Tag: cia

CIA VENTURE CAPITAL ARM PARTNERS WITH EX-GOOGLER’S STARTUP TO “SAFEGUARD THE INTERNET”

TRUST LAB WAS founded by a team of well-credentialed Big Tech alumni who came together in 2021 with a mission: Make online content moderation more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy. A year later, the company announced a “strategic partnership” with the CIA’s venture capital firm.

Trust Lab’s basic pitch is simple: Globe-spanning internet platforms like Facebook and YouTube so thoroughly and consistently botch their content moderation efforts that decisions about what speech to delete ought to be turned over to completely independent outside firms — firms like Trust Lab. In a June 2021 blog post, Trust Lab co-founder Tom Siegel described content moderation as “the Big Problem that Big Tech cannot solve.” The contention that Trust Lab can solve the unsolvable appears to have caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm tasked with securing technology for the CIA’s thorniest challenges, not those of the global internet.

The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel — which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA — will work on “a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet.” Key terms like “harmful” and “safeguard” are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward “pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”

Keep reading

CNN analyst declares that freedom of speech is ‘nonsense,’ claims Elon Musk’s new Twitter empowers Vladimir Putin and is ‘destructive to American national security’

A CNN analyst aspersed the freedom of speech as “nonsense,” and claimed that Vladimir Putin and Russia will be “all over Twitter” dispersing disinformation to the entire world.

Former CIA case officer and current CNN intelligence analyst Robert Baer appeared on the cable news network on Friday to discuss the opening up of Twitter by new CEO Elon Musk.

“CNN Newsroom” host Boris Sanchez began by bringing up the news that Musk plans to grant mass amnesty to accounts that were previously suspended. Musk made the decision after running a Twitter poll, in which 72.4% approved of welcoming the previously banned accounts.

“The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.

Sanchez asked Baer about his opinion regarding formerly banned accounts being reinstated.

Baer responded, “Well, Boris, I can tell you one thing, Putin will be all over Twitter if there’s no regulations on this. Fake accounts, spoofed accounts, the rest of it, this is a great opportunity for him.”

Without evidence, Baer added, “And so when he’s talking about the popular voice, Musk, he’s really talking about Russian intelligence.”

“The Russians are waiting for something like this,” the former CIA agent claimed.

“They need a propaganda campaign against the United States and against our support for Ukraine,” he continued. “And they’re going to be all over Twitter. I guarantee this. Supporting the far right, plans, demands to stop arming Ukraine. You just wait.”

Baer alleged that the Russians will “put up” misinformation and it will “cascade everywhere, in India, in Europe.” He said the Russian disinformation would “appeal” to the European far right and Chinese. He said that Putin and the Russians are going to weaponize Musk’s new pro-free speech Twitter “as a vehicle to save himself and Ukraine.”

The CNN security and intelligence analyst bizarrely asserted, “And you know, this freedom of speech is just nonsense because you can’t go in a movie theater and yell ‘fire.’ It’s against the law.”

Keep reading

CIA Seeking To Recruit Russians “Disgusted” By Putin’s War

The Central Intelligence Agency is seeking to tap Russians as potential spies who are “disgusted” with Putin’s war in Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported this week, as part of a new push to bolster its ranks of Russian assets.

The CIA’s deputy director of intelligence David Marlowe, who has been in the post since June 2021, said in a rare speech at George Mason University’s Hayden Center that the CIA is “looking around the world” for Russian who are unhappy with the invasion of Ukraine. It was Marlowe’s first public appearance while at post as deputy director. 

This is “because we’re open for business,” he underscored. The attempt to gain dependable assets is said to include military officers and even oligarchs who are angry at being impacted by Russia’s extreme economic and political isolation on the world stage. 

Offering his assessment on how the war is going for the Russians, Marlowe described, “Putin was at his best moment the day before he invaded.” Speaking of the potential for the Russian leader to put pressure on neighboring Ukraine and NATO before the decision to invade, Marlowe added: “He squandered every single bit of that.”

At that point before the February 24 incursion, President Putin had “all the power that he is ever going to have,” according to the CIA #2 official. 

Some international publications dubbed Marlowe’s speech, which happened last week but was first revealed on Tuesday, a “recruitment pitch”.

Keep reading

Secret research: Why did the CIA feed children radioactive cereal?

When Fred Boyce and dozens of other boys joined the Science Club at Fernald State School in 1949, it was more about the perks than the science. Club members scored tickets to Boston Red Sox games, trips off the school grounds, gifts like Mickey Mouse watches and lots of free breakfasts. But Fernald wasn’t an ordinary school, and the free breakfasts from the Science Club weren’t your average bowl of cereal: the boys were being fed Quaker oatmeal laced with radioactive tracers.

The Fernald State School, originally called The Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded, housed mentally disabled children along with those who had been abandoned by their parents. Conditions at the school were often brutal; staff deprived boys of meals, forced them to do manual labor and abused them. Boyce, who lived there after being abandoned by his family, was eager to join the Science Club. He hoped the scientists, in their positions of authority, might see the mistreatment and put an end to it.

“We didn’t know anything at the time,” Boyce said of the experiments. “We just thought we were special.” Learning the truth about the club felt like a deep betrayal.

Keep reading

Was the CIA Behind the Jonestown Massacre?

“I think the Jonestown incident was an extension of In Search of the Manchurian Candidate. I think those people were conditioned to act in certain ways and would have probably just moved from Montreal [where CIA mind control experiments were carried out under the direction of Dr. Ewen Cameron] to Guyana, in this case. You look at Jim Jones’ background carefully, he had a lot of intelligence contact there for doing exactly what he did. It escalated once they killed Congressman Leo J. Ryan; basically, they had no other way to go, so they just tried to self-destruct the whole mission. And that means the death of hundreds of people. As I point out in the book, the medical examiner there made some startling statements, and we wouldn’t even allow the bodies to be properly examined when they were brought back to the East Coast and turned in. So obviously it was a cover-up. Jonestown I think was an extension of MK-ULTRA from the CIA and there are probably other experiments going on.”– Colonel James Bo Gritz, legendary Special Forces operative who trained Special Forces that went into Jonestown after the massacre.[1]

When someone is duped into doing or believing something foolish, it has long been common to chide them for “drinking the Kool-Aid.”

This phrase derives from the infamous Jonestown massacre deep in the jungles of Guyana when, on November 18, 1978, 913 men, women and children supposedly drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide poison from paper cups.

They had been instructed to do so by Jim Jones, a preacher with the People’s Temple, a left-wing religious cult which had established a settlement in Guyana that they were part of.

Deeper investigation, however, reveals something even more sinister: That Jones was a CIA agent involved in a mind control project coordinated by one of the U.S. Army’s top chemical warfare specialists, Dr. Laurence Layton.[2] Rather than a mass suicide, most of the parishioners were murdered—it appears in order to coverup the true purpose of Jonestown and Jones’s own connection to the CIA.

Keep reading

CIA Caught Covering Up Rampant Child Sex Crimes Inside Agency and NO ONE Has Gone to Jail

Imagine an agency so secretive and so corrupt that they can literally get away with criminal sexual abuse of children. Then imagine you are forced to pay for this agency and despite knowing that their agents are abusing children — even admitting to it — they are avoiding any kind of legal ramifications. Well, there is no need to imagine because that and more, is happening within the CIA and no one is doing anything about it.

Last December, through multiple FOIA lawsuits, Buzzfeed News obtained hundreds of internal CIA reports that detailed the rampant abuse. According to the reports, despite multiple agents and contractors, at least 10, being caught in child sex abuse situations, federal prosecutors have brought no charges. The abusers remain protected by the agency.

It’s been nearly a year since this information became public yet there has been no investigation and essentially no interest by anyone in D.C. or the political establishment to hold them accountable.

Buzzfeed reports that most of the cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution but in an apparent quid pro quo scenario, the US attorneys send the cases back to the CIA to “handle them internally.” As a result of this scenario, these child-abusing monsters face no legal ramifications. At most, according to the report, they may lose their job or security clearance.

As Buzzfeed points out, some of these crimes are utterly horrifying and involve toddlers.

Keep reading

Crypto Developer Found Dead Hours After Claiming CIA/Mossad Were Sex Trafficking In Caribbean

A young crypto developer and millionaire was found dead just hours after making disturbing comments about the CIA, Mossad, and pedophile elites on Twitter.

Nikolai Mushegian, a prominent figure in the cryptocurrency world, claimed intelligence agencies like the CIA and Mossad were operating a “sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring” in the Caribbean.

“CIA and Mossad and pedo elite are running some kind of sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring out of Puerto Rico and caribbean islands. They are going to frame me with a laptop planted by my ex gf who was a spy. They will torture me to death,” Mushegian posted to Twitter on October 28 at 4:57 AM.

Keep reading

The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and the National Security State Continues

The steady march of the post-2016 tech censorship campaign has been picking up pace lately, and we’ve just learned of another leap forward. According to recent major reporting from the Intercept, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been involved in efforts aimed at corralling what it refers to as “MDM”: misinformation, disinformation, and “malinformation.”

Documents obtained and made publicly available by the news outlet show that the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been formulating a strategy to combat MDM regarding US elections and other matters. While seemingly unobjectionable on the surface ― who could be against combating false information, which is rife online? ― it raises serious questions about the extent of government involvement in the already-troubling phenomenon of tech censorship.

The conversations detailed in the documents show the federal government, and the DHS specifically, taking a more active role in tech companies’ efforts to suppress MDM. We’ve had some indications this was happening for a while, as when DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC in August that the government was “working with the tech companies” on “strengthen[ing] the legitimate use of their very powerful platforms and prevent[ing] harm from occurring,” and that it was doing so “across the federal enterprise” ― comments that were only reported in right-wing media.

The documents give us details about what that work has entailed. In these discussions, the government did not directly carry out censorship. Rather, they involved government agencies: doing “debunking” and “pre-bunking”; directing the press, local and state governments, and other stakeholders to “trusted resources”; carrying out “rumor control”; boosting “trusted authoritative sources”; giving financial support to its external partners; and improving information literacy. Much of the focus is on elections, with participants talking about using these resources to prevent people being misled about how, where, and when to vote, and stressing that CISA should strictly be a “resource” that at most uses its “convening power.”

Keep reading

Snowden reveals ‘most important video of the year’

US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden says a 1983 interview with former CIA officer Frank Snepp, detailing how the agency used mainstream newspapers in the US to distribute disinformation, is still the “most important video of the year.”

Snowden, who currently lives in Russia after gaining citizenship in the country, posted a short clip from Snepp’s interview on Monday. In the video, the former intelligence officer explained how he had served as an interrogator, agent debriefer and chief strategy analyst while working in the US embassy in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

Snepp said one his duties was to brief the press when the CIA wanted to “circulate disinformation on a particular issue,” noting that this information was not necessarily a lie, and could be a half-truth. 

“We would pick out a journalist, I would go do the briefing, and hope that he would put the information in print,” Snepp said, noting that the journalists would usually have no way of actually verifying any of the information provided to them.

Snepp went on to name a few journalists who the CIA had specifically targeted over their “terrific influence,” and named a few “respected journalists” who were working in Saigon at the time, such as Robert Chaplin of the New Yorker, Kies Beach of the Los Angeles Times, Malcolm Brown of the New York Times, and Maynard Parker of Newsweek magazine, among others.

Keep reading

Get a Peek Inside the New CIA Museum

FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS, the CIA Museum has been one of the most mysterious collections of artifacts in the world. Housed in the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia—one of the most secure buildings in the United States—the museum tells the story of the government’s clandestine undertakings from the Cold War through the CIA’s mission in May 2011 to kill Osama bin Laden to today. It has had an exclusive audience: only CIA officers and approved officials have been allowed to view the collection—until now.

No, Langley hasn’t swung open its doors. Instead, as part of a recent renovation of the museum, curators have begun to digitize the 3,500 objects in the museum collection. To date, there are 217 online including a German enigma machine used during World War II to develop codes, a Glomar Explorer bunk card, which told the crew of the search vessel what to do in an emergency, and a CIA 25th Anniversary program, the milestone anniversary that led to the creation of the museum, all of which you would see in in person if you were among the few to get an invitation.

Keep reading