The House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (yes, that's its real committee name) held a hearing yesterday you might have missed or tuned out on account of its witness list. But it's worth paying attention to because the far-right GOP's contention that everyone is out to censor their first amendment rights is starting to take aim at info sharing efforts between the private sector and the USG to fight Internet and computer security threats.
The pretext for the hearing is a "story" that ran this week that decried the "Censorship Industrial Complex," one of several new buzzwords echoed by Rep. Jim Jordan and other GOP members asking questions. Bear in mind that the folks pushing this narrative use this term interchangeably to describe any "anti-disinformation efforts":
https://public.substack.com/p/ctil-files-1-us-and-uk-military-contractors
The story and the hearing concerned the insidious censorship threat posed by a shadowy entity called the CTI League, which was allegedly started as a joint public-private partnership but which according to the "Twitter files" useful idiot Matt Taibbi is a cleverly disguised effort to censor republican and conservative views on social media.
In reality, the CTI League was one of several groups that formed around the time of the 2020 pandemic to help respond to the crushing number of phishing and scam websites that were taking advantage of the situation. Here's one example:
When asked by a GOP committee member to describe the biggest "bombshell" -- the "most alarming thing" -- to come from "the Twitter files," Taibbi answered that the activities of the CTI League were "shocking." He went on to describe how this group maintained censorship spreadsheets with domains numbering in the hundreds of thousands. But he forgot to mention these were PHISHING DOMAINS!!!!!
Here's the giant whopper: Taibbi said there was "a regular, organized stream of communications between the FBI, the Dept of Homeland Security and the largest tech companies in the country," he said. "They had an organized system for flagging content. Not occasionally, but in enormous numbers involving spreadsheets of accounts that ran into the hundreds of thousands. This was shocking to us. This isn't some crazy conspiracy theory. We've already had 4 federal judges rule that this activity violates the first amendment."
Yeah. There was a spreadsheet of a bajillion domains that several thousand security people had access to that everyone agreed were malicious or phishous. CENSORSHIP!
https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-weaponization-federal-government-4
Public
CTIL Files #1: US And UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan For Global Censorship In 2018, New Documents ShowWhistleblower makes trove of new documents available to Public and Racket, showing the birth of the Censorship Industrial Complex in reaction to Brexit and Trump election in 2016
@briankrebs@infosec.exchange
More highlights from the hearing (w/ timestamps from the video):
One of the witnesses that the committee has heard from before is Michael Shellenberger, whose title -- I shit you not -- is "Twitter Files Journalist." At ~43:14, Schellenberger advocates abolishing CISA, DHS, and something called the National Science Foundation's "Track F," Trust & Authenticity in Communications.
https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2021/nsf21572/nsf21572.htm
At 1:14:40 Shellenberger disparages the “so called greatest cybersecurity professionals” expressing skepticism that anyone would volunteer to help out hospitals, saying they spend “millions of dollars a year” on cybersecurity already. “it gave me the creeps just reading about it” he says.
These people are dangerous, and it's dangerous to ignore this bullshit.
Some additional context from WaPo which shows how these hearings are part of an overall strategy to cut funding for combating foreign disinformation campaigns. E.g., the Post writes that "the federal government is no longer warning Meta about foreign influence campaigns, a shift that comes amid a legal campaign against the Biden administration’s communication with tech platforms."
The Washington Post
U.S. stops helping Big Tech spot foreign meddling amid GOP legal threatsThe federal government has stopped warning Meta about foreign influence campaigns amid a legal campaign against the Biden administration’s communication with tech firms.
BTW, curious which people in infosec jobs share the view that fighting phishing and ransomware = combating disinformation/censorship, just search LinkedIn for "ctil files." Apparently, this week's shocking revelations are "the first installment" of the CTIL files.
