Preserving Democracy Through Authoritarianism

Exposing "The Intercept" for Comically Blatant Hypocrisy and Plagiarism

It’s been a strange few years during which the world has changed for the worse. Citizens of nearly every democracy on Earth have seen many of the most fundamental rights that their forefathers died for become watered down or outright abolished. Western democracies no longer seem to practice what they preach — it is almost as if the west no longer values western values. Freedom of speech is the quintessential human right; the central processing unit of any free society. Authoritarianism is the inevitable fate of any society that loses it’s right to speak unpopular speech. If America is the “guiding light of the modern world”, than I fear that if she falls, so too will the rest of the worlds liberal democracies. The people would do well to remember that without active efforts to preserve and defend our freedoms, countries will revert to their default autocratic state of governance.

Like an alcoholic in denial about the loss of control of their life, the civilians of the democracies of the world, intoxicated by propaganda, seem to be in denial about the loss of control of their governments. It’s time for us to take a moment and reflect on the situation, so that we can try to understand what has occurred. Only after one recognizes that there is in fact a problem can one solve that problem.

The problem is that our democratic institutions have been infiltrated by a group of elitist technocrats representing the interests of non-government organizations, private enterprise, and intelligence agencies. No matter from where on the political spectrum, I imagine that everyone is aware of this to some extent. Recently The Intercept published a damning story about how our governments have been policing so-called mis/dis/mal/information on our social networks.

The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.

Sadly one of the biggest stories of the year, the key takeaways of the article are as follows:

• Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing.

• DHS plans to target inaccurate information on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

• Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners to report disinformation directly.

But did you know that The Intercept story was actually just a sliver of the full story, and that the article was basically written by the CIA? The truth is that this story — the real story — was originally reported in 2021 by The Gateway Pundit.

The National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) held meetings with the UN since 2018, now we see that they also worked with Twitter in 2020 to prevent free speech.

We reported again yesterday the story about how one American, Dr. Shiva Ayyarurai, discovered that Twitter has built a special portal offered to certain governmental entities so that government officials can flag and delete content they dislike for any reason, as part of what they call “Twitter Partner Status.”

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who invented email, ran for US Senate in Massachusetts as a Republican and made allegations of voter fraud on Twitter. These tweets were then deleted by the far-left tech giant.  Later it was discovered that they were deleted at the direction of government employees of the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office. 

Discovering this, Dr. Ayyadurai filed a federal lawsuit by himself, alleging that his federal civil rights were violated when the government silenced his political speech in order to affect an election.

It is incredible that only one tiny conservative independent news site bothered to report this explosive story. Representing himself in this lawsuit (which he won), Dr. Shiva revealed how election officials and government actors work together to coordinate with social media platforms to silence speech in America. This was in 2021.

A follow up article by The Gateway Pundit contains Dr. Shiva’s amended complaint to the court which tells the extraordinary story.

Billionaires, in particular Pierre Omidyar, through his Democracy Fund, as well as the Rockefeller Brothers, the Murdoch Family’s Quadrivium, Mark Zuckerberg, and other nongovernmental entities, to fund, design and deploy this centralized infrastructure for censorship of speech. The network diagram in Exhibit A provides a visual illustration of those relationships and the technology infrastructure they created to censor speech. These relationships provided the Defendants special access to channels to use if when and necessary for personal benefit, to not only blacklist and surveil US citizens, but also to silence their domestic speech, which is what they did to Dr. Shiva starting on September 25, 2020.

5. The existence of this infrastructure was discovered during the course of this lawsuit: On October 30, 2020, testimony elicited by this Court, revealed for the first time the existence of a “Trusted Twitter Partnership” between Government and Twitter; on May 19, 2021, Dr. Shiva discovered the “Playbooks” co-authored by the Defendants, which were presented to this Court during the May 20-21, 2021 hearings, that detail the step-by-step process for identifying Influence Operators (IOs), monitoring them and silencing their speech; and, on June 28, 2021, the staggering discovery of The Long Fuse Report, confirmed that this infrastructure had been monitoring Dr. Shiva starting as early as June of 2020. Discovery of The Long Fuse Report is as momentous in US History as discovery of the Pentagon Papers. This lawsuit provides the context to understand it.

6. Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (“Dr. Shiva”), MIT PhD, the inventor of email, is a scientist, technologist, political activist (see Exhibit B), and educator – an independent thinker -, a minority, who was born as a low-caste “Untouchable” in India’s deplorable caste system, earned four degrees from MIT, a Fulbright Scholar, Westinghouse Science Talents Honors Award recipient, Lemelson-MIT Awards Finalist, nominee for the Presidential National Medal of Technology and Innovation. His life has been about identifying problems and proposing solutions based on a systems science approach – that is neither partisan nor bi-partisan -, is beyond left and right, and is based on objectively understanding the interconnections of the parts of any system. He developed a systems science curriculum, which he originally taught at MIT, that he now teaches to the broad public to educate them on applying a systems approach to any problem. This approach is what Dr. Shiva employs in his videos and social media posts in analyzing a problem or situation.

7. Since 2011, Dr. Shiva worked hard to build his followers on Twitter – his main platform for education, outreach, and political activism – from 0 to 360,000 followers with a reach of tens to hundreds of millions as documented in The Long Fuse Report, before he was deplatformed by these Defendants on February 1, 2021. His content, combining text posts, images and video streams, enabled his students and followers on Twitter to get a deep and unique education, from a systems approach, on any number of issues be it innovation, healthcare, education, agriculture, vaccines, election integrity, Big Tech, etc. Given that Twitter is the most powerful megaphone for politics (politicians and political activists must be on Twitter to even have a chance of their message being heard), Dr. Shiva’s content, based on this systems-based approach, appealed to the broad mass of independent thinkers in America. Up until September 25, 2020, Dr. Shiva was never
suspended or deplatformed from Twitter, though he spoke on a number of controversial topics, from a non-mainstream, systems-science-based approach.

8. In February of 2017, Dr. Shiva decided to engage in electoral politics. He ran as an Independent for U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in 2018 against Elizabeth Warren. In 2020, he ran as a Republican (though the Massachusetts GOP did not support him, given he had his own independent base) in the U.S. Senate primary; and later, in the U.S. Senate general elections as a write in candidate on the platform of #StopElectionFraud and #TruthFreedomHealth.

…

10. On September 1, 2020, following the confounding results from his own U.S. Senate Primary election Dr. Shiva began his journey to discover two (2) systemic problems in the processes of U.S. electronic voting systems:
a. The certification by State Election Directors of voting systems software with features that allowed for the multiplication of a voter’s vote by a factor (the “weighted race” feature), thus denying one person one vote; and,
b. The lack of adherence to Federal law 52 USC 20701 that election officials must preserve digital ballot images for twenty-two (22) months for federal elections, to enable auditing.

11. During September 1-24, 2020, Dr. Shiva used Twitter to educate his nearly 260,000 students and followers, from a systems science approach, to appreciate the realities of these two systemic system problems that he had identified. He tweeted, shared posts, did videos on his own experience during his primary election campaign, the mechanics of the weighted race feature that denies one person one vote, how ballot images were being deleted – thus thwarting forensic audits, and the slogan of his U.S. Senate Write In campaign: #StopElectionFraud. The Long Fuse Report documents that at that time, the infrastructure co-architected by these Defendants was being only used to surveil him and actively analyze his ‘influence and reach’ to gauge his threat severity. During this period, Twitter never took any action to silence any of his tweets (see Exhibit C) or deplatform his tweets or his Twitter account.

13. On September 24, 2020, Dr. Shiva tweeted out about destruction of digital ballot images by Tassinari and Galvin, which went viral on social media. In response to this tweet, Defendant Galvin had his office respond with a press release disputing Dr. Shiva’s tweet. Galvin’s office also officially filed a complaint with Twitter through their dedicated Partner Support Portal (“PSP”). Galvin’s office is a “Trusted Twitter Partner,” which means any complaints from them receive a higher priority response than some normal private citizen complaining to Twitter. The Playbooks explain this in detail.

14. On September 25, 2020, Dr. Shiva posted a threaded tweet sharing four (4) screenshots of emails that explicitly named Defendant Michelle Tassinari, (“the September 25, 2020 Tassinari Tweet”). Tassinari holds many positions of power at the key intersection of governmental and non-governmental members of the infrastructure established to censor domestic speech:

a. State Election Director of Massachusetts;
b. Chief Legal Counsel for Massachusetts Secretary of State Galvin;
c. President of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED);
d. Executive Committee Member of the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency’s Election Infrastructure-Government Coordinating Council (CISA EI-GCC);
e. Member of the Advisory Board of the MIT Election Data & Science
Laboratory;
f. Member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (US EAC); and,
g. Member of the Council of State Governments

15. The September 25, 2020 Tassinari Tweet went viral and revealed her personal role in destroying digital ballot images. This time, unlike the earlier official response, Tassinari had Amy Cohen, the Executive Director of NASED and someone who commanded immense influence through relationships that Cohen had forged over years in Washington DC, as shown in Exhibit A, to do ‘whatever it takes’ to get Dr. Shiva’s tweet removed.

16. Tassinari and Cohen’s coordination with Twitter and using the relationships they had forged, resulted in Dr. Shiva’s tweet being removed and Dr. Shiva being locked out of his Twitter account for most of the one month period leading to the general elections on November 3, 2020. Tassinari had used the relationships and the infrastructure to benefit her personally i.e. removing the tweet that revealed her violation of federal law. The deliberate silencing of Dr. Shiva on Twitter in the midst of his U.S. Senate campaign just prior to election day, severely crippled his last month of efforts including: raising money, reaching out to voters, sharing his message, etc.

17. On October 20, 2020, Dr. Shiva filed a lawsuit and sought to enjoin Galvin from further silencing him on Twitter. On October 30, 2020, this Court held a TRO hearing Case 1:20-cv-11889-MLW
and elicited testimony which gave us the first glimpses of the infrastructure designed by the Defendants i.e. the “Trusted Twitter Partnership.” In her affidavit, Tassinari had concealed the Trusted Twitter Partnership and her use of the infrastructure through Amy Cohen to do ‘whatever it took’ to stop Dr. Shiva from spreading the news of Tassinari’s violation of federal law. This Court ruled in Dr. Shiva’s favor, ordered Galvin to stop contacting Twitter; Galvin to stop contacting NASED; and, ordering Galvin to respond to Dr. Shiva’s speech on Twitter with his own speech. At that hearing, this Court also indicated that it was more than likely that, per the Blum test, Dr. Shiva would prevail in his lawsuit in demonstrating that Twitter’s action was State Action.

18. Dr. Shiva would discover, later that Tassinari’s and Cohen’s influence and coercive power far outweighs that of the average state election director.

19. Starting on November 4, 2020, when Dr. Shiva was back on Twitter, until January 31, 2021, Dr. Shiva tweeted on all different topics. At this time his followers had grown to 360,000 and his influence and reach had also grown, as documented in The Long Fuse Report.

20. On February 1, 2021, when he once again shared the September 25, 2020 Tassinari Tweet in a video lecture about developments in this very lawsuit, to his students and followers, Dr. Shiva received, within seventeen(17) minutes of the lecture ending, an official Twitter email informing him that Twitter had permanently suspended his account. Those seventeen (17) minutes permitted no time for Twitter to exercise any independent private internal judgment; it kicked Dr. Shiva off Twitter because the other Defendants wanted it to do so. Interestingly, Tassinari, Cohen, and Twitter’s counsel Stacia Cardille (“Cardille”), who has submitted false affidavits in this case, were all together at NASED’sFebruary 1-5, 2021 Winter Conference at which Tassinari and Cohen had invited Cardille to give a talk on “Managing Misinformation on Social Media Platforms,” at the same time that Twitter deplatformed Dr. Shiva.

21. The Defendants, to conceal their coordinated efforts to silence Dr. Shiva, then coordinated together to conceal from this Court the existence of their relationship. Already in this case, multiple of the Defendants have made repeated omissions as well as direct factual misrepresentations via testimony and affidavit. Two of the more recent efforts to conceal the truth from this Court include:
a. Defendants failed to disclose to the Court the existence of the Playbooks setting out the means by which they were to regulate speech on social media and the fact that Twitter Legal, Tassinari and Cohen co-wrote them; and b. Cardille, on behalf of the Defendants, misrepresented that Twitter deplatformed Dr. Shiva through internal deliberations within Twitter. Cardille was confronted with the need to explain the 17-minute response time. This would have required her to reveal to this Court that 24/7 live surveillance teams were watching Dr. Shiva’s tweets on 4-hour shifts every day on behalf of the Defendants, as documented in the Long Fuse Report. Cardille chose to conceal this fact and filed a false affidavit instead.

22. The Long Fuse Report analyzed Dr. Shiva as the test subject, the canary in the coal mine, the first U.S. Senate candidate deplatformed during his election campaign, to see if the infrastructure works as designed, in order to next be employed against a sitting member of Congress (which is now underway as this lawsuit is being filed). In fact The Long Fuse Report, recommends in its closing chapters that political speech not be given preferential treatment – openly challenging the highest protection afforded by the First Amendment – and bringing the United States back in line with the British Commonwealth.

The article in The Intercept mentions none of this. Nothing about the lawsuit, nothing crediting Dr. Shiva for discovering “The Election Influence Operations Playbook”, or the Twitter backdoor portal, or anything — he isn’t even mentioned. It may amuse you to learn that “The Election Influence Operations Playbook” was written partly by Pierre Omidyar, who is both the CEO of Ebay and the owner of The Intercept … That’s why they didn’t bother to report any of this.

Last night, Dr. Shiba appeared on an episode of Redacted to discuss these events. Apparently, this is how the fourth estate operates in this day and age. He tells us how after he was de-platformed by Twitter and reinstated, he was then de-platformed again for posting about being de-platformed. He also explains how it is common in academia for the mainstream press to essentially plagiarize indepedent journalist’s investigative work.

The Intercept is an award-winning news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism.

This is comically absurd. Here you have a billionaire that owns a news organization that claims to be engaged in “real investigative journalism” and “dedicated to holding the powerful accountable” while working with the CIA to censor a candidate running for the Massachusetts state legislature. The first amendment is dead. We are not a democracy anymore. These people are so delusional that the playbook begins by claiming that what they are really trying to do is “protect democracy”.

We established the Defending Digital Democracy Project (D3P) in July 2017 with one goal: to help defend democratic elections from cyber-attacks and information operations. Over the last three years, we have worked to provide campaign and election professionals in the democratic process with practical guides, trainings, recommendations and support in navigating the evolving threats to these processes.

They actually believe that. If we have to resort to authoritarianism in order to “preserve democracy”, then what is it point of being “a democracy”? And don’t be a fool. This is a bipartisian issue, and you should be disturbed about it regardless of your political views.

The last time I checked, the CIA was not legally allowed to operate domestically. But hey, who cares. Is anyone even keeping track at this point? Our government is acting with lawlessness and imputy, and nobody cares. At least other countries are not deluded about the fact that their government is corrupt and they don’t have true freedom. American Exceptionalism indeed.