On November 24, 2020, Joe Biden proclaimed: “This is not a third Obama term”.
Except, it is. Team Biden is filled with the same individuals who ran the show from Jan. 2009 to January 2017. The only difference is the actor playing the lead role.
Furthermore, Team Biden is continuing the vicious war on conservative Americans that began when he was vice president. That war relies on “disinformation” and is waged under the guise of attacking “disinformation”, according to a new in-depth report. It continued throughout the Trump Administration as if the 2016 election had never happened.
“In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course,” Jacob Siegel wrote for Tablet magazine on March 28.
On December 23, 2016, Obama signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, “which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war”.
The Obama strategy’s ultimate goal was to “dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens,” Siegel wrote.
The “half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open Internet to bypass US strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call ‘cognitive hacking,’ ” Siegel wrote. “Defeating this specter was treated as a matter of national survival”.
A December 2016 article in the defense industry journal Defense One stated: “The US Is Losing at Influence Warfare”.
The article quoted two government insiders arguing that laws written to protect US citizens from state spying were jeopardizing national security.
According to Rand Waltzman, a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, America’s adversaries enjoyed a “significant advantage” as the result of “legal and organizational constraints that we are subject to and they are not”.
The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign.
Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting US citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated: “The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren’t collecting data on US citizens. Well, … by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it’s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a US citizen in Tunisia, I don’t have the ability to discern that … If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access … I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time”.
Since 2016, the US government “has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a ‘whole of society’ effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error”, Siegel wrote.
Step one in plan defeat dreaded “disinformation” saw the US national security infrastructure fused with social media platforms where the disinformation war was being fought. The feds started deputizing tech executives as de facto wartime information commissars.
“At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment”, Siegel noted. “But with the new alliance between US national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together. With the D.C.-Silicon Valley fusion, the federal bureaucracies could rely on informal social connections to push their agenda inside the tech companies”.
In the fall of 2017, the FBI opened its Foreign Influence Task Force. The task force’s sole purpose was monitoring social media to flag accounts trying to “discredit US individuals and institutions”. The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role.
“At around the same time, Hamilton 68 blew up”, Siegel noted.
The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a think tank founded in 2017 shortly after President Donald Trump took office, created the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which claimed it monitored 600 Twitter accounts alleged to be Russian bots.
“Publicly, Twitter’s algorithms turned the Russian-influence-exposing ‘dashboard’ into a major news story”, Siegel noted. “Behind the scenes, Twitter executives quickly figured out that it was a scam”.
When Twitter reverse-engineered the secret list, it found, according to Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi, that “instead of tracking how Russia influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming”. The discovery prompted Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to suggest in an October 2017 email that the company take action to expose the hoax and “call this out on the bullshit it is”.
In the end, Siegel added, “neither Roth nor anyone else said a word. Instead, they let a purveyor of industrial-grade bullshit — the old-fashioned term for disinformation— continue dumping its contents directly into the news stream”.
Siegel continued:
“It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.
“The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say”.
