Matt Taibbi and Mike Benz — March 2, 2023 Twitter Space Transcript

Matt, it's worse than that ...

It's worse than that

You know? I don't know. It's... Uh, sorry, I just, uh, just joined here. Um- Uh, I have- Hey, Mike Uh, hey, thanks for, thanks for having me. Matt, uh, 00:14:00 you're, you're, you're now... I've been following from afar. My name is Mike Benz. Um, I'm, uh-

... uh, hi, uh, hi. I, uh, run a, a, a non-profit free speech foundation, uh, after previously serving, uh, in the government role watching all this.

I've been, uh, what, what- Oh- ... you're doing on your track is what I've been chronicling for about six, seven years, and I've been hoping to talk to you-

... for a long time because I believe I have all of the missing pieces of the puzzle that I've been watching you search for. You've done an amazing job. Really an incredible, potentially history altering job with, with the way that you've put together the, the, what, what you've al- what you already have.

Uh, I have seen you search for certain levels of things that I hope that maybe, uh, if you, if I can sort of upload my brain onto yours and see what you do with it.

Uh, so just a little background on myself. So, um, I was the s- I was the cyber DAS at State, meaning the deputy assistant 00:15:00 secretary for international communications and information technology.

It's a long way of saying I ran the big tech portfolio at the State Department in 2020 during that-

... d- during that time when all of this fusion between big tech and big government was happening. So I, my desk was, I was the one who would field the calls from Google lobbyists when they would want favors from big government.

And in return, we, the State Department, would cram down on, you know, the European Union or other countries in order to get tech policy more favorable to our US national champions. This is obviously something that we've been doing, you know, since the banana wars with big sugar. You know, this, this sort of big government scratches the back of, of, of big corporations always was done with this sort of social contract in mind that Americans would have, you know, cheaper gas prices or cheaper sugar or, uh...

But what was happening in 2020 is the US government was doing favors 00:16:00 for big corporations, and then those corporations would turn around and censor the people who voted for the government. So, so completely... So I watched this all happen- with total horror and fascination. Uh, I was previously i- in, in the White House before that, and then before that I was a, I was a tech lawyer.

Uh, and I watched this monstrosity of the, of the sort of, you know, what I call the ce- the censorship industry as it was, uh, uh, as it was building. I was actually put into that role because I kept warning the White House this was going to happen. No one on the first floor believed me until it actually did, and then they slotted me into actually, uh, into a policy role to change it.

And I had been actually working on a, a whole, uh, I was halfway through a documentary in 2018 about this whole censorship industry when everything that I'd put in the documentary had already come true by, by that point, so it just... I, I've been, I guess I've been on this for six, seven years now. I just wanna, what you just touched on today is- Mm-hmm

is actually now getting to where the crux of things 00:17:00 are. So, uh, uh, by the way, I, I don't mean to totally dominate this by coming into it, so if you want me to, to pause-

... or, okay.

Yeah.

Right. So-

Yeah. No, I honestly... So, uh, this sounds weird and, and I won't, I won't put too much of a point. I know I've already said it a few times, but, you know, I, uh, I don't 00:18:00 think there's a close second in the... Like, I, I don't think it's possible to have spent more hours a day on this exact thing that you're now, that, that you're, you're in than...

I, I literally, my wife calls it the man in the box because my whole life has, has just been listening to this whole network, uh, day and night, and chronicling and archiving and explaining. I've done about eight or nine congressional briefings to oversight Homeland Security, uh, uh, House, you know, House Judiciary, House, House and Senate, uh, Homeland, uh, E and C.

Uh, I've spoken to, uh, I don't know, four or five senators and a handful of c- I've, I've been doing... I, I... But you're someone who can actually communicate the story to a large platform. Uh, so I think that if, if we can talk in a longer setting, I can tell you literally everything. I mean, e- every single individual, every institution, the chronology, the pretexts that were used, um, you know, the, uh, all of, all of the 00:19:00 dirty little tricks that were done each step of the way, uh-

how, how it con- how it connects to both, you know, the policy and the technology. 'Cause y- 'cause it, the, the, the tech involved here is also a lot of how this is powered with AI, and the AI revolution that happened with, with what was, you know, natural language processing and the ability to actually be proactive with censorship rather than the pre-2016 reactive model, uh, that content moderation had.

So, uh, uh, if I can s- I, I sort of, if, if... I know we're gonna talk longer, you know, uh, in another setting, but for the benefit of people in the audience, um, I, I, I thought it might be useful for me to cover, uh, a little bit about how what, what you just dropped today, uh, uh, some, some of the backstory on it, but I can pause here- Yeah.

Please. Okay. So before I start with the linear story, you know, you mentioned new knowledge. And, you know, and exactly what you said, I, about, about the incredible scandal of, of, uh, of New Knowledge's involvement, uh, you know, given the fact that they did a, you know, a, a, a, a i- in their exact words, "We," quote, "We orchestrated an elaborate false flag operation to portray Roy Moore as someone..."

That's a direct quote from their donor request, uh, yeah, uh, report that they did. But it's even worse than that. Uh, this is sort of where I entered the conversation, 'cause when I heard you say that, I mean, it's, it goes so much deeper. So, so New Knowledge, you know, you mentioned Jonathan Morgan and whatnot, but another New Knowledge employee was Renee DiResta.

Now, now Renee DiResta wasn't just, you know, uh, the, it, the top lieutenant under Alex Stamos at the Stanford Internet Observatory for as at, for EIP. 00:21:00 EIP, who was the deputized disinformation flagger for, um, for DHS. They had a formal partnership. They, you know, they had, they, they, uh, uh, starting June 23rd, 2020, and then formalized on dhs.gov, uh, using DHS's 24/7 cyber mission control, they converted it from a cybersecurity mission control, this is EI ISAC, to a cyber censorship mission control center, and they gave EIP special privilege access to have a m- to have a, uh, a content moderation escalase, uh, escalation pathway to every single, uh, social media company's, uh, content moderation teams.

And that was on par with DHS and FBI. So basically they deput- they gave this private group, EIP- Uh, DHS, FBI powers to talk directly to the, the, the key content moderation, uh, liaisons who are all set up initially with these 00:22:00 DHS partnerships to stop Russian... And then they did what I call the foreign to domestic switcheroo.

So, so what happened, so Renee DiResta is, was actually the keynote speaker at CISA in the September 2021, uh, uh, uh, CISA disinformation conference. She gave a, Matt, you have to watch this whole video. And, and it, it, she, this is about a 15, 20-minute keynote speech on disinformation. She, she's one, and she's for a long, I mean, she's literally, she's sort of like the CISA sherpa on, on, uh, on s- on censorship.

You know, and she's been at this a long time. She was doing it, you know, she's got a, quite a pedigree. But she was, but she was the technical director at New Knowledge. So in addition to her, she, not only was sh- uh, she involved on, on the angle that, that, that you're mentioning here, but she is a, she is essentially a government actor on this as well.

I mean, not 00:23:00 just doing an advisory thing with the Senate Intelligence Committee, but she's actually giving direction to DHS and to CISA, and she was deputized. They didn't just, it wasn't like she's just providing, you know, some advisory language in a, in a, uh, you know, in a sort of white paper style Senate report.

She was deputized as the top lieutenant at EIP to censor not just the 2020 election, and by the way, EIP censored 22 million tweets, okay?

According to their own 292-page report, okay? But I have all this chronicled, by the way, my, um, on my, uh, my foundation's website. I've got all of this. I've got a 10,000-word report with about 25 insider confession videos from all these people that, that, Matt, once you see this you're- You're gonna gr- the superpowers I think this will give you with to be armed with this info is going to make everything start to make, make a lot of sense.

But basically, uh, with, with Renee DiResta, 00:24:00 it's, and, you know, EIP, so, so the, in their own 292 page they w- port- now again, they did this just like New Knowledge did because they need to brag about what they did because the competitive, the, the censorship industry is a competitive space. Everyone's competing for the same pool of donor funds and government grants.

So EIP actually got, her lab got $3 million from the Biden administration right after publishing their confession. Every single one of the EIP groups, the, the four, the four groups that DHS contracted out to censor the 2020 election and to censor COVID, uh, ended up getting millions of dollars from the federal government, uh, right after the 2020 election.

But so what happened is, is it was 22 million tweets that they labeled misinformation incidents between June 2020 and November 2020, just in that five-month span, and they did this for 15 platforms. So it was Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. They even went to Reddit, Twitch. They, the, they 00:25:00 combed the entire internet.

In total, the sum damage was hundreds of millions of social media posts and content through a government deputized dhs.gov using taxpayer-funded infrastructure w- through EI ISAC to do it.

I mean, this, this is a scale of censorship the world has never experienced before. This is something... Now I've been following this since the, you know, when, when Freedom House was publishing its, i- its papers on, on the China, uh, the China's great firewall.

There's a 2013 Freedom House report that goes through how, you know, China's internet censorship techniques. I went back recently and compared what, what we're doing to what we accuse China of doing. It's these orders of magnitude. I mean, there's... A- but and by the way, this, this whole DHS... See, that's what I'm saying.

The, and why, I wanna tell the whole story in a second, but just one last thing on this to complete the thumb- the, the thing of it 'cause I don't wanna make this a partisan thing. I don't consider myself a 00:26:00 partisan person even though I was a Republican political appointee both at the White House and the State Department.

But so, so I don't want to focus too much on, on just election censorship. The fact is, is COVID censorship worked the same way. They took this model that, that consolidated itself between the summer and fall of 2020, and EIP, the Election Integrity Partnership, run by Renee DiResta and, and Alex Stamos and Kate Starbird and the Atlantic Council and Graphika, uh, they...

EIP folded up after the 2020 election. They came back and they censored again with, with DHS for 20, uh, the 2022 midterms. But in the in between time, they, they renamed themselves The Virality Project. So they went from being EIP to being VP, and they did the exact same formula where they used what they called the whole of society model, which is four categories of institutions all working together.

You know, they said, they said, "Misinformation is a whole society challenge, and so 00:27:00 it requires a whole society solution." Which is a cute way of saying they onboarded every category of institution from the government to the private sector to the civil society to political like-mindeds in news media and fact-checking.

Those four categories, government, p- private sector, civil society, meaning, you know, universities, NGOs, activists, and then media, which is, you know, basically news media plus fact-checking. Those four categories of stakeholders began a long series of disinformation conferences, disinformation sort of, uh, best practices sharing, disinformation sort of policy formulation, and then they, they grafted that whole thing onto COVID and they used this ticketing system to do it.

I'm working with groups for FOIAs and lawsuits and potentially congressional subpoenas to obtain all those logs. I consider that to be the El Dorado, uh, you know, which is, which you've sort of opened the door and frankly, you've helped m- you've helped me a tremendous amount, uh, to be able to educate policymakers on this 00:28:00 because you...

The Twitter Files, the, the popularity of them and the accessibility of them has opened the door to get more transparency into the next level of them, which is what I'm trying to seek right now, which is this, there's this vast ticketing sys- You know, you, you put-

Okay, I'll stop.

Sure.

Right. So, so just to piggyback on that. So you know, GEC was set up at a ti- You know, so you had this...

W- when, when social media became... You know, the State Department's involvement in social media started with Jared Cohen in, in about 2007. Jared Cohen was, uh, i- is, is a figure who's, who now runs Google Jigsaw. He started off as a 24 or 26-year-old kid at the Office of Policy Coordination at the State Department, which is the, which is the linkage node between the State Department and the CIA.

And he got there in about 2000, 2007. You know, so you had fa- you had 00:36:00 Face- Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, smartphone in, in 2007. Uh, in 2007 when Jared Cohen gets there, uh, he looks around and as he's this young, young, young kid who was basically advising on, on, on how to, um, how to organize youth movements, uh, for purposes of regime change operations overseas.

And so he was helping at, at the OPC, he was helping the State Department and CIA formulate, uh, basically covert operations and, and, and forge statecraft, uh, initiatives around regime change and counterinsurgency, uh, for purposes of us managing the world empire He looked around and he saw everything was being done analog.

You know, at that point the State Department was still using CIA station houses and consulates and embassies. Everything was, was, was, it was analog. Nothing scaled digitally. He said, "Why are we running these operations, uh, uh, through the, through an analog 00:37:00 method when all of the people we want to organize if we, uh, for a color revolution or for a regime change, everyone's on Facebook.

Everyone's listening to things on YouTube. Everyone's talking on Twitter. Why are we running things through embassies when we could be running them through social media?" And so he helped carve under, uh, under the Bush administration, under Condoleezza Rice, a doctrine that came to be known as digital statecraft or Statecraft 2.0.

He, uh, this Republican appointee was considered so critical to, to the next evolution in American statecraft and intelligence operations that he was actually kept on by the Democrats. When Hillary Clinton... When, when Obama won in 2008, uh, and Hillary Clinton ran the State Department, she kept, she kept over this Bush-era holdover, and Jared Cohen became sort of like the cream, you know, the talk of the town, uh, from, from that period And then, uh, he, you know, he's vo- voted...

He was named one of the top 50 most powerful people in Washington at, like, 00:38:00 27 years old. Could have done anything, and he goes over at that point to what at the time was only a nu- number 120 by market cap in terms of corporations, and that was Google. Everyone thought, "What the hell is Jared Cohen doing with his career?"

But turned out that he was going to start this one-person incubator at Google, which was called, at the time, Google Ideas, it's now called Google Jigsaw, where, where it would have the non-profit mission of simply solving, uh, geopolitical problems, uh, that Google has proprietary resources on. What that was was the creation of essentially a shadow state department that would work in the private sector to help coordinate information operations of the State Department with, with those contacts.

It, but it never had a formal place that it resided within State. They couldn't have it, they couldn't have OP, they couldn't have the Office of Policy Coordination, right? That, that's the CIA. So, they cr- so, when, so when the Global Engagement Center got started, it was initially for as, as Matt said, you know, under the banner of 00:39:00 counter-ISIS, right?

Because at the time, Obama wanted to put boots on the ground in Syria, and there was a big sort of, you know, scare around homegrown ISIS threats. Um, and it, it was also, uh, you know, out of this sort of recognition of, of the power of so... Th- there was no s- s- uh, censorship office at State. You know, censorship was always something that was done on the covert side, you know, if the CIA was going to, say, shake down an editorial desk in Germany in order...

Or, or, you know, manipulate information environments, that wasn't something that was done overtly. But in order for something to scale, you know, y- you are going to need some sort of, of overt public-facing front. The Global Engagement Center was, was created for that purpose. And, and it was originally run by a guy named Rick Stengel.

Rick Stengel was the former managing editor of Time Magazine. He was a free speech absolutist, which, which is ironic after, after his evolution, because, uh, Rick Stengel He's a total, you know, dyed in the wool, you know, sort of Atlantic 00:40:00 Council, uh, uh, NATO, NATO fellow, uh, from that sort of traditional foreign p- uh, foreign policy establishment side.

And he was the Undersecretary of Public Affairs, so he ran propaganda. He, you know, he called him- he was a self-described propagandist in chief for the Obama administration. Uh, and then when Trump won the election in 2016, he about-faced everything. You know, it's funny because the Global Engagement Center folks testified on the Hill that, that their job was to, uh was to export the First Amendment abroad, which is ironic because Rick Stengel then wrote a book after Trump won and then published a Washington Post editorial calling for an end to the First Amendment because the First Amendment w- was no longer compatible with a social media age where it could result in people like Trump getting elected.

He called it a thr- a th- this is the guy who ran, this is, this is the founder of the Global Engagement Center. You know, Rick St- uh, you know, uh, the, its first di- director, whatever, Rick Stengel. Uh, and so, so this, so I, what 00:41:00 happened was is the Global Engagement Center became used at, the d- the Department of Defense has a limited amount of, of play with what it can actually do without laundering things through non-military channels.

The, so, so DOD had 120 milli- million scheduled, uh, that was allotted to it for fighting basically Russian influence in Eastern Europe, uh, after the Crimea annexation in, in, uh, in 2014. When Trump won in 2016, that 120 million was slotted from the Defense Department. It was transferred over to GEC because you have to understand even though, even though it was a, now a Republican administration, the, the sort of war hawk, uh, uh, and more tra- the sort of legacy establishment GOP foreign policy establishment side, uh, as well as the careers who were, who were predominantly Democrats totally owned the Global Engagement Center.

They wanted to set up CISA, which beca- which is now 00:42:00 DHS's permanent domestic censorship entity. They wanted that originally. It, it's funny, there's memos that they, that they, that they, uh, that they wrote in 2017 about how they could get a domestic censorship bureau into, uh, y- how to give it permanent authorization.

And they talk about, oh, you know, we could put it in the CIA, but we can't really scale it if we do it clandestine, plus it's foreign-facing. We would love to put it, we would love to have the Global Engagement Center do, uh, do domestic, uh, do domestic counter-misinformation, domestic censorship, but it's, it's foreign-facing.

Ah, we really can't do it there. We want to do the FBI, but the FBI has a domestic, has, uh, uh, is, uh, has a domestic jurisdiction, but it's unfortunately it's the investigative arm of the Justice Department. So we can use DHS to combine the foreign powers of the CIA with the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI without needing a law enforcement predicate, because DHS is the only other equity in, that is, that is in- intelligence and domestic-facing other than the FBI.

But the difference 00:43:00 is DHS doesn't require y- uh, law-breaking as a predicate. They could, FBI could do censorship on, on, on Russia-related stuff because they say, "No, it's counterintelligence," and so this is national security and counterintelligence. They can't do that for your tweets about COVID or, or mail-in ballots.

That was the beauty of what they created at CISA. CISA was modeled on what they were already doing with GEC. They took the GEC model and they, and they applied it domestically by say, by essentially creating a domestic CIA, which I should add is exactly how the Church Committee hearing started when the CIA was doing this in the '60s and '70s, and Ramparts Magazine busted them for basically having foreign intelligence powers applied against domestic political movements.

Um, I can talk way more about this. We'll pause here.

Is that question for me or for Matt? Well- Sorry.

Okay. Sure. Yeah. Well, so, you know, I've 00:49:00 now... My sense of it is that there actually is a lot of momentum, the likes that have not existed really ever to this point, uh, in Congress to actually, uh, seek that transparency. Now, the transparency is actually a much easier ask than legislation.

Uh, and I have, I've gotten encouraging feedback that those subpoenas, uh, are likely to be fired off. I sh- and I should say, by the way, uh, Jim Jordan's, uh, weaponization subcommittee actually did sub- send subpoenas to Google. I believe that f- for, uh, specifically for all of Google's communications with government, uh, representatives, employees or agents, uh, all written documents, all records, logs, emails, you know, all of that.

Uh, so that has been subpoenaed with a demanded response date, I believe, of March 23rd or thereabouts. So there, so the subpoena process... Now, that's from the Judiciary Committee. Um, there could be more 00:50:00 specific and, and ta- tailored ones from, from different committees. Um, but so that's already been fired off, and I should say that there were folks who thought that because, you know, Jim Jordan has received funding from Google previously, that, that he might not take that kind of, uh, potentially hostile action against Google, and I should say that he has impressed in pr- in, in moving forward with it.

Now, what they do with that, that information, uh, the extent of what's provided and whether there is aggressive follow-up is a separate matter altogether. Um, but there are, I believe, a number of ways to, to get at that, uh, if what comes back in late March is not satisfactory.

Let's, let's put it that way. Uh, and that's when things can get done. Does that make sense? Yeah. And Matt, to that- Go ahead ... Matt, to that point, uh, just, just to put on your radar, my foundation has documented a $100 million, uh, from, uh, from about eight different federal agencies in total that are subsidizing the censorship industry.

Uh, here you mentioned, you know, what you're tracking with GEC. And by the way, if you, I can, I can give you a whole, you know, sort of, uh, a ro- you know, roadmap on, on, on the GEC funding because, you know, a lot of the GEC stuff is do- you know, it's sort of laundered the 00:54:00 same way they laundered the Steele dossier, right?

They'll go to like a, a, you know, the University of Cambridge or Oxford. They, you know, they'll sort of liter- launder through British disinfo labs and, and orgs, or British orgs, and then the British orgs will come back and do the domestic censorship, uh, just like with the Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Research Lab.

But, uh, but you know, I, I saw earlier, just because we're talking about government funding in sort of responsive to the question of what to do about it, you know, so- You know, a lot of these GEC grants are only a couple million dollars. Um, the National Science Foundation has a whole new program called the Convergence Accelerator Track F program.

This is something set up in the Trump administration in 2019 for h- for grand challenges in science, uh, around quantum technology and, and, you know, solving these grand challenges, uh, in science. And when the Biden administration took over, they took this, this, uh, this Convergence Accelerator program and they added a new track called Track F, which is for the science of censorship.00:55:00

They say that misinformation is a gran- grand scale... And it's $40 million that I've documented in government grants. And when you see the promo videos for this, I, I did two reports on this. I've got a third one coming out next week. Y- uh, Matt, if y- when you read this, I think you'll be able to do magic with it because, um, I mean, by the way, $40 million is the amount that Sam Bankman-Fried gave the Dem- you know, he was the second-biggest donor to the Democrat Party in the last election cycle at $40 million.

This is $40 million straight from the taxpayers, and it's basically a continuation of DARPA/DHS Science and Technology Division doing it. I mean, this, what they're, what they're creating are AI censorship computer science, uh, tools, uh, frameworks, digital dashboards for them to arm their civil society and tech platforms with in order to s- to censor more efficiently.

You know, they say 00:56:00 fast, comprehensive, and precise. Uh, a- and, and they're literally creating millions of databased people on the basis of whether or, o- they are misinformation tweeters, retweeters, followers, amplifiers. You know, this, you know, it's, it's like the sort of counterinsurgency, uh, population mapping that was done under the Petraeus model in, you know, under, under the, for, for counterinsurgency purposes in Afghanistan, except it's being done, y- you know, it's being done for misinformation domestically.

So it's s- very similar to what happened with the evolution of GEC, where you went from counterterrorism to counterpopulism Well, the same thing is actually happening now in the misinformation space, and they don't even need a terrorism, they don't even need an extremism predicate. You know, immediately after January 6th, it was a little bit easier for them to sort of contextualize misinformation as being sort of a proxy for domestic extremism.

But as the 00:57:00 political energy for that has ebbed, it's all the way down to just misinformation. If you're wrong... In fact, not just misinfor- Malinformation is actually the lion's share of what's ca- of what's, of what's censored, and I can talk about how they actually got that. But malinformation is information that's technically true, or that fact-checkers can't falsify.

And, uh, and, you know, over 99% of the, the 22 million tweets, for example, that EIP censored were in that malinformation category because they, anything about... Well, I can go into all that. But basically, what I'm saying is there's $40 million just from National Science Foundation. It, but you've got, you've also got the Pentagon.

The Pentagon is funding NewsGuard. The Pentagon is funding Graphika. The pe- uh, and, and a do- and a- about a dozen others. Graphika, which, which censored COVID starting in January 2020. A military contractor who's getting, who's getting money for misinformation fingerprinting to see what people are saying about COVID origins.

Yeah, I mean, this, uh, the DoD who, who, who ran point on Warp Speed is 00:58:00 literally c- you know, is contracting out a, a s- uh, their, the, the censorship of, of online dialogue domestically, the US military. And so, I mean, between, between the State Department, the Defense Department, uh, the, the National Science Foundation, uh, the FBI, and DHS, I mean, that right there is basically e- you know, every s- every single one because under their own model, whole of society, whole of government, it requires all of them to each find the thing they can do to contribute to the censorship industry so that it's robust and, and, and subsidized.