"A Total Crock...Un-American" - Taibbi Exposes Censorious Arm Of State-Sponsored Blacklisting
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"A Total Crock...Un-American" - Taibbi Exposes Censorious Arm Of State-Sponsored Blacklisting

The list of state-funded entities pushing narratives, crushing questions, demanding censorship, and feeding the liberal media unsourced 'facts' is about to grow dramatically as the shadowy line between First Amendment protections and Orwellian DoubleSpeak gets blurred by Matt Taibbi's latest exposition from his delving deeper into The Twitter Files.

In the recent past, we have seen the farce of 'Hamilton68' and its efforts to tamp down any dissenting voice of reason as 'Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigners'.

Today, we find about about The Global Engagement Center (GEC), The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), and New Knowledge (NK) - all doing similar censorious things by similar censorious methods, demanding social media entities blacklist accounts for the barest minimum of reasons.

The silver lining of this exposure is that not just does this reduce their reach by their actions being brought into the light, but it turns out that several Twitter executives, including Trust and Security chief Yoel Roth, rejected many of these requests, even going so far as to mock some of the requests. One former intel source sums up the situation perfectly in his comments to Taibbi:

“It’s an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex..." specifically discussing the GEC, but the comments could apply to any of these entities, adding,

“all the shit we pulled in other countries since the Cold War, some morons decided to bring home.”

Matt Taibbi and the team at Racket put together the following thread of examples of that 'shit'...

Take a breath...

On June 8, 2021, an analyst at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab wrote to Twitter:

“Hi guys. Attached you will find… around 40k twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior… and Hindu nationalism more broadly.”

DFRLab said it suspected 40,000 accounts of being “paid employees or possibly volunteers” of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

But the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics.

“I have no connection to any Hindu folks... Just a Reagan Republican here in CT,” replied “Bobby Hailstone.”

“A Hindu nationalist? I’ve never even been out of this country. Let alone the state of NJ,” said “Lady_DI816.”

“These people are insane!” said “Krista Woods.”

Twitter agreed, one reason many of the accounts remain active.

“Thanks, Andy,” replied Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

“I spot-checked a number of these accounts, and virtually all appear to be real people.”

DFRLab is funded by the U.S. Government, specifically the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

Director Graham Brookie denies DFRLab it uses tax money to track Americans, saying its GEC grants have "an exclusively international focus.”

But Americans on DFR’s list, like Marysel Urbanik, are unconvinced its focus is “exclusively international.”

“This is un-American,” says Urbanik, who immigrated from Castro’s Cuba.

“They do this in places that don’t believe in free speech.”

The Global Engagement Center is usually listed as a State Department entity.

It's not.

Created in Obama’s last year, GEC is an interagency group “within” State, whose initial partners included FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others.

GEC’s mandate: “To recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign... disinformation.”

On the surface, it’s the same mission the United States Information Agency (USIA) fulfilled for decades, with a catch. USIA focused on foreign “disinfo.”

GEC’s focus is wider.

GEC could have avoided controversy by focusing on exposing/answering “disinformation” with research and a more public approach, as USIA did. Instead, it funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious – and idiotic – new form of blacklisting.

GEC’s “Chinese” list included multiple Western government accounts and at least three CNN employees based abroad.

“Not exactly Anderson’s besties, but CNN assets if you will,” quipped Twitter’s Patrick Conlon.

"A total crock,” added Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

GEC passed some good information to Twitter, but mostly not.

Taibbi points out that the root problem was exemplified by a much-circulated 2020 report, “Russian Pillars of Disinformation and Propaganda.”

This GEC report was contradictory.

On one hand, it offered reasoned evidence that a specific outlet was partnered with the Russian Foreign Ministry, which would make it a true "proxy site."

However, the same report advanced a far lazier idea.

Along with state actors, groups that “generate their own momentum” should also be seen as parts of a propaganda “ecosystem."

Independence, GEC said, should not “confuse those trying to discern the truth.”

And while the “ecosystem” is not a new concept. It’s been with us since Salem: guilt by association.

As one Twitter exec put it perfectly:

“‘If you retweet a news source linked to Russia, you become Russia-linked,’ does not exactly resonate as a sound research approach.”

GEC sent Twitter a series of reports on a series of topics, often employing the “ecosystem” concept.

Its report on France “attributes membership in the yellow vest movement as being Russia-aligned,” is how Twitter’s Aaron Rodericks put it.

GEC’s report on China was “more entertainment value than anything,” said Rodericks.

“It equates anything pro-China, but also anything against China in Italy, as part of Russia's strategy.”

And so, as Taibbi reports, Twitter staffers showed professionalism.

They tended to look at least once before declaring a thing foreign disinformation. This made them a tough crowd for GEC.

Fortunately, there's an easier mark: the news media.

GEC’s game was simple:

1. create an alarmist report,

2. send it to the slower animals in journalism’s herd,

3. and wait as reporters bang on Twitter’s door, demanding to know why this or that “ecosystem” isn’t obliterated.

Twitter emails ooze frustration at such queries. UGGG! reads one.

Roth noted Bret Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy was quoted in Frenkel’s story and said: “Seems like ASD are back at their old tricks.”

Roth was referring to the fact that the ASD created Hamilton 68, another guilt-by-association scheme detailed in Twitter Files #15.

The Hamilton “dashboard” claimed to track accounts linked to “Russian influence activities,” but the list was largely made up of Americans.

But facts didn't matter to these fact-checkers...

In a crucial in-house Q&A in mid-2017, Roth was asked if it was possible to detect “Russian fingerprints” using Twitter’s public data.

Though “you can make inferences,” he said, “in short, no.”

Twitter therefore knew from the first days of the “foreign interference” mania that the media zone was flooded with bad actors playing up cyber-threats for political or financial reasons, GEC included.

“GEC has doubled their budget by aggressively overstating threats through unverified accusations that can't be replicated either by external academics or by Twitter,” wrote Rodericks.

The same is true of New Knowledge, the scandal-plagued company staffed by former NSA officials that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) hired to do “expert” assessments of the initial batches of “suspect” Facebook and Twitter accounts.

When Twitter saw New Knowledge and its reporter-worshipped “disinformation” gurus like Jonathon Morgan and Renee DiResta were making analytical leaps they felt were impossible, they knew something was off.

After Politico cited a New Knowledge report to the SSCI as evidence for what it called a “sweeping effort to sow divisions,” Twitter dug in.

NK pointed to five supposedly Russian accounts it said were “relatively easy to find with the Twitter public API."

Roth scoffed.

Roth said two of the five accounts were a “small Indonesian content farm… just commercial spam. (Would suspend but don’t want to throw fire on the NK report by making anyone think they’re correct.) Becca account is an American and not at all suspicious.”

Twitter’s Nick Pickles: “New Knowledge’s pitch... pick accounts that they have deemed to be IRA controlled, and then spin up bigger macro analysis... stories about ‘2000 Russian accounts tweeting about Kavanagh/Walkway/Caravan’ [were] often based on media activity from NK.”

As Matt Taibbi concludes, just like Hamilton 68, GEC and New Knowledge littered the media landscape with flawed or flat-out wrong news stories.

Exacerbating matters, Americans in both cases paid taxes to become the subject of these manipulative operations.

Foreign cyber-threats exist, and there are sophisticated ways of detecting them.

But GEC and its subcontractors don’t use those, instead deploying junk science that often lumps true bad actors in with organic opinion.

Twitter comms official Ian Plunkett wrote years ago that “misinformation, like [countering violent extremism, or CVE] before it, is becoming a cottage industry.”

Disinformation is the counterterrorism mission, rebranded for domestic targets.

Reauthorization for GEC’s funding is up for a vote this year. Can we at least stop paying to blacklist ourselves?

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/02/2023 - 16:40
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TD Doubles Down On 10Y Treasury Long In Anticipation Of Hard Landing
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TD Doubles Down On 10Y Treasury Long In Anticipation Of Hard Landing

At a time when the 10Y yield is once again surging (rising to 4.08% from the mid-3% one month ago) and rate bulls are watching the chart below in stunned disbelief as their January gains melt away...

... one bank is sticking to its Treasury long guns. In a note from TD's Priya Misra, the rates strategist says that she is doubling down on her Treasury Long call.

Reminding readers that she recently initiated a long 10y Treasury as she "thought that Fed pricing was appropriate at 5.25% and bond fund inflows were supportive", since then both inflation and growth data has been very strong and the market is now pricing a Fed effective terminal rate of 5.5% (target FF rate of 5.7%) and the pricing of rate cuts has also declined" Misra writes. As a result of the recent powerful hawkish repricing, markets are now penciling in the first 25bp rate cut by Mar 2024 and a total of 170bp of cuts are priced in the 2y years after hikes end (down from 220bp in mid-Jan). In addition, global rates have risen, putting upward pressure on term premium.

So why double down now?

As she explains, "we initiated only half the risk in our trade since we were worried about strong incoming data, and we double down on the position."

The thesis is simple: the hawkish Fed is likely to take policy even more restrictive, "increasing the odds of a hard landing", and thus a recession which sends yields across the curve sharply lower. Needless to say, strong data remains the biggest risk for the trade since a higher terminal rate will drag the 10y rate higher as well.

"Monetary policy works with a lag and once the savings buffer has been eliminated we think that consumption will slow" Misra predicts, adding that the long TSY thesis is boosted by "bond fund inflows which have continued."

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/02/2023 - 15:00
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The UK Is "Rationing" Vegetables... & It's All About Normalization
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The UK Is "Rationing" Vegetables... & It's All About Normalization

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

The past few days have seen certain fruits and vegetables “rationed” by major UK supermarkets.

Aldi, Morrisons, Tesco and Sainsbury’s have all put limits on customer purchases of peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers.

Just yesterday, Lidl added their own name to that list.

Many – including Justin King, former Sainsbury’s CEO – have jumped at the chance to lay the blame at Brexit’s feet.

But that doesn’t make much sense, since Morocco – whence the UK imports a lot of salad vegetables – obviously isn’t in the EU. Further, Ireland has been affected too, plus we’re only 5 months removed from France (and other EU nations) facing their own “catastrophic food shortages”

The other side of the Brexit divide is firmly set on blaming any shortages on the weather. Of course, that’s also helpful to the establishment narrative since the “bad weather” angle can be swiftly and easily parlayed into discussions about climate change. In fact, it already has been.

The real reason there are shortages – supposing there are real shortages, not just psy-op nonsense like the toilet paper fiasco at the beginning of the “pandemic” – is that, one way or another, they have been engineered.

The cost of producing, harvesting and transporting all crops has spiked because the cost of oil and gas was deliberately inflated. The cost of growing crops has increased because there is a “shortage” of fertiliser – likewise purposefully created.

Both of these are “blamed” on the war in Ukraine, but the war but both the energy crisis and fertiliser crisis predate the war in Ukraine (see here and here). We covered this in detail last spring when “food shortages” first hit the headlines.

Speaking of Ukraine, it’s currently easier to get tomatoes in war-torn Kherson than in London. That’s the reality we’re being presented with.

In short, the rationing is just another narrative that doesn’t make internal sense. It’s due to Brexit but isn’t. It’s due to the weather, but not everywhere. It’s a in some stores and not others and apparently in some places but not others and apparently only affecting major supermarkets.

According to one farmer, these supermarkets could make up the shortfall in imports by buying domestically grown produce, but are refusing to incur those costs. Further evidence that the food shortage narrative must be serving a purpose.

And all the while empty shelves and rationing are being normalised.

Neil Oliver nailed it in his most recent monologue:

They’re rationing tomatoes in the supermarkets. We’re told it’s about supply chains, bad weather and the price of heating, but right now, in terms of the messaging, I suspect it’s more about pushing the word – rationing. Less about any believable shortage of food and more about getting us used to hearing the word.

No doubt, if experience is anything to go by, the rest will come later. My money says the rationing app for our smartphones is already sitting on a hard drive somewhere, ready when we are.

For now, it’s more of a familiar process of psychological manipulation. Get us acquainted with the general idea of food scarcity so that we’re well-primed when the planned reality is unrolled.

We were given the same treatment with words like “lockdown” and “pandemic”, “mandate” and “denier”. Nudge, nudge. Rationing is a word from our parents’ and grandparents’ generation, a bit like “War in Europe” and “Fascist” and now they’re back in fashion once more. Rationing, I ask you, while the landfills swell with fresh food dumped every day.

That’s all it’s about. And it is carefully calculated.

Just as Roald Dahl is the first little taste of retroactive censorship – made acceptable by both his controversial legacy and the fact he wrote for children – this is the thin end of the rationing wedge. It’s just tomatoes, after all. No hardship is it?

And yet the head of the UK’s Farmers Union said it would likely get worse, calling it “the tip of the iceberg” (he wasn’t even making a lettuce pun, which is an awful wasted opportunity).

Maybe we should all eat insects or lab-grown paste instead of importing vegetables, amiright?

Tyler Durden Wed, 03/01/2023 - 06:30
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Mass Drone Attack Unleashes Chaos, Air Raid Sirens Inside Russia
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Mass Drone Attack Unleashes Chaos, Air Raid Sirens Inside Russia

Russia has come under attack by multiple drones on Tuesday, with one of those drones reportedly causing a fire at an oil depot in the southern part of the country, and another hitting outside Moscow.

The attack on the oil facility happened in Tuapse, which lies about 150 miles southeast of the Crimean peninsula, with Reuters citing local media to report, "Emergency services put out a fire at an oil depot in southern Russia overnight after a drone was spotted flying overhead, the RIA news agency said on Tuesday." Crucially, Tuapse is about 500 kilometers from the nearest Ukrainian-held territory, which exhibits significant reach assuming the UAV was launched by the Ukrainians.

Ukrainian mystery weapon strikes again... likely drone laden with explosives reached all the way to the oil terminal in the town of Tuapse.

The fires which started at the facility at about 2:30am were extinguished after they spread to an area of some 200 square meters. "The oil tanks were not affected. There was no spill of oil products. No injuries," a local official, Sergei Boyko, described.

Another drone crashed in the Moscow region on the same day, with Governor Andrei Vorobyov saying it was likely an operation to target civilian infrastructure.

"This happened near the village of Gubastovo, the target was probably a civilian infrastructure facility, it was not damaged. There are no casualties or destruction on the ground," Vorobyov said on his Telegram channel, as translated by the Moscow Times.

"The FSB and other competent authorities are dealing with the situation, nothing threatens the safety of residents," he added. The Moscow Times notes that unverified reports said the drone was a Ukrainian UJ-22 Airborne manufactured by Ukrjet.

The Russian defense ministry in a statement made mention of another drone attack in southern Russia, close in time to the attack on the oil facility which it says was intercepted:

The attacks — in the Krasnodar and Adygea regions — had been "suppressed" and failed to inflict any damage, it said.

But it followed reports by Russian state news agencies of a fire at an oil depot in Krasnodar, around 240km south-east of the Crimean peninsula, after a drone was spotted flying overhead.

The Russian defense ministry stated that "The Kyiv regime attempted to use unmanned aerial vehicles to attack civilian infrastructure in the Krasnodar region and the Adygea Republic." It claimed further,  "The UAVs were neutralized by electronic warfare units."

There may have additionally been a drone incident in the border area of the Belgorod region. The Daily Beast described it as a night of chaos for Russians:

The strikes were part of what local media described as a "mass drone attack" that appears to have intensified in the last 24 hours.

On Monday morning, residents of an apartment building in the Belgorod region, near the border with Ukraine, were forced to evacuate in the middle of the night after one of four drones crashed into the building, according to Baza. Another drone landed on the roof of a supermarket and exploded, scorching the premises.

And possibly another attempted attack in St. Petersburg: 

Hours later, St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport came to a standstill as authorities shut down the surrounding airspace, reportedly in response to an "unidentified flying object" spotted in the area.

Amid all the local reports coming out of Russia, there were in total possibly half-a-dozen to a dozen or more inbound drones which had been sent against various Russian cities overnight into Tuesday.

This comes after a past year which witnessed a number of sporadic drone and alleged sabotage attacks on sensitive Russian facilities, including military bases, as Ukraine and its backers grow more emboldened. 

One December investigative report written by a US special forces veteran said the CIA was behind many of the covert sabotage operations happening with increasing frequency on Russian soil. President Putin has recently said he sees the conflict in Ukraine and West-backed proxy war there as a fight for the survival of the Russian people, alluding to it as an 'existential threat' in fresh comments.

Bayraktar TB2 drone during an exercise in 2021, Getty Images

The timing of these fresh, brazen attacks on Russian appears significant, given that just within the last few days there's been some actual international momentum toward getting serious about an eventual brokered peace - this after China unveiled its 12-point plan for negotiated ceasefire on Friday. Will efforts at peace be sabotaged before a process can ever hope to get off the ground? If Russian soil keeps getting attacked, it's very unlikely the two sides will even come close to seriously contemplating negotiations.

Tyler Durden Wed, 03/01/2023 - 05:45
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Biden Supports 'Safe And Secure' Gain-of-Function Research, White House Says
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Biden Supports 'Safe And Secure' Gain-of-Function Research, White House Says

Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClear Wire,

While the White House reported Monday that the U.S. intelligence community has not yet reached a “consensus” on the origins of the COVID-19 virus, the Biden administration voiced support for the practice of gain-of-function research, so long as it was done safely, securely, and with transparency.

As complicated as it is complex, such research generally refers to the intentional manipulation of viruses to make them more transmissible, and therefore more dangerous, in order to study them. Critics argue the risks outweigh any potential reward if this kind of research goes wrong.

Congressional Republicans, led by Sens. Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Rand Paul, say that the coronavirus likely leaked from a Chinese research facility in Wuhan that was engaging in that kind of research and have called for a moratorium on federal funding to any university or organizations conducting gain-of-function studies.

When RealClearPolitics asked Monday if President Biden thought gain of function was “prudent,” John Kirby, the president’s National Security Council spokesman replied that he did.

“He believes that it’s important to help prevent future pandemics, which means he understands that there has to be legitimate scientific research into the sources or potential sources of pandemics so that we understand it so that we can prevent them and we prevent them from happening obviously,” Kirby said before adding that the president believed any such research “must be done in a safe and secure manner and as transparent as possible to the rest of the world.”

To sum up, Kirby then told RCP, “I think that’s a fancy way of saying ‘yes.’”

The Obama administration reached a different conclusion in 2014 and halted taxpayer funding for such research. Three years later, during the Trump administration, the National Institute of Health lifted that moratorium.

Republicans have accused the NIH of funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through an intermediary, the American biomedical company EcoHealth Alliance. Dr. Anthony Fauci, formerly the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Congress in May of 2021 that NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Critics have returned to that controversy in light of new reporting by the Wall Street Journal that the Energy Department has concluded the COVID-19 most likely arose from a laboratory leak. That theory was first posited during the Trump administration and widely dismissed at the time as a conspiracy theory. It increasingly seems plausible after a separate earlier analysis by the FBI concluded that the lab in Wuhan was the “likely” origin of the virus.

“If we have learned anything from this pandemic, it’s that risky virus-enhancing research – like the type conducted in Wuhan that was funded by the U.S. government – needs more oversight and regulation,” Rand Paul told RCP.

A physician and a vocal critic of Fauci, Paul added that “worldwide approximately 15 million people died – the memory of their deaths demands that we have more scrutiny of this dangerous research.”

Congressional Republicans already promised more oversight and investigations into the issue, especially after the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General wrote in a report last month that “NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address” whether EcoHealth Alliance complied with reporting requirements. 

The White House did not confirm the WSJ report but reiterated that Biden had “doubled down” and ordered that considerable resources are put behind “getting to the bottom of the origins of COVID-19.” Republicans, meanwhile, continue to argue that Biden is going soft on Beijing.

“The Biden White House won’t have credibility on safe scientific research so long as it continues to dismiss the growing evidence that COVID came from a gain-of-function lab accident in China,” Marco Rubio, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told RCP.

Biden drew the ire of Republicans last summer when his administration declined to say whether the president personally urged Chinese President Xi Jinping to cooperate with international investigations of the pandemic’s origin. So far, Beijing has not done so, blocking the World Health Organization, for instance, from conducting additional on-the-ground probe.

Asked if the president has broached the issue, Kirby noted how the administration has regularly called on Beijing to be more transparent and told RCP that Biden called for additional cooperation “when he met with President Xi in Bali just a couple of months ago.” A White House readout of that meeting, as the New York Post reported at the time, did not include any mention of the origins of COVID.

Controversy continues on the gain-of-function front. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NASB) recommended sweeping new changes to how the government regulates gain-of-function experiments last month. As the New York Times reported, the decision now rests with the Biden administration as it seeks to balance the apparent need for research to prevent a pandemic with the possibility of that kind of research inadvertently jumpstarting a plague.

“If the government implements the spirit of what they’ve written,” Gregory Koblentz, a biodefense specialist at George Mason University, told the Times, “this would be a major overhaul of dual-use research oversight in the United States.”

That kind of research remains “vital for ensuring the United States is prepared to rapidly detect, respond to, and recover from future infectious disease threats,” Acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak said last year. What is needed is balance, he explained in a February 2021 statement announcing the review by the NASB board. “Such research can be inherently high risk given the possibility of biosafety lapses or deliberate misuse,” Tabak said. “However, not doing this type of research could impair our ability to prepare for and/or respond to future consequential biological threats.”

As the New York Times noted, the White House will soon decide whether to adopt the new recommendations for how gain of function should be handled. Biden, as Kirby told RCP, believes that kind of research can be done prudently.

Tyler Durden Tue, 02/28/2023 - 20:45
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