Sanctioning Dissent
Part 3: Censoring muckraking or adversarial journalism becomes a lot easier when you just label it disinformation and a threat to national security
In 2012, six years after Wikileaks’ first document release, it was reported that the US military declared the whistle-blowing organization an ‘enemy of the state.’ It published classified documents in what became known as the “war logs”—US military logs from Afghanistan and Iraq—including the “collateral murder” video of a US military Apache helicopter firing at and killing more than a dozen Iraqis including two Reuters journalists. It was former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning who leaked the “war logs” to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. In 2013, Manning was charged and sentenced to 35 years in prison for violating the Espionage Act, but her sentence was commuted in 2017 just before US President Barack Obama left office.
While the war on Wikileaks had begun a few years earlier, the “enemy of the state” designation was a serious escalation in demonizing the group, placing Assange and Wikileaks alongside other more well-known “terrorist” organizations at the time, such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In the US, someone declared an “enemy” can be dealt with under the laws of war – which include killing, capturing, and detaining – all without a trial.
Screen grab of video of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks being dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy by British police on April 11, 2019.
At the time, author, constitutional lawyer and investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald reported that the development was part of then President Barak Obama’s “war on whistleblowers” and that any leak of classified information that ultimately becomes public could be seen as “communicating with an enemy” or “aiding an enemy.”
Greenwald writes, “If someone can be charged with ‘aiding’ or ‘communicating with the enemy’ by virtue of leaking to Wikileaks, then why wouldn’t that crime be committed by someone leaking classified information to any outlet: the New York Times, the Guardian, ABC News or anyone else?”
Greenwald raises the important point that the real “enemies” of the state are not those “who seek to inform… about the bad acts engaged in by their government in secret… people who do that are more aptly referred to as heroes. The actual ‘enemies’ are those who abuse secrecy powers to conceal government actions and to threaten with life imprisonment or even execution those who blow the whistle on high-level wrongdoing.”
At that time, according to Greenwald “in lieu of proving that Wikileaks had committed a crime, they [the US government] decided instead to punish Wikileaks through extrajudicial means,” that is not by being charged and then being convicted in a court of law by a judge or jury. “This is foundational to how an operating democracy functions,” says Greenwald.
In 2022, on his news show System Update, Greenwald—who is probably best known for his exclusive reporting on Edward Snowden—the whistleblower behind the biggest intelligence leak in the history of the National Security Agency—reported how in 2010, instead of charging Wikileaks or Julian Assange with a crime, the US government pioneered a “financial tool” called “de-banking” which would banish Wikileaks from the financial system. Essentially, the process involves pressuring private companies to deny a person or entity of the ability to have accounts, to receive funds, to use funds, to use credit cards, and to use banks.
In his show, titled “Banishment from the Financial System: The War on Dissent,” Greenwald explains how the goal was “to destroy Wikileaks without proving they are guilty of any crime.”
Greenwald reminds us that while the US government is not allowed to censor anyone directly because of the First Amendment, it can pressure private companies (Facebook, Google, Twitter and others) by implicitly or explicitly threatening them. “If they don’t censor the people and the messages that the US government wants censored, those companies will suffer legal and regulatory reprisals.” Greenwald and others have been following and covering how this indirect control of speech and expression is still a violation of the First Amendment.
According to Greenwald, the effort to destroy Wikileaks was led by neoconservative Senator Joe Lieberman – who was Al Gore’s VP running mate in the 2000 presidential election. In 2010 Lieberman was the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and he used that platform to call on financial companies to banish Wikileaks by alleging it was guilty of a crime, according to Greenwald. Lieberman also accused any companies that provided financial services to Wikileaks of “aiding and abetting” Wikileaks, which the government deemed was a security threat.
Wikileaks’ domain name server provider, for instance, stopped pointing at the domain “wikileaks.org,” which helped to make it “unreachable.”
According to an in-depth article on this subject that appeared in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review:
Amazon, whose cloud computing platform was hosting Wikileaks data, cut off hosting services for the site, and Apple pulled a Wikileaks App from its App Store. Banks and payment companies, like MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Bank of America, as well as the Swiss postal bank, cut off payment service to Wikileaks in an effort to put pressure on the site’s ability to raise money from supporters around the world. These private company actions likely responded to concerns about being associated publicly with “undesirables.” There is no clear evidence that these acts were done at the direction of a government official with authority to coerce them. The sole acknowledged direct action was a public appeal for and subsequent praise of these actions by Senator Joe Lieberman. In that regard, these acts represent a direct vulnerability in the private infrastructure system and a potential pathway of public censorship.
In essence, private companies involved in finance and technology (“fintech”) moved to “choke” Wikileaks of funds.
“The point of this was to destroy a news outlet through extrajudicial means,” says Greenwald, who reminds us that Wikileaks’ actions by publishing the “war logs” and the “collateral murder” video were “deemed illegal” but not “proven illegal.”1
The US government, with the help of the UK, has also tried to destroy Assange himself, in what also appears to be a form of extrajudicial punishment. For more than five years he’s been held in Belmarsh Prison in London used for cases involving national security. Assange has been kept there, without actually being convicted of anything, awaiting extradition to the United States. The charges against Assange, for “conspiring” with a source, is a threat to press freedom everywhere. In a recent decision by the High Court in London, Assange has been granted the right to appeal the extradition order, but those close to the case argue its part of “the slow-motion execution” of Assange, and that the “prolonged imprisonment, which the granting of this appeal perpetuates, is the point. The 12 years Julian has been detained — seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and over five in high-security Belmarsh Prison — have been accompanied by a lack of sunlight and exercise, as well as unrelenting threats, pressure, prolonged isolation, anxiety and constant stress. The goal is to destroy him.”
Glenn Greenwald is an investigative journalist and constitutional lawyer who is best known for his reporting on NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
Other ways to destroy a news outlet: censorship by proxy, labelling it “disinformation”
In October of 2023, Consortium News filed a lawsuit in New York Federal Court that accuses so-called media watchdog NewsGuard of defamation and the US Pentagon’s Cyber Command of “acting in concert with NewsGuard to violate the First Amendment. Consortium News is seeking $13 million in damages for defamation and civil rights violations.
The court filing charges the Pentagon's U.S. Cyber Command, an element of the U.S. intelligence community, with contracting with NewsGuard, to identify and report on American media organizations that dissent from U.S. official positions on foreign policy, including about Syria, Russia and Ukraine. According to the suit, the US government and NewsGuard are “engaged in a pattern and practice of labeling, stigmatizing, and defaming American media organizations that oppose or dissent from American foreign and defense policy.”
As background, Consortium News was founded in 1995 by investigative journalist Robert Parry, as a non-profit independent news service devoted to critiquing US foreign and domestic policy. Parry was very highly regarded in his field, and in 2015, three years before his death, received the coveted I.F. Stone Medal for journalistic independence. He was well-known for his role in the covering the Iran-Contra affair.
According to Joe Lauria, the current editor and chief of Consortium News, speaking at a press conference on the law suit, NewsGuard, worked “jointly” with the United States, “to achieve a form of censorship designed to compel the removal of viewpoints that challenge policies of the United States and its allies, labeling commentaries as false content, disinformation, or Russian propaganda…[seeking] to silence or abridge debate and commentary.”
Lauria says all of this was done under the guise of “identifying sources of disinformation for the US and its allies.”
According to Lauria, NewsGuard took issue with six stories that appeared on its site, but tagged all 20,000+ articles published since 1995 with warnings, “proceed with caution,” and told subscribers that the news organization produced “disinformation,” “false content,” and is “anti-US.”
Consortium News challenges all the characterizations in detail in the lawsuit.
“The suit comes at a time when many in Congress and elsewhere have charged the US government with using private entities and internet platforms as proxies to suppress free speech in violation of the First Amendment,” says Lauria.
Lauria continues:
To label an entire news organizations output over 30 years as publishing false content, failing to meet journalistic standards, labeling it as anti-U.S., and saying that the reader must proceed with caution before going further with this website, that is defamation, and when tied to a government contract to report on organizations that write in the area of Russia, Ukraine matters, then it becomes a violation of free speech under the First Amendment.
Lauria says that if news organizations don’t abide by the corrections or retractions that NewsGuard demands, they get a red label warning. He says news organizations that “tend to dissent” from official US policies or “the government’s line” are targets.
“One of the highest forms of citizenship is to criticize your own government. That’s what a democracy is supposed to be about,” says Lauria. “That’s the notion of adversarial journalism, that our responsibility to the public, to our readers, to our viewers, is to challenge what the government says when it needs to be challenged… We criticize the US because we care about our country.”
Robert Parry, founder of the Consortium News
‘A worldwide system of censorship that crosses continents’
A UK subscription-based news organization, UnHerd, recently reported that when it decided to put advertising on its website, it approached three ad agencies and in each instance the site was only able to get a “tiny, tiny fraction of what was expected”—between 2% and 6% of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of its size.
“It was a real mystery,” says editor-in-chief Freddie Sayers. “Eventually, with the third agency, they revealed what they were seeing on their internal dashboards.”
Sayers recounts that the ad agency used a technical platform called Grapeshot – described as “a provider of brand safety… used to avoid unsafe content that will damage brand equity”—which then pinged something called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). According to Sayers, GDI had placed UnHerd on its “dynamic exclusion list,” which is “basically their list of the most dangerous publications that you should not go anywhere near,” if you’re an advertiser.
After complaining, Sayers says GDI revealed that the rating was the result of what was deemed “anti-LGBTQi+ narratives” by several of its contributors, including a “prominent gender-critical feminist,” Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel, who Sayers describes as “a lifelong campaigner against violence against women,” and Debbie Hayton, someone who identifies as a trans woman.
“These companies act as invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising,” writes Sayers.
GDI was founded in the UK in 2018 “with the stated objective of disrupting the business model of online disinformation by starving offending publications of funding, he writes. It receives funding from the UK government, the European Union, the German Foreign Office and a body called Disinfo Cloud, which was created and funded by the US State Department, writes Sayers.
Sayers also writes that GDI founders, Clare Melford and Daniel Rogers, who formerly worked in the US Intelligence Community, have “spearheaded a carefully intellectualized definitional creep as to what counts as “disinformation.”
Sayers explains:
Back when it was first set up in 2018, they [GDI] defined the term [disinformation] on their website as “deliberately false content, designed to deceive.” Within these strict parameters, you can see how it might have appeared useful to have dedicated fact-checkers identifying the most egregious offenders and calling them out. But they have since broadened the definition to encompass anything that deploys an “adversarial narrative,” – stories that may be factually true but pit people against each other by attacking an individual, an institution, or “the science.” GDI founder Clare Melford explained… this expanded definition was more “useful” as it allowed them to go beyond fact-checking to targeting anything on the internet that they deem “harmful” or “divisive.”
“Milford's team and her algorithm are basically looking for things that she finds offensive that she doesn't agree with. And the result of those decisions is to defund and break the business models of those publications,” says Sayers.
GDI doesn’t only operate in the UK. It has gotten involved in the media landscape – assessing the “disinformation risk of the online news market” all over the world. It has published “country reports” spanning thus far 28 countries, and is seeking “implementation partners” for these risk assessments by appealing to local experts in “civil society and academia,” who are then provided with training and tools to draft a report and present the findings to “key journalism, policy and civil society stakeholders.”
One of its disinformation risk reports is about Canada’s online news market. Unlike the GDI report on the US media landscape (which you can download but cannot be linked to) the Canada report does not list the “riskiest online news outlets.” It does list the news outlets it included in its risk assessment as well as those that were considered “minimum risk,” (see screen shots below) but didn’t reveal who it deemed more risky.
Several weeks ago I contacted GDI to find out more about which Canadian sites were considered most risky and why, but I received no response.
Screen shots taken of key Table and Figure in the Global Disinformation Index: Disinformation Risk Assessment: The Online News Market in Canada (2021).
As we’ve seen in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, in addition to addressing economic threats, “modernizing” the definition of what constitutes a national security threat broadens the definition to include the religiously, politically, and ideologically motivated violent extremist (MVE) who is—according to Public Safety Canada— “fuelled on disinformation” and wants to “destabilize and undermine our cohesion and confidence in our democratic institutions and processes.”
Threats to national security also include “cyber-security threats”—“informational activity” including misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM).
If the government has the authority to determine what constitutes misleading or exaggerated information, or a false narrative, and is also able to unleash a whole security apparatus to combat it, including financial tools, it’s hard not to imagine how this power can be abused to cover-up government wrong-doing, to achieve political gain, or be used domestically against its own citizens as a form of cognitive warfare.
We would do well here to remember the late Ursula Franklin, who may be best known for her work on the “technological imperative” which she asserted drives the arms race and requires the creation of an enemy as a “permanent social institution.”
As I reported in a three-part series “Remote Control,” Franklin wrote that the extremely capital-intensive nature of modern weapons technologies coupled with the often very long lead time between the initial research stage and deployment means that governments “must provide financial security and political justification for the project.” Franklin wrote, “the state not only provides the funding but also identifies a credible external enemy who warrants such expenditure.”
“Crises such as the attacks of 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, and protest movements have provided that “credible external enemy”, whether it’s the foreign terrorist, the domestic terrorist, the anti-government extremist, dissidents, protesters, or the “anti-vaxxer,” just to name a few.
During the pandemic, for instance, many countries repurposed existing security measures like cybercrime laws to justify surveillance of online activity and gave increased powers to intelligence services; civil society was silenced from openly questioning restrictions and measures through criminal penalties and the monitoring of public spaces; and surveillance was used to identify and censor, through content moderation, those who were accused of spreading MDM.2
In other words, under the guise of combatting so-called “harmful” information, the US security state colluded with social media companies to monitor the speech of those critical of government and government policies including politicians, academics, journalists, scientists, human rights campaigners and the general public. As we’ve just seen, they are also funding censors who are masquerading as “anti-disinformation” gatekeepers.
Many so-called democracies are also bringing in laws to tackle “online harm,” which critics argue are a gateway to allow governments to further censor expression and criminalize political activism. Canada’s proposed legislation—the Online Harms Act— is particularly egregious, frightening even.3
Laws that are being drawn up to criminalize and surveil “anti-government sentiment” won’t care what side you’re on. These laws, coupled with the enhanced ministerial authorities and the policy-driven definitions can be weaponized against anyone who dares to challenge the government in power.
Let’s face it, anyone can be labelled a security threat: someone not wearing a mask, someone who’s not vaccinated, someone blocking a pipeline, someone blocking a logging road or a major trade route, or demanding a cease fire, or setting up an encampment on a university campus calling for divestment… all of these can be (and have been) labelled dangerous or a threat to security, depending on who’s doing the labelling.
Some things are hard to tell for sure—no one can predict the future—but there is a move afoot and even with all the uncertainty and unknowns, one thing is for sure: you can’t save democracy by destroying it first.
In 2012, in response to the “dangerous model” that the Wikileaks “banking blockade without due process” presented to other publishers or news organizations, Glenn Greenwald, along with Laura Poitras (a colleague in the Edward Snowden reporting), the late Daniel Ellsberg (whistle-blower in the Pentagon Papers), and actor John Cusack launched a press freedom group to block US government attacks on whistleblower rights. The Freedom of the Press Foundation called on anyone who wanted to donate to Wikileaks to donate to the Foundation instead, who would then give the money to Wikileaks. “The primary impetus of the formation of this group was to block US government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent journalistic enterprise the way they did with Wikileaks,” says Greenwald.
In Canada, the government has just introduced the Online Harms Act – Bill C-63 – which passed first reading in the House of Commons. It has already been called “Orwellian,” and will allow government appointees outside the court system to censor expression and criminalize political activism.
According to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), the Bill also “risks censoring a range of expression” including “journalistic reporting,” by imposing “draconian penalties for certain types of expression, including life imprisonment for a very broad and vaguely defined offence of “incitement to genocide”, and 5 years of jail time for other broadly defined speech acts. This not only chills free speech but also undermines the principles of proportionality and fairness in our legal system. Bill C-63 also creates a new offence (“offence motivated by hatred”) that risks misuse or overuse by police, and unfairness to accused persons in court.”
“The bill also re-introduces a speech restriction within the Canadian Human Rights Act, which CCLA has previously opposed. The new provision has the potential to censor strong opposition to political authorities. It limits debate and dissent on contentious issues, and historically has not adequately protected the most marginalized groups.”
Similar draconian laws threatening speech and other freedoms have recently passed in other so-called democracies.
In the US, critics argue that a piece of legislation that recently passed in the House of Representatives is not only “dangerous” it will have a chilling effect on speech, forcing colleges and universities to restrict student and faculty speech. Another startling piece of US legislation will dramatically expand warrantless surveillance and allow intelligence agencies to “conscript any service provider” to help surveil individuals of interest, essentially instituting a “spy draft,” according to one press freedom watchdog.
Thank you Linda Pannozzo for this excellent expose of the war being waged on free speech in so-called western democracies and its various modalities. As an aside, though I haven't yet read the whole Harvard Law Review article, the quote from it is premised on an outdated paradigm. It reads:
"These private company actions likely responded to concerns about being associated publicly with 'undesirables.' There is no clear evidence that these acts were done at the direction of a government official with authority to coerce them. The sole acknowledged direct action was a public appeal for and subsequent praise of these actions by Senator Joe Lieberman."
In fact, these massive private companies, particularly Silicon Valley leviathans like Amazon, have practically merged with the government and it's not clear who is responding to whose concerns, or whether there is any meaningful difference between them at this point. In a world run by organized crime on the public-private-partnership model, the facilitation and protection of whistle-blowers in both corporations and governments is a threat to the whole gangster class, to the Jeff Bezoses and the Joe Liebermans of the world. One doesn't need "clear evidence of coercion". Where interests merge, no coercion is required. And the fear is not of public association with Wikileaks but of their own dark secrets being exposed by the organization.
I hope the threat to free speech in Canada posed by Bill C-63 also becomes widely known and opposed. As Matt Taibbi writes:
"C-63 is a Frankenstein’s Monster combining the worst censorship ideas already deployed by supposed ally government-in-laws like Europe’s Digital Services Act, Australia’s updated Australian Communications and Media Authority Act (ACMA), and Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which saw 7,152 complaints in its first week when the law took effect last month.
Trudeau’s creation is a turbo-charged social surveillance law aimed first at forcing big platforms like Facebook and Twitter to 'self-police,' but secondarily targeting individuals and doling out civil and criminal penalties for speech and thought on a scale not seen anywhere. What constitutes hateful conduct? While the bill newly defines hate speech as 'likely to foment detestation or vilification' of Canada’s growing list of protected groups and individuals, Canadian lawyers interviewed were generally unsure of what the standard might look like in practice."
Jesus... to quote Kurt Vonnegut Jr., What a "tentative, tangle of tendrils."
Thank you for unspooling this crazy ball of yarn, Linda.