Social Media & the National Security State with Alan MacLeod

more specifically social media networks. Social media in the modern era has become the equivalent of the town square and these platforms have come to dominate much of the socialization and communication in Western society and beyond.

Yet unbeknownst to most users of social media, there are long standing efforts by social media companies, as well as the national security state to influence social media users in a variety of unsettling ways, ranging from emotional manipulation to the propagation of specific narratives that benefit big tech, and more often their benefactors. A major theme in my work for several years has been how big tech in the

national security state have essentially fused. Indeed, most big tech companies today double US military and or intelligence contractors, and many of these big tech giants have origin stories that are directly linked to those same military and intelligence agencies. In the case of social media, this fusion has also been taking place in ways that are both dangerous and insidious, especially now, thanks to recent

advances in artificial intelligence. One of the few writers who has been doing great work on this topic for some time is today's guest Alan McLeod. Alan is a senior staff writer at MintPress news as well as the author of two books including propaganda in the information age, still Manufacturing Consent. He has contributed to sites such as the Guardian, The Groza, and Jacobin, and has also published several academic

articles. Several of his recent investigations have worked to expose the increasing fusion of big tech and the National Security states of the US and Israel, including meet the ex CIA agents deciding Facebook's content policy, and revealed the former Israeli spies working in top jobs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft. So thanks for joining me today. Alan, welcome to unlimited hangout.

hiring an alarming number of FBI agents. So what did you find back during your investigation last June and has Twitter even since the Twitter files has it changed? Its hiring practices under Emperor Ilan?

really hear about who is actually making the decision. So I really wanted to know, and they're rather opaque about that. And what I found was basically, that's an alarming amount of people in Twitter's upper echelons, particularly in politically sensitive fields, such as content, moderation, trust, and safety or security, are actually ex FBI, ex NSA or ex CIA. They are basically agents of the national security

states. And very, very often these people actually leave their jobs at the government, and then immediately are parachuted into the higher ranks of Twitter, which suggests one of two things, either that Twitter is actively recruiting from these agencies, or that there's some sort of deal between the US government and big tech. There's some sort of quid pro quo going on whereby Silicon Valley agrees to bring in these agents to help modify and run these sites to cleanse

them politically or ideologically. Either of which seems to be very startling and hair raising something which more people should know about it. So you know, just as an example of this Are the people that Twitter has been hiring in 2019, hired Don Barton, who was poached from her job as the senior innovation advisor to the director of the FBI, she became Senior Director of Strategy of operations for legal public policy and trust and safety at Twitter. And there are dozens

and dozens of examples of this going on. Since Elon Musk has come in, I don't think the hiring practices really changed very much. We have seen Musk firing 1000s of people, but from what I can see a lot of the spooks and spies that Twitter hired a year two years three years ago, are still for the most part in their jobs. And that is, again, a little bit worrying, especially if you are under the impression that Elon Musk is cleaning house and it's going to, you know, remove the

deep state from political interference. I really don't think that that's going on at all.

nature. So one of the other things that was a scandalous, supposedly scandalous revelations at Twitter files was the collusion between the FBI and Twitter, as well, as you know, what we just what you just talked about how Twitter is hiring a lot of former FBI people. But in your article back in June, again, well, before the Twitter files, you point out that in September 2020, Twitter put out a statement thanking the FBI, for their close collaboration and continued

support about protecting the public conversation. And then you know, that a month later, I guess in October 2020, the company Twitter announced that the FBI was feeding it intelligence and essentially, issuing requests that, you know,

that certain accounts be deleted. And this is essentially, the big revelation, one of the biggest, I think, in terms of how it was promoted, you know, revelations from Twitter files, but here you are talking about it well, before so I'm very puzzled about how this was essentially out in the open.

And then, you know, the whole Twitter file situation takes place and acts like it's, you know, a sudden, Revelation, I guess, when, you know, people could have found this information, or, you know, Twitter itself was essentially promoting it, you know, you didn't need necessarily access to, you know, private emails of executives to know that this was

going on. So I'm wondering, Alan, what your thoughts are about why someone, you know, what is the utility of making these revelations, but then, you know, keeping it as business as usual, essentially, going back to the same model, like no revelation, about the FBIs influence on Twitter had even been made. And it just seems a little weird to me. I don't know what your thoughts are.

pretty much quietly in the shadows. And yet, we still talk about Twitter as if it's a private company. This is like a quarter step removed from government control over the means of communication. And it really is a First Amendment issue. And we should be talking about it like that. As you said, in your introduction, Twitter, and these big social media

companies really are a global Time Square. And the fact that the United States and its government has such a close, close and firm grip over our means of communication really presents a national security threat to pretty much every other country in the world. Why this is coming out right now. I mean, I actually talked to some of the journalists who were putting out the Twitter file stuff, and it did seem that they

had been influenced by what I had written. I think Elon Musk has his own agenda, when it comes to the Twitter files, settling certain scores. But he really invited a whole diverse group of journalists in there who started picking apart and started looking at things that they were particularly

interested in. And so I think once that door was opened, the floodgates kind of came through and perhaps some things that Musk maybe didn't exactly want out in the open have now come out, and those for me tend to be some of the more interesting revelations from the Twitter files.

And so if they were public companies, there'd be, you know, a certain amount of regulation there on what they can and can't do, in terms of censorship, because of what you pointed out First Amendment issues. But what we essentially have is Twitter. And of course, a lot of these other social media companies that we can get to in a second, are very much populated with people from the government. And, you know, at this point, we know, at least in the case of Twitter are colluding with

people from the government. So it seems like that argument that these are just private companies? Well, it's kind of hard to make that anymore at the at, you know, at best, they're public, private. And at worst, they're, you know, just tools of

the national security state. So this makes the whole censorship debate very, I don't know, a bit more complicated than it has, you know, it's been treated differently, you know, in the media for some time, but I think it's becoming increasingly hard to maintain what is really, I guess, the illusion that these are just private companies operating unto, you know, as independent private entities, you know, they're tentacle the tentacles of the national security state are intimately

throughout all of these organizations. And I think your work speaks to that.

by the US government. It comes at a cost to the point where, you know, we could talk about any of them, but we periodically see, you know, sorts of intimidation from the US government talks about regulating them talks about breaking them up. You know, there was a point, let's switch to Facebook, for instance, that in 2018, people were talking about, nationalizing Facebook, breaking up and even jailing Zuckerberg for his role in, you know, helping crazy conspiracy

theories elect Donald Trump as president. And just a few weeks after that, Facebook suddenly announces a new partnership with The Atlantic Council, which is NATO, and all but name. Suddenly, Facebook's upper ranks are just filled with these ex NATO guys, who are now deciding content moderation for 3 billion people online. So I think clearly there comes a point where these big Silicon Valley giants become too big to get ignored. And that's kind of what's happening right now. Well, let's

range of debate while also tackling hate speech. It's very important to him apparently to be open and honest about this. But the thing is, is that at no point is he or Facebook, divulge that he was until just a couple of years ago, one of the highest

ranking members of the CIA. So until 2019, Aaron Berman was senior analytic manager at the agency to the point where he was actually writing the President's daily briefs for President Obama and President Trump, meaning that that's the sort of thing that those presidents would have read out to them every day in the Oval Office. So he was pretty high ranking member of

the CIA. He was a mover and shaker there. And suddenly he drops that job at the agency and just gets parachuted into this extremely important position at Facebook, to the point where he's essentially deciding what 3 billion people around the world see, and crucially don't see in their news feeds. But when it comes to the CIA and Facebook, it's really not just our

environment. In fact, I was able to find dozens and dozens of examples of people just from going on places like zoom in thought and LinkedIn and writing things like Facebook CIA and, and it is extraordinary the amount of matches you get. So of course, that's not the full amount of people who are working at Facebook who used to be spoofs. This is just the people who actively and openly admit it on their social media profiles.

I think one of the most extraordinary cases of Facebook CIA collusion is Scott Stern. Until 2013, he was the chief of targeting for the CIA, for the Middle East. And if you're wondering, what does that mean is does that mean like he was deciding where drones get struck in which Yemeni villages get bombed, that is exactly what he was doing. But today, He is the senior manager of risk intelligence or meta, where his

targets are misinformation and malicious actors. And so it is really I can barely think of a better example of the fusion of the national security state and big tech to the point where one can just one guy like Scott scan can go from being one of the most important and you know, bloodthirsty members of the military industrial complex, and is now sitting in a position in Silicon Valley, where he is deciding what everybody sees all the time, and what content you're allowed to see what

content you're not allowed to post. It is really incredible what's going on right now.

the CIA in social media. And then, of course, he gets headhunted and joins Facebook, which has a history of hiring people from the national security state, as you just pointed out, but also, you know, there's another situation that I wrote about a few years ago, where they hired a former DARPA director, for example, to be in charge of what was then building I think, now it's called something like Facebook reality labs. They renamed it a year or two ago, but they they tend it,

this is a long pattern for Facebook. And when one considers the history of Facebook, and how it became the company it is today, you know, you have the really the guy that put Facebook on the map is Peter Thiel, who at the same time he was becoming the top investor. Early on in Facebook, was also creating Palantir, which was designed to be a program a software product, explicitly designed with the CIA in mind. This is attested to by

Alex Karp, Palantir, CEO himself. And of course, Palantir for its first three years as a company exclusively works for the CIA. They go to CIA headquarters, every two weeks, they're their product development managers, to have the CIA tweak their products, you know, very close collusion there. And then at the same time, you have that same network developing Palantir for the CIA, you know, developing Facebook to

a significant extent. And you have people not just like Peter Thiel, but the guy that brought in Peter Thiel, to Facebook, Facebook, Sean Parker, who was recruited by the CIA after as a teenager actually because he was involved with Napster for people that remember that as as a teen and then admits it himself was approached by the CIA as a result of that situation. So it's just interesting to see Facebook, and some of these other social media companies in light of the fact that a lot of

their origin stories have these elements there as well. And if you if you follow it, it's continuous From their inception as a company, to now and it really makes you wonder about social media in general, because I've written a lot, for example, about a program that is now defunct, of course, it didn't really get off the ground, but it was pitched and was going to be implemented by DARPA, specifically the Pentagon's

researcher arm after 911 called total information awareness. And they tried to rename it later, terrorist information awareness, to sound less light, less like a giant machine of, of dragnet surveillance, and total information awareness was trying to get Americans essentially profiled them based off of data about their daily lives, where they're going, who they're meeting, things of that nature, and some of the programs that were related to this, you know, like the Lifelog program was

shut down in 2004. It looks an awful lot like Facebook today. And I think what's interesting about looking at companies like Facebook and Palantir, and how they come out of similar networks is that you know, a lot of the uproar about total information awareness was that the military was directly involved. And Peter Thiel and some of these other guys gambled correctly, I think that people would willingly give up their data if it was seen as up Clearly private enterprise, and

not as part of the state. But what your work has shown in some of this earlier, you know, some of the earlier history shows as well is that it was never really a private venture from the off in the way that most people have been taught, you know, told about it, these origin stories, a lot of these Silicon Valley companies, whether it's true or not, you know, a lot of people imagine it as oh, these these guys were just tinkering in their garage in California, and all of a sudden pops out this

giant company. Well, for Google, we know that's fake for Facebook. We know that's fake. So I don't know what what are your thoughts about that? Alan, about, you know, the utility of this? For the national security state? You know, from the off? Was this something that some of these companies were intended to do From their inception, you know, for the national security state? Or was national security fusion, something that that came along later?

pile is not necessarily completely random. I think in some cases, the sort of rags to riches story of these, these platforms is pretty much true. But in other cases, as you pointed out, it's really not quite the case, there's a lot more going on. And a lot of these companies did have their hands held by the national security state. From the outset. I don't know too much about Facebook's origins. That was very interesting what you were saying. But I have written at

length about Google's origins. And so a lot of people really are not aware of how Google really fundamentally started as a CIA project. In fact, Sergey Brin, his research at Stanford University, according to a great investigation by Dr. Anna fees, Ahmed showed that the CIA and the NSA were bankrolling his research there, and that his research there with the laser produce Google, not only that, they weren't only bankrolling it, but his, his, his supervisor, there was a CIA

person. So the CIA actually directly midwife Google into existence. In fact, until 2005, the CIA actually held shares in Google and eventually sold them, which, you know, if we're going to talk about business deals, probably not a great idea to be selling your Google stock in 2005. But okay, whatever. So we've seen

high tech industries in the United States. The point of it is from the CIA's perspective, is they go around finding small companies, or maybe not so small as well, but companies that are on the cutting edge of various technologies, and try to work with them and develop them and get comparative advantage over their rival countries like Russia and China, so that the national security state of the United States can stay one or

even two steps ahead of its rivals. And for a small company that's just starting in California say, the draw of working with the CIA is huge because that is like an unlimited source of money basically, it transfers a lot of you know, kudos to your company a lot of governmental backing it you know, more I don't want to say ensure success, but it certainly makes the likelihood of you succeeding in a very competitive and difficult industry to break into makes it

much more likely and so I can see it from both ends why companies would want to work with the CIA and in Q tel and why in Qatar would want to work with these companies.

had a very close relationship with weapons manual. acteurs on because the person that created Ankita for the CIA was the exact top executive at what at Lockheed Martin, I think it was Lockheed Martin, actually at the time and went through some mergers in the 90s. To become Lockheed Martin, the company does today. But it was Norm Augustine was the guy that was in charge of Lockheed Martin at the time that the CIA chose to

tap to create, and Q tel for them. So an interesting connection worth worth keeping in mind, because as I mentioned earlier, in the intro for this podcast, a lot of these companies, specifically Google is our major contractors to the US national security state, whether it's the Department of Defense or the intelligence community, or, you know, several intelligence agencies, like in the case of Palantir, that I talked a little bit about earlier, all 18 US intelligence

agencies contract with Palantir. So, you know, it makes sense, I guess, for them, that there would be some sort of revolving

door there. But it's just stunning, when you start to get engaged with this, this type of information in this research, the extent of the overlap, and I really think there's no word we can really use for it beyond fusion, you know, you really can't tell where one and one ends and one begins at this point, you know, maybe you could, potentially a decade or two ago, depending on the company, but But these days, you

know, it's really hard not to see them as one in the same. So as since you were talking about Google, you, of course, have also written about Google in some of your recent work, meaning last year, you wrote national security search engine,

Google's ranks are filled with CIA agents. Can you tell us a little bit about your article there and what you found and what the implications of that are given that Google is essentially a monopoly on major on major facets of how people around the world access information, particularly through the supremacy, I guess, of their search engine?

admitting that they were once CIA agents. This is the sort of thing that, you know, you would have been laughed at 20 years ago for even considering, but it seems to be a total reality. Now, what's a bit more interesting, and a bit more nefarious about this is that when you actually go through these Google employees that were x spooks, none of them are really being put into positions of political unimportance. They're not working in fields like marketing or customer

service. They're going into fields like trust and safety, security and content moderation. And so that really clearly suggests a political motive for these sorts of these sorts of hires. I mean, if you look at, you know, the people who are actually involved in trust and safety, it's very important to

understand who these people are. So you know, just an example, Jacqueline loop, where she spent more than 10 years at the CIA, where she served as a leading US government expert on security challenges in the Middle East. In her own words, she joined Google in 2017, and is now the senior intelligence collection and trust and safety manager. So she's basically in charge of intelligence, and the brains of Google, as you might be able to, say, another CIA employee, between 2010 and in 2015. Jeff,

Lazarus was a political analyst at Langley. In 2017, he was hired as a policy advisor for trust and safety at Google, where he works on suppressing, quote, extremist content, unquote. He now works at Apple doing a similar job. There are dozens and dozens of examples of these people who now work at Google, who formerly were CIA agents, who have just been parachuted into these positions of extreme importance. And this is all happening silently. You know, we're we've been talking

about Facebook and Twitter. And to a certain extent, if you're not on these platforms, you can ignore them. But Google is really too big to ignore. There's no way that your life isn't affected by Google. It's something we use daily, even if we're not really, you know, super online. What you know, what comes up in a Google search has huge implications for how people think for political movements for public opinion.

The The sort of power that Google has over modern society can barely be over, over simplified, and you know, overset, this company has become a behemoth in just 20 years, to the point where it might be the most important and influential

company in the world. Yeah. And so it's close. Its close ties with the US national security state should really be alarming people in all over the world, especially foreign governments, who often rely on Google for neutral and professional services, all the while, they are entrusting their data and all of their most important information to a company that has intimately close ties to Washington, DC.

Google enabled Android phone. And the only way you don't have Google on your phone using an Android is if you use a D Googled Android operating system like graphene Alas, which a lot of people you know, don't know how to really set them up, set themselves up with an operating system like that. So you have a lot. I mean, Google really is everywhere. And in addition to that, what gets left out a lot, of course, is YouTube, which is owned by Google and managed by, I guess, the sister in law of

Sergey Brin. Because he's married to forget her name, though. Shiki sisters. So the head of YouTube is one of those sisters and the other sister is? Well, there's three sisters. But one of one of the other two is married to Sergey, Brandon runs 23andme, the DNA testing company. So YouTube, as people know, obviously, listening to this podcast, was probably even more censorship happy, since, I don't know 2016 or so as

Facebook and Twitter, if not more so. And one of the people that you listed in your article that's, you know, she went from working for the CIA for over a decade, as a political and leadership analysis. She is now the intelligence analyst lead for trust and safety at YouTube. So she's, you know, the person essentially saying, This is who we censor, these are the topics we censor? And these are the ones we don't. And that's a, you know, longtime CIA veteran right there. And it's a I don't know,

pretty astounding. I mean, you would think if so many people were scandalized by some of these Twitter files Revelations we talked about earlier about collusion between the national security state more specifically the FBI, and the social media company, Twitter, why would they not be concerned about the CIA and Google or any of these other companies like Facebook? It seems? I don't know, it just seems a little weird that the

discussion was so limited on Twitter. And, you know, I don't want to pick on anybody, because I'm sure, you know, people that were writing that stuff, we're focused, you know, on the revelations themselves, but at least some people reporting on that, if not, the people that did the original reports themselves could have pointed to how this is industry wide problem, you know, this is not exclusive to any one social media network, you know, this is really what's going on with all

of them. And I would consider YouTube to an extent social media, because it's, um, there's a lot of engagement with comments and people posting back and forth. And a lot of people for years have used YouTube as a substitute for cable television, because of course, cable news viewing has gone down. YouTube views have gone up, it's become, you know, in for many people, essentially a replacement for TV to an extent. And, you know, that adds another level to its dominance of, of information.

And it's really not surprising you'd see the CIA there because, you know, a quote attributed to people like CIA, former CIA director, William Casey, the CIA director under Reagan, was about the need to have large, wide ranging disinformation campaigns to manipulate the American public national security policy unimpeded, because it would be against some of the sensibilities of the American public at large, which, of course, you know, that type of behavior on the part of the

national security state has not changed since the 80s or before then. But obviously, having a tool like Google, if you're the CIA is something that's going to be incredibly useful for you as an agency. But it's frankly, very, very disturbing. When, as you noted in your article, we have people like former CIA directors like Mike Pompeo being like, yeah, we lie and we cheat

and we steal like that's normal here. So, you know, and of course, not to mention the CIA's litany of historical crimes against humanity and even against American interests, not to mention the interests of you know, other states and As you know, election integrity and other countries election meddling, what have you. And what's worth pointing out to

with Google is, I don't remember the specifics of it so much. But I do know that back during the Arab Spring events of 2011 2012 or so, Google played a major role in a lot of that, from what I from what I remember, and efforts to sort of manipulate and for what information was being seen to boost certain oppositional movements in certain countries. and things of that nature, Google played a major role in that. And during that same period of time, you had DARPA, funding extensively

social media for the purpose of strategic communication. And we can talk a little bit about that later. But some of this eventually made its way into the Guardian and other newspapers about how the US military studied how to influence Twitter users, and DARPA funded research focusing specifically on manipulating Occupy Wall Street protests, and then protesting them in the Middle East, specifically referring to the Arab Spring. So this is something that's been going on

for a long time. And as obviously, I think, you know, from what I've laid out here pretty clearly, and Sidious. But I'm wondering, Alan, what your thoughts are about how, how this type of activity, this pattern of activity and how entrenched these agencies are in these companies today? Um, how do you see that impacting things from here on out specifically, when we're considering that the technology they've been utilizing is much more advanced now than it was 10 years ago?

imagination. And the reason it grew was because it was an alternative to what you saw on the television, it was really a golden age for people who were working in alternative media, you could put up videos on there and get real traction and you know, really reach a broad public build an audience and do

really well. And it was absolutely shown when the algorithms back then were much more neutral, people would click on the alternative media stuff rather than the stuff from CNN, or Fox, or CBS or whatever, specifically, because it was of a higher quality. And people would be actually covering topics that you couldn't see, if you just turned on a television.

Unfortunately, that golden age really came crashing to a very quick halt in the wake of the 2016 election, whereby the Clinton campaign and many others, besides in the intelligence community as well claimed that basically fake news on the Internet sponsored by a foreign power, specifically Russia, was the reason that Trump was able to beat Hillary

Clinton. And in the wake of this, we saw YouTube, Google, Facebook, and all the other big social media platforms, change their algorithms radically to promote what they said was authoritative content, and suppress what they called

borderline content. But the problem with this is that the outcome of this wasn't to kick away really low quality conspiracy theories, what it was, was ultimately, the opportunity and yeah, the opportunity to kick away high quality alternative media websites that had been kicking the ass of corporate media on the Internet for years and

years. So for instance, the eye workout MintPress news lost over 90% of its Google search traffic, and more than 99% of its Facebook traffic, within a period of just a few months, even much more established websites like the intercept. Last 19%, democracy now lost 36% of its Google traffic overnight.

And so what I really understand this big algorithmic change that happened in early 2017, to be was basically a coordinated campaign, which was in the interests of big corporate media, and the Democratic Party, and also the national security state to kind of re tighten their grip over the means of communication, which had really been flagging for the last 10 years with the rise of the Internet. And the fact that social media really did offer an alternative place to try and get

information news and views from. So unfortunately, now we've seen as we've been laying out for the last 20 minutes or so, the real sort of powerplay from the US government trying to retake control over the means of communication. Unfortunately, there's very few people talking about this. So I think it's probably going to get worse rather than better. Even though when people do talk about this in print or online anywhere.

There is a lot of interest from the public because I think a lot of people sense that this is kind of going on, but they don't actually have The details.

becoming increasingly more common. But some of them too, like rumble, for instance, is very much aligned with one particular political ideology, which tends to be those who feel most censored by YouTube, for example. But there are some robust alternatives there. But for things like Twitter and Facebook, there have been efforts to create alternative

social media networks. I mean, there's loads of them at this point, but none of them have really ever caught on and it seems like people have sort of become dependent on these platforms in a sense, and that's not necessarily good, if you wish to change major aspects of their, of their policy or hiring practices and things like that, or you want to European opposed to them fusing with the national security state, you know, it's kind of hard as a, as a single user to really have any

influence on on on those decisions. So, Alan, if it's okay with you, I'd like to turn to another social media network that we haven't talked about yet, which does tend to crop up and alternative media to an extent but largely over claims of its utility for you know, the Chinese I guess, military

industrial complex, tick tock. So for example, most people are probably familiar with sound bites here and there from Joe Rogan and other podcasts of that type, talking about how tick tock is basically a surveillance machine, though, unfortunately, for people like that, I would say they, to their detriment ignore the fact that, you know, the NSA, for example, and other you know, surveillance companies on the other side of surveillance entities on the other side, are very much in bed

with some of the social media networks and social networks and other companies we've already talked about today, like Facebook and Google, you know, going back to the some of the revelations from Edward Snowden and others was that, you know, a lot of pretty much all of big tech was openly collaborating with the NSA with very little complaints from the private side about, you know, essentially undermining American

constitutional rights. But anyway, you know, the claim is often made about tick tock in that, in that lens that, you know, it's being used by the Chinese government for the purpose of surveillance. But what you notably pointed out in your article, the NATO, the Tick Tock pipeline, why is tick tock employing so many national security agents? There is, of course, a lot more to this narrative, as, as the title pretty much points out, tick tock is hiring a lot of former

intelligence people. And I don't know, why do you think that might be? Alan?

they're, you know, international conglomerates. But in reality, they usually have bricks and mortar homes in Texas or California, and they are subject to American laws, tick tock was a little bit different, because it was started by a Chinese company bytedance. And I think because of that, that really sparked huge, huge concern in the United States that perhaps tick tock wasn't going to be as ofay wasn't going to be as easy

to manipulate as the other ones. And so in 2020, you might remember this big push by the Trump administration to force tick tock to even sell, its pretty much its entire business to an American company like Microsoft, or Oracle, or face being totally shut down in the United States. In fact, the company actually had secured a deal with Bill Gates for I can't remember the exact amount, but Gates was basically going to buy

the US operation of Tiktok to keep it afloat. Suddenly, though, this big hysteria over a Chinese surveillance of your kids was just dropped. It was like almost overnight, we just had stopped hearing about it. In fact, Gates himself was very surprised to hear that his his purchase of the company was basically nixed, and he didn't even know why. And I didn't know why as well for the longest time. But I did start to put two and two together when I started to look at who is actually being

implied in the higher echelons of tic toc. What I found was that at exactly the same point that the US government stopped making noise about tick tock being a Chinese surveillance tool was exactly the same point whereby a ton of people from NATO and other big national security state organizations, were being hired by tick tock into very important roles in the company to run its most important operations. And again, like Google and Facebook, they weren't being employed in

marketing or customer service. They're being employed in content moderation, to control the algorithms and trust and safety, and insecurity. And I think one of the people that I think is most blatant, and probably is worth knowing about is Greg Anderson. So according to Greg Anderson's own LinkedIn profile, until 2019, he worked on quote, psychological operations and quote for NATO. And he left his job and immediately got put into Tiktok, as the new feature Policy

Manager. So basically, you know, deciding what sort of policies the company would, would go ahead with. And Greg Anderson is just one of many, many people I find, all of whom are working in these politically sensitive fields, it takes up at exactly the same point that the US government stops making such a noise about tick tock being foreign controlled. Now is the Chinese government, perhaps, you know, has some sort of backdoor into ticks off? Well, maybe that is possible. It's not like

they're averse to surveilling their own citizens. So, you know, perhaps that's the case. But really, this is a case of a huge, enormous example of the pot calling the kettle black here. The real danger in terms of surveillance comes from the US government, and not some foreign entity. And that's the thing we should really be focusing on if we are Westerners ourselves.

AI and what it means for the world. And Schmidt also had previously it's concluded its work now but had headed the National Security Commission on artificial intelligence, which was basically a meeting of intelligence agencies, the

military, and big tech. And what they had argued, and sort of what he argues with Kissinger's in his book with Kissinger, is this idea that in order to avoid war with China, there should be an effort to essentially bring together so, you know, we've been talking a lot about how the national security state and big tech in the US had been fusing he wants to, what he talks about when he talks about China, Eric Schmidt, is that he wants to

advance that fusion even more. And he sort of refers to China as that, you know, talking about what they ought to left, a lot of times these people in the US government refer to as the civil military fusion model. But it's really not any different than what has been going on in the US for some time, there's just sort of like a semantic difference or how its publicly treated, that

makes it different. But what Schmidt is trying to say is that in order to avoid war with China, this national security state, big tech fusion in the US, that nexus should merge with the equivalent in China, and that we should develop this sort

of system together. Which is a bit odd, isn't it when you consider that a lot of the same entities within that National Security Commission, you know, for example, are very much into the brinkmanship between the US and China, this idea of pushing us toward, you know, world war three, and some of the stuff that's taught up touched on, for example, and John Pilcher pillagers documentary on the coming war with China, you know, there's a huge segment of that in the national security state,

but then you have these big tech people like Schmidt, who were very much plugged in to the US government right now. And they're, you know, looking to sort of have, I guess, you could say, groups like, tick tock work much more closely, you know,

with sort of their equivalents in the US. So in the case of what you're talking about, in this article, you have, you know, tick tock Canada and tick tock us, you know, these are subsidiaries of this Chinese based company that's been accused of being, you know, a surveillance tool, but it's, it's merging essentially, with some of these actors, relatively, you know, very much in mesh with the national

security state. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty weird. And to me, it ultimately speaks to how some of these people just, you know, want to see this model, I guess, sort of expand for the purpose of controlling information not just in the US but beyond and also how a lot of these countries around the world, regardless of what side of the political divide, they may be on are very interested in developing any sort of technology regardless if it's from enemy state number one, or

whatever, you know, if it serves them for the purpose of domestic control, they seem to be increasingly on board with that kind of stuff.

called the new digital age, it came out in 2013. And in it, there's this incredible quote that I use very often, when he's talking about what information technology really is. Schmidt says, and I've got the direct quote here, what Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century technology and, and cybersecurity companies like Google will be to the 21st and quote, so what he's saying there is that big tech is the ideological tip of the spear for the US Empire going into the

21st century. So before it was all about the power of the US military, and now it's all about the power of us social media, and the tech industry in general, that will further advance Washington's interest. And I think that's maybe what we're seeing here. As regards to China, I really don't know, it does seem much more likely that the US is preparing for war with China rather than cooperation. But, you know, perhaps cooperation would be well,

that this is the only way to avoid war. That's the claim anyway, made by these guys, you know, how influential that is on a military industrial complex that spent billions and devoted a lot of time and energy to putting bases all throughout the Pacific and NATO bases all around Russia for some sort of power competition war at some point. You know, I think it's

pretty clear that there's a competing interest there. But it's worth pointing out that that is a policy vision that's been articulated by some of these people that stand at this sort of this area that bridges, big tech and national security, I just think it's worth them, you know, pointing it out, because you do see some sort of collaborations, it seems like between entities you want to expect like NATO and the US national security state and Tiktok, based on the narratives

that most people are familiar with, you know, it seems illogical to some perhaps why that collaboration might take place, right? Oh, yeah. But

But grafica is doing all sorts of stuff, as you know, in the article, they're cited very frequently by mainstream media, their claims are usually without any sort of analysis on the part of mainstream media just repeated, as fact. And as you point out, they have a lot of national security, connections and all sorts of, you know, weird, weird things about them, I guess I'll throw it to you to sort of explain what graphic is

and its importance. But there's actually, as we can talk about after, there's a lot of companies trying to fit this exact same mold that grafica is, you know, the niche, it's sort of created for itself. There's a few other companies that are are quite similar. So who is grafica? How are they tied to the CIA? And how are they influencing, you know, in what information is able to be accessed by people today?

But that when you start looking into the company starts to really crumble, not only because of who is working for the company, but who is actually funding this company as well. So first of all, they have very glitzy offices in Manhattan. And it turns out these are being paid for by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, DARPA, and the Department of Defense, and also from grants from the US

Navy, and from the US Air Force as well. They've also had funding from the Atlantic Council, which is NATO and all but name. So it's really quite remarkable where this money is coming from that already should start raising alarm bells in your mind. But when you actually look at who works for grafica, it becomes clear that these people are just ex military intelligence, or ex national security state agents going back for many years. So I mean, one of them, for example, is the

head of investigations. Ben Nimmo, who's, you know, he is absolutely notorious. He was actually NATO's press officer for many years. And he's now head of intelligence for Facebook as well. So again, this is the you know, this fusion of think tanks of social media, and of the national security state

all at once. We've got so many people, when you look at food, who actually works there, what his strategy executive service, Chris Bing, he spent 24 years at the CIA, then seven years in the US Army, and then moves into, you know, working for this, you know, people led, you know, private organization, which is shining a light on everything. Joanne Perry's spent three and a half years as a CIA intelligence analyst, before moving to graphical, Lauren pen check, who was who is graphic, as vice

president of financial and operations worked at the NSA. In fact, she became the Director of Corporate Strategy at the NSA, she also worked for Northrop Grumman. And now she works, you know, at this place. So there are just dozens and dozens of examples of extremely spooky characters working for graphical. And when you look at the reports, graphic of pumpout, it's all about Russian interference in US society, or Chinese interference, or Iranian or the threat from Iran or

Venezuela, or whatever. And ultimately, when we see this, this is basically propaganda about propaganda is what I'm saying. There is a huge state led effort by the United States to try to convince Western publics that there is an enormous state led influence operation going on, at the hands of Russia, or China or Iran, that is really the perfidious and the source of all sorts of conflict in the United States.

It's not the internal class contradictions, it's not the fact that people at the top of society are stealing trillions from people at the bottom is actually just pesky Russians, or a pesky Iranians, you know, standing well fake memes around which has got people so worried and anxious.

like, its allies are, must be foreign. You know, bots are like, you know, people paid for influenced by foreign entities, when there's plenty for people living within the US or the UK, or any of the five eyes countries to be in an uproar about how their governments are behaving and doing, you know, whether it's foreign policy, domestic policy, whatever, it's essentially, as I've written about in the past, it's, it's in

a way, it's a war on dissent. By claiming that, you know, anyone that propagates narratives that are deemed unfriendly to the state are treated as foreign adversaries, or at least adjacent to foreign adversaries, which is, you know, remember in this in the concept in the context of this being an information war and information, warfare and all of that, you know, that those narratives are the enemy. So it doesn't really

matter. If you actually are affiliated with the foreign countries, or you're just a regular person, you know, that's the narrative they want to target. And if they have to use a broad brush to paint everyone is a Russian bot, or a Chinese spy, or, you know, whatever fits, you know, they tend to do that. And I think it's very insidious, because, um, this is actually in the Biden administration's policy papers

for the war on domestic terror. It frames any sort of narrative that undermines trust in the US government, as you know, essentially an act of domestic terror, which is just totally insane. At the idea that the only way to not have domestic terror is to have everyone in the US agree about everything. I mean, it's just nuts because the whole idea is that this is all all this has to be done. They say also to protect our democracy but if your homeland centralizing discourse and

making everyone have to say the same stuff. How democratic is that? There's nothing democratic about that at all. I don't know your thoughts, Alan.

one. You know, if anyone's involved in the peace movement, they'll know that, you know, people who were criticizing the US government's role in starting the war in Iraq, or trying to campaign against that, actually happening were called Secret lovers of Saddam, they were doing Saddam Hussein's work the, they love the dictator, or maybe if it was in Libya, they were no secret admirers of Qaddafi, or if it was in Syria, they were talking about, you know, not wanting the US to get involved,

they were actually in a status. Now very few people who were criticizing the US government over these things, Americans, I mean, actually had any love for these three characters. But that was the the paint which was used to tar these movements. And if you go back even further, it goes on. If you were criticizing the US government's role in let's say, Latin America, in the 1980s, you were secretly a red, and you were a communist agent. This is how Martin Luther King and the whole black liberation

movement of the 60s was tired. They were secretly communists, they were getting direction from the Kremlin. And so this sort of McCarthy's nonsense really goes back for decades and decades, if not centuries in the United States. But we are seeing a new kind of twinge to it a new spin on this in the digital age. And as we're seeing a sort of slow decline of American power, this, I suspect might get worse and worse rather than better.

Command. And in that press release, it says primer will develop the first ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation. So that's a very interesting term suspected disinformation, because based on what, you know, we just laid out if you are saying anything that is against the government line, right, as the narrative has been set up, you can just be treated as a

Russian bot, or whatever. So essentially, any narrative that runs counter to the state narrative can be treated under these metrics based on what we've seen thus far as suspected suspected, disinformation, you don't actually have to have proof it's disinformation only, suspicion must be introduced about what you're saying For primer AI and the Air Force to take it. You know, take it out of the news feeds and whatnot. And they're very, just like a lot of the companies you've

talked about. They have a very large amount of CIA and NATO people and all sorts of connections like that. And in this interesting blog post that was published by primers founder and 2020, who by the way, his name is Shawn Gourley. I think he's a New Zealander. But what he did before primer was a he created a programs for the US military to track insurgency, and post invasion Iraq. Yeah. And so now he's turning that to

domestic disinformation campaigns. And he says, he said in April 2020, computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will and 2020 become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deployed to fight them. He then goes to argue that there must be a quote, Manhattan Project for truth. Yeah, where he says there should be a Wikipedia style database written by country's intelligence agencies, and that's going to be the baseline

for what's true or not. So that's pretty insane. And then at the end of the blog post, this last sentence says and 2020 we will begin to weaponize the truth and this is a guy you know, this company is working with social media all sorts of other companies that are very much involved with the information people can or can't access again you have in que tal backing these guys as well as Mike Bloomberg and a lot of people that previously were involved with Iraq War, the Iraq

War surge people tied to Neo cons like the Kagan family, Air Force Intelligence us NATO. I mean, all these guys we've been talking about are the people that stuff primer AI in this effort to go after disinformation and in the context of the Air Force being the contracting group for primer. What I find interesting, there's this 2014 article from Ars Technica, it says Air Force Research colon, how to use social media to control people like drones. Pretty interesting.

Basically turn people into robots that do their bidding, I guess is what I sort of get from that headline, but you have this idea from primary AI that intelligence agencies need to decide what's truth or not for everyone. And it's conveniently

a company stuffed with former intelligence agents. And now the Air Force is contracting it to manipulate what what is seen on social media networks using AI. And previously, the Air Force wanted to use social media networks to turn people into, you know, their robotic drone, like slaves, I guess is how it

comes across. I mean, it seems pretty insane. The efforts currently underway and using AI, which, of course is everyone knows by now is advancing pretty steadily, not just to censor, but to alter people's perceptions with the end goal of essentially brainwashing them, I guess you could say, so that they're easier to control. I mean, it's very insane and insidious. And I just, you know, I'm blown away that more people don't see social media for what it is. I don't know. Do you have

any thoughts, Alan? Well, there

the fact that they have no qualifications to do so. And what I found so insidious about this whole Russian bot narrative, meaning that if you say something that goes against the, you know, collective will of the beltway in Washington, that you're labeled a Russian box, is that to bring it back to what we were talking about earlier, the Twitter files, the Twitter files have really blown the lid open on this Russian bot narrative, to the point where we now know because we have the

emails that even people who are in positions at the very top of Twitter, realize that this entire Russian bot narrative from the beginning was completely baloney. Really, you know, the, the emails from URL Roth talking about this Hamilton 68 dashboard, which was this, which was this program that was designed to find hundreds of Russian bots spreading misinformation, you will Ross was talking about this, the head of Twitter saying this is completely unnecessary horse vs.

And that we have to, you know, push back against it. That's what he was saying in private, but in public, he was going along with the narrative that Oh, yes, Russian bots are a problem. When you actually look at who was on this list, almost all of them are Americans, and you know, quite easy to figure out who these people are. And you can, you know, give them a

direct message and talk to them. Most of them are on the sort of Trump right, but there were some on the left as well, like people like Joe Lauria, the head of

And it's important that people keep abreast of it, because otherwise, they will be fed, filling their heads with all sorts of misinformation.

crazy. The amount of manipulation and how it can just be used to censor your reach and how your information gets out there. I mean, it's it's really a war on independent information on a massive scale. And the people behind it are, I think, pretty clearly up to no good. I mean, they're certainly not up to, you know, democratic value, the democratic values that claim to be protecting right, um, which is about, you know, what

makes the US democracy great. The First Amendment, free speech, all of the stuff I mean, obviously, there's an effort to make it only the Free Speech condoned by these powerful entities in the American government. And, you know, obviously, some of their their allied states, I just find it very, very unsettling across the board. All right. Well, I think we've been going for some time now, Alan, and I want to thank you a lot for your for your time today. And for of course, your

your important work on these on these matters. Because I you know, like I said earlier, I don't think there's just enough coverage about what's going on here because ultimately, when you consider the extreme power that Silicon Valley and big tech and also, of course, socially social media networks have in

our society. At and to have essentially, the CIA and a lot of these intelligence agencies or entities with an awful track record, whether it comes to human rights or democracy are propping up the worst governments in the history of the world dictatorships, what have you, you know, these are

the people running this operation. And most people are unknowingly, you know, in this in this what is essentially a war viewed by the national security state as a war, but they're unaware that they're in the middle of this war, which is ultimately a war for our hearts and minds in the war over over human, you know, on human perception, essentially. And anyway, just thanks a lot for everything you've done to bring

this to light. Because, you know, the Twitter files did some good in that sense, but really your work even before those, and despite of it has done a lot more, I think, to really show the true nature of what's been going on here. So thanks a lot, Alan.

talked about today. So I know that MIT Press hasn't has the ability to be tied to an RSS feeder app just as unlimited hangout does, and a lot of other websites around there. So consider adding MintPress and so you can add to you know, your RSS feed if you if you'd like because Allen's working is great and a lot of other people at MIT Press of course doing important work. Alright, so thanks a lot, Alan. Again, appreciate your

time and your work. And thanks to everyone so much for listening, especially people that subscribe to unlimited hangout and make this podcast possible. Alright, thanks so much, everybody and catch you on the next episode.