UPDATE May 24th, 2024
In the wake of a major hacking scandal in the summer of 2020 in which 130 high-profile accounts — including those belonging to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Elon Musk — Twitter hired famed ex-hacker and cybersecurity expert Peiter “Mudge” Zatko to address the problem.
In late December of 2020, Zatko asked Twitter employees for visiblity into their security arrangements. By the day after the Capitol Hill riot, on January 7, 2021, as reported in Public, Zatko recommended that Twitter hire an outside contractor.
“I feel an external investigation may be quite valuable,” he said, in a Slack chat. “I’d recommend Alethea Group for the disinformation angle.”
Alethea was an interesting choice. At the time only just founded in 2019, some of the firm’s initial capital came by way of a $10 million investment by Ballistic Ventures, led by Ted Schlein and Kevin Mandia. Schlein, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, sat on the board of trustees of the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. When asked if In-Q-Tel funded Alethea Group, Schlein told Public, “This is a question either the company or InQTel should answer, not me.”
Alethea would go on to conduct two sets of audits for Twitter. The company fought hard to keep these reports private, but the authors (and many journalists who saw them) never released the full contents, either. They are embarrassing to Twitter, but the contractors’ recommendations for fixing the company’s “vulnerabilities” are also unnerving, and in parts read like the stuff of science fiction:
Massie stepping up with a BILL to DEFUND!
I've introduced HR 8519 to eliminate taxpayer funding of online censorship.
The Twitter Files showed the government colludes with private companies and universities to violate the 1st Amendment.
Congress must use the power of the purse to end this unconstitutional activity.
The ORIGINAL POST MAY 23rd, 2024
Here are a few quotes and links to Matt’s work as well as a few of my own interactions with Clint Watts around this same issue of government funded think tanks devoted to censorship and propaganda, especially around Health Freedom ISSUES!
Jenny Hatch
First, this is not the story I referenced about plans for souped-up, AI-themed versions of the Stanford-run, DHS and DOS-partnered Election Integrity Partnership heading into the 2024 election. That’s still to come, and part of a separate series in collaboration with Public.
The following documents do however show that participants in the original Election Integrity Partnership planned to continue and expand their program into 2024 and beyond:
Shellenberger Tweet Thread is HERE!
Podcast about Michael’s Thread. I listened to almost all of this four hour chat this morning.
It was RIVETING!
The language he used in his piece was so over the top manipulative, it hit all the nodes for propaganda. And the comments were so universally one sided, I had to say something.
After I posted my first comment, (which was later deleted) I then decided to go learn more about Clint.
It was not surprising to me that he is at the heart of the Russian Collusion fraud that was perpetrated on the United States by Deep State actors.
This level of duplicity and fake narrative is only now being completely obliterated by Bill Binney who has exposed the fact that Wikileaks did not hack into the DNC emails.
It was Seth Rich who downloaded the DNC emails on a thumb drive and paid for that action with his life.
And what was on the thumb drive shared with Wikileaks and ultimately the world? Pedogate, Pizzagate, Spirit Cooking, Lies, Fraud, Cheating, Stealing, and all manner of “Being Drunken with Iniquity”.
The dates on the emails stop just about the time Seth was murdered in DC. Even DNC chair Donna Brazile was terrified they were going to come after her when it all went down and her friend Seth was murdered. She wrote about that in her book.
So if Clint is comfortable with being the face of Russian fakery and even wrote a book about it, why is it such a leap that he would delve into the whole vaccine war as if his whole life depended upon everyone getting vaccinated?
The number one thing the media gatekeepers are afraid of is losing status and power over the narrative.
They admit this every day as they write and write and write. They can feel their influence and ability to control how people think just flitting away in the wind and it literally guts them.
Jenny Hatch
On April 11, 2021, the University of Washington’s Kate Starbird sent a letter to former FBI agent Clint Watts, whom Racket readers will recognize as the face of the ill-fated Hamilton 68 dashboard. Funded by the Alliance for Security Democracy, whose board contains former heads and deputy heads of agencies like the CIA, NSA, and DHS, Hamilton 68 spawned hundreds of incorrect stories about alleged Russian bot activity. In the Twitter Files, we found executives reverse-engineered the “dashboard,” discovered it was full of people unconnected to Russia, and argued it should be called out for “the bullshit it is.”
Watts in early April 2021 had invited Starbird to join in a “Societal Resilience Roundtable” after being asked by the “new administration” to gather a “special group of experts” for an off-the-record roundtable:
In the last year, newspapers, magazines, and even broadcast programs like 60 Minutes have been aggressively arguing that civic-minded “anti-disinformation researchers” are suffering under assault by outside investigators, who misuse tools like congressional subpoenas and the Freedom of Information Act to slow or halt their crucial work. The “bad actors” are almost always described as “right-wing activists,” “conservatives,” “Trump’s allies,” and so on, who attack beleaguered protectors of the informational realm out of “bias” and bad faith.
Bullshit. These are publicly funded researchers who’ve spent years developing tools for suppressing or deamplifying the speech of the very people paying their salaries. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to use FOIA to find out what these programs do or how they’re funded, but a look under the hood makes clear why they want things that way:
Censorship Files by Matt Taibbi and Racket News