[D66] [JD: 120] US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media

[R.O.]

  US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media

Published on November 25, 2020

By
principia-scientific.com
14 min
View Original
<https://principia-scientific.com/us-uk-intel-agencies-declare-cyber-war-on-independent-media/>

Written by Whitney Webb

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 “war on
terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources
promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that
runs counter to their state narratives.

A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal
intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ),
which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be
“propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19
vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations
involved.

Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military
recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism
officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the
so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at
new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the
Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort
known as Operation Warp Speed.

Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who
raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the
extreme secrecy
<https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/operation-warp-speed-is-using-a-cia-linked-contractor-to-keep-covid-19-vaccine-contracts-secret/> surrounding
state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine
candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) by month’s end.

Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing
<https://abcnews.go.com/Business/pfizer-fined-23-billion-illegal-marketing-off-label/story?id=8477617> and
for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug
trial that killed eleven children
<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pfizer-bribed-nigerian-officials-in-fatal-drug-trial-ex-employee-claims/> (among
other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which
instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the
company’s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company’s 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’s Center for Drug Evaluation and
Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for
product safety
<https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/23/janet-woodcock-replacement-fda/> who
covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects
<https://www.classaction.org/zoloft>.

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 intimately involved
<https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/28/operation-warp-speed-vast-military-involvement/> in
the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.


    UK Intelligence’s New Cyberwar Targeting “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda”

On Monday, the UK newspaper /The Times /reported
<https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gchq-in-cyberwar-on-anti-vaccine-propaganda-mcjgjhmb2> that
the UK’s GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt
anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a
toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material
peddled by Islamic State” to do so. In addition, the UK government has
ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in
“information warfare
<https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/british-military-information-war-waged-their-own-population>,”
to launch an online campaign to counter “deceptive narratives” about
Covid-19 vaccine candidates.

The newly announced GCHQ “cyber war” will not only take down
“anti-vaccine propaganda” but will also seek to “disrupt the operations
of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data
so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each
other.”  The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other
countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance (US, Australia, New Zealand and
Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target
such “propaganda” sites hosted within their borders.

/The Times/ stated that “the government regards tackling false
information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a
reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that
efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to
approval.

It seems that, from the perspective of the UK national-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.

While /The Times/ asserted that the effort would target content “that
originated only from state adversaries” and would not target the sites
of “ordinary citizens,” the newspaper suggested that the effort would
rely on the US government for determining whether or not a site is part
of a “foreign disinformation” operation.

This is highly troubling given that the US recently seized the domains
of many sites, including the /American Herald Tribune/, which it
erroneously labeled as “Iranian propaganda,”
<https://news.antiwar.com/2020/11/04/doj-seizes-27-domains-claims-they-are-controlled-by-iran/> despite
its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The US
government made this claim about the /American Herald Tribune /after the
cybersecurity firm FireEye, a US government contractor, stated that it
had “moderate confidence” that the site had been “founded in Iran.”

In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it
plans to target are “linked to Moscow” gives further cause for concern
given that the UK government was caught funding
<https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2018-11-27/196177> the
Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled
critics of the UK government’s actions as well as its narratives with
respect to the Syria conflict
<https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/beyond-integrity-initiative-scale-ukgov-counter-disinformation> as
being related to “Russian disinformation” campaigns.

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 such as Bellingcat
<https://www.rt.com/uk/504694-bellingcat-foreign-office-higgins/> or the
Atlantic Council’s DFRLab
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/mysterious-death-media-scrambles-white-helmets-founder-james-le-mesurier/263142/> that
a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber
offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the
main government sources for /The Times /article bluntly stated that
“GCHQ 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,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyber war
will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their
suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a
means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on
targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.

This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national
security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in
part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering
Digital Hate <https://www.counterhate.co.uk/our-people>, a member of the
UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism
<https://extremismcommission.blog.gov.uk/2020/04/15/our-steering-committee/> Pilot
Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for
Countering Extremism.

Ahmed told the UK newspaper /The Independent/ in July
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-social-media-anti-vax-misinformation-vaccine-conspiracy-a9604481.html> that
“I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they
are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then
stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy
it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world
views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that
“anti-vaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism.

Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization
<https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_7aa1bf9819904295a0493a013b285a6b.pdf> as
promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were
Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center,
Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.

Similarly, a think tank tied to US intelligence—whose GCHQ equivalent,
the National Security Agency, will take part in the newly announced
“cyber war”—argued in a research paper published just months before
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/27/us-warning-pandemic-anti-vaxxers> the
onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the US ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would
pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a
novel organism.’”

InfraGard, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) and members of the private sector,” warned in the paper published
last June that “the US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected
with ‘social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns’ orchestrated
by the Russian government,” as cited by /The Guardian/
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/27/us-warning-pandemic-anti-vaxxers>.

The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent “anti-vaxxers” are
aligned “with 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–aligned organization.”

An article published just last month by the/ Washington Post/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/coronaviurs-antivax-conspiracies/2020/10/06/96ddd2c2-028e-11eb-b92e-029676f9ebec_story.html> argued
that “vaccine hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging
with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,” which the
FBI named a potential domestic terror threat
<https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/fbi/455770-fbi-memo-warns-qanon-poses-a-potential-terror-threat-report> last
year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical
Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying “The US
anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it’s going toward
more-extremist tendencies.”

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. 

It is worth pointing out that many so-called “anti-vaxxers” are actually
critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed
to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels “anti-vaxxer” and
“anti-vaccine” misleading.

Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making Covid-19
vaccines donate heavily to politicians
<https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/10/big-pharma-continues-to-top-lobbying-spending/>in
both countries
<https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/covid%E2%80%9319-big-pharma-players-behind-uk-government-lockdown> and
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.


    The CIA-Backed Firm “Weaponizing Truth” with AI

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 “machine intelligence” company Primer. Per the press release
<https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/socom-and-us-air-force-enlist-primer-to-combat-disinformation-301143716.html>,
“Primer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to
automatically identify and assess /suspected disinformation /[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.”

According to Primer
<https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/socom-and-us-air-force-enlist-primer-to-combat-disinformation-301143716.html>,
the company “builds software machines that read and write in English,
Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across
large volumes of data,” and their work “supports the mission of the
intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and
research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.”

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 openly admits this
<https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/socom-and-us-air-force-enlist-primer-to-combat-disinformation-301143716.html>,
stating that their current effort “will 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.”

Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the
shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of “truth,” as
defined by the state. Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously
created AI programs for the military to track “insurgency”
<https://www.insider.com/sean-gourley-primer-funding-walmart-2017-10> in
post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April blog post
<https://primer.ai/blog/to-fight-disinformation-we-need-to-weaponise-the-truth/> that
“computational 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.”

In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan
Project for truth” that would create a publicly available
Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already
exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security
purposes.” Gourley then wrote that “this effort would be ultimately
about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and
establishing a baseline for what’s true or not” as established by
intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in
2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.”

Notably, on November 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to
target “anti-vaccine propaganda,” the US website /NextGov/ reported that
<https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2020/11/air-force-turns-machine-learning-fight-covid-19-disinformation/169900/> Primer’s
Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to
“Covid-19 related disinformation.”

According to Primer’s director of science, John Bohannon, “Primer 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.”

Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with
NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told /NextGov/ that Primer’s new
Covid-19–focused effort “automatically classifies documents into one of
10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID” on areas
such as “business, science and technology, employment, the global
economy, and elections.” The final product is expected to be delivered
to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.

Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the
national-security state it is designed to protect by “weaponizing
truth.” 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’s National Security Group is Brian Raymond
<https://primer.ai/about/>, a former CIA intelligence officer who served
as <https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/brian-raymond> the Director
for Iraq on the US National Security Council after leaving the agency.

The company also recently added several prominent national-security
officials to its board including:

  * Gen. Raymond Thomas
    <https://www.govconwire.com/2020/10/primer-names-veralinn-jamieson-raymond-thomas-to-advisory-board-sean-gourley-quoted/> (ret.),
    who led the command of all US and NATO Special Operations Forces in
    Afghanistan and is the former commander of both US Special
    Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
  * Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson
    <https://www.govconwire.com/2020/10/primer-names-veralinn-jamieson-raymond-thomas-to-advisory-board-sean-gourley-quoted/> (ret.),
    the former deputy chief of staff for Air Force Intelligence,
    Surveillance and Reconnaissance who led the Air Force’s intelligence
    and cyber forces. She also personally developed “strategic
    partnerships” between the Air Force and Microsoft, Amazon, Google,
    and IBM in order “to accelerate the Air Force’s digital transformation.”
  * Brett McGurk
    <https://www.govconwire.com/2020/04/brett-mcgurk-named-primer-independent-board-director-sue-gordon-appointed-strategic-adviser/>,
    one of the “chief architects” of the Iraq War “surge,” alongside the
    notorious Kagan family
    <https://www.aei.org/profile/frederick-w-kagan/>, as NSC Director
    for Iraq, and then as special assistant to the president and senior
    Director for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration.
    Under Obama and during part of the Trump administration, McGurk
    was the special presidential envoy
    <https://www.state.gov/biographies/brett-mcgurk/> for the Global
    Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the State Department, helping to
    manage the “dirty war”
    <https://21stcenturywire.com/2019/04/21/us-defeat-in-syria-leaves-only-a-campaign-of-spite/> waged
    by the US, the UK, and other allies against Syria.

In addition to those recent board hires, Primer brought on Sue Gordon
<https://www.govconwire.com/2020/04/brett-mcgurk-named-primer-independent-board-director-sue-gordon-appointed-strategic-adviser/>,
the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as a
strategic adviser. Gordon previously “drove partnerships within the US
Intelligence Community and provided advice to the National Security
Council in her role as deputy director of national intelligence” and had
a twenty-seven-year career at the CIA. The deep links are unsurprising,
given that Primer is financially backed by
<https://primer.ai/about/> the CIA’s venture-capital arm In-Q-Tel and
the venture-capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/mike-bloomberg-ties-jeffery-epstein-harvey-weinstein/265369/>,
Bloomberg Beta.


    Operation Warp Speed’s Disinformation Blitzkrieg

The rapid increase in interest by the US and UK national-security states
toward Covid-19 “disinformation,” particularly as it relates to upcoming
Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, is intimately related to the
media-engagement strategy of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed.

Officially a “public-private partnership,” Operation Warp Speed, which
has the goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by next January, is
dominated by the US military and also involves
<https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/google-oracle-monitor-americans-who-get-warp-speeds-covid-19-vaccine-for-two-years/> several
US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA)
and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as
intelligence-linked tech giants Google, Oracle
<https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/google-oracle-monitor-americans-who-get-warp-speeds-covid-19-vaccine-for-two-years/>, and Palantir
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/palantir-to-help-u-s-track-covid-19-vaccines-11603367276>.
Several reports published in /The Last American Vagabond/
<https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/category/expose-warp-speed/>by
this author and journalist Derrick Broze have revealed the extreme
secrecy of the operation, its numerous conflicts of interest, and its
deep ties to Silicon Valley and Orwellian technocratic initiatives.

Warp Speed’s official guidance discusses at length its phased plan for
engaging the public and addressing issues of “vaccine hesitancy.”
According to the Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the
Frontlines
<https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/strategy-for-distributing-covid-19-vaccine.pdf>,”
“strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure
maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging
across the national media.”

It also states that “working with established partners—especially those
that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing
public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines”
and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence,
countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and
at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”

The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s
three-pronged strategic framework for its communications effort. The
third pillar of that strategy is entitled “Stop Myths” and has as a main
focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of
misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted
messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”

Though that particular Warp Speed document is short on specifics, the
CDC’s Covid-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook
<https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/downloads/COVID-19-Vaccination-Program-Interim_Playbook.pdf> contains
additional information. It states that Operation Warp Speed will “engage
and use a wide range of partners, collaborations, and communication and
news media channels to achieve communication goals, understanding that
channel preferences and credible sources vary among audiences and people
at higher risk for severe illness and critical populations, and channels
vary in their capacity to achieve different communication objectives.”

It states that it will focus its efforts in this regard on “traditional
media channels” (print, radio, and TV) as well as “digital media”
(internet, social media, and text messaging).

The CDC document further reveals that the “public messaging” campaign to
“promote vaccine uptake” and address “vaccine hesitancy” is divided into
four phases and adds that the overall communication strategy of Warp
Speed “should be timely and applicable for the current phase of the
Covid-19 Vaccination program.”

Those phases are:

  * Before a vaccine is available
  * The vaccine is available in limited supply for certain populations
    of early focus
  * The vaccine is increasingly available for other critical populations
    and the general public
  * The vaccine is widely available

Given that the Covid-19 vaccine candidate produced by Pfizer is expected
to be approved by the end of November, it appears that the US
national-security state, which is essentially running Operation Warp
Speed
<https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/28/operation-warp-speed-vast-military-involvement/>,
along with “trusted messengers” in mass media, is preparing to enter the
second phase of its communications strategy, one in which news
organizations and journalists who raise legitimate concerns about Warp
Speed will be de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of
pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.

Read more at unlimitedhangout.com
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/11/reports/us-uk-intel-agencies-declare-cyber-war-on-independent-media/>

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