WW: Hey there and welcome to Unlimited Hangout. I'm your host
Whitney Webb. We're longer than you might think information
warfare has been a major concern of the US national security
state. In recent decades. One of the key battlegrounds in this
information war has not just been the internet itself, but
more specifically social media networks. Social media in the
modern era has become the equivalent of the town square
and these platforms have come to dominate much of the
socialization and communication in Western society and beyond.
Yet unbeknownst to most users of social media, there are long
standing efforts by social media companies, as well as the
national security state to influence social media users in
a variety of unsettling ways, ranging from emotional
manipulation to the propagation of specific narratives that
benefit big tech, and more often their benefactors. A major theme
in my work for several years has been how big tech in the
national security state have essentially fused. Indeed, most
big tech companies today double US military and or intelligence
contractors, and many of these big tech giants have origin
stories that are directly linked to those same military and
intelligence agencies. In the case of social media, this
fusion has also been taking place in ways that are both
dangerous and insidious, especially now, thanks to recent
advances in artificial intelligence. One of the few
writers who has been doing great work on this topic for some time
is today's guest Alan McLeod. Alan is a senior staff writer at
MintPress news as well as the author of two books including
propaganda in the information age, still Manufacturing
Consent. He has contributed to sites such as the Guardian, The
Groza, and Jacobin, and has also published several academic
articles. Several of his recent investigations have worked to
expose the increasing fusion of big tech and the National
Security states of the US and Israel, including meet the ex
CIA agents deciding Facebook's content policy, and revealed the
former Israeli spies working in top jobs at Google, Facebook and
Microsoft. So thanks for joining me today. Alan, welcome to
unlimited hangout.
Unknown: Great to be with you. Whitney. How are you?
WW: I'm doing well. It's summer here. So nice and toasty down
here in Chile. I'm hoping you're faring well. And in the UK. I
hear it's been a bit cold up there this winter.
Unknown: Yeah, it has been but I'm bearing with it. All right.
Well,
WW: good to hear. So Alan, I'm sure you've heard about how one
of the big scoops of the Twitter files was to reveal the high
number of national security officials working at Twitter.
But when I first heard that I went, Huh, wait a second. I'm
pretty sure Allen wrote about this long before the Twitter
finals were even a thing. And indeed you did last June in an
article entitled, The Federal Bureau of tweets, Twitter is
hiring an alarming number of FBI agents. So what did you find
back during your investigation last June and has Twitter even
since the Twitter files has it changed? Its hiring practices
under Emperor Ilan?
Unknown: Yes, so what I find was basically, I'm not some sort of
incredible investigative journalist with all these tools.
This was really research done and very simple way in which I
just went to employment databases, such as zoom info,
and LinkedIn, and started googling some things about who
was actually on Twitter's board. Because, you know, we hear a lot
about how you know, Twitter, pools, people from its platform,
or takes, for instance, Donald Trump away, but they never
really hear about who is actually making the decision. So
I really wanted to know, and they're rather opaque about
that. And what I found was basically, that's an alarming
amount of people in Twitter's upper echelons, particularly in
politically sensitive fields, such as content, moderation,
trust, and safety or security, are actually ex FBI, ex NSA or
ex CIA. They are basically agents of the national security
states. And very, very often these people actually leave
their jobs at the government, and then immediately are
parachuted into the higher ranks of Twitter, which suggests one
of two things, either that Twitter is actively recruiting
from these agencies, or that there's some sort of deal
between the US government and big tech. There's some sort of
quid pro quo going on whereby Silicon Valley agrees to bring
in these agents to help modify and run these sites to cleanse
them politically or ideologically. Either of which
seems to be very startling and hair raising something which
more people should know about it. So you know, just as an
example of this Are the people that Twitter has been hiring in
2019, hired Don Barton, who was poached from her job as the
senior innovation advisor to the director of the FBI, she became
Senior Director of Strategy of operations for legal public
policy and trust and safety at Twitter. And there are dozens
and dozens of examples of this going on. Since Elon Musk has
come in, I don't think the hiring practices really changed
very much. We have seen Musk firing 1000s of people, but from
what I can see a lot of the spooks and spies that Twitter
hired a year two years three years ago, are still for the
most part in their jobs. And that is, again, a little bit
worrying, especially if you are under the impression that Elon
Musk is cleaning house and it's going to, you know, remove the
deep state from political interference. I really don't
think that that's going on at all.
WW: Yeah, well, I think that's definitely clear from the
evidence. And we can talk about a little later why that might be
because you as well as myself have been some of the people
pointing out Elon Musk, very close ties to the national
security, state of military contracting and things of that
nature. So one of the other things that was a scandalous,
supposedly scandalous revelations at Twitter files was
the collusion between the FBI and Twitter, as well, as you
know, what we just what you just talked about how Twitter is
hiring a lot of former FBI people. But in your article back
in June, again, well, before the Twitter files, you point out
that in September 2020, Twitter put out a statement thanking the
FBI, for their close collaboration and continued
support about protecting the public conversation. And then
you know, that a month later, I guess in October 2020, the
company Twitter announced that the FBI was feeding it
intelligence and essentially, issuing requests that, you know,
that certain accounts be deleted. And this is
essentially, the big revelation, one of the biggest, I think, in
terms of how it was promoted, you know, revelations from
Twitter files, but here you are talking about it well, before so
I'm very puzzled about how this was essentially out in the open.
And then, you know, the whole Twitter file situation takes
place and acts like it's, you know, a sudden, Revelation, I
guess, when, you know, people could have found this
information, or, you know, Twitter itself was essentially
promoting it, you know, you didn't need necessarily access
to, you know, private emails of executives to know that this was
going on. So I'm wondering, Alan, what your thoughts are
about why someone, you know, what is the utility of making
these revelations, but then, you know, keeping it as business as
usual, essentially, going back to the same model, like no
revelation, about the FBIs influence on Twitter had even
been made. And it just seems a little weird to me. I don't know
what your thoughts are.
Unknown: It really is remarkable. Actually, what the
Twitter files really explored and put a bit of meat on the
bones that I've been putting out there for a couple of years, was
that we really have this absurd situation whereby current FBI
agents will be monitoring social media, and then phoning and
emailing former FBI agents who work at Twitter and telling them
to delete or demote or D rank or D list certain ideas, certain
people, certain stories, etc. And this is actually going on
pretty much quietly in the shadows. And yet, we still talk
about Twitter as if it's a private company. This is like a
quarter step removed from government control over the
means of communication. And it really is a First Amendment
issue. And we should be talking about it like that. As you said,
in your introduction, Twitter, and these big social media
companies really are a global Time Square. And the fact that
the United States and its government has such a close,
close and firm grip over our means of communication really
presents a national security threat to pretty much every
other country in the world. Why this is coming out right now. I
mean, I actually talked to some of the journalists who were
putting out the Twitter file stuff, and it did seem that they
had been influenced by what I had written. I think Elon Musk
has his own agenda, when it comes to the Twitter files,
settling certain scores. But he really invited a whole diverse
group of journalists in there who started picking apart and
started looking at things that they were particularly
interested in. And so I think once that door was opened, the
floodgates kind of came through and perhaps some things that
Musk maybe didn't exactly want out in the open have now come
out, and those for me tend to be some of the more interesting
revelations from the Twitter files.
WW: All right. So what you just touched on a minute ago, I think
is a really important point because for a long time that
argument about social media, and I guess content curation, you
know, which is sort of a fine line between that in and
censorship, the argument has been made, right that these are
private companies. So they're not, you know, public companies.
And so if they were public companies, there'd be, you know,
a certain amount of regulation there on what they can and can't
do, in terms of censorship, because of what you pointed out
First Amendment issues. But what we essentially have is Twitter.
And of course, a lot of these other social media companies
that we can get to in a second, are very much populated with
people from the government. And, you know, at this point, we
know, at least in the case of Twitter are colluding with
people from the government. So it seems like that argument that
these are just private companies? Well, it's kind of
hard to make that anymore at the at, you know, at best, they're
public, private. And at worst, they're, you know, just tools of
the national security state. So this makes the whole censorship
debate very, I don't know, a bit more complicated than it has,
you know, it's been treated differently, you know, in the
media for some time, but I think it's becoming increasingly hard
to maintain what is really, I guess, the illusion that these
are just private companies operating unto, you know, as
independent private entities, you know, they're tentacle the
tentacles of the national security state are intimately
throughout all of these organizations. And I think your
work speaks to that.
Unknown: Yeah, thank you very much. I agree completely with
what you were saying there, it's very difficult to see the line
at which the, you know, Silicon Valley ends and national
security begins. These organizations are now
fundamentally intertwined, to the point where it's very
difficult to tell them apart. And this has happened over a
number of years, you know, these big platforms have been boosted
by the US government. It comes at a cost to the point where,
you know, we could talk about any of them, but we periodically
see, you know, sorts of intimidation from the US
government talks about regulating them talks about
breaking them up. You know, there was a point, let's switch
to Facebook, for instance, that in 2018, people were talking
about, nationalizing Facebook, breaking up and even jailing
Zuckerberg for his role in, you know, helping crazy conspiracy
theories elect Donald Trump as president. And just a few weeks
after that, Facebook suddenly announces a new partnership with
The Atlantic Council, which is NATO, and all but name.
Suddenly, Facebook's upper ranks are just filled with these ex
NATO guys, who are now deciding content moderation for 3 billion
people online. So I think clearly there comes a point
where these big Silicon Valley giants become too big to get
ignored. And that's kind of what's happening right now.
Well, let's
WW: turn to Facebook for a second. So one of one of your
best articles on this topic, in my opinion, is the one you did
about Facebook and the ex CIA agents deciding Facebook's
content policy. And I was really blown away by this, especially
this Aaron Berman character who is a former pretty high ranking
CIA guy. And of course now he's gotten to be one of the top guys
at Facebook. So who is Aaron Berman? What's his background?
And what is his role at Facebook's parent company?
Unknown: Well, I guess if you're looking at Facebook's website
itself, Aaron, he's just called out and is a very nice homely
guy who wears purple sweaters, and is in charge of content
moderation at Facebook. He's basically the face of content
moderation there. There's many videos on fb.com, where you can
listen to him chat in very well lit rooms about his philosophy
on content moderation, and how important it is to allow a wide
range of debate while also tackling hate speech. It's very
important to him apparently to be open and honest about this.
But the thing is, is that at no point is he or Facebook, divulge
that he was until just a couple of years ago, one of the highest
ranking members of the CIA. So until 2019, Aaron Berman was
senior analytic manager at the agency to the point where he was
actually writing the President's daily briefs for President Obama
and President Trump, meaning that that's the sort of thing
that those presidents would have read out to them every day in
the Oval Office. So he was pretty high ranking member of
the CIA. He was a mover and shaker there. And suddenly he
drops that job at the agency and just gets parachuted into this
extremely important position at Facebook, to the point where
he's essentially deciding what 3 billion people around the world
see, and crucially don't see in their news feeds. But when it
comes to the CIA and Facebook, it's really not just our
environment. In fact, I was able to find dozens and dozens of
examples of people just from going on places like zoom in
thought and LinkedIn and writing things like Facebook CIA and,
and it is extraordinary the amount of matches you get. So of
course, that's not the full amount of people who are working
at Facebook who used to be spoofs. This is just the people
who actively and openly admit it on their social media profiles.
I think one of the most extraordinary cases of Facebook
CIA collusion is Scott Stern. Until 2013, he was the chief of
targeting for the CIA, for the Middle East. And if you're
wondering, what does that mean is does that mean like he was
deciding where drones get struck in which Yemeni villages get
bombed, that is exactly what he was doing. But today, He is the
senior manager of risk intelligence or meta, where his
targets are misinformation and malicious actors. And so it is
really I can barely think of a better example of the fusion of
the national security state and big tech to the point where one
can just one guy like Scott scan can go from being one of the
most important and you know, bloodthirsty members of the
military industrial complex, and is now sitting in a position in
Silicon Valley, where he is deciding what everybody sees all
the time, and what content you're allowed to see what
content you're not allowed to post. It is really incredible
what's going on right now.
WW: So one of the things that really stood out to me about
Aaron to go back to him for a second is that in terms of how
he describes his time at the CIA's, one of the things he
focused on when writing intelligence briefs for senior
US officials, including the President, was the impact of
influence operations on social movements, security and
democracy. So to me, that suggests an interest while at
the CIA in social media. And then, of course, he gets
headhunted and joins Facebook, which has a history of hiring
people from the national security state, as you just
pointed out, but also, you know, there's another situation that I
wrote about a few years ago, where they hired a former DARPA
director, for example, to be in charge of what was then building
I think, now it's called something like Facebook reality
labs. They renamed it a year or two ago, but they they tend it,
this is a long pattern for Facebook. And when one considers
the history of Facebook, and how it became the company it is
today, you know, you have the really the guy that put Facebook
on the map is Peter Thiel, who at the same time he was becoming
the top investor. Early on in Facebook, was also creating
Palantir, which was designed to be a program a software product,
explicitly designed with the CIA in mind. This is attested to by
Alex Karp, Palantir, CEO himself. And of course, Palantir
for its first three years as a company exclusively works for
the CIA. They go to CIA headquarters, every two weeks,
they're their product development managers, to have
the CIA tweak their products, you know, very close collusion
there. And then at the same time, you have that same network
developing Palantir for the CIA, you know, developing Facebook to
a significant extent. And you have people not just like Peter
Thiel, but the guy that brought in Peter Thiel, to Facebook,
Facebook, Sean Parker, who was recruited by the CIA after as a
teenager actually because he was involved with Napster for people
that remember that as as a teen and then admits it himself was
approached by the CIA as a result of that situation. So
it's just interesting to see Facebook, and some of these
other social media companies in light of the fact that a lot of
their origin stories have these elements there as well. And if
you if you follow it, it's continuous From their inception
as a company, to now and it really makes you wonder about
social media in general, because I've written a lot, for example,
about a program that is now defunct, of course, it didn't
really get off the ground, but it was pitched and was going to
be implemented by DARPA, specifically the Pentagon's
researcher arm after 911 called total information awareness. And
they tried to rename it later, terrorist information awareness,
to sound less light, less like a giant machine of, of dragnet
surveillance, and total information awareness was trying
to get Americans essentially profiled them based off of data
about their daily lives, where they're going, who they're
meeting, things of that nature, and some of the programs that
were related to this, you know, like the Lifelog program was
shut down in 2004. It looks an awful lot like Facebook today.
And I think what's interesting about looking at companies like
Facebook and Palantir, and how they come out of similar
networks is that you know, a lot of the uproar about total
information awareness was that the military was directly
involved. And Peter Thiel and some of these other guys gambled
correctly, I think that people would willingly give up their
data if it was seen as up Clearly private enterprise, and
not as part of the state. But what your work has shown in some
of this earlier, you know, some of the earlier history shows as
well is that it was never really a private venture from the off
in the way that most people have been taught, you know, told
about it, these origin stories, a lot of these Silicon Valley
companies, whether it's true or not, you know, a lot of people
imagine it as oh, these these guys were just tinkering in
their garage in California, and all of a sudden pops out this
giant company. Well, for Google, we know that's fake for
Facebook. We know that's fake. So I don't know what what are
your thoughts about that? Alan, about, you know, the utility of
this? For the national security state? You know, from the off?
Was this something that some of these companies were intended to
do From their inception, you know, for the national security
state? Or was national security fusion, something that that came
along later?
Unknown: Well, I guess it depends on which example you're
going to pick, certainly, I think it's pretty natural,
that's coming out to the internet that we are have these
machines that really appear in our homes and the 90s and 2000s.
Across the world, there was this incredible potential for
connection and community to be built. And so I think some level
of social media was kind of natural, that this was always
going to happen, but who actually rises to the top of the
pile is not necessarily completely random. I think in
some cases, the sort of rags to riches story of these, these
platforms is pretty much true. But in other cases, as you
pointed out, it's really not quite the case, there's a lot
more going on. And a lot of these companies did have their
hands held by the national security state. From the outset.
I don't know too much about Facebook's origins. That was
very interesting what you were saying. But I have written at
length about Google's origins. And so a lot of people really
are not aware of how Google really fundamentally started as
a CIA project. In fact, Sergey Brin, his research at Stanford
University, according to a great investigation by Dr. Anna fees,
Ahmed showed that the CIA and the NSA were bankrolling his
research there, and that his research there with the laser
produce Google, not only that, they weren't only bankrolling
it, but his, his, his supervisor, there was a CIA
person. So the CIA actually directly midwife Google into
existence. In fact, until 2005, the CIA actually held shares in
Google and eventually sold them, which, you know, if we're going
to talk about business deals, probably not a great idea to be
selling your Google stock in 2005. But okay, whatever. So
we've seen
WW: well, if you don't want to be seen as directly linked to
the company, yes, going forward, then that's probably what you
do. And I did forget to mention that the CIA also was the big
investor early on and Palantir. Besides Peter Thiel, I guess,
Another commonality between them, but go on, sorry.
Unknown: Yeah, well, I was gonna say, when we talk about Google,
with the CIA, we have to talk about company called into detail
which is the CIA's venture capitalist for arm. A lot of
people will be surprised to know that the CIA has a venture
capitalist arm. But yes, in que tal has midwifed and birthed and
help nurture a huge amount of big tech and other important
high tech industries in the United States. The point of it
is from the CIA's perspective, is they go around finding small
companies, or maybe not so small as well, but companies that are
on the cutting edge of various technologies, and try to work
with them and develop them and get comparative advantage over
their rival countries like Russia and China, so that the
national security state of the United States can stay one or
even two steps ahead of its rivals. And for a small company
that's just starting in California say, the draw of
working with the CIA is huge because that is like an
unlimited source of money basically, it transfers a lot of
you know, kudos to your company a lot of governmental backing it
you know, more I don't want to say ensure success, but it
certainly makes the likelihood of you succeeding in a very
competitive and difficult industry to break into makes it
much more likely and so I can see it from both ends why
companies would want to work with the CIA and in Q tel and
why in Qatar would want to work with these companies.
WW: Well, I think it's important to point out really quick about
inky tell that it's it you know, it's it's definitely the CIA's
venture capital arm of course, the CIA claims it's fully
independent, blah, blah, blah. But if you actually look into
how in Q tel structured, that's not really so but the thing I
did want to point out is that in Q tel from its inception, has
had a very close relationship with weapons manual. acteurs on
because the person that created Ankita for the CIA was the exact
top executive at what at Lockheed Martin, I think it was
Lockheed Martin, actually at the time and went through some
mergers in the 90s. To become Lockheed Martin, the company
does today. But it was Norm Augustine was the guy that was
in charge of Lockheed Martin at the time that the CIA chose to
tap to create, and Q tel for them. So an interesting
connection worth worth keeping in mind, because as I mentioned
earlier, in the intro for this podcast, a lot of these
companies, specifically Google is our major contractors to the
US national security state, whether it's the Department of
Defense or the intelligence community, or, you know, several
intelligence agencies, like in the case of Palantir, that I
talked a little bit about earlier, all 18 US intelligence
agencies contract with Palantir. So, you know, it makes sense, I
guess, for them, that there would be some sort of revolving
door there. But it's just stunning, when you start to get
engaged with this, this type of information in this research,
the extent of the overlap, and I really think there's no word we
can really use for it beyond fusion, you know, you really
can't tell where one and one ends and one begins at this
point, you know, maybe you could, potentially a decade or
two ago, depending on the company, but But these days, you
know, it's really hard not to see them as one in the same. So
as since you were talking about Google, you, of course, have
also written about Google in some of your recent work,
meaning last year, you wrote national security search engine,
Google's ranks are filled with CIA agents. Can you tell us a
little bit about your article there and what you found and
what the implications of that are given that Google is
essentially a monopoly on major on major facets of how people
around the world access information, particularly
through the supremacy, I guess, of their search engine?
Unknown: Yeah, sure. So again, no, an investigative journalist
with a huge amount of resources. Again, this was literally just
publicly available data on social media sites like
LinkedIn, just taking things like CIA, Google, and seeing
what happens. And I was absolutely astonished by the
dozens and dozens and dozens of results from people who were
clearly Google employees and high positions, who are openly
admitting that they were once CIA agents. This is the sort of
thing that, you know, you would have been laughed at 20 years
ago for even considering, but it seems to be a total reality.
Now, what's a bit more interesting, and a bit more
nefarious about this is that when you actually go through
these Google employees that were x spooks, none of them are
really being put into positions of political unimportance.
They're not working in fields like marketing or customer
service. They're going into fields like trust and safety,
security and content moderation. And so that really clearly
suggests a political motive for these sorts of these sorts of
hires. I mean, if you look at, you know, the people who are
actually involved in trust and safety, it's very important to
understand who these people are. So you know, just an example,
Jacqueline loop, where she spent more than 10 years at the CIA,
where she served as a leading US government expert on security
challenges in the Middle East. In her own words, she joined
Google in 2017, and is now the senior intelligence collection
and trust and safety manager. So she's basically in charge of
intelligence, and the brains of Google, as you might be able to,
say, another CIA employee, between 2010 and in 2015. Jeff,
Lazarus was a political analyst at Langley. In 2017, he was
hired as a policy advisor for trust and safety at Google,
where he works on suppressing, quote, extremist content,
unquote. He now works at Apple doing a similar job. There are
dozens and dozens of examples of these people who now work at
Google, who formerly were CIA agents, who have just been
parachuted into these positions of extreme importance. And this
is all happening silently. You know, we're we've been talking
about Facebook and Twitter. And to a certain extent, if you're
not on these platforms, you can ignore them. But Google is
really too big to ignore. There's no way that your life
isn't affected by Google. It's something we use daily, even if
we're not really, you know, super online. What you know,
what comes up in a Google search has huge implications for how
people think for political movements for public opinion.
The The sort of power that Google has over modern society
can barely be over, over simplified, and you know,
overset, this company has become a behemoth in just 20 years, to
the point where it might be the most important and influential
company in the world. Yeah. And so it's close. Its close ties
with the US national security state should really be alarming
people in all over the world, especially foreign governments,
who often rely on Google for neutral and professional
services, all the while, they are entrusting their data and
all of their most important information to a company that
has intimately close ties to Washington, DC.
WW: Yeah, I mean, it's really astounding when you think about
Google's influence. So you know, you have search, which we've
talked about and around the world, most people including
where I live in Chile, you know, it's Google dominates search
period. And most people use also here, Google's browser Chrome.
And of course, if you don't have an iPhone, most people have a
Google enabled Android phone. And the only way you don't have
Google on your phone using an Android is if you use a D
Googled Android operating system like graphene Alas, which a lot
of people you know, don't know how to really set them up, set
themselves up with an operating system like that. So you have a
lot. I mean, Google really is everywhere. And in addition to
that, what gets left out a lot, of course, is YouTube, which is
owned by Google and managed by, I guess, the sister in law of
Sergey Brin. Because he's married to forget her name,
though. Shiki sisters. So the head of YouTube is one of those
sisters and the other sister is? Well, there's three sisters. But
one of one of the other two is married to Sergey, Brandon runs
23andme, the DNA testing company. So YouTube, as people
know, obviously, listening to this podcast, was probably even
more censorship happy, since, I don't know 2016 or so as
Facebook and Twitter, if not more so. And one of the people
that you listed in your article that's, you know, she went from
working for the CIA for over a decade, as a political and
leadership analysis. She is now the intelligence analyst lead
for trust and safety at YouTube. So she's, you know, the person
essentially saying, This is who we censor, these are the topics
we censor? And these are the ones we don't. And that's a, you
know, longtime CIA veteran right there. And it's a I don't know,
pretty astounding. I mean, you would think if so many people
were scandalized by some of these Twitter files Revelations
we talked about earlier about collusion between the national
security state more specifically the FBI, and the social media
company, Twitter, why would they not be concerned about the CIA
and Google or any of these other companies like Facebook? It
seems? I don't know, it just seems a little weird that the
discussion was so limited on Twitter. And, you know, I don't
want to pick on anybody, because I'm sure, you know, people that
were writing that stuff, we're focused, you know, on the
revelations themselves, but at least some people reporting on
that, if not, the people that did the original reports
themselves could have pointed to how this is industry wide
problem, you know, this is not exclusive to any one social
media network, you know, this is really what's going on with all
of them. And I would consider YouTube to an extent social
media, because it's, um, there's a lot of engagement with
comments and people posting back and forth. And a lot of people
for years have used YouTube as a substitute for cable television,
because of course, cable news viewing has gone down. YouTube
views have gone up, it's become, you know, in for many people,
essentially a replacement for TV to an extent. And, you know,
that adds another level to its dominance of, of information.
And it's really not surprising you'd see the CIA there because,
you know, a quote attributed to people like CIA, former CIA
director, William Casey, the CIA director under Reagan, was about
the need to have large, wide ranging disinformation campaigns
to manipulate the American public national security policy
unimpeded, because it would be against some of the
sensibilities of the American public at large, which, of
course, you know, that type of behavior on the part of the
national security state has not changed since the 80s or before
then. But obviously, having a tool like Google, if you're the
CIA is something that's going to be incredibly useful for you as
an agency. But it's frankly, very, very disturbing. When, as
you noted in your article, we have people like former CIA
directors like Mike Pompeo being like, yeah, we lie and we cheat
and we steal like that's normal here. So, you know, and of
course, not to mention the CIA's litany of historical crimes
against humanity and even against American interests, not
to mention the interests of you know, other states and As you
know, election integrity and other countries election
meddling, what have you. And what's worth pointing out to
with Google is, I don't remember the specifics of it so much. But
I do know that back during the Arab Spring events of 2011 2012
or so, Google played a major role in a lot of that, from what
I from what I remember, and efforts to sort of manipulate
and for what information was being seen to boost certain
oppositional movements in certain countries. and things of
that nature, Google played a major role in that. And during
that same period of time, you had DARPA, funding extensively
social media for the purpose of strategic communication. And we
can talk a little bit about that later. But some of this
eventually made its way into the Guardian and other newspapers
about how the US military studied how to influence Twitter
users, and DARPA funded research focusing specifically on
manipulating Occupy Wall Street protests, and then protesting
them in the Middle East, specifically referring to the
Arab Spring. So this is something that's been going on
for a long time. And as obviously, I think, you know,
from what I've laid out here pretty clearly, and Sidious. But
I'm wondering, Alan, what your thoughts are about how, how this
type of activity, this pattern of activity and how entrenched
these agencies are in these companies today? Um, how do you
see that impacting things from here on out specifically, when
we're considering that the technology they've been
utilizing is much more advanced now than it was 10 years ago?
Unknown: Yeah, I think, if we go back 10 years, and the reason
YouTube group was, as YouTube, by the way, started off as a
competitor to Google Video, which was Google's own brand,
YouTube, which failed to really capture the public's
imagination. And the reason it grew was because it was an
alternative to what you saw on the television, it was really a
golden age for people who were working in alternative media,
you could put up videos on there and get real traction and you
know, really reach a broad public build an audience and do
really well. And it was absolutely shown when the
algorithms back then were much more neutral, people would click
on the alternative media stuff rather than the stuff from CNN,
or Fox, or CBS or whatever, specifically, because it was of
a higher quality. And people would be actually covering
topics that you couldn't see, if you just turned on a television.
Unfortunately, that golden age really came crashing to a very
quick halt in the wake of the 2016 election, whereby the
Clinton campaign and many others, besides in the
intelligence community as well claimed that basically fake news
on the Internet sponsored by a foreign power, specifically
Russia, was the reason that Trump was able to beat Hillary
Clinton. And in the wake of this, we saw YouTube, Google,
Facebook, and all the other big social media platforms, change
their algorithms radically to promote what they said was
authoritative content, and suppress what they called
borderline content. But the problem with this is that the
outcome of this wasn't to kick away really low quality
conspiracy theories, what it was, was ultimately, the
opportunity and yeah, the opportunity to kick away high
quality alternative media websites that had been kicking
the ass of corporate media on the Internet for years and
years. So for instance, the eye workout MintPress news lost over
90% of its Google search traffic, and more than 99% of
its Facebook traffic, within a period of just a few months,
even much more established websites like the intercept.
Last 19%, democracy now lost 36% of its Google traffic overnight.
And so what I really understand this big algorithmic change that
happened in early 2017, to be was basically a coordinated
campaign, which was in the interests of big corporate
media, and the Democratic Party, and also the national security
state to kind of re tighten their grip over the means of
communication, which had really been flagging for the last 10
years with the rise of the Internet. And the fact that
social media really did offer an alternative place to try and get
information news and views from. So unfortunately, now we've seen
as we've been laying out for the last 20 minutes or so, the real
sort of powerplay from the US government trying to retake
control over the means of communication. Unfortunately,
there's very few people talking about this. So I think it's
probably going to get worse rather than better. Even though
when people do talk about this in print or online anywhere.
There is a lot of interest from the public because I think a lot
of people sense that this is kind of going on, but they don't
actually have The details.
WW: Yeah, I think that's, that's fair to say. But the problem is,
you know, a lot, there's so much dependency for communication now
on a lot of these platforms that I think even when people who use
them become outraged, they're like, Well, what can I do about
it, I either stop participating in, you know, stop using these
platforms, but then I can't communicate with people or watch
this content or do this or that, you know, because, you know,
there are alternatives for you to write, that I think are
becoming increasingly more common. But some of them too,
like rumble, for instance, is very much aligned with one
particular political ideology, which tends to be those who feel
most censored by YouTube, for example. But there are some
robust alternatives there. But for things like Twitter and
Facebook, there have been efforts to create alternative
social media networks. I mean, there's loads of them at this
point, but none of them have really ever caught on and it
seems like people have sort of become dependent on these
platforms in a sense, and that's not necessarily good, if you
wish to change major aspects of their, of their policy or hiring
practices and things like that, or you want to European opposed
to them fusing with the national security state, you know, it's
kind of hard as a, as a single user to really have any
influence on on on those decisions. So, Alan, if it's
okay with you, I'd like to turn to another social media network
that we haven't talked about yet, which does tend to crop up
and alternative media to an extent but largely over claims
of its utility for you know, the Chinese I guess, military
industrial complex, tick tock. So for example, most people are
probably familiar with sound bites here and there from Joe
Rogan and other podcasts of that type, talking about how tick
tock is basically a surveillance machine, though, unfortunately,
for people like that, I would say they, to their detriment
ignore the fact that, you know, the NSA, for example, and other
you know, surveillance companies on the other side of
surveillance entities on the other side, are very much in bed
with some of the social media networks and social networks and
other companies we've already talked about today, like
Facebook and Google, you know, going back to the some of the
revelations from Edward Snowden and others was that, you know, a
lot of pretty much all of big tech was openly collaborating
with the NSA with very little complaints from the private side
about, you know, essentially undermining American
constitutional rights. But anyway, you know, the claim is
often made about tick tock in that, in that lens that, you
know, it's being used by the Chinese government for the
purpose of surveillance. But what you notably pointed out in
your article, the NATO, the Tick Tock pipeline, why is tick tock
employing so many national security agents? There is, of
course, a lot more to this narrative, as, as the title
pretty much points out, tick tock is hiring a lot of former
intelligence people. And I don't know, why do you think that
might be? Alan?
Unknown: Yeah. So it's, it's interesting to note that Tiktok
is one of the only major social media networks in fact, the only
one that is not actually an American company. We'd like to
think of social media networks as these kinds of transnational
entities which don't really are not defined by borders, and
they're, you know, international conglomerates. But in reality,
they usually have bricks and mortar homes in Texas or
California, and they are subject to American laws, tick tock was
a little bit different, because it was started by a Chinese
company bytedance. And I think because of that, that really
sparked huge, huge concern in the United States that perhaps
tick tock wasn't going to be as ofay wasn't going to be as easy
to manipulate as the other ones. And so in 2020, you might
remember this big push by the Trump administration to force
tick tock to even sell, its pretty much its entire business
to an American company like Microsoft, or Oracle, or face
being totally shut down in the United States. In fact, the
company actually had secured a deal with Bill Gates for I can't
remember the exact amount, but Gates was basically going to buy
the US operation of Tiktok to keep it afloat. Suddenly,
though, this big hysteria over a Chinese surveillance of your
kids was just dropped. It was like almost overnight, we just
had stopped hearing about it. In fact, Gates himself was very
surprised to hear that his his purchase of the company was
basically nixed, and he didn't even know why. And I didn't know
why as well for the longest time. But I did start to put two
and two together when I started to look at who is actually being
implied in the higher echelons of tic toc. What I found was
that at exactly the same point that the US government stopped
making noise about tick tock being a Chinese surveillance
tool was exactly the same point whereby a ton of people from
NATO and other big national security state organizations,
were being hired by tick tock into very important roles in the
company to run its most important operations. And again,
like Google and Facebook, they weren't being employed in
marketing or customer service. They're being employed in
content moderation, to control the algorithms and trust and
safety, and insecurity. And I think one of the people that I
think is most blatant, and probably is worth knowing about
is Greg Anderson. So according to Greg Anderson's own LinkedIn
profile, until 2019, he worked on quote, psychological
operations and quote for NATO. And he left his job and
immediately got put into Tiktok, as the new feature Policy
Manager. So basically, you know, deciding what sort of policies
the company would, would go ahead with. And Greg Anderson is
just one of many, many people I find, all of whom are working in
these politically sensitive fields, it takes up at exactly
the same point that the US government stops making such a
noise about tick tock being foreign controlled. Now is the
Chinese government, perhaps, you know, has some sort of backdoor
into ticks off? Well, maybe that is possible. It's not like
they're averse to surveilling their own citizens. So, you
know, perhaps that's the case. But really, this is a case of a
huge, enormous example of the pot calling the kettle black
here. The real danger in terms of surveillance comes from the
US government, and not some foreign entity. And that's the
thing we should really be focusing on if we are Westerners
ourselves.
WW: Yeah, I think that's, that's fair to point out. And it sort
of makes me think also, they'll have. So I don't know if you're
familiar with Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, he's been
described by The New York Times as the new Kissinger, meaning
Henry Kissinger, which is unsettling, but he actually
wrote a recent book with, with Kissinger, about the future of
AI and what it means for the world. And Schmidt also had
previously it's concluded its work now but had headed the
National Security Commission on artificial intelligence, which
was basically a meeting of intelligence agencies, the
military, and big tech. And what they had argued, and sort of
what he argues with Kissinger's in his book with Kissinger, is
this idea that in order to avoid war with China, there should be
an effort to essentially bring together so, you know, we've
been talking a lot about how the national security state and big
tech in the US had been fusing he wants to, what he talks about
when he talks about China, Eric Schmidt, is that he wants to
advance that fusion even more. And he sort of refers to China
as that, you know, talking about what they ought to left, a lot
of times these people in the US government refer to as the civil
military fusion model. But it's really not any different than
what has been going on in the US for some time, there's just sort
of like a semantic difference or how its publicly treated, that
makes it different. But what Schmidt is trying to say is that
in order to avoid war with China, this national security
state, big tech fusion in the US, that nexus should merge with
the equivalent in China, and that we should develop this sort
of system together. Which is a bit odd, isn't it when you
consider that a lot of the same entities within that National
Security Commission, you know, for example, are very much into
the brinkmanship between the US and China, this idea of pushing
us toward, you know, world war three, and some of the stuff
that's taught up touched on, for example, and John Pilcher
pillagers documentary on the coming war with China, you know,
there's a huge segment of that in the national security state,
but then you have these big tech people like Schmidt, who were
very much plugged in to the US government right now. And
they're, you know, looking to sort of have, I guess, you could
say, groups like, tick tock work much more closely, you know,
with sort of their equivalents in the US. So in the case of
what you're talking about, in this article, you have, you
know, tick tock Canada and tick tock us, you know, these are
subsidiaries of this Chinese based company that's been
accused of being, you know, a surveillance tool, but it's,
it's merging essentially, with some of these actors,
relatively, you know, very much in mesh with the national
security state. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty weird. And
to me, it ultimately speaks to how some of these people just,
you know, want to see this model, I guess, sort of expand
for the purpose of controlling information not just in the US
but beyond and also how a lot of these countries around the
world, regardless of what side of the political divide, they
may be on are very interested in developing any sort of
technology regardless if it's from enemy state number one, or
whatever, you know, if it serves them for the purpose of domestic
control, they seem to be increasingly on board with that
kind of stuff.
Unknown: That's very interesting. I haven't seen Eric
Schmidt's new book, we should actually just say that Schmidt
actually left a job and the national security state to
become CEO of Google. And while at Google, he took a job at the
Defense Department as well. So he's Yeah, fundamentally, very
closely revolving door guy. He's very closely linked with
Washington, I have read another book by Eric Schmidt, it was
called the new digital age, it came out in 2013. And in it,
there's this incredible quote that I use very often, when he's
talking about what information technology really is. Schmidt
says, and I've got the direct quote here, what Lockheed Martin
was to the 20th century technology and, and
cybersecurity companies like Google will be to the 21st and
quote, so what he's saying there is that big tech is the
ideological tip of the spear for the US Empire going into the
21st century. So before it was all about the power of the US
military, and now it's all about the power of us social media,
and the tech industry in general, that will further
advance Washington's interest. And I think that's maybe what
we're seeing here. As regards to China, I really don't know, it
does seem much more likely that the US is preparing for war with
China rather than cooperation. But, you know, perhaps
cooperation would be well,
WW: I'm not, I'm not saying that they're that views necessarily
going to win out, I just find it interesting that there's people
like Eric Schmidt, propagating that idea, you know, within
their specific circles, and yet, you have Kissinger sort of
saying similar things, because he's, you know, styles himself
these days is sort of like a China expert. And it's this idea
that this is the only way to avoid war. That's the claim
anyway, made by these guys, you know, how influential that is on
a military industrial complex that spent billions and devoted
a lot of time and energy to putting bases all throughout the
Pacific and NATO bases all around Russia for some sort of
power competition war at some point. You know, I think it's
pretty clear that there's a competing interest there. But
it's worth pointing out that that is a policy vision that's
been articulated by some of these people that stand at this
sort of this area that bridges, big tech and national security,
I just think it's worth them, you know, pointing it out,
because you do see some sort of collaborations, it seems like
between entities you want to expect like NATO and the US
national security state and Tiktok, based on the narratives
that most people are familiar with, you know, it seems
illogical to some perhaps why that collaboration might take
place, right? Oh, yeah. But
Unknown: listen, the social media is now enormously
important. It really decides what we think about what we see
what we don't see, it informs everything about our being. And
so whenever an entity becomes this powerful, it's natural,
that powerful organizations, whether they're corporations, or
governments will start to look at that and try to understand
how they can hack it, how they can use it for their own
benefits, or how they can even infiltrate it. And that's what
we're seeing. Sure.
WW: Yeah, good point. Okay. So, in coming up to the last bit of
the podcasts, there's a couple other articles of yours. Well,
really one in particular that I definitely wanted to touch on
today, which is about a company called grafica, spelled with a K
at the end, and you call it the deep states beard for
controlling the Information Age, which I found pretty amusing.
But grafica is doing all sorts of stuff, as you know, in the
article, they're cited very frequently by mainstream media,
their claims are usually without any sort of analysis on the part
of mainstream media just repeated, as fact. And as you
point out, they have a lot of national security, connections
and all sorts of, you know, weird, weird things about them,
I guess I'll throw it to you to sort of explain what graphic is
and its importance. But there's actually, as we can talk about
after, there's a lot of companies trying to fit this
exact same mold that grafica is, you know, the niche, it's sort
of created for itself. There's a few other companies that are are
quite similar. So who is grafica? How are they tied to
the CIA? And how are they influencing, you know, in what
information is able to be accessed by people today?
Unknown: Oh, sure. If so, I mean, if you read corporate
media, you will understand grafica as this privates, people
led intelligence operation, which is really shining a light
on the dark corners of the internet, and trying to do good
in this world. They describe themselves as the cartographers
of the Internet age. So basically, they are this trendy
Manhattan company that does sorts of investigations,
supposedly to try and bring you're owed more freedom online.
But that when you start looking into the company starts to
really crumble, not only because of who is working for the
company, but who is actually funding this company as well. So
first of all, they have very glitzy offices in Manhattan. And
it turns out these are being paid for by the Pentagon's
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, DARPA,
and the Department of Defense, and also from grants from the US
Navy, and from the US Air Force as well. They've also had
funding from the Atlantic Council, which is NATO and all
but name. So it's really quite remarkable where this money is
coming from that already should start raising alarm bells in
your mind. But when you actually look at who works for grafica,
it becomes clear that these people are just ex military
intelligence, or ex national security state agents going back
for many years. So I mean, one of them, for example, is the
head of investigations. Ben Nimmo, who's, you know, he is
absolutely notorious. He was actually NATO's press officer
for many years. And he's now head of intelligence for
Facebook as well. So again, this is the you know, this fusion of
think tanks of social media, and of the national security state
all at once. We've got so many people, when you look at food,
who actually works there, what his strategy executive service,
Chris Bing, he spent 24 years at the CIA, then seven years in the
US Army, and then moves into, you know, working for this, you
know, people led, you know, private organization, which is
shining a light on everything. Joanne Perry's spent three and a
half years as a CIA intelligence analyst, before moving to
graphical, Lauren pen check, who was who is graphic, as vice
president of financial and operations worked at the NSA. In
fact, she became the Director of Corporate Strategy at the NSA,
she also worked for Northrop Grumman. And now she works, you
know, at this place. So there are just dozens and dozens of
examples of extremely spooky characters working for
graphical. And when you look at the reports, graphic of pumpout,
it's all about Russian interference in US society, or
Chinese interference, or Iranian or the threat from Iran or
Venezuela, or whatever. And ultimately, when we see this,
this is basically propaganda about propaganda is what I'm
saying. There is a huge state led effort by the United States
to try to convince Western publics that there is an
enormous state led influence operation going on, at the hands
of Russia, or China or Iran, that is really the perfidious
and the source of all sorts of conflict in the United States.
It's not the internal class contradictions, it's not the
fact that people at the top of society are stealing trillions
from people at the bottom is actually just pesky Russians, or
a pesky Iranians, you know, standing well fake memes around
which has got people so worried and anxious.
WW: Well, the the idea of that narrative, though, is completely
insane on its face, because the it's the idea that people that
don't agree with the official government line of the US and
like, its allies are, must be foreign. You know, bots are
like, you know, people paid for influenced by foreign entities,
when there's plenty for people living within the US or the UK,
or any of the five eyes countries to be in an uproar
about how their governments are behaving and doing, you know,
whether it's foreign policy, domestic policy, whatever, it's
essentially, as I've written about in the past, it's, it's in
a way, it's a war on dissent. By claiming that, you know, anyone
that propagates narratives that are deemed unfriendly to the
state are treated as foreign adversaries, or at least
adjacent to foreign adversaries, which is, you know, remember in
this in the concept in the context of this being an
information war and information, warfare and all of that, you
know, that those narratives are the enemy. So it doesn't really
matter. If you actually are affiliated with the foreign
countries, or you're just a regular person, you know, that's
the narrative they want to target. And if they have to use
a broad brush to paint everyone is a Russian bot, or a Chinese
spy, or, you know, whatever fits, you know, they tend to do
that. And I think it's very insidious, because, um, this is
actually in the Biden administration's policy papers
for the war on domestic terror. It frames any sort of narrative
that undermines trust in the US government, as you know,
essentially an act of domestic terror, which is just totally
insane. At the idea that the only way to not have domestic
terror is to have everyone in the US agree about everything. I
mean, it's just nuts because the whole idea is that this is all
all this has to be done. They say also to protect our
democracy but if your homeland centralizing discourse and
making everyone have to say the same stuff. How democratic is
that? There's nothing democratic about that at all. I don't know
your thoughts, Alan.
Unknown: Yeah, this sort of tactic is actually quite an old
one. You know, if anyone's involved in the peace movement,
they'll know that, you know, people who were criticizing the
US government's role in starting the war in Iraq, or trying to
campaign against that, actually happening were called Secret
lovers of Saddam, they were doing Saddam Hussein's work the,
they love the dictator, or maybe if it was in Libya, they were no
secret admirers of Qaddafi, or if it was in Syria, they were
talking about, you know, not wanting the US to get involved,
they were actually in a status. Now very few people who were
criticizing the US government over these things, Americans, I
mean, actually had any love for these three characters. But that
was the the paint which was used to tar these movements. And if
you go back even further, it goes on. If you were criticizing
the US government's role in let's say, Latin America, in the
1980s, you were secretly a red, and you were a communist agent.
This is how Martin Luther King and the whole black liberation
movement of the 60s was tired. They were secretly communists,
they were getting direction from the Kremlin. And so this sort of
McCarthy's nonsense really goes back for decades and decades, if
not centuries in the United States. But we are seeing a new
kind of twinge to it a new spin on this in the digital age. And
as we're seeing a sort of slow decline of American power, this,
I suspect might get worse and worse rather than better.
WW: Yeah, I definitely think that's true. So to add what you
said about graphic earlier, I sort of mentioned a little bit
there that there's a lot of other companies trying to do
similar things for the same entities. And one of the groups
that I've written about in the past has been this company
called primer or primer AI, which, in 2020, became a
contractor for the US Air Force and US Special Operations
Command. And in that press release, it says primer will
develop the first ever machine learning platform to
automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation.
So that's a very interesting term suspected disinformation,
because based on what, you know, we just laid out if you are
saying anything that is against the government line, right, as
the narrative has been set up, you can just be treated as a
Russian bot, or whatever. So essentially, any narrative that
runs counter to the state narrative can be treated under
these metrics based on what we've seen thus far as suspected
suspected, disinformation, you don't actually have to have
proof it's disinformation only, suspicion must be introduced
about what you're saying For primer AI and the Air Force to
take it. You know, take it out of the news feeds and whatnot.
And they're very, just like a lot of the companies you've
talked about. They have a very large amount of CIA and NATO
people and all sorts of connections like that. And in
this interesting blog post that was published by primers founder
and 2020, who by the way, his name is Shawn Gourley. I think
he's a New Zealander. But what he did before primer was a he
created a programs for the US military to track insurgency,
and post invasion Iraq. Yeah. And so now he's turning that to
domestic disinformation campaigns. And he says, he said
in April 2020, computational warfare and disinformation
campaigns will and 2020 become a more serious threat than
physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we
deployed to fight them. He then goes to argue that there must be
a quote, Manhattan Project for truth. Yeah, where he says there
should be a Wikipedia style database written by country's
intelligence agencies, and that's going to be the baseline
for what's true or not. So that's pretty insane. And then
at the end of the blog post, this last sentence says and 2020
we will begin to weaponize the truth and this is a guy you
know, this company is working with social media all sorts of
other companies that are very much involved with the
information people can or can't access again you have in que tal
backing these guys as well as Mike Bloomberg and a lot of
people that previously were involved with Iraq War, the Iraq
War surge people tied to Neo cons like the Kagan family, Air
Force Intelligence us NATO. I mean, all these guys we've been
talking about are the people that stuff primer AI in this
effort to go after disinformation and in the
context of the Air Force being the contracting group for
primer. What I find interesting, there's this 2014 article from
Ars Technica, it says Air Force Research colon, how to use
social media to control people like drones. Pretty interesting.
Basically turn people into robots that do their bidding, I
guess is what I sort of get from that headline, but you have this
idea from primary AI that intelligence agencies need to
decide what's truth or not for everyone. And it's conveniently
a company stuffed with former intelligence agents. And now the
Air Force is contracting it to manipulate what what is seen on
social media networks using AI. And previously, the Air Force
wanted to use social media networks to turn people into,
you know, their robotic drone, like slaves, I guess is how it
comes across. I mean, it seems pretty insane. The efforts
currently underway and using AI, which, of course is everyone
knows by now is advancing pretty steadily, not just to censor,
but to alter people's perceptions with the end goal of
essentially brainwashing them, I guess you could say, so that
they're easier to control. I mean, it's very insane and
insidious. And I just, you know, I'm blown away that more people
don't see social media for what it is. I don't know. Do you have
any thoughts, Alan? Well, there
Unknown: are so many hangers on these private companies that
we've been talking about that are setting off, you know,
collectively, they're usually set up in the outskirts of
Washington, DC as a think tank in the region I call Raytheon.
Akers, which, you know, basically, they're just trying
to get that money from defense contracts. And now they seem to
have pivoted towards this sort of misinformation angle, you
know, they're all offering to be the guardians of truth, despite
the fact that they have no qualifications to do so. And
what I found so insidious about this whole Russian bot
narrative, meaning that if you say something that goes against
the, you know, collective will of the beltway in Washington,
that you're labeled a Russian box, is that to bring it back to
what we were talking about earlier, the Twitter files, the
Twitter files have really blown the lid open on this Russian bot
narrative, to the point where we now know because we have the
emails that even people who are in positions at the very top of
Twitter, realize that this entire Russian bot narrative
from the beginning was completely baloney. Really, you
know, the, the emails from URL Roth talking about this Hamilton
68 dashboard, which was this, which was this program that was
designed to find hundreds of Russian bots spreading
misinformation, you will Ross was talking about this, the head
of Twitter saying this is completely unnecessary horse vs.
And that we have to, you know, push back against it. That's
what he was saying in private, but in public, he was going
along with the narrative that Oh, yes, Russian bots are a
problem. When you actually look at who was on this list, almost
all of them are Americans, and you know, quite easy to figure
out who these people are. And you can, you know, give them a
direct message and talk to them. Most of them are on the sort of
Trump right, but there were some on the left as well, like people
like Joe Lauria, the head of
WW: Yeah, so
Unknown: this kind of happens, this kind of feels like this
whole proper knot thing all over again. Yeah, this is quite a 16
thing where a whole bunch of outlets got labeled Russian
propaganda, despite the fact I think most of them were, you
know, based in the United States, and had were very
obvious who they were. So I just think this is just a latest
chapter of this ongoing information war that goes on.
And it's important that people keep abreast of it, because
otherwise, they will be fed, filling their heads with all
sorts of misinformation.
WW: Yeah, and not just that, but it's so it's a war on people
like you and me and other people and independent media, that
challenge these narratives. There's major efforts to take us
out of play, you know, whether it's through censorship, or you
know, financial censorship, or you know, what you mentioned
earlier with what happened with MIT presses, Google traffic when
I was working at MIT Press when that happened, and it was just
crazy. The amount of manipulation and how it can just
be used to censor your reach and how your information gets out
there. I mean, it's it's really a war on independent information
on a massive scale. And the people behind it are, I think,
pretty clearly up to no good. I mean, they're certainly not up
to, you know, democratic value, the democratic values that claim
to be protecting right, um, which is about, you know, what
makes the US democracy great. The First Amendment, free
speech, all of the stuff I mean, obviously, there's an effort to
make it only the Free Speech condoned by these powerful
entities in the American government. And, you know,
obviously, some of their their allied states, I just find it
very, very unsettling across the board. All right. Well, I think
we've been going for some time now, Alan, and I want to thank
you a lot for your for your time today. And for of course, your
your important work on these on these matters. Because I you
know, like I said earlier, I don't think there's just enough
coverage about what's going on here because ultimately, when
you consider the extreme power that Silicon Valley and big tech
and also, of course, socially social media networks have in
our society. At and to have essentially, the CIA and a lot
of these intelligence agencies or entities with an awful track
record, whether it comes to human rights or democracy are
propping up the worst governments in the history of
the world dictatorships, what have you, you know, these are
the people running this operation. And most people are
unknowingly, you know, in this in this what is essentially a
war viewed by the national security state as a war, but
they're unaware that they're in the middle of this war, which is
ultimately a war for our hearts and minds in the war over over
human, you know, on human perception, essentially. And
anyway, just thanks a lot for everything you've done to bring
this to light. Because, you know, the Twitter files did some
good in that sense, but really your work even before those, and
despite of it has done a lot more, I think, to really show
the true nature of what's been going on here. So thanks a lot,
Alan.
Unknown: Thank you. It's great to speak with you. Likewise.
WW: So anyway, how can people follow and support your work?
Unknown: Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, we've been racking on
social media for about an hour, but I'm still on there myself.
You can find me on Twitter, Alan R McLeod, a la NRMACLEO. De, or
if you're on Instagram, and Alan dots are dots McLeod. But the
best way to actually find my work is to go to MintPress
news.com. And bookmark it just like in the old days.
WW: Yeah, absolutely. And I believe MIT Press also has an
RSS feed. So I've talked about this in some recent podcasts and
in my recent ama for subscribers, so RSS feeds, if
you're not familiar, please look them up. It's a great way to
curate your own censorship proof news feed equivalent, taking big
tech out of the middleman as as you know, the arbiter of what
you see and what you don't see. And a good way to sort of fight
back against a lot of the unsettling trends that we've
talked about today. So I know that MIT Press hasn't has the
ability to be tied to an RSS feeder app just as unlimited
hangout does, and a lot of other websites around there. So
consider adding MintPress and so you can add to you know, your
RSS feed if you if you'd like because Allen's working is great
and a lot of other people at MIT Press of course doing important
work. Alright, so thanks a lot, Alan. Again, appreciate your
time and your work. And thanks to everyone so much for
listening, especially people that subscribe to unlimited
hangout and make this podcast possible. Alright, thanks so
much, everybody and catch you on the next episode.