True and False narratives are in the eye of the beholder.
From my earliest years I was taught by my parents to think about what
I read in the papers, and heard on the news over the radios(we did not
have TV until late 1951)
The first question my parents would ask, why was this item important
enough to warrant posting? Next question, why was the item worded the
way it was?
There were many other questions, but I recall being asked to wonder
who benefited from this particular article. News broadcasts and
newspapers do not come together by Divine Decree. They are what they
are because of special interests. Are we supporting our military
buildup? Are we pushing consumerism? Are we making a case for or
against a portion of our population? The list is as long as each of
us has the time to investigate. But the one place we must avoid at
all cost is to simply take the word of the article being presented.
Never forget, the price of Freedom is eternal vigilance.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/6/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
FBI launches open attack on 'foreign' alternative media outlets challenging
US foreign policy
Under FBI orders, Facebook and Google removed American Herald Tribune, an
alternative site that publishes US and European writers critical of US
foreign policy. The bureau's justification for the removal was dubious, and
it sets a troubling precedent for other critical outlets.
By Gareth Porter
The FBI has publicly justified its suppression of dissenting online views
about US foreign policy if a media outlet can be somehow linked to one of
its adversaries. The Bureau's justification followed a series of instances
in which Google and other social media platforms banned accounts following
consultations with the FBI.
In a particularly notable case in 2018, the FBI encouraged Facebook,
Instagram and Google to ban the American Herald Tribune (AHT), an online
journal that published critical opinion articles on US policy toward Iran
and the Middle East. The bureau has never offered a clear rationale,
however, despite its private discussions with Facebook on the ban.
The FBI's first step toward intervening against dissenting views on social
media took place in October 2017 with the creation of a Foreign Influence
Task Force (FTIF) in the bureau's Counterintelligence Division. Next, the
FBI defined any effort by states designated by the Department of Defense as
major adversaries (Russia, China, Iran and North Korea) to influence
American public opinion as a threat to US national security.
In February 2020, the FBI defined that threat in much more specific terms
and implied that it would act against any online media outlet that was
found
to fall within its ambit. At a conference on election security on February
24, David K. Porter, who identified himself as Assistant Section Chief of
the Foreign Influence Task Force, defined what the FBI described as "malign
foreign influence activity" as "actions by a foreign power to influence
U.S.
policy, distort political sentiment and public discourse."
Porter described "information confrontation" as a force "designed to
undermine public confidence in the credibility of free and independent news
media." Those who practice this dark craft, he said, seek to "push
consumers
to alternative news sources," where "it's much easier to introduce false
narratives" and thus "sow doubt and confusion about the true narratives by
exploiting the media landscape to introduce conflicting story lines."
"Information confrontation", however, is simply the literal Russian
translation of the term "information warfare." Its use by the FTIF appears
to be aimed merely at justifying an FBI role in seeking to suppress what it
calls "alternative news sources" under any set of circumstances it can
justify.
While expressing his intention to target alternative media, Porter
simultaneously denied that the FBI was concerned about censoring media. The
FITF, he said "doesn't go around chasing content. We don't focus on what
the
actors say." Instead, he insisted that "attribution is key," suggesting
that
the FTIF was only interested in finding hidden foreign government actors at
work.
Thus the question of "attribution" has become the FBI's key lever for
censoring alternative media that publishes critical content on U.S. foreign
policy, or which attacks mainstream and corporate media narratives. If an
outlet can be somehow linked to a foreign adversary, removing it from
online
platforms is fair game for the feds.
The strange disappearance of American Herald Tribune
In 2018, Facebook deleted the Facebook page of the American Herald Tribune,
a website that publishes commentary from an array of notable authors who
are
harshly critical of U.S. foreign policy. Gmail, which is run by Google,
quickly followed suit, along with the Facebook-owned Instagram.
Tribune editor Anthony Hall reported at the time that the removals occurred
at the end of August 2018, but there was no announcement of the move by
Facebook. Nor was it reported by the corporate news media until January
2020, when CNN elicited a confirmation from a Facebook spokesman that it
had
indeed done so in 2018. Furthermore, the FBI was advising Facebook on both
Iranian and Russian sites that were banned during that same period of a few
days. As Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos noted on July 21,
2018, "We have proactively reported our technical findings to US law
enforcement, because they have much more information than we do, and may in
time be in a position to provide public attribution."
On August 2, a few days following the removal of AHT and two weeks after
hundreds of Russian and Iranian Pages had been removed by Facebook, FBI
Director Christopher Wray told reporters at a White House briefing that FBI
officials had "met with top social media and technology companies several
times" during the year, "providing actionable intelligence to better enable
them to address abuse of their platforms by foreign actors." He remarked
that FBI officials had "shared specific threat indicators and account
information so they can better monitor their own platforms."
Cybersecurity firm FireEye, which boasts that it has contracts to support
"nearly every department in the United States government," and which has
been used by Department of Homeland Security as a primary source of "threat
intelligence," also influenced Facebook's crackdown on the Tribune. CNN
cited an unnamed official of FireEye stating that the company had
"assessed"
with "moderate confidence" that the AHT's website was founded in Iran and
was "part of a larger influence operation."
The CNN author was evidently unaware that in U.S. intelligence parlance
"moderate confidence" suggests a near-total absence of genuine conviction.
As the 2011 official "consumer's guide" to US intelligence explained, the
term "moderate confidence" generally indicates that either there are still
differences of view in the intelligence community on the issue or that the
judgment "is credible and plausible but not sufficiently corroborated to
warrant higher level of confidence."
CNN also quoted FireEye official Lee Foster's claim that "indicators, both
technical and behavioral" showed that American Herald Tribune was part of
the larger influence operation. The CNN story linked to a study published
by
FireEye featuring a "map" showing how Iranian-related media were allegedly
linked to one another, primarily by similarities in content. But CNN
apparently hadn't bothered to read the study, which did not once mention
the
American Herald Tribune.
Finally, the CNN piece cited a 2018 tweet by Daily Beast contributor Josh
Russell which it said provided "further evidence supporting American Herald
Tribune's alleged links to Iran." In fact, his tweet merely documented the
AHT's sharing of an internet hosting service with another pro-Iran site "at
some point in time." Investigators familiar with the problem know that two
websites using the same hosting service, especially over a period of years,
is not a reliable indicator of a coherent organizational connection.
CNN did find evidence of deception over the registration of the AHT. The
outlet's editor, Anthony Hall, continues to give the false impression that
a
large number of journalists and others (including this writer), are
contributors, despite the fact that their articles have been republished
from other sources without permission.
However, AHT has one characteristic that differentiates it from the others
that have been kicked off Facebook: The American and European authors who
have appeared in its pages are all real and are advancing their own
authentic views. Some are sympathetic to the Islamic Republic, but others
are simply angry about U.S. policies: Some are Libertarian
anti-interventionists; others are supporters of the 9/11 Truth movement or
other conspiracy theories.
One notable independent contributor to AHT is Philip Giraldi, an 18-year
veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service and and an articulate critic of US
wars in the Middle East and of Israeli influence on American policy and
politics. From its inception in 2015, the AHT has been edited by Anthony
Hall, Professor Emeritus at University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.
In announcing yet another takedown of Iranian Pages in October 2018,
Facebook's Gleicher declared that "coordinated inauthentic behavior" occurs
when "people or organizations create networks of accounts to mislead others
about who they are what they're doing." That certainly doesn't apply to
those who provided the content for the American Herald Tribune.
Thus the takedown of the publication by Facebook, with FBI and FireEye
encouragement represents a disturbing precedent for future actions against
individuals who criticize US foreign policy and outlets that attack
corporate media narratives.
Shelby Pierson, the CIA official appointed by then director of national
intelligence in July 2019 to chair the inter-agency "Election Executive and
Leadership Board," appeared to hint at differences in the criteria employed
by his agency and the FBI on foreign and alternative media.
In an interview with former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell in
February,
Pierson said, "[P]articularly on the [foreign] influence side of the house,
when you're talking about blended content with First Amendment-protected
speech.against the backdrop of a political paradigm and you're involving
yourself in those activities, I think that makes it more complicated"
(emphasis added).
Further emphasizing the uncertainty surrounding the FBI's methods of online
media suppression, she added that the position in question "doesn't have
the
same unanimity that we have in the counterterrorism context."
