Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/30/24 Matt Taibbi on the Newest Revelations about Twitter’s Relationship with the Intelligence Agencies

Episode Date: June 2, 2024

Scott is joined by Matt Taibbi to discuss a series of reports he recently coauthored that provide new details on the so-called censorship-industrial complex. Taibbi talks about what he and his fellow journalists discovered and what it reveals about the official effort to control narratives going into the 2024 election. Discussed on the show: “Censorship Files: "We Will Not Be Intimidated From Continuing Our Mission in... 2024" (Racket) “Twitter Files - CIA” (Public) “The Overlooked Twitter Files Scandal: How the Intelligence Community Wore Down the Platform” (Racket) Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author and political commentator. Subscribe to his Substack publication: Racket News and follow him on Twitter @mtaibbi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got the great matt taeby from racket news and he's got some blockbusters for us here welcome back matt how you doing thanks for having me. Uh, very happy to have you here. Um, the censorship files, we will not be intimidated from continuing our mission. That's the state talking. I love it. We will not be intimidated. It's so

funny. They're so brave. And then, uh, more importantly, Twitter files, CIA. And there's Jane Harmon, our friend, the old, uh, burnt massad spy. And, uh, this one is a joint racket with you and public. That's Michael Schellenberger and friends over there. And you have, I guess, what's sort of a short summary of it at Rackett called the Overlooked Twitter File scandal. One more big one, at least here, how the intelligence community wore down the platform. So take us through it here. Yeah, so the Twitter file story, just to back up on the mechanics of how that whole thing happened, we, when we got in, in the first week, week of doing that story, we had basically like a portal that allowed us to search universally

in any direction for like an eight-month period of Slack chats. And that's where we got a gigantic amount of material. And then after that we had a number of different regimes of searches where we had people looking up different things but once we settle on the FBI thing we were mostly looking for that uh you know this question of like government censorship so we started to get all this stuff and it's hundreds of it's it's really 150 160 000 emails maybe and there's a lot of stuff in there including attachments that we didn't read and there's no way any one person could even by now have gone through all of it so we missed some things you know and

One of the stories that we didn't look at involved this thing that was already known to the public, which is that Twitter got hacked in 2020. Barack Obama's account was compromised. So was Joe Biden's and Elon Musk's. And after that, Twitter brought in a famed hacker and cybersecurity expert named Peter Mudge Zatko to conduct a security review of the platform and what schellenberger found we didn't we ignored that story for a couple of reasons or we didn't think it was newsworthy for a couple of reasons one is that it had some people thought that his conclusions about security failures that twitter might have been beneficial to Elon Musk so we didn't want to be accused of doing something that was like it in favor of Elon but

When Michael went back through and looked at all this material, he finds emails, one of which says that this guy got fired by Twitter for having a relationship with the security agencies while he was accessing all of Twitter's internal documentation and reviewing all of its security procedures. you know, I'll just read you the one smoking gun email that he found. Without the knowledge or support of the management or the board, Twitter learned that Zatko had engaged with members of the U.S. intelligence agencies and sought to enter a formal agreement that would allow him to work with them and provide information to them. So this now, it's hard to explain. This led us down this long rabbit hole that involves pressure,

that was applied to the company to let the intelligence services and the enforcement agencies be involved in the content moderation process. And this was a kind of a key moment in that progression. And we just didn't know about it until we started diving into it.

So that's kind of the starting point of the whole thing. I see. So, yeah, from what I gleaned from this thing, you're saying that because these, this Aletha, that's not Alethea, yep. Now, that's not this guy's company, but that's a contractor that he hired, but they're sort of a cutout for CIA.

Is that right? Yeah. So the basic plot is Twitter gets hacked. There's an outcry that there's security issues of the company. This guy who used to work for DARPA, by the way, is brought in as a consultant. He presses the company to hire a firm called Alethea, which. was started with, among other things, $10 million in seed capital from Incutal, which is the venture capital arm of the CIA. They issue a whole bunch of recommendations about how

basically Twitter can't handle security itself and needs to bring in, quote unquote, outside partners. And when Twitter doesn't go for it, the guy turns whistleblower and places additional pressure on the company to let outside agencies, you know, into their internal processes. There's like, there are Senate hearings and a whistleblower complaint and other stuff. But if you look at all those pieces of information together, it looks like kind of a suspicious timeline. And we just missed that angle. Yeah. So tell us about Nina James. of what's role in this?

Well, that's a little bit controversial. Here's what we found is that this company, Alethea, now they did a pair of audits that were ordered by this Mudge guy, and they suggested a whole range of crazy content moderation slash censorship ideas, including things like pre-platforming and putting people in artificial void. and stuff like that and then there was another audit where they reviewed twitter's alleged role in january sixth now the work order that we found for that second audit listed nina jankowitz as the technical research director of the project and said that she was making three hundred

seventy five dollars an hour doing that she denies that um that she did any work for the company uh with twitter but the work order is what it is we published it and uh it's a little weird because the the the audit that they conducted basically concluded that twitter ad note role in january 6th they couldn't find any evidence of planning or violent speech or anything like that so the whole premise of why you would need to have the government involved in a platform like twitter is kind of undermined by their own report which is interesting yeah Um, and so to zoom out a bit here, I mean, the point is that to some degree, the CIA and its contractors just completely took over what, like the algorithm for what gets suppressed or what doesn't or what? Well, it's, yeah, I apologize. It mean, it's kind of a weedsy story, right? Um, and because we've been subsumed in it for a couple of years, it jumped out at us probably more than it would for somebody who isn't living it.

Basically, the company for years had been under pressure to let outside agencies be part of their decision-making about content and how to build algorithms and for restricting this and that. You know, we even found a letter where the FBI passed on a note from their friends at the fort, meaning Fort Meade, basically saying, you know, we know you're not providing data to the IC. Would you like to reconsider? Twitter says no. And then it's a few months later that this hack happens, and then this guy comes in. And so it's all part of this big narrative where Twitter was trying to hold out and be an independent company and not have to be partnering with the FBI, the CIA, or, you know, the NSA on content.

And at the end of this process, they got so much bad press that they just basically ended up partnering with these folks and creating just this very complicated system where, you know, Homeland Security, FBI and apparently some other agencies were intimately involved in their. decision-making so this really was though a major turning point in the thing that you guys had overlooked but in other words I don't know again in the scheme of things this really made a difference the one time they hired this contractor that was the the camel's nose and the under the flap of the tent there yeah I think so because you know first of all the hack was significant Twitter gets hacked the president of the United States accounting gets hacked as one person I talked to a former military intelligence guy said the president's

the cat attacked were at least kind of drive by the building you know um and so you know did they did they insert this person in to to clean things up well it's not exactly clear we don't have full proof of that but we do have chatter in the company saying that he was let go because of this um he didn't respond to our queries about that but clearly this incident coupled with this avalanche of negative press about security failures and it led to them eventually sort of saying uncle and letting in the FBI and other agencies and creating a formal system of content flagging that involved the FBI and the Office of the Director of National intelligence but we we just thought that the this moment where this person who was basically

kind of in charge of security at the company for a brief period of time you know the revelation that he was probably working for the intelligence agencies or that he might have been it seemed that seemed kind of a significant to us okay so that sort of brings us I guess to the next article here, the censorship files because, well, there's a couple more here. Hey, you're really

cranking out a lot of great stuff here. The point being that if I have it right, there was some sort of rollback as a consequence of your and your colleagues great journalism on this issue and because of the lawsuits about it

by, I guess it was State Attorney General pursuing over it and all of that. And so, and there was pressure from some in Congress. So they had suspended some of this, and yet they're, like in the name of your co-author here, undead FOIA, these are the undead censors here. They're not quite all the way gone yet. And it's an election here, and everybody knows that Trump is a Russian, fascist agent, spy. and, of course, the New York Times already has stories about there's Russian disinformation projects afoot.

I have a tab here somewhere like that. So, oh, there it is. Russia steps up covert sabotage campaigns. And, oh, that wasn't the online one. There's a different one about online. Anyway, point being, they got their pretext for protecting democracy by destroying the First Amendment here. So where are they at now? And where does that leave us for the rest of the election?

election you're here. Yeah, so if you, you might have noticed in the last couple of months, there have been a spate of news stories basically suggesting that AI and deep fakes are creating a unique security threat for the coming election. The Senate Intelligence Committee is about to hold hearings on what to do about that. the ranking member, I'm sorry, the majority leader for the Intelligence Committee, which Senator Mark Warner out of Virginia,

actually let it slip a couple of weeks ago that in relation to that topic, these security agencies had begun working with the platforms again. As you said, because of that Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri, they had kind of backed off so the the fbi and the dhs they had stopped um at least they say they did they stopped doing this these censorship programs with facebook twitter google all these other companies but um in anticipation of winning that supreme court case they've now started up again

and the reason ostensibly is because of a new concern about a i and deep fix i mean it's just thought up one reason after another going back eight years now originally it was like russian bots right then it was domestic violent extremists that needed to be stopped then it was um you know election denial it's one thing after another so enforcing their covid and ukraine narratives exactly all those things right so covid was a big one and now the thing du jour is is is AI and deepfakes and and you know the question is what programs are they going to install and what we did is we you know after the twitter files um we had some trouble figuring out where the funding was going for some of these anti disinformation agencies that the government

has like the global engagement center and the foreign intelligence task force and stuff like that So we sent out hundreds of freedom of information request to universities and other places asking for documents about what it is that they're actually doing. And we started to get answers back and we began publishing some of that stuff. And that's what these censorship file stories are about. And the reason they're significant is because some of them point to plans for 2024 to do more aggressive content, programs. They're not terribly specific, but they're interesting. Yeah. Hey, y'all, let me tell you about Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc.

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That's rrbi.cow. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com. And if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else. But not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scott Horton's show.substack.com.

Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's Libertasbella.com. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th, from the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of poor things, comes the roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee

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Trump boosters were deep, not necessarily deep platform. They wouldn't necessarily know they were kicked off, but they just had their engagement cranked all the way down, right? Yeah. So the big program to do content moderation was this thing called the election integrity partnership that was run out of Stanford, but it partnered with Homeland Security and the State Department, weirdly enough. And, And they put out a big report at the end of what they did, is they were, they were sending out masses of flags to companies like Twitter saying, you might want to think about taking this down, basically. And in their own top 10 list of offenders, they were all kind of pro-Trump conservative outlets,

like the Gateway Pundit and stuff like that. And, you know, that's by their own admission. found you know in this latest batch of stuff that you know they were having discussions where they're talking about you know maybe we shouldn't just um ban accounts but like whole sites including occupied democrats and gateway pundit and the reason that's interesting is because it speaks to the mindset of these folks like the old idea about censorship is you take down something that's incorrect But their whole idea is that people can be incorrect or sites can be incorrect just generally. So let's just preemptively take down the whole thing.

That's one of the ideas we found in some of their correspondence. Yeah. Well, they'll go as far as they can with it, that's for sure. And are they outright? Do you find anything where they're like outright just identifying the election of Trump as something that must be stopped? wouldn't be surprising you know they don't go that far um but it's certainly kind of one of the between the lines things that you read in all this um correspondence we found a lot of stuff about discussions that for instance the aspen institute where they had this crazy panel

um that was called uh the the commission on information disorder that was like headed up by of all people katie corrick prince harry and the former head of um the homeland security department of cissa what the hell yeah i know it's absolutely crazy i didn't think you're about to say all those words in a row there taevi oh yeah i know i mean when we first saw this stuff in the twitter files there's like a page where it had a list of all the commissioners. And when I saw Prince Harry and Katie Corrig at the top of the page, I almost had a heart attack. I was like, it's so surreal some of this stuff. But, you know, that's what it is. Anyway, this commission, some of their ideas were so crazy and so beyond the scope of just

taking down material that they thought was incorrect, that even somebody who, who's, you know, about as partisan as you can get, which is, you know, the chess champion, Gary Kasparov. He kind of quit the commission and sent them this vicious letter saying that this reminds me of home, you know, using a disinformation committee to do things like try to force people to change their workplace diversity policies. That's a, that approach was a common practice in the USSR. are um so they the interesting thing about this is that they view this this idea of creating disinformation committees as a way to get their nose into almost any conceivable kind of

political issue whether it's hiring practices um you know taxation uh you know conquering racism like They believe that disinformation is responsible for people voting incorrectly, or if you don't favor reparations, it's because you haven't been properly informed about the history of slavery, so they see that as part of their mandate. And, you know, the idea that this is mission creep and that the government should never be involved in this stuff, certainly, it's just totally absent from their thinking. And, you know, even me, I'm basically kind of a political liberal, but it's the unconstitutionality of this that jumps out when you read these files. Yeah, it's funny, too, when Kasparov is comparing them to Soviet communists, he's not saying because of, like, what leftist revolutionaries they are, but because of what, like, horrifying, bureaucratic totalitarians they are, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It has nothing to do with ideology. It's the, it's the authoritarian structure of how these things work that set him off. And I understand that. I mean, I lived in, I was a student in the Soviet Union back in the day, and I lived in post-communist Russia for a long time. And the idea, for instance, of using psychiatric committees to change somebody's place in the workforce, right you can give them a mental illness diagnosis for having the wrong ideas uh you could use that they had this committee called the the rab crin which was the like a workers and peasants

committee supposedly protecting workers rights but really what it was is you know if you wanted to snitch out somebody that you worked with who you didn't like and take his take his job you just you got the right position in in the committee and you did it that way and that's what you know that's what set him off about this is that you can use these disinformation committees to go after almost anybody and that's that's that's that's what's so scary yeah so they don't have to be you know kind of a leftist really at all they could this is the perfect type job for a center left liberal democratic voter like a hillary clinton night type you know right right and that's this has been my frustration with this whole story is i you know when we first started doing the twitter files

people were saying, oh, you're, you know, you're doing work for the right. You've gone over to conservatism and all this other stuff. And I said, just read these files. It has nothing to do with ideology. This is all about power. And, you know, using these new methodologies to basically hand over new forms of authority to the federal government that they are constitutionally barred. from having right um we can't for instance the state department has no legal business being involved in

speech in the united states or or dealing with um or regulating say election uh misinformation like they're not supposed to be involved domestically at all but they're working with these crazy committees at places like stanford to review content what is that all about that's crazy it doesn't matter whether you're right or left that's crazy yeah and um and and and that's why people just they they misunderstand what this whole thing is about it's it's about power not not ideology well and by in large partisan arguments are about which truths people choose to emphasize rather than just outright lying about what the facts are and people say you know like oh your opinion is incontrovertibly wrong or something but it's an opinion

opinion based on all kinds of things that obviously no one can regulate that other than just free arguments especially in the united states of america if anybody ever heard of that you know free speech and we'll work it out in the free market of ideas and all that yeah i mean it's got you know i mean like the whole concept of um how the free press is supposed to work in this country is like we we don't assume that we're going to be right about stuff and And we certainly, the news is fluid, like even something is kind of, you know, relatively, I would say, uncomplicated as journalistic truth, or, you know, which is usually just the measure of what can we say without being sued, right, for being wrong. even that is very very difficult to determine you know at the at the outset of crises like the pandemic um you can't just come in and say it's not it didn't come from a lab you don't

know that right like you might think that but you don't you don't know that and and it's bad enough for private companies to lay down rules about what you can and cannot say but when you start getting you know the the FBI and the State Department involved in these issues or even worse the Pentagon funding some of these committees then you're into this whole new world of just weirdness which is which is exactly what the founders I think we're trying to avoid when you know when they design the First Amendment we don't want the government having a truth committee that's something we arrive at by discussion because you You just never know, right?

Like, that's the whole idea. And these people think completely the opposite, and that's what's nuts about them. Yeah, well, I mean, even then, the presumption should be that they're the worst liars in America about everything, of course. They're not going to be the ones to get to the bottom. And even just since this censorship regime

that you've so well described was created, what they do? They enforce the phony Russiagate narratives and that everyone who knew better was one of them and deserve to be outright censored or shadow banned, et cetera, et cetera. And then on from there to, as you say, COVID, not just that it couldn't possibly have been from anywhere but a wet market, but also about, you know, people arguing about the effectiveness of masks

and mandates and lockdowns and vaccines and all of the rest of that, all the censorship behind that. And, of course, every bit of the censorship was on the wrong side of all of those issues. the whole time. It turns out, yeah, the lockdowns didn't do any good at all. The mask didn't do any good at all. All of that massive totalitarian social engineering didn't stop the virus one damn bit. And the vaccines had their problems and all of the rest of that. And then you move on to the laptop, which they obviously were lying if you're an honest person at the time. But still, they claim was Russian disinformation to crush the Republicans' October surprise in 2020 before

the election there and uh anyway i'm rambling but on and on every single one of them they're liars they're enforcing lies and trying to prevent people from telling the truth and then they just call it the opposite of that but it's pretty obvious right i mean if what people don't understand about this is that if you if you put the government in charge of deciding what is and is not a fact then you're just giving them a monopoly on lying. And these are people, as you say, that have a record of putting out the most destructive lies that you can have. I mean, the biggest lies are always official, right? You go back to from the Gulf of Tonkin to WMDs to, you know, the missile gap to, you know, any one of a dozen other things to rush to Russiagate us, you know, is another one that it's just one.

one sort of wrong story after another that was cranked out to the public and you want to put those folks in charge of deciding what is and is not a fact, you know, that, again, that's what we have a free press for. The press is there to kind of consider everything and say, no, bullshit, this isn't true. Or at least some of the time. I mean, mostly they're just the handmaiden of the state, but there ought to be some discrepancies available, you know? Yeah, exactly. And if you turn off. off even that limited valve, right? Then you have a real problem. And that's, that's where, you know, that's why we're trying to, you know, pressure these folks into not doing this because, you know,

bad outcomes will absolutely ensue. Yeah. All right. Well, it's the fact that whenever I get an email says rack it on it, I stop whatever I'm doing and read that thing because you do such great work all the time, Matt. So really appreciate you. All right. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me on. Hell yeah. Talk soon. Actually, guys, that's Matt Taibi. He's at Substack. And that is... Oh, sorry, I was looking at a public one. It's just racket.news. It's the website, actually.

Racket.com. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.