Democrat U.S. Government Is Building A Vast Surveillance And Speech Suppression Web Around Every American

This is why I fought so hard, for so long, in defense of free speech. The battle is not new. Hardly. And the enemies of our first amendment rights are formidable, immensely rich and powerful. When I ran the Danish cartoons and organized Mohammad art exhibits, it was to fight for freedom of speech. The left dissembled and distracted and reframed the narrative as “islamophobic.” It was nothing of the kind. It was free speech.

The right abandoned us all. We stood alone.

Danish Cartoons: Civilization vs Barbarism

Had this been nipped in the bud, stopped when it started, we would never been in a situation so dire.

EXPOSED: America’s Secret Censorship-Industrial Complex

LA Daily News: "The censorship-industrial-complex must be broken"https://t.co/w8NE8OKpZE

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) March 13, 2023

The U.S. Government Is Building A Vast Surveillance And Speech Suppression Web Around Every American

Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet and censor citizens who don’t toe the party line.

By: Margot Cleveland, The Federalist, March 22, 2023;

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Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet—the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced.

While the “Twitter Files” offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of hundreds of federal awards lay bare. Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover “problematic” speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.

Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
AI and ML Technology Will Monitor Everything We Say and Read

The federal government has awarded more than 500-plus contracts or grants related to “misinformation” or “disinformation” since 2020. One predominant area of research pushed by the Department of Defense involves the use of AI and ML technology to monitor or listen to internet “conversations.”

Originally used as a marketing tool for businesses to track discussions about their brands and products and to track competitors, the DOD and other federal agencies are now paying for-profit public relations and communications firms to convert their technology into tools for the government to monitor speech on the internet.

The areas of the internet the companies monitor differ somewhat, and each business offers its own unique AI and ML proprietary technology, but the underlying approach and goals remain identical: The technology under development will “mine” large portions of the internet and identify conversations deemed indicative of an emerging harmful narrative, to allow the government to track those “threats” and adopt countermeasures before the messages go viral.

With AI and ML identifying in real-time the origins of supposed influence operations and how the messages spread, the government will have the ability to preempt the amplification of the speech, squelching even true reporting before the general populace has an opportunity to learn the news. To appreciate fully the danger this poses to free speech requires Americans to consider the use of that technology with these seven additional details.
1. Everything Everywhere All At Once

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First, the AI and ML technology under development will mine every conceivable mode of conversation for the government. Consider, for example, the databases monitored by just a few of the companies the government is paying to develop this AI and ML technology.

PeakMetrics, the recipient of a $1.5 million award, tracks millions of news sites, blogs, global social platforms, podcasts, TV and radio, and email newsletters.

Omelas Inc., which received more than $1 million in taxpayer money, culls data from “the most influential newspapers, TV channels, government offices, militant groups, and more across a dozen social networks and messaging apps, thousands of websites, and thousands of RSS feeds.”

Alethea Group, which received a Phase I award of nearly $50,000 to develop a “machine learning tool for proactive disinformation/misinformation detection, assessment, and mitigation,” boasts it covers data sources including mainstream and “fringe” social media platforms, peer-to-peer messaging platforms, blogs and forums, state-affiliated media sites, “gray” propaganda sites, and the dark web.

Newsguard, awarded $750,000 by the DOD, offers two databases, including its unreliable reliability ratings database of thousands of news and information websites and a second database of purported hoaxes.

Primer, which scored a $3 million award to develop its technology, offers a database that looks to news and media data sources, publicly captured images, the dark web, cyberattacks shared by the general public, and classified—presumably for government clients—and unclassified data sources. Primer also partners with Flashpoint, which adds “Telegram, Reddit, Discord, and “the deep and dark web” to the databases mined.
2. We’re Talking Americans, Not Just Russian Bots

It is also important to recognize that the AI and ML technology under development will not just mine foreign or state-connected actors, but will monitor everyone’s speech. Both the government grants and the web pages of the monitoring companies confirm this reality.

We also know from the “Twitter Files” that the government and its fellow residents in the Censorship-Industrial Complex view the speech of Americans as related to foreign influence operations merely because the viewpoint matches what they claim is an adversary’s perspective. And we know the government pushed for the censorship of ordinary Americans.

By its nature, AI and ML technology has unlimited potential to flag problematic speech on any imaginable subject. Here, the past is prologue: Speech need not involve terrorism, acts of war, or even our electoral process for our government to consider it within its purview to fact-check. (It also need not be false; see point 4).

The “Twitter Files” and recent events provide Americans a glimpse into the breadth of the topics the government may deem harmful narratives worthy of censor—from elections, to vaccines, to runs on grocery stores. Underlying the government’s obsession with silencing misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information is the “Great Power Competition” perspective of foreign relations, under which China and Russia represent a constant threat to America’s power, influences, and interests.

With the government viewing foreign relations through the Great Power Competition paradigm, speech on any topic, touching even tangentially on America’s “power, influences, and interests,” will be fair game for censorship efforts.