Notes on Musk's CTIL conspiracy-theory
Today, Musk’s crack team of conspiracy-theorists (Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger) have targeted the cybersecurity community, claiming that many are part of a “Censorship Industrial Complex”. I thought I’d write up some notes, being involved with both sides of this issue, being anti-censorship and part of the cybersecurity community.
#TwitterFiles
If you’ll recall, Musk’s claimed reason for taking over Twitter 1.0 was because of its censorship of free-speech. He promised the new Twitter 2.0 would support free-speech.
When he took over the platform, he gave internal files to some writers/journalists with a history of centrist, heterodox, “anti-woke” activities, specifically Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Micheal Shellenberger. They reported in various Twitter threads like this one about the discussions between government and Twitter about moderation/censorship.
Their efforts quickly veered from anything approaching legitimate journalism into rank conspiracy-theory. Instead of documenting the very clear censorship activities of Twitter 1.0, they attempted to create a larger picture of a “Censorship Industrial Complex”.
This is sad, because Twitter 1.0 had a huge censorship problem, but nobody takes it seriously because of their conspiracy-theory reporting.
#CTILfiles
Today, Taibbi/Shellenberger reported on documents from a “whistleblower” that they are calling #CTILfiles.
What they are referring to is the “CTI-League”. That in turn is just one of a zillion small groups in the cybersecurity community that form from like-minded people collaborating on specific tasks. In this case, this group focused on the medical industry, such as hospitals getting infected with ransomware.
Like all such groups, they have a forum. In such forums, people talk about all sorts of things that aren’t the primary mission. Such semi-private forums litter the cybersecurity landscape. I’m not a member of CTI-League, but I have a bunch friends who are. I’m a member of a bunch of other forums, so I understand the shape of it.
Maybe something more happened here, but so far, Taibbi/Shellenberger haven’t shown it. Instead, they’ve distorted something perfectly normal pretending it’s a conspiracy.
The web site looks defunct, which is typical. Such groupings typically last only a few years to be supplanted by new groupings by many of the same people, but invigorated with new blood.
They are drunk with power
Bringing CTI-League into this is nonsense, but there is a general problem in the cybersecurity community as a whole. They’ve become corrupt with power. That power came from giving them control of core network infrastructure (in order to secure it). They now strive to use that power to “solve” other issues.
A good example of this was back in 2016 when a group of DNS researchers claimed a Trump server was secretly talking to a bank in Russia.
DNS is the phone book of the Internet that looks up the names of servers (like www.google.com) to find their corresponding numeric addresses (like 142.250.72.68). Since viruses, malware, and ransomware use DNS in order to phone home back to the hackers who control them, DNS is the focus of a lot of research to find hackers and block malware.
To do that, certain academics and professionals are given private access to DNS server logs.
In 2016, DNS researchers at Georgia Tech abused this privileged access in order to go after Trump politically. They spied on some activities of his campaign, and they cherry picked this data in order to concoct an October Surprise, hoping to swing the election toward Hillary. Their excuse was that Trump’s (unproven) ties to Russia made him a “threat”, and thus, this sort of thing was in their remit as “threat researchers”.
Censorship
In much the same way, during the pandemic, the cybersecurity community declared that “misinformation” and “disinformation” on the Internet was within their field of “cybersecurity”.
What’s particularly evil about this is that their definition of “misinformation” is anything they disagreed with, so it soon became political, with left-wingers targeting the “misinformation” of the right. In contrast, I use other definitions of “misinformation”, namely, claims that aren’t substantiated with evidence.
The #CTILfiles does show an example of this, how security people targeted perfectly legitimate opposition to “lockdowns” and other Covid-19 government policies.
Every possible government policy had people debating that it went to far or that it didn’t go far enough, whether it’s lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, school closures, travel restrictions, and economic stimulus. Crusaders believed morality and/or science was on their side.
Every community has such crusaders, who believe dissent is illegitimate. The only difference here is cybersecurity people abused their position to further such misbeliefs.
But there’s no government here
Instead of the reality that there are a bunch of bad people pushing censorship individually, Musk’s team pretends theirs a conspiracy, a vast “Censorship Industrial Complex”. They just aren’t that organized.
There’s no enforcement arm, for one thing. Individuals can get together an push censorship, like convincing banks to cut off the accounts of speakers they don’t like, but it’s something they can only do as private citizens, unaffiliated with the government.
There are certainly grants from various government agencies, but government agencies give all sorts of grants for all sorts of reasons. None of the grants were for actual censorship. It’s not evidence of a grand government Plan.
CISA doesn’t have a secret police that will come kidnap people in the night because of their tweets.
Some of it is actually legitimate
The #CTILfiles not only pretends individual agendas are government policies, but it also distorts actual government policies. There are several legitimate government policies here.
One is actual “disinformation”, such as tweeting that “Republicans vote on Tuesday, Democrats vote on Wednesday”. Such tactics are illegal election interference and the FBI will come after you. It is legitimate that they do so.
Like every other government agency in the world, CISA responds to citizen’s concerns. If citizen’s are expressing misgivings about ballot dropboxes, it’s right and proper for the CISA to publish correct information to educate them.
In other words, it’s right and proper to combat “misinformation” with “better information”, but Musk’s team pretends that such efforts are directed at censorship.
Another is Russians and Chinese trying to influence elections with influence operations on social-media. It’s absolutely the government’s job to put a stop to that sort of thing. No, that doesn’t mean targeting US citizens, nor does it even mean targeting content. It means going after the foreign actors.
Summary
In short, Shellenberger and Taibbi have failed to demonstrate either ties to government or ties to an industrial complex here. All they’ve done is tapped into a private forum where (admittedly bad) people talked about wanting more censorship. That’s all they’ve shown.
I want solid documentation how there are a lot of bad people pushing censorship. But Musk’s team just isn’t providing that info.