U.S., British intel chiefs confirm 'alliance' with Big Tech

FPI / January 4, 2023

It's not like U.S. government censorship policies by its intelligence agencies in violation of the First Amendment is a state secret.

The Biden team's Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, said on BBC that the White House is undertaking vast efforts to “debunk” disinformation and “false narratives.”

Haines made the comments while speaking with a leading British intelligence officer, who called on Western intelligence agencies to “prebunk” disinformation and use “alliances” between big tech and the government to make people view government-backed narratives with more “trust,” Natalie Winter reported for WarRoom.org on Jan. 2.

The comments by Haines, which follow confirmation that U.S. intelligence agencies have been colluding with social media platforms to censor Americans, came during an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today program featuring Jeremy Fleming as a guest host.

Fleming, the Director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the United Kingdom’s Intelligence, Cyber and Security Agency, also called on intelligence agencies to take a more active role in countering “disinformation,” proposing that intelligence agencies begin “pre-bunking” allegedly false narratives before they become mainstream.

Winters noted that Fleming’s "7,000-person agency has been highly scrutinized following a whistleblower report from Edward Snowden revealing that it collected all online and telephone data in the United Kingdom. The grand chamber of the European court of human rights ruled that these actions violated privacy rights, was unlawful, and breached the right to freedom of expression."

Fleming also alluded to “alliances” between “Big Tech” and government being used to mainstream certain narratives in a more effective manner in the interview, according to the report by Winters.

Haines said that U.S. intelligence agencies’ impact was “far greater in the West than it was in other places in the world.”

“So we recognize that we were able to have impact in countering disinformation but that there were limits on what we were able to do and that we needed to understand that in order to really understand how we can counter this moving forward,” she concludes.

Fleming also alluded to a fusion between public and private enterprise in efforts to counter “disinformation” and shape narratives about global events such as the Russia-Ukraine war.

“It can’t just be government and intelligence voices out there. There have got to be other voices. One of the critical things from this conflict has been the way the private sector has played a part,” Fleming explains before identifying “Big Tech” as an integral component.

“It seems to me there are different alliances which enable us to show and demonstrate that we are more trusted because it’s not just a government voice out there,” the British intelligence officer added.

“Yeah, I absolutely agree with that,” replied Haines.

Free Press International
[Freedom Is Not Free!]