Mike Benz is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, a free speech watchdog dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet. Through educational reports, legal assistance, and public policy analysis concerning developing threats to digital liberties, the Foundation seeks to provide nonpartisan insights and assistance to all peoples taking a stand for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the free exchange of ideas online. Benz is is a former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters. Mr. Benz founded FFO as a civil society institution building on his experience in the role of championing digital freedom around the world in the public sector. See Also: The myth of “Russian-Chinese disinformation” and the U.S. informational PsyOps - U.S. disinformation and psyops strategies are based on what they accuse other countries of doing. Rahphael Machado, Strategic Culture, 27 Sep 2024.
I was going to be talking to you guys about the Whole-of-Society Censorship Framework and going through the internal guts of how our censorship ecosystem works. But then I had a 5:00 AM flight here this morning and I got in about 9:00 AM and there was an an absurd amount of DC traffic. I asked the cab driver, Is there something big going on in the city today? He goes, It’s NATO man. It’s foreign dignitaries and stuff. I thought, Oh that’s right. Today is the first day of the NATO Summit.
So I thought I would actually take this moment in time where we’re potentially on the precipice of World War III. And we may have a zombie donut running for president. And we don’t know what’s going to happen in all this turbulence. Because it really relates to my field of specialty on the censorship industry and the nature of the social media freedoms that were just discussed. Which is that upstream of it all is NATO. This is a story that very few people really understand. A lot of people think Mark Zuckerberg is in charge or ambi-gendered, pink-haired feminists or something. Everyone’s got their own sort of bugaboo.
But the story really begins with NATO. To back that up, it’s useful to understand a little bit of how the military sees the world and how it sees the field of battle. Our US military doctrine has a concept of four theaters of war, four quadrants. We have the Strategic, the Tactical, the Logistical, and the Political. And those are the four ways you can win or lose a war.
The first way is Strategic: What’s our grand strategy or the the grand chessboard of it all? The Tactics are: Where are we going to strike? How are we going to do it? How are we going to time it? How are we going to cloak it? The Logistics are: How are we going to get the money for it? How are we going to get the tanks in position? How are we going to run the small arms munitions to our paramilitary groups? The fourth one, which is very interesting and it’s really where NATO comes into the picture, is the Political quadrant of war. Which is that you can win or lose a war depending on whether or not you have political support or not at home. Vice versa with your adversary, if they have support or no support for the war at home.
Because to fund a military you need money. Mercenaries don’t work as charities. They work—you need money and you need a mandate. You need jurisdiction to enter the field. This is one of the ways that the US lost Vietnam, was through the political. It was not so much the Strategic, the Tactical, or the Logistical. It was the fact that the politicians who had to answer to their domestic base cut the plug. So therefore no more tanks, no more bullets, you lose the war that way.
Fast forward now to 1991. The internet comes online and free speech was an instrument of statecraft for the first 13 years of the internet in a totally unalloyed way. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], the US military, funded all the initial Free Speech architecture we now have: from VPNs to end-to-end encrypted chats, to the Tor sort of onion network to be able to buy and sell goods in an anonymous way. Why? Because it was very useful to be able to build up dissident groups [and] their communications structure.
NATO provided funding to the groups in Yugoslavia, before NATO’s bombings in 1995 and 1999, to set up their own web pages in order to evade Yugoslav state control over media. So free speech was beloved by NATO and the US military.
But then a funny thing happened in 2014 which was Ukraine. Ukraine was this moment where we had—reasonable minds can perhaps disagree about what the ultimate source of that conflict was—but the fact is the US government provided $5 billion in aid, ultimately, to the coup faction that ended up toppling the democratically elected government of Ukraine under Victor Yanukovich. They activated this rent-a-riot mob just weeks after Yanukovich rejected an IMF trade deal and sided with Russia. Our head of our US Embassy, Victoria Nuland, was handing out cookies and water bottles as we effectively January-6th’d the sitting president out of office and installed a new one. Even without a democratic vote.
But NATO was not expecting what happened next which was that the entire eastern half of the country broke away and Crimea voted in an independent referendum to join the Russian Federation. This set off the sort of heart attack moment that we now live under with internet censorship. This was really the moment that internet freedom stopped becoming an unalloyed good in the minds of the military and the intelligence class. And the need to reconceptualize our understanding of war to stop enemy propaganda began to really dominate the military’s thinking.
This is really when the military began to take a much more active role in the media. The way they saw it was this: despite pumping $5 billion into independent media and NGOs and creating this surround sound of pro-NATO propaganda, you still had half of the entire country decide to go with the Russian propaganda and join the Russian Federation. This also was spreading like a cancer in NATO’s minds across all of Central and Eastern Europe. You had the Nordstream 1 pipeline already in Germany which was providing an economic lifeline to Germany. You had the US State Department in the UK foreign office doing a world tour across Europe to try to get those countries all around Europe to try to cut themselves off from Russian gas.
Now these parties began to be—these countries started to have a dominant faction of right-wing populist groups starting to rise. After NATO assassinated Gaddafi in 2011 this led to the European migrant crisis and you had these basically lower middle class and middle class European parties who were vehemently anti-immigration who are right-wing populist nationalist and because of their economic circumstances, wanted cheap Russian gas. This is everywhere from France to the UK to the VOX party in Spain to AFD in Germany.
This was running right headlong into a NATO prerogative to have these countries essentially saw off their own leg through economic sanctions on Russia in order to trap or starve the Russian Bear. The problem was, nobody was really buying NATO’s propaganda at that point. So they needed a way to be able to tune down opposition voices instead of simply Clockwork-Oranging their own messaging in. So they came up with a with a neat little term to describe what they needed to do. They called it the Gerasimov Doctrine. This is in 2014 just a couple months after the counter-coup in Ukraine.
The Gerasimov Doctrine was penned by this NATO scholar named Mark Galeotti and he said that he found a transcript of this Russian General, Valery Gerasimov, who said, The fundament nature of war has changed. It’s no longer about military-to-military conflict. It’s all about control over the media and social media. Because if you can get the right person elected by controlling hearts and minds through media, you control the military simply through the executive office. And it’s much cheaper to win a war by simply installing a president, than it is going head-to-head with tanks and F-16s.
So the Gerasimov Doctrine became this lightning rod for billions of dollars of NATO funding of psychological operations and online disinformation and all this infrastructure that was laid down all throughout Central and Eastern Europe; from Germany to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. It was the Talk of the Town, Gerasimov Doctrine. We need a way to fight back against this Russian capacity to tilt elections by using social media memes.
Three years later, Mark Galeotti would pen a mea culpa for what he had just done. He said, actually I, you know, I sort of decontextualized that a little bit. General Gerasimov was not talking about what Russians were doing. He was talking about what we do in the United States. But by that point the horse had left the barn. And it had started—it changed its name to what was called Hybrid Warfare. This was this idea that war was no longer about tanks, it was about tweets. Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, went on a world tour at that point to announce to the world that NATO was expanding its Doctrine from tanks to tweets. You can look up that direct quote if anyone wants to look it up. It’s got a kind of funny history to it.
But basically, in 2017 after Brexit and the US presidential election, NATO periodicals began to write that the biggest threat to NATO was not hostile foreign influence from Russia, but rather domestic elections in Europe from right-wing populist parties. Mark Galleotti— that same individual, the NATO scholar in NATO periodicals who coined the phrase Gerasimov Doctrine— wrote another piece saying that right-wing populism will wash NATO away unless we stop it.
NATO then began a political course which was to say that now the fundamental nature of NATO’s survival is not whether or not we can do tank-to-tank warfare with Russia. Of course they would sort of eat their words on this 5 years later. But it’s actually about controlling domestic elections. We need an apparatus to stop the rise of right-wing political candidates all across Europe who are favored by Russia, because that is Russia’s modality of war. So we need to control social media—we need to control media in these countries in order to stop the rise of right-wing populist politicians because they will wash NATO away.
I’ll give you just a few anecdotes on this. Brexit happened in June 2016. In July 2016 just one month later in Warsaw, NATO formally amended its Charter to allow capacity building of Hybrid Warfare institutions, meaning tweet fighting rather than tank fighting. It’s just one month after Brexit.
At that point you had the setting up of infrastructure such as these Centers of Excellence for Psychological Resilience. They set up these other cells—groups like The Integrity Initiative, which had cluster cells in every NATO country, to be able to determine what’s trending online and connect that to the rise and fall of political figures.
A famous example: a group that Nina Jankowicz, who had come to be the head of our own Department of Homeland Securitie’s Disinformation Governance Board, also had Anne Applebaum and other folks you may know—they were part of this UK intercluster cell that ended up getting Pedro Baños, a Spanish National Security Director, getting his nomination tanked by running basically an online smear campaign that activated politicians, business interests, NGOs, journalists, all the way up to members of parliament and the whole thing was being run by NATO. So you had the military directly intervene to stop the appointment of a civilian position within the Spanish government. And they had this in every NATO country.
So 2017 happens where you have this institutional capacity building and then maybe I’ll tee it up to where Cara is going. They began to take a large interest in funding AI censorship scan-and-ban technology. Now a lot of this goes back to the US military itself. Something changed fundamentally in the technology of censorship in 2016. Folks may have felt it in the air. But there was a very serious thing underpinning it. Before 2016 all censorship online happened through whack-a-mole. Someone had to see a post and then report it and then you had these trust and safety moderators who would bop it, one-at-a-time But the problem is, they were overwhelmed. Because there’s tens of millions of us and there’s only tens of thousands of them and you need to see something, something needs to go viral before it can even really be flagged. Then they need to make a game time decision.
So this manual era of censorship was unable to actually control domestic politics. That’s when the military entered the picture with this really cool idea. This actually started in 2014 when we were taking on ISIS and there was said to be this homegrown threat from ISIS recruiting in the United States where the Obama Administration wanted to put military boots on the ground in Syria. And ISIS was said to be recruiting on Facebook and Twitter. So the military developed a technology called Natural Language Processing, pouring tens of millions of dollars into this AI technique to be able to determine all the words you say on the internet—everything you post on Twitter, everything you post even on YouTube. Because that gets transliterated into speech to text. And to create these, essentially, maps-of-meaning of words and how they filter into narratives so that entire narratives can be scanned-and-banned impacting millions of tweets or Facebook videos or YouTube videos at a time.
This is why I refer to these AI super weapons As Weapons of Mass Deletion. They effectively did for internet censorship what weapons of mass destruction did for war. You didn’t need a standing army anymore of a million soldiers ready to go. You could have a few lines of code take out an entire political organization. And this is what has been deployed by NATO through various NATO-funded cutouts, such as the Atlantic Council which has seven CIA directors on its board. It gets annual funding from all four branches of the US military: the Army, the Marines, the Navy, and the Air Force. It also gets funding from the US State Department, from the UK Foreign Office and about a half a dozen other NATO countries as well as CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy.
Almost every major player in the censorship industry is funded by the NATO Transatlantic Military Alliance. Whether directly through the military institutions or indirectly such as military pass-throughs like our National Science Foundation which has in its Charter Mandate that 15% of its funds have to go towards National Security-related technologies and these misinformation or pro-democracy programs, which fund a hundred million dollars of censorship institutions here in the US every year, are all filtered through that.
So I will use that because I know Cara’s going to go into the AI censorship. But basically, we need to bring the military and intelligence use of AI to heal as I see it in order to restore a genuine democracy both in our country and across Europe