Mike Benz is a former official with the U.S. Department of State and current Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, is a free speech watchdog organization dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet. www.foundationforfreedomonline.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the 'Ministry of Truth'?
Is that what it's called, the ministry of truth? Well, yeah. They tried to do that for a while. That was, I think— So just as a background, please tell people what you do and what positions you held.
I do all things internet censorship. That's really my mission in life, my North Star. I started off as a corporate lawyer and then worked for the Trump White House. I was a speechwriter. I sort of advised on technology issues. And then I ran the
So the cyber division for the State Department, basically the big tech portfolio that interfaces between sort of big government international diplomacy issues on technology and then the sort of private sector U.S. national champions in the tech space like Google and Facebook. So I was the guy that Google lobbyists would call when they wanted favors from big government.
But, you know, my life took a huge sort of U-turn, you might say, when the 2016 election came around and I became obsessed with the early development of the censorship industry, this giant behemoth of government, private sector, civil society organizations and media all collabing to censor the Internet. It was kind of a weird, weird path from there.
When did it all start rolling? When did the government realize that they had to get actively involved in censorship? And what steps did they initially take to get involved in this?
It started in 2014 with the Ukraine fiasco. The coup. The coup and then the counter coup. The coup was great for internet free speech. I mean, you really do need to start the story of internet censorship with the story of internet freedom because censorship is – promotion of censorship is sort of the flip side of promotion of free speech.
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Chapter 2: How did internet censorship start?
And we've had this free speech government diplomatic role for 80 years now. When World War II ended, we embarked. We had the international rules-based order that was created in 1948. We had the UN. We had NATO. We had the IMF, the World Bank. We had this big global system now. There was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN Declaration of Human Rights that allowed
You can't acquire territory by military force anymore and have it be respected by international law. So everything had to move to soft power influence. And so the U.S. government took a very active role beginning in 1948 to promote free speech around the world. And this was done through all these, you know, initially CIA proprietories like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
And then the whole Wisner's Wurlitzer State Department CIA apparatus, all the early partnerships with the media and the worst, the war machine around propaganda for World War Two continued through the Cold War. And then that that hit the gas with promotion of free speech on the Internet when the Internet was privatized. It was initially a military project. So it was a government operation from.
Chapter 3: What role did the U.S. government play in censorship?
from Jump Street. And then in 1991, the World Wide Web came out, civilian use. And right away, the State Department, the military, our intelligence sphere was promoting free speech so that we could have a basically government pressure on foreign countries to open up their internet, to allow basically groups that the U.S.
government was supporting to be able to combat state control over media in those other countries. So we already had this sort of deep interplay between government, tech companies, universities, NGOs that dates back 80 years. You look at the evolution of NGOs like Freedom House or the Atlantic Council or Wilson Center and promoting these free speech things. So
But what happened was, is in 2014, we had had about 25 years of successful free speech diplomacy. And then there was a, you know, we tried to overthrow the government of Ukraine. We successfully did. And I'm not even arguing whether that's a good or bad thing. But the fact is, is the U.S. did effectively January 6th, the Yanukovych government out of power in 2014.
I mean, we literally had our assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs in Victoria Nuland handing out cookies and water bottles to violent street protesters as they surrounded the parliament building and ran the democratically elected government out of office. But then what happened is the eastern side of the state completely broke away. So we don't respect this new U.S.
installed government. Crimea voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation. And that kicked off, that sort of set in motion the events that would end the concept of free speech diplomacy as like a U.S. government unfettered good. Because what they argued is we pumped $5 billion worth of U.S. government money into media institutions in Ukraine.
That's the figure that's cited by Victoria Nuland in December 2013.
right before the coup five billion dollars setting up independent media companies basically sponsoring mockingbird style our media assets in the region and they still didn't penetrate eastern ukraine the eastern ukraine was primarily ethnic russian uh didn't penetrate crimea so they said we need something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence
And they initially called this the Gerasimov Doctrine, named after Valery Gerasimov, who was this Russian general. They took a quote from him saying, the new nature of war is no longer about military to military conflict. All we need to do is... is take over the media in these NATO countries. And that's primarily social media.
Get one of our pawns elected as the president, and that president will control the military. So it's much cheaper and more efficient to win a military war by simply winning civilian elections. So that was called the Gerasimov Doctrine. That's what set up the early censorship infrastructure in 2014. Three years later, the guy who coined that, Mark Gagliotti, would write a
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Chapter 4: How did the 2016 election influence censorship policies?
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It seemed like the censorship machine was winning up until around the time that Elon purchased X. That seems to me to be our fork in the road. That's the alternative timeline. Mark Andreessen talked about that yesterday, that we've had a couple of alternative timelines where things have shifted. I think that was one of the big ones.
No, that's exactly it. I mean, he's sort of the timeline where we miss the bullet is where there's a deus ex machina, you know, it's sort of like a deus ex machina where it's this random plot thing that happens. You know, someone descends onto the stage and solves all the plots, loopholes and magically saves the, you know, the plucky heroes that were otherwise in danger.
There were events in the run up. Well, it all sort of happened simultaneously, really, because the month that Elon announced his acquisition was the same month that the Disinformation Governance Board was announced at DHS. which was the first thing that really roused Republicans and, frankly, anyone with institutional power in D.C.
to finally stare into the sun and recognize or at least begin to glimpse the size of what they were up against. The Disinformation Governance Board set off a flurry of congressional activity from Chuck Grassley and other luminaries in Congress. There were a lot of – there's whistleblower documents came out and –
For years, the entire Republican Party and most of the Democrat Party had denied the existence of government censorship. And frankly, the Ministry of Truth was not the Disinformation Governance Board. The Ministry of Truth had already existed three years earlier at DHS. They just called it a name that masked what it did. It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
which is a name that puts you half to sleep by the time you're finished saying it.
Ministry of Truth scared the shit out of people just because of the Orwellian context of the term. You know, it just seemed like, what are you, what?
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Chapter 5: What is the 'whole of society' approach to disinformation?
That's for CIA, NSA people to stop Russians from hacking us. And they think critical infrastructure. They think things like dams or subsea cables or low earth satellites. They don't they don't think it means you sitting on the toilet at 930 p.m. on a Thursday saying, I don't know that I love mail in ballots. And then suddenly you're being flagged by DHS as a cyber threat actor.
for attacking the U.S. critical infrastructure of confidence in our elections. But that's how they scaled these definitions into this giant mission creep. And now it's metastasized into the entire U.S. federal government, the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, DHS, FBI, DOJ, HHS.
And the task in front of this administration is just unbelievably enormous in deconstructing that.
Is it possible?
going to run into a lot of headwinds because once this power was discovered and funded to the tune of billions as it has been we we have this foreign policy establishment that manages the american empire that saw internet censorship as kind of an eldorado key to permanently winning the soft power influence game around around the world
And what I mean by that is, okay, so you know how a lot of people talk about the early CIA activity in the media with things like Operation Mockingbird and whatnot and the ability to sort of propagandize things in the media. You never had this capacity in the 1950s while that was going on.
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Chapter 6: How did COVID-19 change censorship practices?
If you and I were at dinner, Thanksgiving or something, and there's 12 people at the table and I start talking to you about, I don't know, the COVID vaccines may have adverse side effects. There was never an ability to simply...
Reach under the table as an intelligence agency or as the Department of Homeland Security or the Pentagon or the State Department, just turn off the volume when we talk to each other peer to peer. But since the lion's share of all communication is digital, especially the politically impactful ones, that capacity now allows our voices.
blob our foreign policy establishment to effectively control every election or at least tilt every election around the world. And they've sprawled this into 140 countries. And Trump is going to run into every single regional desk at the State Department every
Every single equity at the Pentagon arguing that if you don't do not allow us to continue this censorship work, it will undermine national security because it will allow Russian favored narratives to win the day in the Ivory Coast, in Chad, in Nigeria and.
And Brazil and Venezuela and Central and Eastern Europe, you're going to have the State Department argue that if we don't have this counter misinformation capacity, then extremists will win elections around the world or populists will win the election around the world. And that will undermine the power of our democratic institutions, essentially our programming, our assets in the region.
And they've built this enormous capacity. We use it because it works, because it wins. And the fact is, is Trump probably only won this election because for the same reason he probably only won the 2016 election, which was in both cases, there was largely a free Internet. It was when Trump got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the U.S.
government under his nose, working with webs of of outside NGOs and Pentagon front groups to mass censor. Virtually every narrative that he was that he was putting out that that he lost. So it does work to win elections. And every there's a regional desk at the State Department covering every country on Earth. Victoria, Newland, you know, at a desk, they cover about 20 countries.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of AI in censorship?
So every country, the State Department is a preferred winner of that election. We work with all political parties. And that's a that's a hugely powerful tool to lose. It's just twisted and evil and it needs to. And we we need to win.
I don't want to say fair fights, but dipping into this sort of dark sorcery power has not only does it crush the First Amendment entirely, but the diplomatic blowback is just absolutely enormous. I can go through examples of that if you're interested. Sure. Well, so we have this thing called the Global Engagement Center at the State Department.
It was set up initially to fight ISIS because in 2014, 2015, when the Obama administration was trying to put military boots on the ground in Syria, there was this sort of giant threat that was publicly talked about all over about ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter. Homegrown ISIS threats, for example, the Garland, Texas riots.
fiasco where there was a shooting by a ISIS terrorist and the web of online intrigues around that. Three years later, it would come out that he had been effectively groomed by the FBI. The FBI had paid someone over $100,000 to become his best friend and text him to tear up Texas before that. But never mind. The horse was out of the barn.
So this idea that ISIS was recruiting on Facebook and Twitter gave a license to the State Department to create this thing called the Global Engagement Center, which was really the first official censorship capacity in the U.S. government. It predated the DHS stuff that would come along in the Trump era.
And this gave the State Department the direct back channel, the direct coordinating capacity with all the social media companies to tell them about ISIS, ISIS accounts, ISIS narratives that were trending. The Pentagon poured hundreds of millions of dollars into developing a technique called natural language processing. which is a way to use AI to scan the entire internet for keywords.
And you would have these academic researchers effectively constructing code books of language. What do ISIS advocates or supporters talk like? What words do they use? What prefixes and suffixes? This whole lexicon is then conjoined with the ingested sum of all of their tweets and transcribed YouTube videos and Facebook posts.
And then suddenly the State Department is a real-time heat map of everyone who is likely to be or hits a certain confidence level being suspected to support ISIS. That was 2014 to 2016, set up by this guy, Rick Stengel, who described himself as Obama's propagandist in chief. He's now on the advisory board of NewsGuard, one of the largest censorship mercenary firms in the world.
But he described himself as a free speech maximalist because before he started this, he was the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. He started this censorship center. He was the former managing editor of Time magazine. And so he's talked about how he used to be a free speech maximalist back when he was in the media and media companies benefited from that.
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Chapter 8: How do foreign governments handle U.S. censorship?
But that was primarily targeting left wing left wing communists or left wing socialists or left wing populist run countries. When Trump won the election in 2016, this was this is one of the reasons I think Republicans were so slow to move on all this.
They never experienced the brunt of the intelligence state against the mainline GOP, or at least the in power Trump faction of the GOP in the way that Democrats did in the 1960s and 70s when the CIA was actively interfering in Democrat Party politics to try to tilt them away from the anti-Vietnam movement and more into the sort of
limousine liberal international um interventionalist neoliberal camp and so in 2016 the global engagement center pivoted from being counter-terrorism to counter-populism arguing that that right-wing populist governments it wasn't just right-wing they were also against left-wing populists but they simply never rose to power in the way that trump did in the u.s bolsonaro did in brazil matteo salvini did in italy marine le pen almost did in france
Nigel Farage was on his way to in the UK and the Brexit referendum, the AFD party in Germany, the Vox party in Spain. In 2016, they were afraid that social media rising all these pop right wing populist parties to power.
would effectively collapse the entire rules-based international order unless there was international censorship because brexit would give rise to frexit if marie and the pen won and she was massively overpowered on social media versus macron if you know as i mentioned italy there was going to be not just brexit there's going to be frexit spegs it it'll exit greg's it greg's it
So the entire EU would come undone, which would mean all of NATO would come undone, which would mean there's no enforcement arm for the IMF or the World Bank or international creditors. I mean, it would be like the ending scene of Fight Club where the credit card company buildings all collapse just because you're allowed to shitpost on the Internet.
And they talked about that quite openly in 2017 in as they were creating this whole censorship infrastructure.
So the 2016 elections was, that was a counterpoint. That was like a turning point. That was a moment where they realized like this is actually dangerous. Like allowing people to freely communicate online and say whatever they want completely undermines the propaganda that they have been distributing.
Completely undermines their ability to control who's the president, what policies get pursued, things along those lines.
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