{"id":37604,"date":"2020-11-20T12:22:06","date_gmt":"2020-11-20T16:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=37604"},"modified":"2020-11-20T12:22:58","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T16:22:58","slug":"why-are-the-us-and-uk-intelligence-communities-waging-cyber-war-on-the-alt-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=37604","title":{"rendered":"Why are the US and UK Intelligence Communities waging cyber-war on the Alt Media<\/i>?"},"content":{"rendered":"

US \u2013 UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media<\/strong><\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

British and American state intelligence agencies are \u201cweaponizing truth\u201d to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced \u201ccyber war\u201d to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives.<\/h3>\n

by Whitney Webb
\nUnlimited Hangout<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9\/11 \u201cwar on terror\u201d are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting \u201cvaccine hesitancy\u201d and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.<\/p>\n

A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK\u2019s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be \u201cpropaganda\u201d that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.<\/p>\n

Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm\u2014stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State\u2014to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting \u201csuspected\u201d disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military\u2013led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.<\/p>\n

Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or\u00a0the extreme secrecy<\/a>\u00a0surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer\u2019s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month\u2019s end.<\/p>\n

Pfizer\u2019s history of being\u00a0fined billions for illegal marketing<\/a>\u00a0and for bribing government officials to help them cover up\u00a0an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children<\/a>\u00a0(among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company\u2019s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company\u2019s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA\u2019s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is\u00a0the former Pfizer vice president for product safety<\/a>\u00a0who covered up\u00a0the connection of one of its products to birth defects<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Pedestrians walk past Pfizer world headquarters in New York on Monday Nov. 9, 2020. Pfizer says an early peek at its vaccine data suggests the shots may be 90% effective at preventing COVID-19, but it doesn\u2019t mean a vaccine is imminent. (AP Photo\/Bebeto Matthews)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are\u00a0intimately involved<\/a>\u00a0in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.<\/p>\n

UK Intelligence\u2019s New Cyberwar Targeting \u201cAnti-Vaccine Propaganda\u201d<\/h2>\n

On Monday, the UK newspaper\u00a0The Times\u00a0<\/em>reported<\/a>\u00a0that the UK\u2019s GCHQ \u201chas begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states\u201d and \u201cis using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State\u201d to do so. In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military\u2019s 77th Brigade, which\u00a0specializes in \u201cinformation warfare<\/a>,\u201d to launch an online campaign to counter \u201cdeceptive narratives\u201d about Covid-19 vaccine candidates.<\/p>\n

The newly announced GCHQ \u201ccyber war\u201d will not only take down \u201canti-vaccine propaganda\u201d but will also seek to \u201cdisrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the \u201cFive Eyes\u201d alliance (US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such \u201cpropaganda\u201d sites hosted within their borders.<\/p>\n

The Times<\/em>\u00a0stated that \u201cthe government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,\u201d suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.<\/p>\n

It seems that, from the perspective of the UK\u00a0national-security state, those who question corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and its possible impact on the leading experimental Covid-19 vaccine candidates (all of which use experimental vaccine technologies that have never before been approved for human use) should be targeted with tools originally designed to combat terrorist propaganda.<\/p>\n

While\u00a0The Times<\/em>\u00a0asserted that the effort would target content \u201cthat originated only from state adversaries\u201d and would not target the sites of \u201cordinary citizens,\u201d the newspaper suggested that the effort would rely on the US government for determining whether or not a site is part of a \u201cforeign disinformation\u201d operation.<\/p>\n

This is highly troubling given that the US recently seized the domains of many sites, including the\u00a0American Herald Tribune<\/em>, which\u00a0it erroneously labeled as \u201cIranian propaganda,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0despite its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The US government made this claim about the\u00a0American Herald Tribune\u00a0<\/em>after the cybersecurity firm FireEye, a US government contractor, stated that it had \u201cmoderate confidence\u201d that the site had been \u201cfounded in Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it plans to target are \u201clinked to Moscow\u201d gives further cause for concern given that the UK government was\u00a0caught funding<\/a>\u00a0the Institute for Statecraft\u2019s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled critics of the UK government\u2019s actions as well as its narratives\u00a0with respect to the Syria conflict<\/a>\u00a0as being related to \u201cRussian disinformation\u201d campaigns.<\/p>\n

Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor, or perhaps even an allied media organization\u00a0such as Bellingcat<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0the Atlantic Council\u2019s DFRLab<\/a>\u00a0that a given site is \u201cforeign propaganda\u201d in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the main government sources for\u00a0The Times\u00a0<\/em>article bluntly stated that \u201cGCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,\u201d which suggests that the targets of GCHQ\u2019s new cyber war will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected \u201cforeign\u201d origin. The \u201cforeign\u201d aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ\u2019s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.<\/p>\n

This larger pivot toward treating alleged \u201canti-vaxxers\u201d as \u201cnational security threats\u201d has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of\u00a0the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate<\/a>,\u00a0a member of the UK government\u2019s\u00a0Steering Committee on Countering Extremism<\/a>\u00a0Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government\u2019s Commission for Countering Extremism.<\/p>\n

Ahmed told the UK newspaper\u00a0The Independent<\/em>\u00a0in July<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cI would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.\u201d He then stated that \u201conce someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it\u2019s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,\u201d thereby implying that \u201canti-vaxxers\u201d might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites\u00a0cited by Ahmed\u2019s organization<\/a>\u00a0as promoting such \u201cextremism\u201d that poses a \u201cnational security risk\u201d were Children\u2019s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.<\/p>\n

Similarly, a think tank tied to US intelligence\u2014whose GCHQ equivalent, the National Security Agency, will take part in the newly announced \u201ccyber war\u201d\u2014argued in\u00a0a research paper published just months before<\/a>\u00a0the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that \u201cthe US \u2018anti-vaxxer\u2019 movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a \u2018pandemic with a novel organism.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

InfraGard, \u201ca partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector,\u201d warned in the paper published last June that \u201cthe US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with \u2018social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns\u2019 orchestrated by the Russian government,\u201d\u00a0as cited by\u00a0The Guardian<\/em><\/a>. The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent \u201canti-vaxxers\u201d are aligned \u201cwith other conspiracy movements including the far right . . . and social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns by many foreign and domestic actors. Included among these actors is the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government\u2013aligned organization.\u201d<\/p>\n

An article published just last month\u00a0by the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em><\/a>\u00a0argued that \u201cvaccine\u00a0hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,\u201d which the FBI\u00a0named a potential domestic terror threat<\/a>\u00a0last year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying \u201cThe US anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it\u2019s going toward more-extremist tendencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Simone Warstat of Louisville, Colo., waves a placard during a rally against a legislative bill to make it more difficult for parents to opt out for non-medical reasons to immunize their children Sunday, June 7, 2020, in Denver.\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is worth pointing out that many so-called \u201canti-vaxxers\u201d are actually critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels \u201canti-vaxxer\u201d and \u201canti-vaccine\u201d misleading. Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making Covid-19 vaccines\u00a0donate heavily to politicians<\/a>in both countries<\/a>\u00a0and have been involved in numerous safety scandals, using state intelligence agencies to wage cyber war against sites that investigate such concerns is not only troubling for the future of journalism but it suggests that the UK is taking a dangerous leap toward becoming a country that uses its state powers to treat the enemies of corporations as enemies of the state.<\/p>\n

The CIA-Backed Firm \u201cWeaponizing Truth\u201d with AI<\/h2>\n

In early October, the US Air Force and US Special Operations Command announced that they had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the US-based \u201cmachine intelligence\u201d company Primer. Per\u00a0the press release<\/a>, \u201cPrimer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess\u00a0suspected disinformation\u00a0<\/em>[emphasis added]. Primer will also enhance its natural language processing platform to automatically analyze tactical events to provide commanders with unprecedented insight as events unfold in near real-time.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Primer<\/a>, the company \u201cbuilds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data,\u201d and their work \u201csupports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.\u201d In other words, Primer is developing an algorithm that would allow the national-security state to outsource many military and intelligence analyst positions to AI. In fact, the company\u00a0openly admits this<\/a>, stating that their current effort \u201cwill automate the work typically done by dozens of analysts in a security operations center to ingest all of the data relevant to an event as it happens and funnel it into a unified user interface.\u201d<\/p>\n

Primer\u2019s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of \u201ctruth,\u201d as defined by the state. Primer\u2019s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military\u00a0to track \u201cinsurgency\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in\u00a0an April blog post<\/a>\u00a0that \u201ccomputational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a \u201cManhattan Project for truth\u201d that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of \u201cknowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries\u2019 intelligence agencies for national security purposes.\u201d Gourley then wrote that \u201cthis effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what\u2019s true or not\u201d as established by intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that \u201cin 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notably, on November 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to target \u201canti-vaccine propaganda,\u201d\u00a0the US website\u00a0NextGov<\/em>\u00a0reported that<\/a>\u00a0Primer\u2019s Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to \u201cCovid-19 related disinformation.\u201d According to Primer\u2019s director of science, John Bohannon, \u201cPrimer will be integrating bot detection, synthetic text detection and unstructured textual claims analysis capabilities into our existing artificial intelligence platform currently in use with DOD. . . . This will create the first unified mission-ready platform to effectively counter Covid-19-related disinformation in near-real time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told\u00a0NextGov<\/em>\u00a0that Primer\u2019s new Covid-19\u2013focused effort \u201cautomatically classifies documents into one of 10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID\u201d on areas such as \u201cbusiness, science and technology, employment, the global economy, and elections.\u201d The final product is expected to be delivered to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.<\/p>\n

Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the national-security state it is designed to protect by \u201cweaponizing truth.\u201d Primer proudly promotes itself as having more than 15 percent of its staff hailing from the US intelligence community or military. The director of the company\u2019s National Security Group is\u00a0Brian Raymond<\/a>, a former CIA intelligence officer who\u00a0served as<\/a>\u00a0the Director for Iraq on the US National Security Council after leaving the agency.<\/p>\n

The company also recently added several prominent national-security officials to its board including:<\/p>\n