, under pressure from U.S. government agencies, censored ordinary Americans and spread disinformation. Today, at 10 am ET, journalist Matt Taibbi and I will testify before Congress and reveal the existence of a secret censorship-industrial complex in the United States. Our findings are shocking. A highly-organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it. We and others have already reported on some of the actions of this complex, including its disinformation campaigns. But the extent of its censorship was unknown to us until very recently. And, as importantly, we now understand the ways in which this complex simultaneously spreads disinformation and demands censorship. What my 68-page testimony to Congress shows is an effort by U.S. government intelligence and security agencies to wage "information warfare" against the American people. I do not doubt that some people will try to justify the behaviors we have documented. They will say such censorship is necessary for "fighting disinformation." But there is no moral or legal justification for the acts of state-sponsored censorship we document, much less for the fundamentally unAmerican censorship-industrial complex. I believe that any reasonable person reading our report, no matter their politics, will be horrified by what is taking place and demand an end to it. With our testimony, we are calling on Congress to defund and dismantle the censorship-industrial complex immediately. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Both are under attack. Michael PS: A written transcript of my verbal testimony, which summarizes our findings, is below. I hope you will consider reading the full 68-page document, which can be downloaded by clicking the "download" button.
The Censorship-Industrial ComplexMy verbal testimony to Congressby Michael Shellenberger In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex." Eisenhower feared that the size and power of the "complex," or cluster, of government contractors and the Department of Defense would "endanger our liberties or democratic processes." How? Through "domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money." He feared public policy would "become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Eisenhower's fears were well-founded. Today, American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America's scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy. I am grateful for the opportunity to offer this testimony and sound the alarm over the shocking and disturbing emergence of state-sponsored censorship in the United States of America. The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits, and investigative reporters have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on a range of issues, including on the origins of COVID, COVID vaccines, emails relating to Hunter Biden's business dealings, climate change, renewable energy, fossil fuels, and many other issues. I offer some cautions. I do not know how much of the censorship is coordinated beyond what we have been able to document, and I will not speculate. I recognize that the law allows Facebook, Twitter, and other private companies to moderate content on their platforms. And I support the right of governments to communicate with the public, including to dispute inaccurate and misleading information. But government officials have been caught repeatedly pushing social media platforms to censor disfavored users and content. Often, these acts of censorship threaten the legal protection social media companies need to exist, Section 230. "If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship," notes George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, "it raises serious First Amendment questions. It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly." Moreover, we know that the U.S. government has funded organizations that pressure advertisers to boycott news media organizations and social media platforms that a) refuse to censor and/or b) spread disinformation, including alleged conspiracy theories. The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika all have inadequately-disclosed ties to the Department of Defense, the C.I.A., and other intelligence agencies. They work with multiple U.S. government agencies to institutionalize censorship research and advocacy within dozens of other universities and think tanks. It is important to understand how these groups function. They are not publicly engaging with their opponents in an open exchange of ideas. They aren't asking for a national debate over the limits of the First Amendment. Rather, they are creating blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists. Who are the censors? They are a familiar type. Overly confident in their ability to discern truth from falsity, good intention from bad intention, the instinct of these hall monitor-types is to complain to the teacher — and, if the teacher doesn't comply, to go above them, to the principal. Such an approach might work in middle school and many elite universities, but it is anathema to freedom and is an abuse of power. These organizations and others are also running their own influence operations, often under the guise of "fact-checking." The intellectual leaders of the censorship complex have convinced journalists and social media executives that accurate information is disinformation, that valid hypotheses are conspiracy theories, and that greater self-censorship results in more accurate reporting. In many instances, censorship, such as labeling social media posts, is part of the influence operation aimed at discrediting factual information. The censorship industrial complex combines established methods of psychological manipulation, some developed by the U.S. military during the Global War on Terror, with highly sophisticated tools from computer science, including artificial intelligence. The complex's leaders are driven by the fear that the Internet and social media platforms empower populist, alternative, and fringe personalities and views, which they regard as destabilizing. Federal government officials, agencies, and contractors have gone from fighting ISIS recruiters and Russian bots to censoring and deplatforming ordinary Americans and disfavored public figures. Importantly, the bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from "countering terrorism" to "countering extremism" to countering simple misinformation. The government no longer needs a predicate of calling you a terrorist or extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity. The only predicate it needs is simply the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong. These efforts extend to influencing and even directing conventional news media organizations. Since 1971, when the Washington Post and New York Times elected to publish classified Pentagon papers about the war in Vietnam, journalists understood that we have a professional obligation to report on leaked documents whose contents are in the public interest, even when they had been stolen. And yet, in 2020, the Aspen Institute and Stanford's Cyber Policy Center urged journalists to "Break the Pentagon Papers principle" and not cover leaked information to prevent the spread of "disinformation." Government-funded censors frequently invoke the prevention of real-world harm to justify their demands for censorship, but the censors define harm far more expansively than the Supreme Court does. The censors have defined harm so broadly, in fact, that they have justified Facebook censoring accurate information about COVID vaccines, for example, to prevent "vaccine hesitancy." Their goal, clearly, is not protecting the truth but rather persuading the public. That is the purpose of open debate and the free exchange of ideas. And, increasingly, the censors say their goal is to restrict information that "delegitimizes" governmental, industrial, and news media organizations. That mandate is so sweeping that it could easily censor criticism of any part of the status quo, from elected officials to institutions to laws. This extreme, reactionary attitude is, bluntly, un-American. Congress should immediately cut off funding to the censors and investigate their activities. Second, it should mandate instant reporting of all conversations between social media executives, government employees, and contractors concerning content moderation. Third, Congress should limit the broad permission given to social media platforms to censor, deplatform, and spread propaganda. Whatever Congress does, it is incumbent upon the American people to wake up to the threat of government censorship. "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry," Eisenhower noted, "can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."
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Friday, March 10, 2023
cens0rsh!p !ndustr!al c0mplex
Fwd: Dr. Redfield's Bombshell Testimony
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Yesterday, we witnessed the ex-director of the CDC, under oath, directly blame Dr. Fauci and the US Government for the deaths of millions of people. However, if you went to the headlines of Google News - there was nary a news story. I guess Google felt it wasn't important enough to warrant above-the-fold status. Seems like they had to make room for important news items, like the ones above.
A keyword search of Redfield on Google news did come up with the following stories.
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The actual testimony of Dr. Redfield was explosive. Yet, none of these headlines bely the gravity of Dr Redfield's testimony. Dr. Redfield directly linked gain-of-function research and the creation of SARS-CoV-WIV to Dr. Fauci, and to the US Gov - including the DoD. He absolutely believes and gives sworn testimony to the effect that Dr. Fauci and Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and soon be the chief scientist at the World Health Organization, covered up the lab leak information. How Dr. Redfield himself was excluded from the meetings when the processes, strategy and tactics for covering up the lab leak were developed.
This winter, we had a high level Federal employee on the farm. He/she came to me anonymously to express their concerns with what has happened in the execution of this corrupt and failed public health response, and in particular to how the vaccines were developed and implemented. She/he discussed how all of the high level meetings on the clinical trials, the safety of the vaccine, public health response were all done under complete secrecy. That recorders were turned off, plus cell phones and computers were not allowed into the meetings. So, there is literally NO RECORDS of these meetings.
This person believes that finding evidence of the malfeasance, in the meeting minutes or recordings, is going to be difficult. So, when the New York Times headliner (above) cynically states that the Republicans lack a "smoking gun," I believe they know damn well why. The New York Times reporting and editorial staff is many things, but they are not stupid.
But here is the thing, I do speak to people working on these issues in Congress. I have been told that the Federal government has a large paper trail which documents the corruption over the past three years.
But what happened yesterday is explosive - let's start with the video of Congressman Jim Jordan speaking to Dr. Redfield.
Note: these clips are not available elsewhere yet, so I am sorry for the ones from Twitter - I know that some here aren't on it.
Video titled - "nine million bucks from Dr. Fauci"
Then listen to Dr. Redfield speaking
"In Sept. 2019, three things happened in that lab. One is they deleted the sequences. Highly irregular, researchers don't like to do that. The second thing is they changed the command and control from civilian to military. Highly unusual. The third, which is very telling, is they let a contractor redo the ventilation system in that laboratory. Clearly, there was strong evidence that a significant event happened in that laboratory in September."
But there is more: "Dr. Redfield clearly states that the gain of function research received funding from the NIH, State Department, USAID, and from DOD.
For those that missed it, here is the youtube video of Dr. Redfield reading his written testimony in the hearing:
March 8, 2023
Chairman Wenstrup, Ranking Member Ruiz, and members of the Committee, my name is Dr. Robert Redfield. I am pleased to testify today in support of this subcommittee's important work – to investigate the origin of the COVID-19 virus that resulted in the deaths of over one million Americans.
As I know this Committee is aware, from 2018-2021 I served as the 18th Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Trump administration. As CDC Director, I oversaw the agency's response to the COVID19 pandemic from the earliest days of its spread and served as a member of the White House's Coronavirus Task Force.
But perhaps more relevant to the purpose of this hearing, my 45 years in medicine has been focused on the study of viruses. I am a virologist by training and practice. Prior to my time at the CDC, I spent more than 20 years as a U.S. Army physician and medical researcher at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research where I served as the Chief of the Department of Retroviral Research and worked in virology, immunology, and clinical research at the forefront of the AIDS epidemic and other viral threats. In 1996, I co-founded the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in partnership with the State of Maryland, the City of Baltimore, and the University System of Maryland where I served as the Director of Clinical Care and Research and also served as a tenured professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology; chief of infectious disease; and vice chair of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. After my time at CDC, I served as the senior public health advisor to Governor Hogan and the State of Maryland.
As COVID-19 began to spread across the world, there were two competing hypotheses about the virus's origin that needed to be vigorously explored. The first hypothesis is the possibility that COVID-19 infections in humans were the result of a "spillover event" from nature. This is a situation in which a virus naturally mutates and becomes transmissible from one species to another – in this case, from bats to humans via an intermittent species. This is what happened in previous outbreaks of SARS and MERS, earlier coronaviruses that emerged from bats and spread through an intermediate animal. The second hypothesis is the possibility that the virus evolved in a lab involved in gain-of-function research. This is a type of research in 2 which scientists seek to increase the transmissibility and or pathogenicity of an organism in order to better understanding the organism and inform preparedness efforts and the development of countermeasures such as therapeutics and vaccines. Under this theory, COVID-19 infected the general population after it was accidentally leaked from a lab in China.
From the earliest days of the pandemic, my view was that both theories about the origin of COVID-19 needed to be aggressively and thoroughly examined. Based on my initial analysis of the data, I came to believe—and still believe today—that it indicates COVID-19 infections more likely were the result of an accidental lab leak than the result of a natural spillover event. This conclusion is based primarily on the biology of the virus itself, including its rapid high infectivity for human to human transmission which would then predict rapid evolution of new variants, as well as a number of other important factors to include the unusual actions in and around Wuhan in the fall of 2019, all of which I am happy to discuss today.
Even given the information that has surfaced in the three years since the COVID-19 pandemic began, some have contended that there is no point in investigating the origins of this virus. I strongly disagree. There is a global need to know what we are dealing with in the COVID-19 virus because it affects how we approach the problem to try and prevent the next pandemic.
Understanding the origins of COVID-19 is critical for the future of scientific research, particularly as it affects the ongoing ethical debate around the conduct of gain-of-function research. Gain-of-function has long been controversial within the scientific community, and, in my opinion, the COVID-19 pandemic presents a case study on the potential dangers of such research. While many believe that gain-offunction research is critical to get ahead of viruses by developing vaccines, in this case, I believe it had the exact opposite result, unleashing a new virus on the world without any means of stopping it and resulting in the deaths of millions of people. Because of this, it is my opinion that we should call for a moratorium on all gain-offunction research until we can have a broader debate and come to a consensus as a community about the value of gain-of-function research. This debate should not be limited to the scientific community. If the decision is to continue gain-of-function research then it must be determined how and where to conduct this research in a safe, responsible and effective way.
Thank you again for inviting me to be here today as we explore these important topics. I look forward to answering your questions.
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