An amazing self-own
from the US Government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
(CISA)
Background and Context In
this essay I provide an overview of disinformation tactics summarized on the
US Government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
CISA.gov website, and have modified that document for use by individuals and
organizations wishing to counter the mis-mal-disinformation (MDM) constantly
emanating from governments, corporations - such as big pharma,
non-governmental organizations (such as the Gates foundation), astroturf organizations (such as the Center for
Countering Digital Hate). For more
information on CISA, please see our prior Substack
essay titled "HOW A “CYBERSECURITY” AGENCY COLLUDED
WITH BIG TECH AND “DISINFORMATION” PARTNERS TO CENSOR AMERICANS": THE WEAPONIZATION
OF CISA - Interim staff report for the Committee on the Judiciary and the
Select Subcommittee. In
addition to the various organizations, the information summarized below also
applies to individuals spreading MDM, including those who are working for
these agencies or as individuals, with their own, personal agendas. All
of the disinformation tactics described below are being used against the
health sovereignty movement, the freedom (or liberty) movements, those
pushing back against UN Agenda 2030 and the approved climate agenda, the WEF,
the UN, and the resistance against globalization movement (NWO). Tactics of Disinformation Disinformation
actors include governments, commercial and non-profit organizations as well
as individuals. These actors use a variety of tactics to influence others,
stir them to action, and cause harm. Understanding these tactics can increase
preparedness and promote resilience when faced with disinformation. Disinformation
actors use a variety of tactics and techniques to execute information
operations and spread disinformation narratives for a variety of reasons.
Some may even be well intentioned but ultimately fail on ethical grounds. Using disinformation for beneficial purposes
is still wrong. Each
of these tactics are designed to make disinformation actors’ messages more
credible, or to manipulate their audience to a specific end. They often seek
to polarize their target audience across contentious political or social
divisions, making the audience more receptive to disinformation. These
methods can and have been weaponized by disinformation actors. By breaking
down common tactics, sharing real-world examples, and providing concrete
steps to counter these narratives with accurate information, the Tactics of
Disinformation listed below are intended to help individuals and
organizations understand and manage the risks posed by disinformation, Any organization or its staff can be targeted by
disinformation campaigns, and all organizations and individuals have a role
to play in building a resilient information environment. All
of this is yet another aspect of the Fifth Generation Warfare (or propaganda/PsyWar) technologies, strategy, and tactics which are
being routinely deployed on all of us by our governments, corporations, and
various non-state actors. Disinformation Tactics Overview Cultivate
Fake or Misleading Personas and Websites: Disinformation actors create networks of fake personas and
websites to increase the believability of their message with their target
audience. Fake expert networks use inauthentic credentials (e.g., fake
“experts”, journalists, think tanks, or academic institutions) to lend undue
credibility to their influence content and make it more believable. Create
Deepfakes and Synthetic Media: Synthetic media content may include photos, videos, and
audio clips that have been digitally manipulated or entirely fabricated to
mislead the viewer. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools can make synthetic
content nearly indistinguishable from real life. Synthetic media content may
be deployed as part of disinformation campaigns to promote false information
and manipulate audiences. Devise
or Amplify Conspiracy Theories: Conspiracy theories attempt to explain important events as
secret plots by powerful actors. Conspiracy theories not only impact an
individual’s understanding of a particular topic; they can shape and
influence their entire worldview. Disinformation actors capitalize on
conspiracy theories by generating disinformation narratives that align with
the conspiracy worldview, increasing the likelihood that the narrative will
resonate with the target audience. Astroturfing
and Flooding the Information Environment: Disinformation campaigns will often post overwhelming
amounts of content with the same or similar messaging from several
inauthentic accounts. This practice, known as astroturfing, creates the impression
of widespread grassroots support or opposition to a message, while concealing
its true origin. A similar tactic, flooding, involves spamming social media
posts and comment sections with the intention of shaping a narrative or
drowning out opposing viewpoints. Abuse
Alternative Platforms:
Disinformation actors may abuse alternative social media platforms to
intensify belief in a disinformation narrative among specific user groups.
Disinformation actors may seek to take advantage of platforms with fewer user
protections, less stringent content moderation policies, and fewer controls
to detect and remove inauthentic content and accounts than other social media
platforms. Exploit
Information Gaps: Data
voids, or information gaps, occur when there is insufficient credible
information to satisfy a search inquiry. Disinformation actors can exploit
these gaps by generating their own influence content and seeding the search
term on social media to encourage people to look it up. This increases the
likelihood that audiences will encounter disinformation content without any
accurate or authoritative search results to refute it. Manipulate
Unsuspecting Actors:
Disinformation actors target prominent individuals and organizations to help
amplify their narratives. Targets are often unaware that they are repeating a
disinformation actor’s narrative or that the narrative is intended to
manipulate. Spread
Targeted Content:
Disinformation actors produce tailored influencer content likely to resonate
with a specific audience based on their worldview and interests. These actors
gain insider status and grow an online following that can make future
manipulation efforts more successful. This tactic often takes a “long game”
approach of spreading targeted content over time to build trust and
credibility with the target audience. Actions You Can Take Although
disinformation tactics are designed to deceive and manipulate, critically
evaluating content and verifying information with credible sources before
deciding to share it can increase resilience against disinformation and slow
its spread.
The next sections discuss common disinformation technologies,
tactics and strategies in more detail. Cultivate Fake or Misleading Personas and Websites Description:
Disinformation actors
create networks of fake personas and websites to increase the believability
of their message with their target audience. Such networks may include fake
academic or professional “experts,” journalists, think tanks, and/or academic
institutions. Some fake personas are even able to validate their social media
accounts (for example, a blue or gray checkmark next to a username), further
confusing audiences about their authenticity. Fake expert networks use
inauthentic credentials to make their content more believable. Disinformation
actors also increase the credibility of these fake personas by generating
falsified articles or research papers and sharing them online. Sometimes,
these personas and their associated publications are intentionally amplified
by other actors. In some instances, these materials are also unwittingly
shared by legitimate organizations and users. The creation or amplification
of content from these fake personas makes it difficult for audiences to
distinguish real experts from fake ones. Adversaries
have also demonstrated a “long game” approach with this tactic by building a
following and credibility with seemingly innocuous content before switching
their focus to creating and amplifying disinformation. This lends a false
credibility to campaigns. Example:
During the course of the COVIDcrisis, I have had a
number of misleading personas and websites (including substack
authors) target me. It is extremely disturbing to see fragments of my CV, my
life, my peer-review papers dissected, re-configured, even modified to target
me. Evidently, because some government and/or organization perceives my ideas
to be dangerous. There
is one person on Twitter with almost 100,000 followers who has literally
posted thousands of posts targeting me. At one point, Jill took screen shots
of all of these posts and placed in a summary document. She gave up the
project at around page 1500. The file was too big to handle easily. Everyday for years, this disinformation actor posts two
to three hit pieces on me - mixed with other content. He has used every
single one of these tactics outlined above. Clearly, he is being paid by an
organization or government. He self-defines as an independent journalist, and
has a long and well documented history of cyberstalking and spreading
falsehoods. Many of his followers do not question his authenticity. One of
the followers recently even attacked me for having worked on development of
the Remdesivir vaccine! These posts get passed around as authentic
information, and there is nothing I can do. These
fabricated fake information fragments then gets
spread as if they are true information, and other influencers report on these
posts as if they were real. The cycle goes around and around. The end result
is not only intentional damage to myself and my reputation, but also that the
whole resistance movement (whatever that is) gets delegitimized. Which
is a “win” for those chaos agents who are pushing this disinformation. Create Deepfakes and Synthetic Media Synthetic
media content may include photos, videos, and audio clips that have been
digitally manipulated or entirely fabricated to mislead the viewer. Cheapfakes are a less sophisticated form of
manipulation involving real audio clips or videos that have been sped up,
slowed down, or shown out of context to mislead. Sort of like how the
corporate media will often take limited quotes out of context and then weaponize
them. In contrast, deepfakes are developed by training artificial
intelligence (AI) algorithms on reference content until it can produce media
that is nearly indistinguishable from real life. Deepfake technology makes it
possible to convincingly depict someone doing something they haven’t done or
saying something they haven’t said. While synthetic media technology is not
inherently malicious, it can be deployed as part of disinformation campaigns
to share false information or manipulate audiences. Deepfake
photos by disinformation actors can be used to generate realistic profile
pictures to create a large network of inauthentic social media accounts.
Deepfake videos often use AI technology to map one person’s face to another
person’s body. In the case of audio deepfakes, a “voice clone” can produce
new sentences as audio alone or as part of a video deepfake, often with only
a few hours (or even minutes) of reference audio clips. Finally, an emerging
use of deepfake technology involves AI-generated text, which can produce
realistic writing and presents a unique challenge due to its ease of
production. Devise or Amplify Conspiracy Theories Conspiracy
theories attempt to explain important events as secret plots by powerful
actors. Conspiracy theories not only impact an individual’s understanding of
a particular topic; they can shape and influence their entire worldview.
Conspiracy theories often present an attractive alternative to reality by
explaining uncertain events in a simple and seemingly cohesive manner,
especially during times of heightened uncertainty and anxiety. Disinformation
actors capitalize on conspiracy theories by generating disinformation
narratives that align with the conspiracy worldview, increasing the
likelihood that the narrative will resonate with the target audience. By
repeating certain tropes across multiple narratives, malign actors increase
the target audience’s familiarity with the narrative and therefore its
believability. Conspiracy theories can also present a pathway for radicalization
to violence among certain adherents. Conspiracy theories can alter a person’s
fundamental worldview and can be very difficult to counter retroactively, so
proactive resilience building is especially critical to prevent
conspiratorial thinking from taking hold. Furthermore,
conspiracy theories can also be used to divide groups as well as bad jacket
individuals within a movement. Conspiracy
theories can also be used to discredit a movement. Conspiracy theories that
are not based in reality, that can be linked to a movement or organization
can be used to smear that group as a “fringe element.” Not to be taken
seriously or to drown out expert voices. Astroturfing and Flooding the Information Environment Disinformation
campaigns will often post overwhelming amounts of content with the same or
similar messaging from several inauthentic accounts, either created by
automated programs known as bots or by professional disinformation groups
known as troll farms. By consistently seeing the same narrative repeated, the
audience sees it as a popular and widespread message and is more likely to
believe it. This practice, known as astroturfing, creates the impression of
widespread grassroots support or opposition to a message, while concealing
its true origin. A
similar tactic, flooding, involves spamming social media posts and comment
sections with the intention of shaping a narrative or drowning out opposing
viewpoints, often using many fake and/or automated accounts. Flooding may
also be referred to as “firehosing.” This
tactic is used to stifle legitimate debate, such as the discussion of a new
policy or initiative, and discourage people from participating in online
spaces. Information manipulators use flooding to dull the sensitivity of
targets through repetition and create a sense that nothing is true.
Researchers call these tactics “censorship by noise,” where artificially
amplified narratives are meant to drown out all other viewpoints. Artificial
intelligence and other advanced technologies enable astroturfing and flooding
to be deployed at speed and scale, more easily manipulating the information
environment and influencing public opinion. Abuse Alternative Platforms Disinformation
actors often seek opportunities for their narratives to gain traction among
smaller audiences before attempting to go viral. While alternative social
media platforms are not inherently malicious, disinformation actors may take
advantage of less stringent platform policies to intensify belief in a
disinformation narrative among specific user groups. These policies may
include fewer user protections, less stringent content moderation policies,
and fewer controls to detect and remove inauthentic content and accounts than
some of the other social media platforms. Alternative
platforms often promote unmoderated chat and file sharing/storage
capabilities, which is not inherently malicious but may be appealing for
actors who want to share disinformation.* While some
alternative platforms forbid the promotion of violence on public channels,
they may have less visibility into private channels or groups promoting
violence. Disinformation actors will recruit followers to alternative
platforms by promoting a sense of community, shared purpose, and the
perception of fewer restrictions. Groups on alternative platforms may operate
without the scrutiny or detection capabilities that other platforms have.
Often, groups focus on specific issues or activities to build audience trust
and disinformation actors can, in turn, abuse this trust and status to
establish credibility on other platforms. Exploit Information Gaps Data
voids, or information gaps, occur when there is insufficient credible
information to satisfy a search inquiry, such as when a term falls out of use
or when an emerging topic or event first gains prominence (e.g., breaking
news). When a user searches for the term or phrase, the only results
available may be false, misleading, or have low credibility. While search
engines work to mitigate this problem, disinformation actors can exploit this
gap by generating their own influence content and seeding the search term on
social media to encourage people to look it up. Because
the specific terms that create data voids are difficult to identify
beforehand, credible sources of information are often unable to proactively
mitigate their impacts with accurate information. Disinformation actors can
exploit data voids to increase the likelihood a target will encounter
disinformation without accurate information for context thus increasing the likelihood
the content is seen as true or authoritative. Additionally, people often
perceive information that they find themselves on search engines as more
credible, and it can be challenging to reverse the effects of disinformation
once accepted. Of
course, recognize that the “Googlenet” and other
search engines place government websites and “trusted sources” before other
sources of information. Remember, just because it is the first term found on
Google does not make it true. The Googlenet does not like data voids. So
when Google does not like the analytics of a search term or encounters a datavoid, they fill the gap with information they do
like. The Googlenet has even been caught
manipulating search results by hand. This is what happened with the search term
“mass formation psychosis” was used to describe the public response to the COVIDcrisis. As this term went against the COVID
narrative, its legitimacy was quickly snuffed out by the Googlenet. Manipulate Unsuspecting Actors Disinformation
campaigns target prominent individuals and organizations to help amplify
their narratives. These secondary spreaders of disinformation narratives add
perceived credibility to the messaging and help seed these narratives at the
grassroots level while disguising their original source. Targets are often
unaware that they are repeating a disinformation actors’ narrative or that
the narrative is intended to manipulate. The content is engineered to appeal
to their and their follower’s emotions, causing the influencers to become
unwitting facilitators of disinformation campaigns. Spread Targeted Content Disinformation
actors surveil a targeted online community to understand its worldview,
interests, and key influencers and then attempt to infiltrate it by posting tailored
influence content likely to resonate with its members. By starting with
entertaining or non-controversial posts that are agreeable to targeted
communities, disinformation actors gain “insider” status and grow an online
following that can make future manipulation efforts more successful. This
tactic may be used in combination with cultivating fake experts, who spread
targeted content over time, taking a “long game” approach that lends false
credibility to the campaign. Targeted content often takes highly shareable
forms, like memes or videos, and can be made to reach very specific audiences
by methods such as paid advertising and exploited social media algorithms. In Conclusion The
distribution of mis- dis- or mal- information is currently defined as
domestic terrorism by the US Department of Homeland Security (for receipts,
please see prior Substack essay “DHS: Mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM)
being caused by "Domestic Terrorists"). The 2010 DoD Psychological Operations manual, signed off by current Secretary of Defense
Lloyd Austin, includes the following clause: “When authorized, PSYOP forces
may be used domestically to assist lead federal agencies during disaster
relief and crisis management by informing the domestic population”. In other
words, any time a disaster or crisis occurs - as loosely defined by any
component of the Federal administrative state, the DoD is authorized to
deploy military grade PSYOP (otherwise known as PsyWar)
technologies and capabilities on US citizens. A key aspect of PSYOP or PsyWar capabilities involves distribution of grey and black propaganda into a targeted population. The methods
used to accomplish this (summarized above) are clearly defined by CISA on its
own website, and the congressional Interim staff report for the Committee on
the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee titled “HOW A “CYBERSECURITY” AGENCY COLLUDED WITH
BIG TECH AND “DISINFORMATION” PARTNERS TO CENSOR AMERICANS": THE
WEAPONIZATION OF CISA
provides a summary road map of how CISA has acted as a key coordinating
agency for the Federal administrative state as it has deployed these
technologies, tactics and strategies on United States citizens. In an
article published in USA Today on October 03. 2023 titled “Federal appeals court expands limits on
Biden administration in First Amendment case”, journalists Jessica Guynn
and John Fritze summarize current standing of the
key legal case which is revealing the weaponization of CISA against the
American populace. The
nation’s top cybersecurity defense agency likely violated the First Amendment when lobbying Silicon Valley companies to
remove or suppress the spread of online content about elections, a federal
appeals court ruled Tuesday. The
5th Circuit Court of Appeals expanded an injunction issued in September to
include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, ruling that it
used frequent interactions with social media
platforms “to
push them to adopt more restrictive policies on election-related speech.” The
previous decision from a panel of three judges – nominated by Republican
presidents – concluded that the actions of the Biden White House, FBI and
other government agencies likely violated the First Amendment but that CISA –
which is charged with securing elections from online threats – attempted to
convince, not coerce. Republican
attorneys general, who brought the case, asked for a rehearing. In
Tuesday’s order, the 5th Circuit judges ruled that CISA facilitated the FBI’s
interactions with social media companies. The
order bars CISA and top agency officials including director Jen Easterly from
taking steps to “coerce or significantly encourage” tech companies to take down or curtail the
spread of social media posts. The
Justice Department declined to comment. CISA, which is part of the Department
of Homeland Security, said it does not comment on ongoing litigation, but
executive director Brandon Wales said in a statement that the agency does not
censor speech or facilitate censorship. The
lawsuit was filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana as well
as individuals who said their speech was censored. “CISA
is the ‘nerve center’ of the vast censorship enterprise, the very entity that
worked with the FBI to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Missouri
Attorney General Andrew Bailey tweeted. CISA
knew precisely what it was doing and how to accomplish the censorship and
propaganda agenda of the Obama/Biden administration. There are three key
questions remaining at this point 1. What will the Supreme court do about CISA
and Biden Administration violations of the First Amendment? 2. Which is the greater risk, mis- dis- and
mal- information deployed on US Citizens by the USG Administrative State, or
US Citizens discussing information and ideas that the USG Administrative
State does not want discussed, and therefore defines as misinformation. 3. What do you intend to do about this? Please
keep in mind where this all started. And
also remember that in Fifth Generation Warfare, otherwise known as PsyWar, the battle is for control of your mind, thoughts,
emotions, and all information you are exposed to. The only way to win at PsyWar is not to play. As soon as you engage with either
corporate or social media, you enter the battlefield. So be careful out
there. Know
the technology, tactics and strategy of your opponents. The PsyWar battlefield terrain is tortuous, bizarre,
constantly shifting, and dangerous to your mental health. Our opponents make
no distinction between combatant and non-combatant, and they recognize no
moral boundaries to what they will do to achieve their objectives. “Who is Robert Malone” is a reader supported publication.
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