Where Govt Officials Backchannel Instructions to Social Media Engineers and Conduct Surveillance

Leaked DHS Documents Show Portal Connections

Leaked DHS Documents Show Portal Connections Where Govt Officials Backchannel Instructions to Social Media Engineers and Conduct Surveillance

October 31, 2022 | sundance

Before getting to the latest revelation/evidence which affirms CTH research for multiple years, let me just remind everyone of the commonsense aspect.  If the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) was actually doing what I have long said it appeared they were doing, then…

…The databases of the identified social media platforms appear to be integrated with the U.S. intelligence system.  This relationship makes the U.S government a stakeholder in the financial sustainability of the enterprise(s).  Thus, a collaborative effort to financially subsidize the underlying data processing fits the mutual benefit scenario.  ~ Sundance

DHS gets domestic surveillance tools under the guise of ‘national security’.  Meanwhile, massive social media companies get financial offsets for the extreme data processing costs associated with millions of simultaneous users.  That’s the mutual benefit behind “Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop.”  Previously people called it a ‘conspiracy theory‘, I didn’t care, still don’t, it just makes the most sense; Occam’s Razor applies.

Today, all that was almost certain is now brought forth with buckets of evidence showing how social media enterprises have direct portals to DHS to transmit information and receive instructions. It’s a public-private partnership, just like it always appeared.  To quote succinctly, we been knew.

Now before getting all giddy and excited about the documents leaked to The Intercept, proving what CTH has outlined for years, allow me to temper the thirst for immediate I toldyaso’s,   Slow your roll…

Remind yourself when everyone was giddy about getting to see for the first time in history a released ‘top secret’ Title-1 FISA application (Carter Page) and how everyone rushed to review and discuss it without asking the first question(s) first.  We know these are bad actors, so why was it released and who released it?

The same applies here.  We know the change of ownership within Twitter might pose a threat to discovery of government conduct that has taken place inside the enterprise under prior management.  So why is the DHS connection to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc. and social media being revealed now?  What are their motives, and who is leaking it?  We do not yet know.

As to what is being revealed in the leak, it’s a remarkable affirmation of how the Fourth Branch of Government operates.  Specifically, what CTH has outlined for years about the use of the Dept of Homeland Security, as a political surveillance weapon under the justification of national security.

[The Intercept] – […] Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.

“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain,” Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS director, in February.

In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.”

“We do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions, and we independently evaluate content in line with the Twitter Rules,” a spokesperson for Twitter wrote in a statement to The Intercept.

There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

[…]  The extent to which the DHS initiatives affect Americans’ daily social feeds is unclear. During the 2020 election, the government flagged numerous posts as suspicious, many of which were then taken down, documents cited in the Missouri attorney general’s lawsuit disclosed. And a 2021 report by the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University found that of nearly 4,800 flagged items, technology platforms took action on 35 percent — either removing, labeling, or soft-blocking speech, meaning the users were only able to view content after bypassing a warning screen. The research was done “in consultation with CISA,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives. According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative, still ongoing, between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election. (keep reading)

Essentially, the nub of the issue related to the U.S. government telling social media what to remove from the public discussion and what types of information they want monitored.  The social media companies and DHS have a portal between them [EXAMPLE HERE] where these discussions take place.

While there are no specific details as to the human targets of the censoring information, you would have to be obtuse in the extreme not to accept that Donald Trump’s removal from Twitter was one of the larger targeting operations as an outcome of alignment between the activist officials on Twitter and the political officials within the U.S. government [ie. the Fourth Branch].

[…] Intelligence agencies backed new startups designed to monitor the vast flow of information across social networks to better understand emerging narratives and risks.

There it is.

Does anyone need to be beaten with a hammer to accept that “intelligence agencies” funded new subsidiary private sector monitoring networks?

“Backed new startups“?  If the U.S. government is going to pay new private sector startup companies to help the intelligence community with social media surveillance, why wouldn’t the same agencies pay to retain the originating system and data processing that establishes the baseline of the data being reviewed?   Please apply common sense.

[…] “The Department has not been fully reauthorized since its inception over fifteen years ago,” the Senate Homeland Security Committee warned in 2018. “As the threat landscape continues to evolve, the Department adjusted its organization and activities to address emerging threats and protect the U.S. homeland. This evolution of the Department’s duties and organization, including the structure and operations of the DHS Headquarters, has never been codified in statute.”

The subsequent military defeat of ISIS forces in Syria and Iraq, along with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, left the homeland security apparatus without a target. Meanwhile, a new threat entered the discourse. The allegation that Russian agents had seeded disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward Donald Trump resulted in the FBI forming the Foreign Influence Task Force, a team devoted to preventing foreign meddling in American elections.

According to DHS meeting minutes from March, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force this year includes 80 individuals focused on curbing “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”

“The Department will spearhead initiatives to raise awareness of disinformation campaigns targeting communities in the United States, providing citizens the tools necessary to identify and halt the spread of information operations intended to promote radicalization to violent extremism or mobilization to violence,” DHS Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan said in a September 2019 strategic framework.  (read more)

I cannot emphasize the importance of the connections enough.

Surveillance of domestic communication, to include surveillance of all social media platforms, is now the primary mission of DHS.

The information is gathered by social media, funneled by direct portals into the DHS network then distributed to DOJ-NSD and FBI officials as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.   This communication surveillance network is what DHS, created as an outcome of the Patriot Act, is all about.

The four pillars of the Fourth Branch of Government are: DHS, ODNI, DOJ-NSD and the revised/political FBI.  All four pillars were created as an outcome of the Patriot Act. These institutions – as specifically named – represent the domestic surveillance state.  The subsidiary institutions like TSA etc, exist under their authority.  There is no oversight or counterbalance to this system.  The Fourth Branch exists using the shield of “national intelligence” to hide their activity.   Domestic surveillance is done by the intelligence apparatus under one big connected system, operated by the ODNI and DHS.

New York Post – Facebook has been spying on the private messages and data of American users and reporting them to the FBI if they express anti-government or anti-authority sentiments — or question the 2020 election — according to sources within the Department of Justice.

Under the FBI collaboration operation, somebody at Facebook red-flagged these supposedly subversive private messages over the past 19 months and transmitted them in redacted form to the domestic terrorism operational unit at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, without a subpoena.

“It was done outside the legal process and without probable cause,” alleged one of the sources, who spoke on condition of ­anonymity.

“Facebook provides the FBI with private conversations which are protected by the First Amendment without any subpoena.”

These private messages then have been farmed out as “leads” to FBI field offices around the country, which subsequently requested subpoenas from the partner US Attorney’s Office in their district to officially obtain the private conversations that Facebook already had shown them. (read more)

None of this should be surprising to anyone who has been reading our research about the domestic intelligence apparatus and their connections to the Big Tech platforms.  The largest social media networks are fully compromised by this relationship, and that is exactly why the legislative branch has not done anything to impede (ie. break up) the tech monopoly system that was created.

♦ EXAMPLE: Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop (Twitter), essentially a global and public commenting system, could not feasibly exist without the support of the U.S. government providing extreme scale data-processing.  Also, specifically because the platform is in a symbiotic relationship with the intelligence apparatus, the IC itself has contracted people working within the platform.

The whole system was admitted in a 2021 Reuters article outlining the networks and their surveillance relationship with DHS.

We have been trying to hammer this issue for a long time, because at the end of this continuum people will eventually be given digital identities.  It’s just the natural outcome if you follow the arc of how this is operating.  Once a digital ID is established, all of your activity is then connected to it and a digital currency system emerges.

♦ 2021, Public-Private Partnership – The modern Fourth Branch of Government is only possible because of a Public-Private partnership with the intelligence apparatus. You do not have to take my word for it, the partnership is so brazen they have made public admissions.

The biggest names in Big Tech announced in June their partnership with the Five Eyes intelligence network, ultimately controlled by the NSA, to: (1) monitor all activity in their platforms; (2) identify extremist content; (3) look for expressions of Domestic Violent Extremism (DVE); and then, (4) put the content details into a database where the Five Eyes intelligence agencies (U.K., U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand) can access it.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft are all partnering with the intelligence apparatus. It might be difficult to fathom how openly they admit this, but they do. Look at this sentence in the press release (emphasis mine):

[…] “The Group will use lists from intelligence-sharing group Five Eyes adding URLs and PDFs from more groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and neo-Nazis.”

Think about that sentence structure very carefully. They are “adding to” the preexisting list…. admitting the group (aka Big Tech) already have access to the the intelligence-sharing database… and also admitting there is a preexisting list created by the Five Eyes consortium.

Obviously, who and what is defined as “extremist content” will be determined by the Big Tech insiders themselves. This provides a gateway, another plausible deniability aspect, to cover the Intelligence Branch from any oversight.

When the Intelligence Branch within government wants to conduct surveillance and monitor American citizens, they run up against problems due to the Constitution of the United States. They get around those legal limitations by sub-contracting the intelligence gathering, the actual data-mining, and allowing outside parties (contractors) to have access to the central database.

The government cannot conduct electronic searches (4th amendment issue) without a warrant; however, private individuals can search and report back as long as they have access. What is being admitted is exactly that preexisting partnership. The difference is that Big Tech will flag the content from within their platforms, and now a secondary database filled with the extracted information will be provided openly for the Intelligence Branch to exploit.

The volume of metadata captured by the NSA has always been a problem because of the filters needed to make the targeting useful. There is a lot of noise in collecting all data that makes the parts you really want to identify more difficult to capture. This new admission puts a new massive filtration system in the metadata that circumvents any privacy protections for individuals.

Previously, the Intelligence Branch worked around the constitutional and unlawful search issue by using resources that were not in the United States. A domestic U.S. agency, working on behalf of the U.S. government, cannot listen on your calls without a warrant. However, if the U.S. agency sub-contracts to say a Canadian group, or foreign ally, the privacy invasion is no longer legally restricted by U.S. law.

What was announced in June 2021 is an alarming admission of a prior relationship along with open intent to define their domestic political opposition as extremists.

July 26, 2021, (Reuters) – A counterterrorism organization formed by some of the biggest U.S. tech companies including Facebook (FB.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) is significantly expanding the types of extremist content shared between firms in a key database, aiming to crack down on material from white supremacists and far-right militias, the group told Reuters.

Until now, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s (GIFCT) database has focused on videos and images from terrorist groups on a United Nations list and so has largely consisted of content from Islamist extremist organizations such as Islamic State, al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Over the next few months, the group will add attacker manifestos – often shared by sympathizers after white supremacist violence – and other publications and links flagged by U.N. initiative Tech Against Terrorism. It will use lists from intelligence-sharing group Five Eyes, adding URLs and PDFs from more groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and neo-Nazis.

The firms, which include Twitter (TWTR.N) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) YouTube, share “hashes,” unique numerical representations of original pieces of content that have been removed from their services. Other platforms use these to identify the same content on their own sites in order to review or remove it. (read more)

The influence of the Intelligence Branch now reaches into our lives, our personal lives. In the decades before 9/11/01 the intelligence apparatus intersected with government, influenced government, and undoubtedly controlled many institutions with it. The legislative oversight function was weak and growing weaker, but it still existed and could have been used to keep the IC in check. However, after the events of 9/11/01, the short-sighted legislative reactions opened the door to allow the surveillance state to weaponize.

After the Patriot Act was triggered, not coincidentally only six weeks after 9/11, a slow and dangerous fuse was lit that ends with the intelligence apparatus being granted a massive amount of power. The problem with assembled power is always what happens when a Machiavellian network takes control over that power and begins the process to weaponize the tools for their own malicious benefit. That is exactly what the installation of Barack Obama was all about.

The Obama network took pre-assembled intelligence weapons we should never have allowed to be created and turned those weapons into tools for his radical and fundamental change. The target was the essential fabric of our nation. Ultimately, this corrupt political process gave power to create the Fourth Branch of Government, the Intelligence Branch. From that perspective Obama’s “fundamental change” was successful.

TheLastRefuge