Episode 233: Perception Management feat Ken Klippenstein
Infrastructure designed to combat "disinformation" is expanding rapidly within the US government and intelligence agencies. But how do they define it in the first place? And how much transparency around their methods is the public granted? Our guest is Ken Klippenstein, journalist for the Intercept.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Ken Klippenstein: https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein / https://kenklippenstein.substack.com / https://theintercept.com/staff/kenklippenstein/
QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
References
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/
https://theintercept.com/2023/05/05/foreign-malign-influence-center-disinformation/
https://theintercept.com/2023/05/17/pentagon-perception-management-office/
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2021/10/08/performing-disinformation-a-muddled-history-and-its-consequences/
https://ia904509.us.archive.org/20/items/debord-disinformation/Debord-Disinformation.pdf
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 233 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Perception Management episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Fields, Liv Ager, and Travis View.
This week, we are diving into the concept of disinformation here in the United States.
Specifically, we'll be examining how government organizations, including the Pentagon and various intelligence agencies, are rapidly building infrastructure with the stated purpose of identifying and combating their definition of disinformation.
Our guest is Ken Klippenstein, a journalist for The Intercept who's written a series of articles on various aspects of this really cool phenomenon happening here.
So Ken, welcome back to the podcast.
Obviously not your first time.
Great to be back, guys.
So before we jump into all of that, I hear Travis has some QAnon news for us.
Yeah, actually some really exciting stuff.
So, newly released documents from the FBI provides us with some new information about how that agency looked into QAnon.
The documents were obtained by the privately run declassified document repository, The Black Vault, through a FOIA request.
The FBI said that they had 43 pages that were relevant to the request, but only 19 were released.
And the rest were withheld supposedly because they pertained to records or information that were compiled for law enforcement purposes, a release of which could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.
First of all, I find it a little hard to believe that the FBI only has 43 pages of documents about QAnon.
I feel like I have more pages on QAnon.
Yeah, I have way more pages than 43.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, it is a top secret Intel operation.
So they probably, you know, even within the FBI can't really access Q's trove of information.
So the pages that were released are heavily redacted, and most of them don't say very much.
But a couple of these pages, they do tell of a short and fruitless investigation by the New York field office of the FBI into QAnon that started in August 2018.
And this is basically a summary of why they started investigating QAnon.
The preliminary investigation was opened on August 13, 2018, based on allegations that
an unknown person was posing as a federal government official on internet message boards
using the name QAnon and potentially profiting off and/or inciting violence by use of their
false presentation.
How many FBI agents messaged each other in a panic?
Is this you, dude?
Is this you, dude?
Tell me it's not you.
So, yeah, so apparently, yeah, that's that's what they're looking.
They're looking to seeing whether or not this violates, you know, basically impersonating a federal officer and then using that impersonation to incite violence or make money.
So this preliminary investigation was closed in January of 2019 after just like five months.
The document that details the closing of the investigation says this.
FBI New York attempted to identify the persons behind the online persona QAnon by subpoenaing redacted.
OK, was it 8chan?
After that, there's this big paragraph that's totally redacted.
And I think, I mean, if I had to guess who they subpoenaed, it would have to be Jim Watkins, right?
But that means that like 2019, Jesus, I don't know if they were already on to him then.
Damn.
I mean, that would be heavy.
Like, it's like, if I was asked who they should subpoena in order to try to figure out how QAnon is, it'd probably be Jim or Ron Watkins.
But yeah, I mean, Jim Watkins has been subpoenaed before by, like, Congress, you know, so it's not like he's, like, he's a stranger to this kind of, you know, compelled testimony.
It's really unfortunate that we're all for CIA and not FBI, because we could have just called a colleague.
The document goes on to say that no leads were set during the course of the investigation and quote, no evidence was collected during the course of this investigation.
That's a direct quote from the document.
What?
Very strange.
It's quite an investigation.
Yeah, quite comprehensive.
We learned nothing.
What happened is they sat a guy down with 8chan for five months and by the end of it, he just joined the MAGA movement and quit the FBI.
And they're like, ah, shit.
This is such classic FOIA bullshit because this is from what, 2019?
And they're claiming it's an ongoing investigation.
You guys, this is like a very triggering for me to read.
It's like what Beth and I have to deal with all the time with our FOIA requests.
They will use that.
They've used the ongoing investigation excuse for stuff going back like a decade.
It's crazy.
And there's no, there's very little oversight from either the Congress or even the offices that exist within each agency that are supposed to be the oversight bodies for their, for their FOIA departments.
They just get away with that.
It's like the magic wand they wave.
They say, oh, there's an ongoing investigation we don't want to interrupt or undermine by talking about any of this and releasing any of it.
Yeah, an ongoing investigation that's now been going for, what, four years?
In which they said they closed.
So it's like, what?
Yeah.
Yeah, classic.
The document concludes, no criminal subject was identified after a logical and reasonable preliminary investigation.
But there's another document in that drop that also says, FBI New York will reopen the investigation should new actionable information present itself.
So yeah, that's it.
That's awesome.
It's very strange that they just kind of like looked into it for five months, didn't collect any evidence, apparently, and subpoenaed one individual.
I'd have to guess Jim Watkins, I don't know.
And then said, yeah, that's enough of that.
Yeah.
The language is interesting.
They say, potentially profiting off of.
So the FBI has to have a predicate to open an investigation into anything.
And so what that suggests to me is the predicate that they were trying to create.
If you create a fake account that says you work for, say, the Department of Homeland Security or the DOD, just having that fake account in itself is not, in order to make those claims, is not necessarily illegal in itself.
You have to be getting a thing of value in exchange for that, for it to cross the line into a prosecutable federal offense.
Gotcha.
Well, let me ask you this.
Is clout a thing of value in the eyes of federal law enforcement?
I'm just imagining the nine Supreme Court justices having to... We call before the court witness Logan Paul to explain the value of clout.
That's why whoever this redacted is got off, because, you know, you told them clout is a disease, actually.
You don't want it.
It's a curse.
It's like the ring in Lord of the Rings.
You think it's helping you, but it just brings the wraiths about.
So Ken, you're really familiar with FOIA.
I mean, is there any way to potentially FOIA them to get that redacted to be unredacted?
Oh, yeah.
I would recommend that you guys redo the FOIA and then bring this into a court setting.
Because when you have a federal judge looking at it, suddenly the interpretation of FOIA law ends up being a lot, having a lot more fidelity to what the language of the law actually says.
And that's something I found repeatedly.
I mean, I know for a fact, I don't know if it's been reported, but in the FOIA, in the FBI FOIA office, Which is still led by David Harvey, the same guy that's led it under Trump, under Obama, now under Biden.
They have a thing on the wall that says, when in doubt, black it out.
So the culture is just like always err on the side of not giving the requester what they want, specifically with an FBI.
I mean, the culture is not great across the federal government, but it's particularly bad in the intelligence community and the FBI specifically, at least in my experience.
And so this, you know, redacted, like in your experience, do you think they dropped it?
Do you think that they formed a relationship with this redacted?
I mean, what is the usual reason that you'd have this still be ongoing?
Or is it just kind of obfuscation for FOIA?
It's hard to say, but I mean, this is their default move.
If you think of it from the perspective of the FOIA office, what is their incentive structure?
They generally perceive the White House to be their boss since they're the executive branch.
So what reward are they going to get for, you know, responding to FOIAs faithfully and in, you know, in good faith and trying to release as much as they can versus what is the punishment if they release something that embarrasses the White House?
And if, say, there's a gray area thing and they could have interpreted it another way, I mean, there's just very little incentive for them to, you know, carry out FOIA in the way that it was intended to be carried out.
And if you look at the legal mechanisms, you can file an appeal for it, but the appeal goes to a body within the same agency that's making the decision.
So it's limited.
It's very limited what the appeal mechanism is.
And then the only other place you can take it to is the courts, which is, in my experience, significantly better.
I mean, I've never had a case where you take someone to court and the judge doesn't find, look, guys, give them a little bit more kind of thing.
I've never found it to be where the judge is like, yep, this is a reasonable interpretation.
You're not getting any more.
Yeah, this is very frustrating because a big unanswered question is the degree to which the government was looking into or was aware of QAnon during the years it was most active.
And we know that they were interested in it more than what was revealed in these documents.
For example, we know that the Phoenix field office of the FBI, they released an intelligence bulletin to law enforcement about the threat of conspiracy theory driven extremism and then talked about QAnon and Pizzagate.
You know, wait, why exactly was that a big concern at the time?
What intelligence did they have internally to make them so concerned that they thought they would have to release this intelligence bulletin to warn about this?
I also know that, for example, the Secret Service has some documents related to QAnon, because I tried, it was my first ever FOIA request back in 2018, and it basically told me the same thing.
It says we're not going to give you anything because of ongoing investigation or whatever.
So there's lots of documents that are still hidden, you know, within the federal government about what they were talking about or thinking about or concerned about about QAnon.
We just know none of it.
Well, I'm just I'm just glad that they're using logical and reasonable approaches.
So they've clearly been talking to Ben Shapiro.
Yeah, exactly.
We owned the investigation with logic and reason.
That's one of the most astonishing features of the intelligence community.
One of the most frustrating parts of it to me is how much everyone thinks it's Jason Bourne when it's much more Burn After Reading.
Like, a big source of information for me when I want to find out what's going on in the intelligence community is people they bring in to consult to explain things that you would think they would be able to find through the open record.
I would not be surprised at all if their knowledge of QAnon is coming from folks like you that they bring in to tell them like what the heck is going on because they can't their appreciation for like irony and sarcasm and internet culture and I know a lot of you know bureau agents and I don't mean to be I don't mean to suggest they're dumb it's just not the waters that they swim in and so they're Deeply unfamiliar with it and so you know when they're doing counter-terror stuff or whatever they'll bring in guys to explain things and they're kind of at the mercy of the competence of whoever it is that they've brought in to explain stuff.
I mean a huge conduit for information to the Bureau is what's called Confidential Human Sources, CHS's.
And so, you know, these can vary enormously in quality because there's such weak oversight of them, you know, checking to see if what they're telling is true.
If, you know, and if they have a criminal background themselves, they might have different motives in what they're telling them.
So in a lot of these cases, they just recruit someone who they found guilty of a crime, and then they're completely at the mercy of whatever that CHS, whatever picture of the world that CHS paints for them.
And if they hail from QAnon world, you can imagine what that picture might be.
What are the likelihoods that this subpoenaed, redacted person is a specialist?
Or does it sound in the language like this is somebody they would be kind of suspecting of the, you know, crime, alleged crime?
It's really hard to say.
But I can tell you with pretty strong confidence that the FBI doesn't acquire specialty and knowledge of things until they're safely have been around for like five or ten years at the very least.
One of the biggest problems after 9-11 was just finding Arab linguists to understand what the hell is going on in the Middle East.
I mean, you can't overstate how stuck they are in whatever the frame was.
I mean, the biggest shift during the global war on terror was having to move the old timers from this Cold War era frame where they had all of these Russian linguists that had expertise in that domain, and then just updating that framework because fighting, you know, non-state actor terror groups is much different than conflict in the gray zone with a nation-state.
And so I'm, you know, I guarantee you that meeting this problem of these, you know, conspiracy theories is something that is probably still ongoing in terms of their being able to structure things to understand them.
So there's a high likelihood maybe that the FBI really, really old out of touch guy was like, I'm confused by this.
I don't understand what's going on.
And then they just kind of moved on.
Exactly.
Yep.
Yeah, because if you go on the chans, like, I don't think you're gonna find much logical, reasonable stuff.
So he's like, listen, I use logic and reason and it led me to ignoring everything I found there.
Any potential evidence collected is antithetical to my logical and reasonable method.
I do have dank memes though, a huge stash now.
So my next story concerns the release of the QAnon Shaman.
So Jacob Chansley, QAnon Shaman, has served his time.
He was released from a halfway house in Arizona, best known for wearing that horned headdress and painting his face while participating in the January 6th Capitol riots.
So honestly, I had high expectations for Jacob Chansley because I always saw him as kind of a pawn, kind of naive.
I had hoped that upon his release, he would possibly distance himself from his QAnon shaman persona and find a more productive use of his time and talents.
But unfortunately, one of the first things that Jacob Chansley did after being released was create a Twitter account and post a tweet containing an illustration of Chansley in his horned headdress and painted face hanging out of a police car.
And the tweet just says, Freedom.
Yep.
This is the Joker.
Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.
He's going for the Joker shot.
Yeah.
From Dark Knight Rises.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the purple glove.
I have to say, Travis, if you had sat for a beer with Jacob, I think your hopes would have been much lower of him changing, you know, his entire, like, thought structure.
I don't know.
I always thought it was like, like, man, this guy, I mean, it's like you can live in, you know, Larpville for a long time, but then once you run into like serious consequences, you have to do a little bit of time, you have to, you know, be in a federal prison for for a bit.
I imagine that might help someone snap into something more closer to reality, but did not happen.
Also, Jacob Chansley's Twitter account is America Shaman, so I'm a rube for ever having hope in him.
I'll say that.
Chansley also released a five-minute video in which he wears a white suit and America flag tie and headband and talks about the virtues of speaking the truth, forgiveness, and patience.
The pressures brought about by my journey and my ordeal have only strengthened my resolve, and taught me the power that we all possess when we practice patience and forgiveness, and when we find internal peace and live by the truth so that we may speak the truth without fear.
Therefore, the next part of my journey entails using the power of patience and peace to spread
the truth and to do so in the spirit of a Christ-like forgiveness.
Oh, so that's the change in prison is how now he's a Christian?
Wow.
Yes.
Just when you thought he could not get worse.
Yeah.
Are you guys against peace and freedom?
He's in front of a giant dream catcher that has like a kind of central painting of a Native American.
And he's wearing a full white suit with a T-shirt and tie adorned by the American flag.
So this is another surreal image from from our age that will be impossible to explain to, you know, generations to come.
I think what's gone on here is, like, based on his previous, like, kind of internet presence before he got, like, viral, he clearly wanted to be, like, an influencer of sorts.
He wanted people to, like, pay attention to him.
So he gets all this attention, but, like, he's in prison.
Like, he's in jail.
You know, he can't take advantage of it.
And now, so he's finally out.
He's like, well, I have to post.
People are going to look at my post.
Is he doing the Jordan Peterson, like, self-help thing?
Like, is that what the angle is?
He kind of is into that, like the spiritualism stuff is like he'll connect it to his own life and how he like felt better now that he became a shaman and other people can, you know, do shamanism and also feel better by taking ayahuasca, you know, etc.
So I think there's definitely a self-help component here.
I mean, he always was into Jesus, it's just that he would, like, mention that Jesus was the first shaman, and has a rainbow body, and talk about, like, the Tibetan, you know, Book of the Dead and stuff, and yeah.
I don't know if he called himself a Christian, though.
I think that might be new.
Yeah, no, I don't know about that.
I think that, at this point, he's figured out, hey, listen, they don't relate as much to the other stuff.
I think we're gonna need to say that Jesus is here, and I'm gonna be doing it just like him.
Yeah, he's known his audience.
So that is it for QAnon News.
Quite some developments, which we will continue to track.
But I wanted to get back to this disinformation because, of course, you know, the FBI and other agencies are doing their best to help us understand information, what is wrong, what is right.
And Ken, in October of last year, you co-authored an article with Lee Fong entitled Truth Cops Leaked Documents Outlined DHS's Plans to Police Disinformation.
In it, you detailed the failed launch of the Disinformation Governance Board by the Department of Homeland Security.
So can you explain to us what happened there?
Yeah, so at the time, I remember there was this very kind of partisan discourse around what was going on with the Disinformation Governance Board.
There were all these kind of like right-wing opinion people kind of dancing and it ends
up being like, we shut it down because listen to this Orwellian title thing.
But you know, after we made fun of it, then they had to retreat with their tail between
their legs and shut it down.
But what I knew from, you know, the folks that I know in DHS is that that was one of
like close to half a dozen counter disinformation efforts.
I was sort of becoming annoyed at how superficial the coverage of it was.
So I had provided to me a leaked copy of what's called the Department of Homeland Security
quadrennial review.
It's like once every four years, it's this big strategy document that they put out describing
what their goals are for the, it's like long-term, like what are we going to do over the next
decade kind of thing.
And in that document, it talked about what's called the Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation Team, MDM team for short.
That's one of these half dozen agencies that were designed to kind of liaise with these social media companies.
And I never used the word censorship in the article because I think it's a little more subtle than that.
than that. So I want to be clear, at no point is the government going in there and plucking out,
you know, a tweet or a post or anything like that. But what they do do is they're notifying
these social media companies of what they think, you know, constitutes disinformation,
foreign disinformation in particular. And part of the problem with that is, I think,
a lot of people say, well, you know, what's the big deal?
They're just, you know, telling their opinion to these corporations.
But it's like, well, these same corporations are trying to curry favor with the federal government lobbying them.
I find it hard to believe that, you know, when the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security or whatever comes to them and says, hey, it's really problematic that you have this up.
We think that, you know, X, Y, and Z is disinformation.
That's not going to exert some kind of an influence on it.
Again, that is a little bit more subtle than kind of this very simplistic discourse that I think exists around this, which is, you know, it's 1984, George Orwell is here, and the government is, you know, just yeeting posts off Twitter or whatever.
But it's a dynamic that's new and that started, to give you guys a rough timeline, during the global war on terror, which has since sort of drawn down, ISIS accounts on Twitter were posting all sorts of propaganda.
And under the Obama administration, they had to try to come up with a sort of ad hoc way to interact with the social media companies to notify them of these posts.
And so after the Obama administration, it really becomes formalized, ironically, during the Trump administration.
The reason I say ironically is because, again, the discourse around this just flattens everything and tries to make it into this You know, it's the Biden and the Democrats.
And it's not really accurate to say it's a completely Trump phenomenon either.
It's more of like a national security phenomenon that's happened steadily under both parties and under, you know, all three administrations.
And I honestly haven't seen much variation depending on the letter next to the name of the person in the White House.
But what that article really detailed, I think, is just Department of Homeland Security's efforts under what's called the misinformation, disinformation, malinformation.
Misinformation being information that's unintentionally inaccurate.
Disinformation being intentionally inaccurate.
And malinformation is kind of squishy.
And really, that's why I think that there are, you know, civil liberties concerns that we want, that people should kind of talk through, just so that we have clear definitions about what any of this stuff means.
So malinformation is the idea that information is true, but it's out of context.
And then at that point, you know, that makes me a little nervous because it's kind of like, well, the federal government is not only determining what they think is falsehoods and what isn't, but then what they think the appropriate context is.
And so in these cases, the devil's really in the details.
I would encourage people to look at a inspector general.
It's the watchdog within DHS.
They did a report detailing All these different efforts within the different Homeland Security components to counter disinformation.
And what they found is that it's poorly structured, they don't have clear definitions of what they're going at.
And, you know, we can have a debate about whether you want these things to exist or not.
But as long as they do it, there should be some kind of organized, structured mechanism agreed upon terms and openness, I think, around because I don't think it's bad to have, you know, the CDC put out a statement saying there's disinformation going on around about the vaccines or something, that's fine. But if they
post it publicly, I think that's preferable to them kind of back-channeling with these
social media firms, which is really what DHS was doing and subsequent to this story, which I found
all kinds of different national security agencies are doing. What I found out in the kind of later
articles too is that DHS is considered to be maybe not the cool kid in the intelligence yard. Oh
yeah, they're like junior varsity.
These are like the kids that are trying to figure out how to do the really fancy operations going on in the FBI and in the DOD.
And so, I mean, would it be accurate to say that the government is, or certain intelligence agencies are, seeking to shape public discourse about what's true and false?
Totally, yeah.
I mean, their argument is, oh, we're just making suggestions and the social media companies can decide for themselves.
But it's like, if you look through these social media companies, they're increasingly staffed by former intelligence and national security officials.
Again, they have a relationship with the government.
They want very much for the government to stay out of their hair.
You're looking at what's happening with TikTok, and that's A pretty clear signal to Silicon Valley, you know, you don't play ball with us.
This could happen to you.
So, you know, I think that raises some important questions that we should at least be discussing around how these things are responded to.
And, you know, I don't dispute that.
It's like falsehood circulating clearly can cause harm.
I mean, Classic one that we saw very vividly is falsehoods about the vaccine.
Probably unthinkable numbers of people died because of that.
So I'm not saying that disinformation is not a concern, but like the way in which the federal government responds to it, I think is really important.
And the existence of a lot of these agencies, I just reported the existence of two that were never disclosed.
So it's the fact that this stuff is happening privately and not in public that I think is of particular concern.
A lot of those DHS agencies, I mean, they don't have Public announcements or press releases accompanying not only their creation, but the decisions that they're making.
And I think that led to a lot of the backlash when people started to learn about these things that were happening.
It's like, why didn't the government, kind of like what we were talking about before, secrecy leads people to conclude the worst when I think often it's not necessarily something really malign that's going on, but it's the fact that it's not being done, you know, out in the open that can really undermine their trust.
And is there a meaningful difference in how this has been handled by the Trump and Biden administrations?
Honestly, I don't think so.
That's the biggest, that's, that's the most subtle point that I think is hard to, whenever I do interviews about this, people are like, oh, is this a, you know, Trump thing?
Is this a Biden thing kind of thing?
Honestly, it makes some difference.
So for example, when you, when you have someone like Trump in office and then there's a news cycle about the disinformation governance board and Fox starts screeching about it, probably that's going to make a difference in terms of what their response is.
But honestly, since so much of it is not happening publicly, that's one of the most horrifying things about About covering the national security agencies is the extent to which the people in the White House don't even seem to know what's going on.
And I don't mean to say that there's some intentional effort to undermine the White House, but they're just not paying attention.
What they're paying attention to is the crisis thing that's on the front page of the newspapers, the debt ceiling, Ukraine, you know, whatever the main order of the day is, and how much of this stuff just goes on autopilot, is run by the agencies themselves on autopilot and doesn't have input from either the Congress or the White House.
Yeah, that'd be a funny way to sell Trump, right?
It's like, he's going to finally pay attention to the deep state.
I mean, I'm curious, you know, like how much, even if these, these agencies kind of work, I guess, more or less independently, mostly because I guess the people who are actually like, I guess, like the actual president and the cabinet have bigger fish to fry.
I mean, are they nonetheless influenced by knowing what the priorities of who the president is?
I mean, I always thought that one possible reason why QAnon wasn't investigated too aggressively during the Trump administration was because, you know,
perhaps the FBI didn't want to look like they were, you know, going after Trump's
most fervent supporters as part of their duties, and that might not be
as much of a concern under a Biden administration. So I mean, like, even if they
aren't being directly being told what to do, are they perhaps, like, taking cues
about what they think the boss might be happy with or not?
Definitely. Absolutely.
And that's how things are run.
And the thing is, it's not just cues from what the boss, they're watching the media.
This is the biggest thing that I've learned covering National Security State.
To a great extent, they're regular people like everyone else.
I mean, you know, they might have some extraordinary authorities, but they're watching much of the same press and reading and consuming a lot of the same media that everyone else is.
And so the cues they're taking are not just from the president, it's from the zeitgeist that exists.
So, you know, a huge shift that this move towards counter disinformation is overlapped with.
I mean, so I mentioned the global war on terror and these terror groups, which, you know, it was scary
seeing ISIS put these horrifying and terrible things.
I understand why they would respond the way that they did.
Another thing was 2016, which was an extremely, you know, traumatic moment for a lot of people
who didn't think that Trump would win.
And so then there became this whole debate about, it's significant number of people that think that,
you know, the Russians don't interfere, which I don't dispute that they did.
I mean, the evidence is overwhelming that the Russian state interfered in an orchestrated
fashion but then to take that and then say,
and that was the decisive factor in Hillary Clinton's loss.
That's a different thing.
And one for which I don't think that there's as strong of evidence for,
but the people in national security state, they were watching those trends too,
just like everybody else.
And responding in kind.
And so, you know, if that's a dominant theme in, you know, on Rachel Maddow or whatever it is that Russians stole the election or whatever, you know, half of the national security community is going to look at that and take conclusions from it.
And, you know, if Congress and the White House is too busy focused on other things, they're going to, you know, structure things around whatever their concern set is.
And again, so it's not just the White House, it's everything.
They're taking cues from everything.
This month you wrote an article entitled, The Government Created a New Disinformation Office to Oversee All the Other Ones.
In it you wrote, Within the federal government, offices dedicated to fighting foreign disinformation are springing up like daisies, from the Pentagon's new Influence and Perception Management Office, to at least four organizations inside the Department of Homeland Security alone, as well as ones inside the FBI and State Department.
So, before we get into specific organizations, what do you think this proliferation means in a broader sense?
Well, what I was saying before, they're consuming the same media as the rest of us in conceptualizing the problems that exist in society, which are real.
You know, I mean, it is horrifying to watch, you know, mass shooters and things, you know, read manifestos that were clearly inspired by, you know, some of these cultural entities that they're now focused on.
But what you're seeing is this bureaucratic response where it's like every agency now wants their own office tasked with countering disinformation, not just one.
I mean, I mentioned that there are nearly a dozen within the Department of Homeland Security.
I don't know how many there are within DOD because that's much more secretive.
I was able to report, and we'll talk about this in a, you know, you just mentioned the Influence Perception Management Office.
That's just one that through, you know, whatever sources I have and whatever public records exist that I'm able to surmise, but it's really astonishing.
There's just a total lack of disclosure of what is going on in any of this.
So, to give you guys another example, within the FBI, there's the Foreign Influence Task Force that works on this.
Not to be confused with the Department of Homeland Security's Countering Foreign Influence Task Force.
So what you're seeing is like a huge amount of overlapping authority and duplication.
And to some extent, you know, Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner was talking about this, about another office that got stood up recently called the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which we'll talk about in a minute.
And he was complaining, he was saying, how do we know that this isn't going to overlap and duplicate all of these other efforts that you guys are setting up?
And I called him for comment, his office, prior to doing that story and said, do you still have concerns about that?
His answer was yes.
And that was it.
And so it's like, it's become a cottage industry.
Like, there's two different ways to look at this.
One is the civil liberties questions that exist, which I do think are legitimate.
I mean, I maybe wouldn't go as far as saying, you know, it's George Orwell in 1984.
But I think they're legitimate questions.
And then the other question is just the amount of waste that's happening now when we have When every department has multiple overlapping agencies and there's no coordination between them and then you need to create agencies on top of the agencies to streamline and orchestrate the efforts.
So there's just another one that's just classic like government waste question that I don't think has really been asked.
Well, I do think it's useful to get into some details about specific organizations here, so I'm going to name a weird euphemistic acronym and you will try to explain them to us.
Alright, we're starting off with the Global Engagement Center, or GEC, which you described in your article as a, quote, State Department entity tasked with countering foreign disinformation by amplifying America's own propaganda.
Yeah, so this was established in 2016 after the Russian, maybe 2015, after the Russian annexation of Crimea, which again, another traumatizing event.
It was terrible and it preceded, you know, the illegal invasion that's taken place since then.
So I understand why people are concerned about it, but they stand this thing up thinking that this is going to be how we counter the Russian propaganda effort to try to legitimize this and try to say, Oh, Ukraine isn't a real country.
Oh, real.
That is a real thing.
And according to the intelligence community, it seems like the evidence is overwhelming for that.
This was a huge, orchestrated and globally pushed out narrative to try to persuade people that what the Russian state was doing was okay.
And so that becomes the first thing.
Under the State Department, whose work is diplomacy.
So the idea is they call it, I was talking to a DOD official who was laughing.
He's like, you're gonna get some people in Washington mad at you for calling this propaganda.
He's like, you know, the proper word for that is actually public diplomacy.
And so that's the euphemism they use for what the Global Engagement Center does.
Not propaganda, public, when we do it is called public diplomacy.
Yeah, it's funny.
Actually, I'm kind of familiar with the Global Engagement Center only because it was referenced in a QDROP all the way back in 2018.
There was a conspiracy theory that the GEC was basically paying $160 million total to American journalists in order to basically promote the state line.
There's no evidence for that.
Well, $160 million was apparently the total two-year budget of the agency.
But yeah, it is interesting.
Yeah, I was just referencing the Q-drop way back when I first started researching QAnon.
I think they do finance foreign media organizations and civil society efforts, but there's laws that make it so they can't do that with American ones.
Okay, so we'll mark that one half true.
That's part of the problem with this is they don't articulate what they're actually doing and then people find something and they jump to conclusions because it's like the first time they're hearing it and they have no point of reference to understand what any of this stuff means.
So yeah, I really hold accountable to a great extent, just the lack of disclosure, which I don't even think is like intentional secrecy.
I just don't, I think the bureaucracy doesn't really prioritize it, explaining to the public what it is that they're doing.
Next up, we've got the Foreign Malign Influence Center, or FMIC, which the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says is, quote, exposing deception in defense of liberty.
Yeah, so this is a really significant one because this elevates these efforts for the very first time to the head agency that overlooks all the spy agencies.
All the 17 different intelligence community components from the FBI to the CIA to the DIA and the Defense Department.
And so what that means is that these guys are going to have access.
If you read their charter, it's really an interesting set of authorities that they have.
They have access to all intelligence from the entire suite of the intelligence community that they deem pertinent to disinformation.
And what's interesting in the language that they use, it's not so much that they're running operations themselves, it's that they're coordinating, which suggests how, you know, broad this effort has become that they need somebody to de-conflict and go between all of these different parallel efforts that exist in the different departments and agencies.
Ken, is someone here to pick you up?
[laughter]
The Defense Military Deception Program, or DMDPO, which according to a Pentagon budget document,
is in charge of "sensitive messaging, deception, influence, and other operations in the information environment."
Yeah, so the Defense Department can be admirably frank about what it's doing.
They don't always have the light touch that an agency like the State Department does to call it, what we were saying before, public diplomacy or use one of the approved euphemisms.
Sometimes they just come out and call it what it is.
I appreciate that candor.
That's what it is.
It's deception.
They put out their own disinformation.
That's one of the great ironies at the heart of all this is, you know, the kind of pearl clutching that exists about foreign nations engaging in disinformation when that's something that not only every state does, our state does as well.
And finally on this list, we have the Influence and Perception Management Office, which we've already discussed a little bit, the IPMO, and their stated role is to quote, employ a broad scope of operational capabilities to address the current strategic environment of great power competition.
It will develop broad thematic influence guidance focused on key adversaries, Promulgate competitive influence strategies focused on specific defense issues which direct subordinate planning efforts for the conduct of influence-related activities and fill existing gaps in policy, oversight, governance, and integration related to influence and perception management matters.
It's pretty straightforward, obviously.
Holy fucking shit!
So the really interesting phrase there to me is direct subordinate planning efforts, which, like I was saying before, means that there are other offices within the DoD that we don't know about.
I only know about what my sources are able to tell me or what I'm able to substantiate in the open record, but the fact that they're saying there's subordinate planning efforts, that means that Influence and Perception Management Office is basically DoD's version of what we were talking about before, the Formaline Influence Center.
It's a coordinator of other efforts.
We just don't happen to know what those other efforts are.
All right, well, could you tell us a little bit about the history of this term perception management when it comes to government operations?
Yeah, so it comes from the Reagan administration.
The Reagan administration did during the Contra operation to arm the Nicaraguan rebels.
It turns out that they had a bit of a PR problem because they kept, you know, doing some unsavory things like torturing children, murdering civilians, all kinds of awful things.
So they had a big PR problem on their hands.
So how did they respond to that?
And the Reagan administration took the CIA's top propaganda specialist, moved him over
the National Security Council, and had him oversee what was called the perception management
effort to try to essentially downplay the crimes that were being described to try to
make the conflict more palatable to the public.
Because the context of that conflict, we were coming out of the Vietnam War, there was what
they called the Vietnam War syndrome.
We had to kick the Vietnam War syndrome.
How do we make Americans stop being uneasy with our military adventurism abroad?
And so this was what they thought their secret weapon would be.
So very interesting history.
And then subsequent to that, during the Bush administration, there was another effort at
perception management office.
This was right after 9/11, but before the invasion of Iraq, led by then Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
So they had their own effort, and it started actually disseminating disinformation.
And as is always the case, there's a big legal distinction between foreign disinformation
is legally permitted, domestic is not.
But in the age of the internet, it's really hard.
That wall has just kind of come down.
It's really hard to make it so that only a foreign audience is going to see something
and not American audience.
So it came to pass that American media started picking up some of this stuff, and there was
a huge scandal because of it.
And they ended up having to shutter the office.
I thought that was kind of interesting that the reaction was so strong when this happened
in the context of the Bush administration.
Now we have essentially the same thing, and nobody seems to care.
I think because of how politicized the subject has become.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're just a simple country podcast listener confused by all these entities, I
mean, what do you think is important to understand about their functions and, you know, and what
Well, it's, you know, the federal government is trying to respond to what they deem to be disinformation.
And unfortunately, that criteria is not publicly known.
And so the question is, how are they carrying this out?
I mean, I think there's a whole philosophical debate about, you know, when I have a story on macroeconomics, for example, and you see the responses to it. You know, I was critical
of the Federal Reserve's rate hikes, for instance, and I was trying to explain how that tends to
have a depressing effect on wages, and so on and so forth. There are not clear binary true/false
answers to any of this stuff.
They call macroeconomics the "dismal science," I think is what one great economist called it,
and I think that's pretty much right.
And so a lot of it is pretty complicated.
And so my big concern is not necessarily that we have this George Orwell situation where they're trying to deceive us, but that, you know, the truth is pretty complex.
And I think that what we've seen that's come out from a lot of the Twitter files, from other reporting on this sort of thing, is people kind of like trying their best to make sense of what's going on and just genuinely making mistakes around calls that are not very easy to make.
And so I'm more concerned about like, what people that are well-meaning might accidentally do,
rather than some kind of, you know, big nefarious attempt to deceive the American public.
We're just like, you know, approaching something as complex as the truth.
And you know, how are we really gonna operationalize that in a way that does justice to how complicated
just everyday life happens to be?
And then how we're structuring this response.
I mean, there's two debates about if we should be doing it at all.
And then the second debate is if we are doing it, how are we gonna make public?
Why is none of this stuff public?
It's crazy to me that there are multimillion dollar agencies
which many of these are that are being established.
and I'm the first guy to report this stuff.
It should be that there's a.
a press release explaining to people what it is, what the staffing is, what they're
gonna be doing. It shouldn't be that you have to go dig around and try to have
sources leak you things to find out what's going on. So I think that's
essentially what it is. And so are there many critics of the government approach
to disinformation right now or is it just kind of like, "Yep, they'll figure out
what's true and then they know what's good for us." Well unfortunately the
response seems very partisan. So it seems like what's so strange about the Bush
administration effort that I was describing before, it was largely
liberals that were unhappy with with this being done. And then you know post
I think 2016 in particular, the role that the Russian active measures, which again
there's overwhelming evidence for, had was to you know tell people that, "Oh you
know this disinformation problem is a serious thing that we need to meet."
And so I think there was a kind of scrambling of the deck where people that had been more civil libertarian minded and You know, had strong concerns about the sanctity and protection of speech.
That started to kind of flip, and now it's a situation where it's like the people that tend to get really exercised by this stuff are the conservatives and the right, and in many cases in sort of sloppy ways, which I think misunderstands what these, you know, as I've tried to sketch out to you.
I have concerns about a chilling effect.
I don't have concerns about censorship.
The government is not mandating that social media companies take this stuff down.
The question is what kind of informal pressure might it get?
That's a much more subtle conversation than the one that I think is taking place in the kind of very shrill discussion around a lot of these things.
I just wish it wasn't that kind of like right-left divide that exists.
I mean, they have the Weaponization Committee in the Congress that's taking place, which is extremely politicized.
The obsession is the Hunter Biden laptop and all these other things that I think is really missing the forest for the trees in terms of the dangers posed by this huge concerted push.
And so, I mean, you kind of mentioned this earlier, but I did want to kind of dig in here.
What is, you know, the difference between domestic and foreign disinformation?
And, you know, how does this apparatus treat these?
And, you know, how does it separate them?
Yeah.
So after my story on DHS, you'll notice that a lot of the messaging around this, they changed the branding.
They now say foreign disinformation.
It's about foreign disinformation.
And the reason for that is because that's what's legal, or that's what's supposed to be legal.
And so the idea is that we can spread propaganda to foreign audiences, but it can't hit the public.
But I think that that distinction, if it ever was very strong, because if you think about it, we get news all the time from foreign sources that you don't even think about.
A lot of stories in the New York Times, for example, come from what's called wire services, like the Associated Press, which are based in the UK.
And they could be a target of these things and then Americans end up consuming the information.
That's exactly what happened during the Iraq War in the case that I mentioned before with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
So in the age of the internet, it's just exacerbated it because things travel.
I mean, there's no way to isolate something to one geographic location anymore.
And in fact, the one act, the law that exists to prevent foreign disinformation from reaching American audiences, the Smith-Monk Act was updated several years ago in what's called the Smith-Monk Modernization Act.
And they basically came out and said, yeah, these distinctions don't mean much anymore because in the internet, everything's bouncing around everywhere.
And instead of creating new systems to protect against these new dangers, they just threw their hands up and said, ah, who cares?
Not much we can do anymore.
And to me, it's like that should be a cause for concern.
And there's hardly been any discussion of any of this outside of the extremely partisan one that we've talked about.
It was funny that I remember during the church committee, one of the big things that they were concerned about investigating was the fact that the CIA would like plant disinformation, these foreign news services.
And they were concerned that like, well, what's the difference between, you know, you planting some sort of disinformation, some sort of foreign news outlet and making it to the United States where Americans believe it or just doing it domestically?
You know, the end result is the same.
And that was in the 70s.
Well, it wasn't exactly, it was like very easy for someone, for a regular American to get like, for example, a newspaper from India or something like that.
So, you know, over the course of the last 50 years or something, those kinds of issues are probably, you know, 10 times more concerning because it's just that kind of disinformation, government-planted disinformation can just, you know, spread everywhere just much faster.
Exactly.
Is the logic behind the foreign-domestic distinction here, like that domestic, you know, is protected by American civil liberties, whereas foreign citizens aren't?
Who cares?
Yep, exactly.
I mean, the Constitution protects Americans.
It doesn't protect anyone else.
That's literally the legal framework for it.
So there has been some writing about this.
You know, like you said, it's not really treated much in the media.
But I did find this blog post by a couple of professors at the University of Manchester called Veritols and Stephen Hutchings.
Their post was called Performing Disinformation, a muddled history and its consequences.
And here's a little passage from it.
Overt falsifications and forgeries constitute a small proportion of what historically has been branded as disinformation.
In most cases, the practices described as disinformation amount to subtle ways of manipulating information which fall short of fabricating false content.
Under these circumstances, the term disinformation is prone to slip into becoming a verbal weapon deployed in bitter polemics between opposing sets of players who often belong within single national contexts.
So yeah, what do you think of this, Ken?
Yeah, I think that's very well put.
I mean, what I don't like about the term is that it can be weaponized so easily.
I mean, there are people that just believe crazy things, and they're not trying to manipulate you or project influence or anything.
I mean, I think a lot of this comes down to when you talk to folks in the intelligence community, a lot of their experience, particularly older ones, is encountering nation-states.
They're fighting the Cold War.
Or they're even fighting against well-constituted groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
And then they bring that cognitive framework to bear on some weirdo on Twitter and think
that they're a part of some broader scheme to do something when in reality people just
believe...
I'll give you an example.
There was a really thoughtful study by the RAND Corporation that they put out recently
that was the most comprehensive look at the effects of the Russian disinformation campaign,
not just from 2016, but up through to, I think, the last several years.
And what it found was not just how ineffective their efforts were.
Not that the efforts weren't real, but that they were ineffective.
But also how many people that believed these crazy pro-Russian things that actually hadn't
been reached by the Russian propaganda apparatus.
And they just happened to believe bizarre things.
So it's like, yeah, I'm very nervous about the extent to which it can become weaponized
I mean, we had an example recently.
I don't know if you guys read this article on Axios, but I was, you know, trying to beat the drum and draw people's attention to the idea that inflation, which is a complex subject, and there are many different dimensions and causes, and I don't want to, you know, simplify it to one single thing.
But I thought, well, corporate profits are probably one driver of it.
And to even suggest that was regarded as a conspiracy theory.
Literally.
There were experts, there were respected economists that were calling it conspiracy theory.
Now it's basically taken for granted.
That's a good example of a case in which trying to marginalize ideas that you don't like by labeling them disinformation, you know, can have the effect of going beyond just protecting people from falsehoods and become a cudgel that you use to beat down, you know, groups or ideologies or thoughts that you don't like.
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the Hunter Biden laptop, you know, being a kind of sticky issue that conservatives or right wingers are kind of obsessed with.
But there is like legitimate concern there since it appears that the information was not wrong.
Right.
And so it was what was the argument there that the context was?
So the context, I mean, and if you look at the emails, it honestly looks like the folks at Twitter, they remember what happened in 2016 with the Hillary, the Russian state orchestrated the hacking of these emails and dumped them everywhere.
And so, you know, put yourself in the mind of a Twitter bureaucrat.
You're worried that, is this going to happen again?
Are we going to get blamed and dragged in front of Congress?
I mean, that's a kind of government influence on how you're looking at this.
And I don't think it's like they're trying to deceive people.
I think they looked at it, probably eyeballed it, and said, yeah.
And, you know, there was a lot of haymaid about all these intelligence officers that put out a statement saying it bears the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
The thing is, it did.
It does resemble it.
It didn't happen to be it, as far as we can tell.
It doesn't look like the Russian government was involved.
But these are not trivial They have a saying in the cyber world, people that work in cyber defense, attribution is hard.
It's really hard to know where something is coming from.
So to give the federal government the power to say this is or this isn't disinformation, that's a pretty extraordinary type of authority to give somebody about a question that's very difficult to ever come up with any clear answer about, I think.
Okay, Igor, we are going to paint him as a crack, a man who smokes a lot of crack and he has sex with Instagram models, okay?
He has a very big penis.
So, what's really crazy about that letter that you mentioned, like 50 former senior intelligence officers, yeah, they signed a letter that said that the whole laptop, 100-byte laptop business, it said, quote, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.
It didn't say disinformation instead of a Russian information operation,
like a foreign malicious operation can include true information. But that was published in
Politico with the headline, "Hunter Biden's Story is Russian Disinfo," dozens of former
intel officials say. So it was this thing where the letter would perhaps is like, you know,
possibly arguably true.
It was all the hallmarks of a Russian information operation.
Well, maybe it wasn't actually, but it sure seems like it.
But then that gets laundered through the press as, oh, this whole story is bullshit.
Don't don't pay attention to it.
Exactly, yeah.
The press has a lot of responsibility in all this, because if you look at the discourse around what people think was said by the intelligence agencies about Russia in 2016, and you actually go and read the intelligence community assessment, you know, the various unclassified summaries that exist, people often have a wildly different idea of what was said.
I'm not defending the intelligence agencies necessarily.
Like, they get all sorts of things wrong all the time, but in that case, the media's encapsulation or summary of it doesn't always bear fidelity to what the source text is, and people don't have time to read the source text.
I don't I also wanted to briefly read from Guy Debord's prescient text, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, which was written in 1988 about his 1967 piece, because I think that his definition of disinformation is relevant to the conversation, if only in a poetic way, and maybe more.
Liv, could you read from this and try to explain if things get a little too complex for us?
The term disinformation is openly employed by particular powers or,
consequently, by people who hold fragments of economic or political authority in order
to maintain what is established, and always in a counter-offensive role.
I think this one is interesting.
It also relates to, at some point Debord notes that this information is a product of a kind of melding of what he says the diffuse and concentrated spectacle.
So like concentrated is like the more kind of Soviet or like where we would say authoritarian or totalitarian model of truth where there is like an institution that says this is what is correct.
You are not allowed to question it.
The diffuses are more kind of 24-hour news cycle, very profit-driven information sphere, where, like, I think what we still have now is, like, some institutions of power that are, you know, completely unaccountable and, you know, affect public discourse based on the interests of a state, but they have to exist in accordance with these kind of, you know, like, news institutions, for instance.
And so they can't decide, like, this is true, you can't question it, but more can just kind of push down things that they don't really like.
As I think Ken was mentioning before, there's like this contextualization of a thing.
It's like, oh, this is connected to all this, you should kind of discount this.
It's always a counter-offensive role to kind of push against certain narratives that may not be beneficial.
"Whatever can oppose a single official truth must necessarily be disinformation emanating from hostile or at
least rival powers and would have been intentionally and malevolently falsified."
So again here there's the contextualization of like, "Oh that's disinformation, it's connected to this group."
So you can like wholeheartedly kind of discount it.
It's also I think related in some ways to the foreign domestic distinction here.
That we always have to kind of bring it back to this threat that we have to deal with.
And like, even in liberal democratic societies, the state has a pretty solid control or capacity to affect or fight those forces.
I think citizens in general, like, oh, well, you know, they're fighting against Russia.
So like, that's good.
I hope that they make sure that this foreign interference isn't happening.
Yeah.
Unlike the straightforward lie, disinformation must inevitably contain a degree of truth, but one deliberately manipulated by an artful enemy.
This is what makes it so attractive to the defenders of the dominant society.
Right.
Because essentially, you know, I mean, the Hunter Biden laptop is kind of perfect here, right?
It's like the idea of deliberate manipulation by an artful enemy becomes the story.
And even if there is like a degree of truth to, you know, what is being put out there, it doesn't it doesn't really matter.
You can label it as disinformation.
In the end, disinformation is the equivalent of what was represented in the 19th century language of social war as dangerous passions.
It is all that is obscure and threatens to oppose the unprecedented happiness which we know this society offers to those who trust it.
A happiness which greatly outweighs various insignificant risks and disappointments.
And everyone who sees this happiness in the spectacle agrees that we should not grumble about its price.
Everyone else is a disinformer.
This one is super interesting.
Yeah.
Like there is kind of an ideological project.
I think this is like, he's also writing about kind of post neoliberal consensus, end of
the Cold War, where this ideological battle between capitalism and communism isn't really
what affects politics, and the state more intervenes or as opposed to things that kind
of just break the idyllic image of what our society is, which is like, for instance, the
relationship between the state news media agencies and the people that it's democratic,
that these institutions are accountable.
And this information is a capacity to push people who are questioning that narrative
away.
And in that context, like, obviously, there are contexts where disinformation is wrong,
right?
But as a tool, it can lump those obviously incorrect things in with some things that
may contain some amount of truth, hold some value that question the faults, the cracks
in these official narratives.
And that's like, as like Ken said before, one of the worries about the fact that these institutions, a lot of them are like secret, unaccountable, undemocratic, isn't that, you know, the things that they're saying are completely incorrect.
It's that we don't want institutions that are undemocratic, etc., to be the ones who are able to make these decisions, to put pressure on the institutions that give us our information.
Yeah, and in this last passage, DuBois also seems to predict the rise of stuff like QAnon and COVID-19 conspiracy theories, which he calls unregulated disinformation.
If occasionally a kind of unregulated disinformation threatens to appear, in the service of particular interests temporarily in conflict, and threatens to be believed, getting out of control and thus clashing with the concerted work of a less irresponsible disinformation, Interesting.
isn't a fear that the former involves other manipulators for more subtle or more skilled.
It is simply because disinformation now spreads in a world where there is no room for verification.
Interesting. I feel like a part of this relates to like post-truth stuff as well and the effect
that the notion of disinformation, especially when it's kind of, you know, controlled by
these undemocratic, unaccountable institutions, creates.
But I mean, I think that this is an interesting way to see disinformation as essentially a
competition, right?
A competition to establish a narrative.
And the term disinformation really only arises when you are trying to kind of label someone else's attempts at, you know, what is, it's hard to call fully propaganda.
It's more this idea of shaping the truth, contextualizing it in ways that are relevant.
And I think at the end of the day, that's something that, you know, connects all of these dots is American interests, right?
So the interests of the United States as a nation, as perceived by these people who are in these endless amounts of different, oftentimes, you know, shattered into small pieces, agencies and kind of units that are trying to counter this, is that, like you said, you know, the Constitution protects Americans.
It does not protect other people.
So even if you were like a kind of, I suppose, non-nefarious person that is dealing with disinformation and countering it, the best you're going to do is promote American national interests, right?
Because that is kind of the limits of the purview.
Yeah.
So, I mean, considering the expansion of all these anti-disinformation efforts, Ken, I think it's important to ask how big of a role disinformation plays in political and social outcomes here in the United States.
You mentioned the RAND Corporation thing, but I'm thinking of like the last few general elections, the midterm elections, you know, I mean, are we being swayed by these, you know, kind of shadowy enemies that are crafting this stuff and pushing it to us?
The evidence suggests not.
I mentioned the Rand Corporation study before, and that found that there was some influence around the margins, but not enough to swing the broader election.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an FBI counterintelligence agent, who his whole career is countering foreign influence, of which this disinformation stuff was supposed to be important because it's supposed to be part of foreign influence.
He made a very interesting point.
said, "When I'm looking at foreign influence, disinformation is a vanishingly
small portion of what these, how these nation states are advancing their
interests." He says, "One of the major things I'm concerned about is basically
the essence of capitalism." Which is, you go to Silicon Valley for instance. Chinese
government, Russian oligarchs, they are throwing vast sums of money around these
startup spaces to control where investment is going, you know, the
direction that production takes. He says, "To me, that is the major concern." He says,
he thinks that foreign influence is a major problem, which I agree with him.
And I think there's plenty of evidence to support that.
But that most of it doesn't take the form of disinformation.
It takes the form of investment.
And unfettered capitalism makes that possible.
And to me, I think that should be the focus of a counter foreign influence strategy, or at least the focus.
And unfortunately, what we see is kind of the reverse of that.
I wonder if there is this kind of tension like these powerful like surveillance kind of intelligence apparatuses are you know they need to be rational in the sense that they need to like understand the actual threats to the American state because they're intervening they they want to help expand the American state but then they also realize oh we can affect public discourse and that also helps the American state but like sometimes that affection like creating lies or or like with disinformation maybe producing things that are misleading the institutions themselves start like believing it and there's a Misallocation of the threat because of this kind of... This is a process you see like far more in like quote-unquote authoritarian or more totalitarian states where like there is an institution that decides truth and they realize like they kind of start to think like oh well we can kind of define truth in a way that's convenient and then they miss the actual threats they're dealing with.
Do you think that like the overemphasis on misinformation, which happens in a different way in American society than like in a Soviet society, could relate to this kind of phenomena?
Oh yeah, totally.
I mean, what I'm struck by again and again is how many true believers there are.
The number of cynics in these agencies is a lot smaller than I thought before when I was a reporter.
How many people are trying, you know, you guys ever read The Quiet American?
It's like the most dangerous thing is the guy that really believes what he's doing rather than the person who cynically realizes, you know, I don't want to go too far and cause too many problems.
Looking at all this, I really think we find ourselves in a, you know, the global war on terror is ending.
I think there's a huge economic component to what's happening.
You know, I talked to a CIA officer who was involved in the investigation of Russian influence in 2016, so very central to all this stuff.
And I asked him what he was doing since then, because he left for various personal reasons, not against the agency's work.
And he said, you know, I'm trying to find work, but all I can find is this disinformation contract stuff.
And I was like, what do you mean?
He's like, well, there's, that's literally all there is.
And this is dumb.
This is a fucking waste of time.
I want to be focused on real things that are really causing problems for the country.
And I thought that just spoke to like how much money they're dumping into this thing, which I think again, the war on terror is drawing to a close and you know, there are a ton of contractors and lots of money involved in this.
Are they just going to take their ball home and say, all right, we're done.
We're going to, I'll find another job.
No, they want to still have work.
And so this is the new meal ticket that they've been able to find, I think.
That is also interesting because it seems like a lot of the true believers, I would assume, are affected by news cycles.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That's a terrifying reality.
They're influenced by all the same stuff that everyone else is.
In a way, it's scarier than if they had their own secret cabal that could decide on things.
I love that Alan Moore expression.
He says, the reality is the world is rudderless.
There is no one guy making decisions.
It's just chaos.
It's the aggregate of all of the narratives, the cacophony of voices that are going on at the same time.
Right.
Klippenstein revealed as a Discordian!
Yeah.
Right, like it's not the 1984 thing, the essential distribution.
Yeah.
Ken, I'm curious.
Suppose there was a person, he was, you know, a good family man, but he was stuck hosting a podcast with some foreign national.
He was looking for an exit and he would instead start a firm called, I don't know, Strain Disinformation Analysis LLC.
And perhaps you get some lucrative contracts with the federal government by doing that, hypothetically.
It depends on if there's a finder's fee for the person that helps this individual.
But in that case, you know, I'd definitely look into it.
Okay, guys, I'm lost what you guys are talking about, but let's just keep this talk to after we record, please.
So, I mean, you know, to kind of cap all this off, I mean, one of the big worries, and, you know, we keep mentioning, you know, 1994, the surveillance state, is that we are being listened to, we are being watched, all of this data is constantly being gathered about us, and it can be, you know, called up to kind of victimize us if the state deems us a threat, right?
But in the past, or at least in the recent past, there's been an issue of too much information, right?
There's no—human beings can't process all of these different data streams and so kind of
aggregate them all and actually make a conclusion that, you know, like
takes it all into account.
But I hear that you have some worries about AI enabling them to be a bit more
effective at this. Yeah, so again I work in the national security space and I
think I see a lot of things that are coming down the pike technologically
because they have the resources and the money to be able to execute these things
before they can be carried out at scale at this consumer level.
So if you pay close attention to the national security world, you can see kind of what's going to become available to the Apple computers and everyone else five or ten years from now.
And what they're really focused on is integrating artificial intelligence into what they do.
And really what this does, one of the big protections against the kind of Orwellian government surveillance that we saw alluded to by Edward Snowden was that there's just so much information that they have to go through that they lack the ability to locate the needle in the haystack.
They're not going to be looking at emails because they have 10 quadrillion emails from last year that they need to look at.
And so that provided very important civil liberties protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
Now, if AI is able to do what people seem to think that it, and I think that's still a big question, but if it is able to do that, that will dissolve that protection that has existed.
And it will make it so that they can actually surf through this Trillions of bits of data and locate what it is that they want in that anonymity.
In the computer science world, they call it security by obscurity.
There's just so much stuff that you're hidden in it by virtue of, you know, safety in numbers.
There's so many people around you.
That will no longer provide the protection that historically has.
And, you know, that's a big, it's a very important question and one which I think is a little different than the direction in which I think a lot of the anxieties about AI are not unreasonable, you know, worrying about replacing jobs, that kind of thing.
But this big one that I'm talking about now, I see hardly any discussion of it.
So you could just kind of type like, Bing, build a good case based on video and text evidence and audio evidence that Travis View is not who he says he is and is perhaps even a threat to the state.
Yeah, so when the NSA's data center in Utah that basically collects everything and the protection that you're supposed to enjoy is, oh, but we won't actually search it for you, the person.
And that was probably true because it's just so much stuff, so many buckets of information.
That's what people don't understand.
It's like, I talk to these FBI guys.
It's like when they need to get something, they're like, well, I've got to subpoena this provider and I've got to do this and I have to ask for that.
It's like a very messy process that does provide a lot of protection.
So say you could query a software program to do all that.
Well, I think we should assign a lot of high-level video cards to Travis View.
That's all I'm saying.
I think that there should be a small Bitcoin farm, making sure we have everything we need about him, so when the time comes, we get him.
Right, folks?
Liberties environment than anything we've experienced at any point in human history, I think.
Well, I think we should assign a lot of high-level video cards to Travis View. That's all I'm saying.
I think that there should be a small Bitcoin farm, making sure we have everything we need about him
so when the time comes, we get him, right? Folks, we're gonna get him. So before we say goodbye,
I mean, you know, let's touch a little bit on QAnon within the context of all of this, right?
So, I mean, you know, how does that fit in?
You know, I mean, is it disinformation?
Isn't it?
And, you know, what do you kind of make of it within this bigger structure?
Well, doing this kind of reporting has been really formative to how I think of these sort of questions.
And kind of what I've settled on is, in the same way that the FBI agent was telling me, yes, this stuff is a problem, but it's in a different way than people think.
The disinformation is the smallest part of it.
It's the huge amounts of foreign capital that are sloshing around Silicon Valley.
I think in that same way, I think there is a serious problem behind what QAnon represents, which is, you know, it seems to me that there's less and less incentive to live in reality and to engage with, you know, politics in some sincere way, this whole post-truth thing, I don't think the
problem is that someone saw a meme and went down a rabbit hole. I think that there must be some
kind of social alienation that exists that predisposes someone to doing that in the first place. And
that to me, in my mind, what we should be focused on, which is central to QAnon, but it's a little
different than how people conceptualize the problem. I don't know that it's so much that a falsehood
was ricocheting around the internet, is that whatever social system we have predisposes someone
to just abandoning the kind of post enlightenment idea that truth matters at all.
You know, when I talk to some of the Q Trump type people, it's not so much that they've been deceived, at least in my, you probably, you guys probably know better than I do.
It's that they've given up on believing in any concept of truth.
You know what I mean?
And that's a spiritual affliction more than an epistemic one in my view.
Yeah, like, it seems like a lot of people's attitude to removing QAnon is just basically playing whack-a-mole with it.
Right, yeah.
Like, fact-checking.
The media loves this.
And how effective was that at stopping the tide of Trump?
It wasn't at all.
Because that's not the point.
The whole point is that the truth doesn't matter anymore.
Yeah, people want this type of content, right?
And until you deal with that, it's gonna keep happening.
If you have this public thought.
Right, why do they want it?
Exactly.
Right.
Well, thank you so much, Ken.
Always a pleasure to have you on and talk to you about this stuff.
Where can people find you and your work?
Thanks for having me, guys.
They can find me at The Interceptor, where I publish all my main articles.
I also have a substack that I encourage people to go to, KenKlippenstein.substack.com.
And I'm, of course, on Twitter, too.
Go check it out, folks.
And thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and our series like Trickle Down and Man Clan.
There's also a yearly subscription now.
So if you want to save some bucks and subscribe for a whole year, you can go ahead and do that on Patreon.
And if you're already a subscriber, we thank you.
It helps us to stay advertising free and editorially independent.
So, Liv, also, what you got?
Plugs?
Let's plug it up.
Yeah, I have a Twitch stream that I will start going on more again.
Just twitch.tv slash Liv Agar for variety, funny stuff, politics, and a philosophy podcast.
Available wherever you listen to podcasts at Liv Agar.
Travis, you got anything to plug?
I mean, I know this is your last episode, so we're all sad to see you go.
You know, I plug going outside, going for a walk.
It's spring now.
It's beautiful.
Enjoy the weather.
For everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
Information laundering is really quite ferocious.
It's when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious.
By saying them in Congress or a mainstream outlet, so.
Disinformation's origins are slightly less atrocious.
It's how you hide a little hide a little lie.
When Rudy Giuliani shared that intel from Ukraine.
Or when TikTok influencers say COVID can cause pain.
They're laundering disinfo and we really should take note.
