Some Future Day

MarcBeckman: All right, I am so thrilled to have you, Mike Benz, on Some Future Day today. How are you?
MikeBenz: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Mark.
MarcBeckman: Good, good. So, Mike, your background is really, um, interesting and impressive and I would imagine that it's provided you with a tremendous amount of first hand insight and intelligence as to what we're about to speak about.
So, can you, um, explain exactly what your title and role in the State Department is? [00:03:00] was.
MikeBenz: Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful. It was Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology in the Economic Bureau of the State Department. So what that is is basically, the Economic Bureau has to deal with our economic diplomacy, our soft power projection on the rest of the world.
We have a hard power projection with our military. The soft power is principally run out of the State Department. And international communications and information technology is basically a long way of just saying the internet. So, there's a lot of cyber diplomacy that the U.S. Does because so much of commerce runs through the internet.
you know, sometime around a decade ago, big tech surpassed big oil as being the largest companies in the world. And so, we have U.S. National champions like Google and Apple and Microsoft and Facebook that depend on the long arm of the U.S. Government via the State Department to do diplomacy on their behalf in order to protect them against cyber attacks.
foreign laws that might impact their interests, which would impact American [00:04:00] jobs, or export markets. And so I sat at the desk that basically governed cyber diplomacy, uh, in the economic space, uh, in 2020.
MarcBeckman: So when you talk about soft power, I'm sorry to take you back for a second, but can you just quickly give our audience the definition of soft power,
MikeBenz: So soft power is a influence projection done using either economic or informational or cultural means in order to influence the internal politics of a foreign country to make that ecosystem there more favorable for interest here. So, for example, if there is a law that a foreign government's parliament is considering passing, that might impact U.S multinational companies and that would force U.S. Companies to You know, kill jobs or hurt their profits because of labor issues or tariffs or whatnot. The State Department would then negotiate with that foreign government on behalf, essentially, of U.S. National champions in order [00:05:00] to put pressure on that country's government.
Another classic soft power projection mechanism is media. So, after World War II, we created, we being the U.S., the U.K., and then. know, NATO, essentially, we created this transatlantic, rules based international order, and in order to take on communism in the 20th century, there were many media proprietories, in house media organizations, that were funded by the State Department or controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency.
These were, uh, these were groups like Radio Free Europe, or Radio Liberty, or Radio Free Asia, or Voice of America. You may have heard of some of these. They're currently said to be independent because of operational transfer, uh, about a generation ago, but these all started as being out of the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department funds thousands of media organizations in basically every, every country around the, globe in order to have, [00:06:00] uh, U.S favorable information projected and piped into foreign countries where U.S. National interests are not necessarily represented.
MarcBeckman: So these media entities were effectively independent from the United States government, advancing the United States government overseas policy, but were funded by our government.
MikeBenz: Yes, yes, you can think of them as, today we would call them GONGOs, Government Organized Non Governmental Organizations. They're essentially cutouts, and their, their principal function is to sway hearts and minds. You know, after the age of empire ended in 1948, we had the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which prevented classical empire building through military capture.
you know, the, the, this rules based international order that I described, has international laws that prohibit the territorial annexation by military force. And so what you need to have today to have basically, you [00:07:00] know, a recognized government is some sort of democratic ratification and projection of soft power became a much bigger role of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon than purely military or paramilitary force And so the, the importance of government funded NGOs, government funded Independent media organizations to sway hearts and minds became a huge part of our theater of, of, of soft war, if you will.
MarcBeckman: I've heard you speak before about how the United States government created effectively a three legged strategic alliance between State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency to kind of drive that soft power overseas. Can you talk a little bit about, that infrastructure within the United States government, that three legged enterprise that you mentioned?
MikeBenz: Yep, so you can think of it as diplomacy, defense, and intelligence. And, and these are, these are three [00:08:00] capacities within the U.S. Government that are supposed to be strictly foreign facing. You know, I mentioned, you know, the world really changed in 1948. That was when we, that's when the Central Intelligence Agency was established.
That was when we renamed the, the Department of War to the Department of Defense to make it basically look like we were no longer engaged in offensive action, but forward defensive action. And, You know, there's a 1948 memo by George Kennan, who's one of the godfathers of the CIA, called the Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare, that basically lays out how the U.S in the, in the late 1940s, uh, our foreign policy establishment decided that we needed a Department of Dirty Tricks to be able to, uh, to be able to engage in this kind of wily soft power projection. And That it would be concentrated within these federal agencies that would not be able to touch U.S.
Citizens. You can almost think of it like a guard dog or a pit bull that defends your house on the outside, but isn't necessarily allowed to come in because [00:09:00] it's a very dangerous animal. is to say that, uh, these these three agencies, if you will, although it's more the intelligence community, you know, all 17 of those on the, uh, uh, say CIA as a sort of shorthand proxy for that.
They are, they're not allowed to operate on U.S. Soil. The State Department can't operate on U.S. Soil. The Defense Department can't. They can't target U.S. Citizens, you know, the CIA can't. Now there's of course a little dirty trick there when they use the word counterintelligence to do so. But leaving that loophole aside, they're all supposed to be foreign facing.
And they all have a different set of skills that they bring to the table. So the State Department is the, is our, those three entities combined, you know, the policy establishment is the way they're referred to in Washington. They're sometimes also called the BLOB. This was the term that President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, used to describe this structure [00:10:00] within Washington.
I think I used that term as well. I think it's a helpful shorthand. Folks within the blob lovingly the phrase the blob as well.
MarcBeckman: Mm hmm.
MikeBenz: Victoria Nuland's husband, Kagan, his counsel to President Biden a week before the election was Respect the blob, learn from the blob, love the blob. He, he wrote that as his, as his, as his three word,
MarcBeckman: Scary. Mm hmm. Scary.
MikeBenz: counsel to President Biden in, in Brookings, uh, just a week before that, the previous election, but.
This is something that you can argue, played a really important role in American prosperity in the 20th century. The, the State Department is the, the formal entity that goes and negotiates with a foreign country's government, and it can offer carrots and sticks in order to influence that government's decisions to, to get them to pass a bill, to get them to kill a bill, to get them to take, uh, you know, to open up their society to allow.
You know, US [00:11:00] favorable media in to, uh, to not do police crackdowns on dissident groups who might be backed by the US government. These sorts of things are negotiated by, by the US State Department. The that's their overt side of US diplomacy. Now the State Department is always synchronized with the activities of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency interagency process, which is basically the consensus of foreign policy establishment institutions.
That's technically coordinated out of the White House National Security Council, but what you have is this overt, you know, this sort of visible side of the iceberg, if you will, that represents the State Department, but the ambassador and the senior level State Department officials are constantly coordinating with the underside of the iceberg, which is our covert the diplomacy work, our covert diplomacy work.
influence work, which is done through the intelligence community. So that's, you know, how the CIA sort of comes into the picture, which is that the CIA was created under a doctrine that's called plausible deniability, which is the [00:12:00] idea that they have a license to do certain kinds of underhanded deeds, certain kinds of things like election, you know, engineering, Um, you know, uh, control over media organizations, uh, working with various dissonant groups, uh, the sorts of things that the State Department was caught doing it, and it was formally attributed to the U.
S. government, it would be a diplomatic scandal, there would be a tremendous amount of blowback when it's done in a deniable fashion. Then that, that allows the State Department to operate at maximum efficiency because they can say one thing while under the iceberg, they're, you know, they're, they're doing something else.
So the State Department. The Pentagon constantly has to be apprised of what the CIA is doing in the region in order to, to maximize what they can do diplomatically and to be able to ask for the right things in negotiations and whatnot. And the Pentagon comes into the picture
MarcBeckman: Alright,
MikeBenz: in two fashions, the sort of hard power, you know, latent threat in a region.
Which is to say, if you don't do what the State Department tells you to [00:13:00] do, and the is being ineffective at being able to do soft power influence, we can come in with hard power. Uh, and we can seize particular territory, we can put troops on the border, we can, you know, do any number of, uh, of formal Pentagon activity, but then there's also a civil affairs branch of the Pentagon, which, uh, which does a lot of this hearts and minds work that the, that's sort of shared with the Central Intelligence Agency, and, you know, the Pentagon is by far the biggest federal agency that we have.
It's the, it's the, the most highest funded. So these three things are constantly in sync.
MarcBeckman: so just to be clear though, Mike, um, the Blob is really originally built to look outside and to function outside of the United States.
MikeBenz: Yes, yes it is. And again, you can make the argument that the blob was a wonderful thing in the 20th century and that, that today it serves an important function. There are, there are competing schools of foreign policy on this that I think are reasonable on both sides, which is to say, you [00:14:00] know, so the oil and gas industry is a famous example of the intertwining of, of the foreign policy establishment, the blob, and, you know, U.
S. Commercial interests, right? So, uh, the work that, that the U.S. Classically did in the 20th century to overthrow foreign governments in order to, you know, have influence over their oil fields, their, their shale reserves, uh, is something that is, that allowed, uh, Exxon and Chevron And mobile and Halliburton and Phillips Conoco to all become these, you know, top of the food chain, uh, market cap companies.
It's maybe the reason we actually had cheap gas, you know, something like three to four times cheaper gas than Europe did for the entire 20th century. You can make the argument that American jobs, the reason we had such middle class prosperity, Relative to the rest of the world was because our commercial interests, which were pried open by the Central Intelligence Agency, which were, you know, which opposition was sanctioned by the State Department or our U.
S. [00:15:00] military stepped in to protect those investments is the reason that we had, you know, the kind of middle class jobs that we had all over the world. You know, from the heartland to the south to, uh, to California, uh, in America in the 20th century. And one of the reasons that we had the export markets we did because we were able to pry open foreign countries to make sure that they were buying, you know, Coca Cola and Pepsi, and they were buying U.
S. steel. And they were allowing us to mine their copper and aluminum and gold and lithium and cobalt. I mean, even today, you know, green energy, this green energy revolution, you know, is, is a very hot topic that relies on two critical minerals, lithium and cobalt. You know, 85 percent of the world's cobalt is basically in Congo.
What happens if, if the blob does not, you know, break out its Department of Dirty Tricks to be able to have representation for access to cobalt? Well, then there goes, you know, any sort of U.S. Commercial capacity to, uh, to move forward with renewable batteries. So, you know, there's a complex [00:16:00] interplay here.
My concern comes with when the Blob basically decided to use that special set of skills that it had, um, in the domestic setting, which is what the, which is what it was doing here in the U.S. In the 1960s,
MarcBeckman: what I was going to get at. Wasn't it like early on, so, so it's interesting because your, your seat, your vantage point from within the State Department allowed for you, you were at the center of, um, essentially like technology and the way that new media is existing today as it relates to social media search and, and perhaps even beyond that, if I understand correctly, you can confirm that.
Am I right?
MikeBenz: no, 100%. So you're, I sat at the desk that lobbyists from Google would call, you know, I would get a call from nine Google lobbyists at, you know, on a, on a big speaker call for them to try to lobby, you know, the U.S. Government, uh, in order to basically coerce foreign countries in our upcoming negotiations.
I mean, this
MarcBeckman: so it's firsthand.
MikeBenz: and butter of, of, you know, big government and big tech diplomacy.
MarcBeckman: that's kind of [00:17:00] remarkable to me. I'm going to, I'm going to move forward with my, my thought in a second, but so you're saying that you would regularly receive in your capacity as an employee of the state department calls from big tech, Google, and perhaps other company, other companies in the tech space to influence the, the state department to behave in a certain way.
MikeBenz: Yes, now they would pitch these as proposals. I mean, that's the way, but, but this is, this is bread and butter State Department work. We simply call this stakeholder engagement. We say that U.S. Commercial all for joining us today and I look forward to seeing you in the next session. You know, they, the State Department reaches out to the private companies to, uh, to get them on board with U.
S. State Department initiatives and the private companies engage the [00:18:00] State Department to make sure their interests are represented or to lobby for their interest to be represented in U.S. Statecraft. There is a favors for favors relationship. And you know, this goes back a long time. I mean, this goes back to the 1800s, this, this practice, you know, the, the famous phrase about banana republics, uh, draws its name from the United Fruit Company, which set up basically puppet governments all over South and Latin America, uh, basically under the protection of the U.
S. State Department and the War Department. And you can make the argument that because of that, that, uh, interplay between big, uh, big corporations and big government that, you know, 18, 19th century, uh, Americans were able to have cheap access to sugar and, and agriculture. Uh, this, you know, as I mentioned, was the same thing in the big oil era.
issue is though, is you never had a situation where the gas companies We're cutting people off at the pump. We, while they were working with big government to get favors from big government, that they were cutting off people, [00:19:00] you know, from the pump, uh, when they went to pump their gas because of, you know, their, their cultural beliefs or their political beliefs.
And so, you know, to me, I found it to be very inflammatory. That, that the government was doing favors for technology companies, while the technology companies appeared to be discriminating against U.S. Citizens. And, uh, that was something that I thought was violative of the, the underpinning, uh, sort of ethical explanation for why this, this government Uh, and, and Commercial Nexus was even, uh, you know, allowed.
MarcBeckman: Well, particularly because it's the citizenry in the United States that is, um, represented in the government. The citizen, our citizenry is our government. But before we talk about that slippery slope, because it's so clear to me the way you just articulated how this good idea and this good intention of having representation and even influence over, international business and, and other, uh, U.
S. based interests. [00:20:00] Wasn't the United States at some point pre tech influencing legacy media? Didn't they move over a little bit? And they went from, I guess, um, let's say state sponsored media. I don't know if that's the correct term of art, but what you described earlier too, then independent entities, perhaps like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Um, didn't that predate your experience, um, but maybe start to set the policy where it made sense for the government to get involved with private U.S. Based businesses for influence and power?
MikeBenz: Oh, absolutely. You know, there's, there's been this intertwining of legacy media and the foreign policy establishment really since the birth of, of, uh, you know, politics. Mass media in America. I mean, Citizen Kane is the, is the story of the, you know, the Hearst Empire, which basically was the media outlet that's, you can say, started the Spanish American war, which was the, which was the birth of the American empire, you know, before 1898, we were [00:21:00] a, we were just the American homeland.
in 19, in 1898 when we won the Spanish American War, we took Cuba from the Spanish and we took the Philippines from the Spanish and occupied it militarily for 45 years. And that's why we built up this, you know, super Navy was because we are now a world spanning empire. So that, you know, that, that grew out of essentially a linkage between, you know, the Hearst and the the Hearst folks and the.
and the War Department. Then you had the, the Office of War Information in 1942 in the Pentagon was what centralized what, what at that time had been all of our mass media properties in the U.S. The media instant, the, the print newspapers, early TV, early Hollywood, early radio. They were all rolled into this Office of War Information, which was the coordinating media wing of the Pentagon in order to create a whole of society consensus around World War II and in order to fight fascism.
It was basically, you know, and if you go back in the, and look at these reels in the 1940s, you'll, you'll see virtually every U.S. [00:22:00] Media property Rolled up in that and working with the Office of War Information that the big three American broadcast, you know, corporations ABC, NBC, and CBS Which you know, which were the big three You know, sort of news stations.
Fox News didn't even come around until the 1990s. It was just those three, you know, options on, on TV every day for virtually the entirety of the 20th century. They were all started by Office of War Information Veterans. Uh, you know, there's the famous example of, you know, what's known as Operation Mockingbird, which was a CIA program from the 1950s stretching through 1975 when it was basically revealed in the church committee hearings.
This was a. This was a generation long CIA legacy media program where the, you know, where, where Bill Colby, the CIA director, you know, confessed to having about 800 different media properties, uh, uh, under the CIA's influence, including 10 to 12 rotating spots at the [00:23:00] new, at the New York Times with the, with the salt, with the Burger family.
You had, uh, you know. In addition to that, you had something called Wisner's Wurlitzer, which was Frank Wisner, who was another one of these CIA godfather figures, you know, who bragged that he could play international media, uh, organizations like a Wurlitzer, you know, like a sort of, uh, long keyboard piano, in order to create global narratives, that were favorable to U.
S. statecraft, because the CIA had penetrated the media organizations of virtually every country in NATO under the, uh, under the Marshall Plan and, uh, and then all over Asia through Radio Free Asia and, and, uh, you know, throughout the world. Now this was, at the time, the U.S. Had a huge advantage in the information space, uh, in the 20th century before other countries developed their own robust internal media platforms.
Organizations, because remember, you know, TV and radio were basically [00:24:00] U.S., U.K., you know, dominated, meet, uh, modalities for getting information across, uh, and we had a first mover advantage there for
MarcBeckman: Right,
MikeBenz: 40 years, and so when, if radio free Europe piped in radio into a region, that was one of the, you know, only a handful of frequencies that citizens could even tune into. but, you know, and then this, this continued, you know, you can go into the CIA reading room and you can see CIA Media Task Force memos in the early 1990s talking about the continuation of this relationship. You know, there was always this backdoor between mainstream media and the foreign policy establishment.
And this is how, this is how legacy media retains a lot of access. For example, the New York Times was just invited by the Central Intelligence Agency onto these 12 military bases. Uh, on, you know, the outer rim of Ukraine. This is not, this was not declassified information. You, a citizen journalist, can't just waltz your way into a top secret, highly classified, special compartmentalized information [00:25:00] CIA base.
Um, you know, this was something that the CIA reached out to the New York Times, invited them in, vetted them, put them through security, so that the New York Times could publish a story that was favorable to the funding interests of the CIA. This is a backdoor to the relationship that's existed for the better part of a century now.
And the issue is, is freedom on the internet through a monkey wrench in that whole, uh, relationship because these soft power proxies of the foreign policy establishment were now getting essentially out competed by citizen journalists on the internet.
MarcBeckman: so that's kind of interesting and it's a great transition to, um, speak about the fact that it seems like it would be natural. The United States government was so inexorably tied with legacy media that now when the internet came out, um, actually it was born, my understanding is, it was born out of the United States government and, um, but then eventually turned into social media.
Like, of course, if you're sitting in the seat of the government and, and the blob, effectively, you would want to connect with, [00:26:00] uh, Twitter and Facebook and Google and beyond, right? It seems very natural. Again, if the intentions are right. So at what point did we see this, like, we see a beginning of the structural transition where, um, there's internet free speech and, privatization going into, perhaps the government coercing and impeding upon citizens, first amendment rights.
When did the blobs start looking, you know, looking internal at, effectively, at the U.S. Citizenry?
MikeBenz: I would, I would peg that at around 2014 and I'll sort of up the evolution to it. So just as you said, free speech on the internet was actually not so much a, a kind of First Amendment gung ho, um, support structure underpinning it. It was soft power projection. So when the Cold War ended in, you know, 1990, 1991, uh, there was.
It's perceived to be a pressing need to be able to pipe [00:27:00] U.S. Media into this, into this brave new world in a setting where, you know, a lot of countries responded to the soft power projection of the U.S. In the 20th century by creating their own state control over media, you know, their own, you know, newspapers in Egypt or in Iran or in, you know, in the Middle East.
In Central and Eastern Europe or in Latin America, their own radio stations, their own TV programming and, and oftentimes, uh, countries would close down their societies if they perceived that there might be foreign influence, uh, pumping up a dissident group to destabilize that country or to overthrow that country's government, which was a practice that the, the, you know, the blob orchestrated something like 85 times in the 20th century, uh, on, on.
Basically, every continent except Antarctica. And so, the Internet in its early stages in 1991, you know, was kind of a new [00:28:00] voice of America. In the sense that, you know, Voice America, as I mentioned, was part of this coterie of CIA proprietary media organizations at the time when there was very scant radio programming by other countries.
the Internet was, was piped around the world partially as a way to, you know, be able to have U.S. Backed dissident groups have their own robust media ecosystems in places where there was state control over media. This is one of the reasons that there was so much money flowing from the State Department, from DARPA, and from CIA NSA projects precisely for this effect.
So remember, the internet itself started as a DARPA project. In the 1960s and in its first use case was was taking social science data from the universities and digitizing it, uh, so that the U.S. Military would be able to take all of this, all of this information that was being, that was being funded by By universities to map foreign populations and foreign cultural, um, you [00:29:00] know, issues and foreign political movements to create this sort of political heat map, the U. S. at the time, it had grown into such a world spanning empire that we began to have a problem with insurgency movements who were deposing U.S. Backed leaders in Vietnam, you know, in Central and Eastern Europe, in Latin America, and so forth. So there was all, you know, there was a ton of literature on these, on these groups that had to be digitized.
And this was one of the early use cases of the internet in the 1960s. This is why DARPA came under, it was then called ARPA, but say DARPA, came under a huge amount of scrutiny by, uh, by U.S. Know, basically, uh, anti war protesters and, you know, predominantly liberal groups were, were vociferous in, in describing, you know, their opposition at Harvard University and at college campuses around the country, the, the octopus threat that the internet represented because of its, [00:30:00] its role in U.
S. imperialism, as it was described.
MarcBeckman: And
that was pre social
media, right? That was just at a point where they were probably, if I understand correctly, collecting data and not even speaking to or at any person or individual, right? It was just a
data collection method at that point? Right, That was in the 1960s. And if you want a good resource on this, there's a book called Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine, which goes through, you know, all the, all the players in that story in the 1960s. But then, you know, fast forward to 1990. turns over control of the internet to the National Science Foundation.
MikeBenz: The National Science Foundation is basically the civilian arm of DARPA, you can think of it that way. Basically, it's technically a sort of civilian agency, but it's, you know, it does a lot of work adjacent to the military. It's basically this kind of dual use. A A lot of U.S. Commercial products. have these military origins, you know, not just the internet, but the cell phone does, You know GPS tracking does, there's, you can make an [00:31:00] argument that much of the engineer, ingenuity of American technology is not so much originating in the commercial sector, but originating with military funding and subsidized by the U.
S. military and then sort of turned over commercial stakeholders.
MarcBeckman: for sure, Mike.
MikeBenz: so, but, you know, what's really interesting is you mentioned, change. You know, how the government might have a role, the foreign policy establishment might have a role in companies like Google. Well, Google is a fascinating, you know, case study, because, you know, the World Wide Web comes out in 1991.
Right away, we are piping it into foreign countries, and we are getting U.S. Backed dissident groups to start blogs, getting them to start static web pages, getting them to start web forums We actually have USAID and State Department and National Endowment for Democracy funding to train Dissonant groups to use this early internet in order to establish their own media in a way that can't be shut down by the the ruling government of that country.
As this is [00:32:00] happening, the, our intelligence services take a very active interest in how information is being diffused across the internet. So in 1995, DARPA created a program called the Massive Digital Data Systems Program, uh, which is, which was a, this was a DARPA program um That was being spearheaded as a joint project of the CIA and the NSA.
The NSA is basically the military's version of the CIA and, this was to track how birds of a feather flock together online in the early internet. Now this is about a decade before social media. Because, you know, Facebook was 2004, YouTube was 2005, Twitter was 2006, the smartphone was 2007. So right now we're in 1995.
This was this DARPA program for tracking birds of a feather flocking together online. This DARPA grant program was actually how, how, uh, Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched Google. They were Stanford PhD students at the time in 1995. Their research was funded by this precise, DARPA, CIA, NSA grant. And they, uh, they [00:33:00] basically, you know, used that grant funding to create the backbone architecture for Google.
The very next year in 1996, they launched Google. first year that Google went public, they became a military contractor. Google only has Google Maps. Because they bought the keyhole satellite technology from the Central Intelligence Agency.
MarcBeckman: That's wild. Sure,
MikeBenz: for Google maps. Yeah.
They didn't make their, so, you know, there's, there's long been this relationship of, of Google as being a Goliath of American statecraft. and you can make an argument that they were exporting the first amendment in doing so from 1991 up until really only a few short years ago. So, you know, basically as the story goes.
You had this doctrine of digital statecraft, as it was called, in the State Department. This was pioneered by a guy named Jared Cohen, who was a guy in his early, early 20s who has recruited the State Department's policy planning staff, which is basically the division within state that coordinates the State Department and CIA.
So [00:34:00] as I mentioned, At State, you need to coordinate the over side of the iceberg and the under side of the iceberg, so that the State Department knows what's going on in the country. If we're negotiating with the Prime Minister, we sort of have to know if the CIA is trying to overthrow the, the Prime Minister.
MarcBeckman: sure.
MikeBenz: a quarterback position there. And, and, and it's this, nexus at the, at the, at policy planning that does this. Now, Jared Cohen was a guy who had, who had, uh, in his teens and early twenties, uh, he had created something called movements. org. which, uh, and, and he had been embedded in a lot of these Middle East, North African dissident groups that were being sponsored by the U.
S. State Department. And, you know, as a, as a very young guy in his mid twenties, he was surrounded by these older fuddy duddies in their forties, fifties, and sixties. And, you know, as, as the, as the story goes, which is widely reported, he was the, basically the talk of town of Washington for an entire decade as he, as he later came to be effectively credited with the, Starting the Arab Spring.
MarcBeckman: Jared
MikeBenz: Cohen looked around and [00:35:00] said, why are we running these operations out of U.S. Embassies or consulates or C. I. A. station houses? Everybody we want to recruit. is on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. This is in 2007 2008. He was a Republican political appointee, uh, in the Condoleezza Rice State Department under, under George Bush, and this idea of using social media to put essentially color revolutions on steroids, to put regime change or destabilization efforts on steroids.
Because you didn't, you no longer needed to, you know, run a black duffle bag of unmarked cash to a handful of, you know, sort of CIA liaisons, and then have that distributed to A dozen of their lieutenants and have them distribute that, uh, you know, 100,000 different people in the trade union labor groups or in the, you know, in all the different groups that are mobilized to create a revolution.
You could just start a Twitter hashtag. You could just create a Facebook. just, you know, sort of influence all of this [00:36:00] via, via YouTube videos. And so this doctrine of digital statecraft was the talk of the town in the late stages of the Bush administration in 2007 2008. Jared Cohen is a Republican political appointee.
His work was considered so important that he was retained by Hillary Clinton when she became Secretary of State under President Obama's term. So this was a very bipartisan thing and, you know, just a few short years later in 2011, the Arab Spring would kick off. Where one by one, all the adversary governments of the Obama administration in East, North Africa, Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan.
Several other countries had their governments toppled in Facebook and Twitter revolutions that were intermediated by these U.S. State Department funded NGOs. And the issue is, is Jared Cohen took that special set of skills and then his very next job after leaving the State Department in 2012 was to join Google.
And Google Jigsaw, which was, you know, said to be this one person think tank where Cohen was to stare at a white wall [00:37:00] all day and think about all the ways that Google could solve complex geopolitical problems by using its proprietary data and resources. And the issue is, is the first thing Google Jigsaw did, In, uh, in late 2016, early was transition from, from free speech advocacy and how to use the internet to pipe free speech into countries that the, that the foreign policy establishment was trying to establish a soft power to hold in.
To internet censorship, and this is because of, you know, basically the geopolitical turbulence from 2014 through 2016 that made the foreign policy establishment focus less on, on the power of, of government to open up societies for speech, but to close them down to stop insurgency political movements, uh, and, and to close off the soft power projection of forces that they deem to be hostile.
MarcBeckman: So, so still working the, um, technology and influence overseas, away from the American [00:38:00] citizenry.
MikeBenz: Well, that was the, that was the idea at first, but that, that. Facade fell through fairly quickly. So, you know, Jared Cohen's jigsaw was, uh, you know, came to be the progenitor of an artificial censorship technique. It's called natural language processing. It's, this is a technique originally developed by the military to be able to detect the speech online of ISIS.
You know, in 2014, 2015, uh, the Obama administration put military boots on the ground in Syria. There was uh, there was a big effort there to overthrow the government of Bashar al Assad. And at the time, there was a big concern that, that ISIS recruiters were very active on Twitter and Facebook. And so the State Department created a censorship office called the Global Engagement Center, whose job was to interface with Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.
And, uh, Reddit and basically every, every speech discourse platform on the U.S. Internet in order to stop ISIS [00:39:00] propaganda, uh, on, on U.S. News feeds. And the way they did that, this was through an artificial technique, artificial intelligence technique that was pioneered um, by DARPA. This NLP natural language processing, which, which basically, uh, It looks at language.
So it, it sense makes language on the internet to create narrative network maps. These, you may have seen some of these, uh, some of these models or visualizations of, you know, sort of like a sphere and it'll have nodes and connection links between nodes and those, you'll be able to say, okay, influencer X has messaging go, going out to these other influencers and it forms, uh, This narrative is comprised of this big ball of yarn of, of these influencers, and here's what they're saying, and you can track different narratives that way.
And what it does is, you basically, it combines social science with computer science. So, in order to create a narrative network map to [00:40:00] mass sensor or mass amplify in the hands of the foreign policy establishment, what you do is, you hire a team of social scientists to map language, You say, okay, this is what this community talks about.
Here's the unique set of phrases, of diction, of slang, of prefixes, of suffixes, of hashtags. Oftentimes this will be accompanied by a multimedia database and the kind of memes, the kind of, you know, visual symbols that they and, and a complex database will be constructed that, that sort of looks. S almost sociologically or, or anthrop, anthropologically at a, at a particular political movement or cultural belief system to create this comprehensive, you know, ma heat map of what distinguishes them from other communities online, other birds of a, it's basically tracking the birds of a feather.
MarcBeckman: Sure. They're looking for keywords, right? They're looking for a specific. I remember you mentioned ISIS. I actually remember traveling internationally a lot during that time period. And ISIS was really all [00:41:00] over social media, trying to recruit people from all over the world, from Europe, from North America, the United States included.
Posting just these horrific images and terrible messages, um, I would imagine at that point in time, Mike, like the, again, the United States government had the right intent, right? When they created this tool effectively where they were blending together social and, and, and empirical data, um, I think the intent there was in the right place.
Do you agree?
MikeBenz: Well, this is the thing it's hard to argue against it, right? I mean, True.
this is one of these things where you could argue it on moral and ethical grounds, you could argue it on national security grounds, you know, you could, you could argue it on, I mean, there's, there's You know, it's the best laid, you know, best laid plans or best intentions.
You can, you can argue that the road, uh, the road to the underworld is, is, is paved with, you know, paved in gold. But you know, this was something that was a technology that again, you know, so you hire these teams of social scientists and then you hire these computer scientists to [00:42:00] basically take that lexicon, to take that linguistic roadmap and then code in.
The Deboosters, the Deamplifiers, the, the various, you know, sort of remove, reduce, and form censorship interventions in order to stop the, you know, stop the virality of, of that kind of content online. The issue is, is it was so effective that it was almost like, uh, one of these, uh, You know, we can almost compare it to like the, you know, the ring in Lord of the Rings or something.
It's one of these things that's, it's, it's such a power that, you know, perhaps no person should be able to wield it. It may, maybe that needs to be cast in the fire because it's so powerful that you can't, it's hard to imagine people refusing that power, uh, in order to wield it against their own domestic adversaries.
And this is really, Something that I became very mortified by personally when I came across this in late 2016, because the very first thing that Google Jigsaw did, again, Google [00:43:00] Jigsaw run by, you know, the guy who created this, this doctrine of digital statecraft to be able to overthrow foreign governments, you know, to be able to destabilize foreign societies, uh, to be able to use social media in the process.
That, that, you know, the, the first three things that, that, uh, Google Jigsaw their, uh, their weapons of mass deletion on, these AI natural language processing techniques on, were on, were on political matters. You know, they were on things around the 2016 election, things around, um, you know, the, the sort of Brexit movement in UK, and, and things around, uh, you know, other, other cultural issues, uh, the energy space.
And
MarcBeckman: so Mike, how, I'm sorry to interrupt, but just in plain English for the audience, can you explain exactly like how it worked, like give an example? is it a person going to search something specific and the results just don't populate, or is it a situation where. a person is trying to send out a, a [00:44:00] message across social media back then and it was not able to reach anyone like in plain English at this point in time.
I don't want to fast forward, but in where I think we're at about 2016 right now, if I'm correct. And in that moment in time, what was it that if you were a consumer or just a United States citizen, like what was happening?
MikeBenz: so this is late 2016, early 2017, and this product that Google Jigsaw put out, and again, Google Jigsaw was effectively a CIA branch at that point, it was, it was run by the guy who left the coordinating wing of the CIA and State Department to run a non profit incubator within Google, That was being used, you know, for, you know, the Arab Spring and, uh, and, and other, you know, sort of, uh, U.
S. State Department, uh, high priority conflict zone areas. And so, you know, what, what Google Jigsaw produced in late 2016, early 2017 was a commercial retail project, a product called Perspective AI. Now, what [00:45:00] Perspective AI did was, you could plug in any sentence, you could go onto, you know, Jigsaw's website, and if you wanted to test this out before your social media platform onboarded it, you, you could go into Perspective AI and you could type any sentence in the world.
Mark is a silly person who loves tennis. Randomly, I'm just, and that will, and, and what it would do is it would spit out a score of that sentence. It would, they, would call these toxicity scores, and, and toxicity was said to take into account, you know, 15 to 16 different metrics about how much of that speech was assessed as hate speech, how much of it was, was assessed as, you know, a call to violence.
How much of it was assessed to be, you know, borderline content about a conspiracy theory, you know, that was mapped in a separate database about how dangerous that was to society or whatnot. there would be a comprehensive score and it would spit it out. So it might say, if our sentence is, Mark is a silly [00:46:00] person, you know, who enjoys tennis, you know, it will, you could, it will literally spit out a numerical number that will say, you know, 0.
11. that would represent a toxicity score of, you know, 11%. It's a score between, you know, zero and one or, you know, zero to 100 percent essentially. And that would say that, that, you know, that is An 11 percent toxic statement because I said the word silly. Silly might be a sort of low, low grade pejorative statement that might be viewed as targeted abuse and harassment if you were to go too far into that, but it's modified by the fact that it's a sort of low severity word and it's in the context of talking about tennis, which is a relatively innocuous topic.
Uh, but if you were to, if you were to talk about highly sensitive political matters, or if you were to use speech that was being codified by the social science researchers as being, you know, highly inflammatory, you know, at the time, you know, immigration was a very big issue at the time, because NATO was highly concerned, and the CIA and [00:47:00] the State Department and the Pentagon were highly concerned That the rules based international order was going to come apart in 2016 of the rise of these populist movements, you know, there's the Brexit, Brexit in the UK, they were afraid that Frexit was going to happen in France.
So France was going to leave the European Union. Spexit was going to happen in Spain because of the Vox party there. Gregxit was going to happen in Germany because of AFD, you know, uh, Italexit was going to happen because of Matteo Salvini, uh, Gregxit was going to happen in Greece so the EU would come undone, which would mean NATO would come undone, which would mean there would be no enforcement arm for the international creditor class and the IMF and the World Bank.
So there was a, there was a five alarm fire at the time that all these institutions said to be protecting democracy set up in the 1940s would become defunct and toothless if, if Free speech on the internet was not contained, and Google Jigsaw's perspective AI was really the first in a now billion dollar industry around AI censorship technology development, much of which is funded by the U.
S. government today, know, [00:48:00] so again, this would manifest itself in the same way that chess computers work. This is actually how I entered this space. I, you know, I was an avid chess player as a kid. I competed all over the country. It was just a, it's just a part time pastime that I, that I loved.
And I came of age at the time when chess computers overtook chess humans.
MarcBeckman: Sure.
MikeBenz: had remembered hearing, you know, that this was never going to happen, but it was very obvious as a child that it would. And the way you train with chess computers is very similar to the way Google Jigsaw's Perspective AI works.
It assesses a move. It does brute force calculation of a billion moves per second in terms of its analysis,
MarcBeckman: It's algebra.
MikeBenz: AI censorship weapons. Yeah, we'll, we'll analyze a billion different, you know, sort of keywords and sentiment analysis modifiers and all this training data that goes into creating these models.
And it spits out a number, you know, a chess computer will say, yeah, Negative 0. 7, which it will assess as being black. If you play this move, you'll be winning as playing the black pieces by seven tenths of a pawn. This is a, this is a, this is an unstoppable [00:49:00] functionality, you know, versus the human mind in the chess world.
And this is what we ran into in the censorship industry with, with these retail AI censorship tools. It would be able to set, you know, development of this is very much like the development of nuclear weapons. You know, it didn't stop after we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We went on to create more and more powerful bombs, hydrogen bombs, and this testing went on for 15 years, and we're now living in this age of this kind of foreign policy establishment, private sector sort of cut out development of the ability to censor speech online.
And this is something that goes way beyond partisan, know, the natural push and pull of partisan disagreement. You don't want any government to have this power.
MarcBeckman: But,
MikeBenz: it's a really a God button.
MarcBeckman: but Mike, when, when you talk, just going back to perspective AI and the way it was trained, I think it's a problem in also, it seems like it was trained from a centralized viewpoint, right? The data that was, the [00:50:00] standards that were built to create that toxicity score were created, if I understand correctly, and this is a question, they were created by Both the United States government and Google. So it was a very subjective, uh, scoring system based upon what those participants decided would be toxic. Is that correct?
MikeBenz: That's exactly right. And this is part of, this is part of the problem with, you know, creating this power is somebody, you know, whoever gets to decide, know, what goes, what goes into it, uh, decides what, what comes out of it. And, you know, as I mentioned at the time, you know, there were things like, uh, like hate speech codified into the toxicity scores.
Well, at the time, you know, NATO was hugely concerned about the rise of these populist movements in, um, in Europe, who were rising because of, you know, in large part because, you know, after the assassination of Qaddafi, in Libya, there was, there was, A large [00:51:00] influx of, of, of immigrants into, into Europe and there was a sort of political response by European parties there and, know, so for example, anti immigration rhetoric, which at, which prior to, you know, 2013 was considered an ordinary push and pull, you know, some people wanted more immigration, some people wanted less, there was a natural sort of Internal political debate in every society about what level of immigration They wanted.
These things were being hard coded into Google Jigsaw as being hate speech now. Hate speech is a highly subjective thing You know there's obvious examples of it that anybody can sort of, you know, sort of see, you know It's sort of like the pornography, I think, uh, I don't know if it was, um, You know, which, which Supreme Court justice, you know, said, uh, back in the, in the 20th century, I know it when I see it, you know, there, but there are, there are, there's a lot of gray area there.
And if you can essentially rig the debate in a country by having this God button, the ability [00:52:00] to instantly kill any speech on the internet over, over Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Discord, Twitch, you name it, uh, Instantly be throttled because of the AI, because that's hard coded any sentiment analysis that opposes a certain policy view as being, you know, over that toxicity threshold.
So, and the way perspective worked is, have these, these confidence thresholds where different censorship interventions will be triggered at different confidence intervals. So, I mentioned with that sentence, if the AI, If Marcus Sillian plays tennis, it's an 11 percent toxicity score. That would not make it onto the heat map of the trust and safety teams.
You know, they would set it at something like 85%. If perspective detects a comment in a reply section, or a tweet, or a Facebook post, or a speech to text transliteration video as being above the 85 percent threshold, then it would automatically be put in a sort of purgatory zone, where it would, you would be able, the speech would [00:53:00] persist on the platform.
But it would not be, it would not be visible. It would be essentially shadow banned. Well, if it was above a sort of 95 percent, then it might be automatically, you know, suspended and then put in a sort of, you know, review, uh, queue for the Mechanical Turks, you know, hired by the, uh, by the social media companies to just click through posts and, and determine whether they live or die.
But this is something that, you know, basically It puts the power in the hands of these largely government funded and government coordinated outside institutions who program that AI.
MarcBeckman: so you mentioned NATO, and, I guess the United States perhaps, um, influencing NATO to a certain extent, to move, the installation effectively of new governments. Is that what was happening? How, how were we, how is NATO using, I guess, artificial intelligence, machine learning and social media to impact the political landscape?
And, you know, throughout Europe.
MikeBenz: Yeah, and [00:54:00] also, just let me also make clear that this, you know, again, this is not a political issue. NATO also targeted Jeremy Corbyn. The, you know, left wing Labour Party leader in, in the UK because of Jeremy Corbyn's, um, foreign policy positions against NATO, which, which were very similar to 2016 Bernie Sanders, you know, the blob targeted Bernie Sanders in the same way that they targeted, sort of, You know, right wing populist because Bernie Sanders wanted to limit U.
S. foreign interventionism debate to pay for free universal health care and free college tuition. And so this is, it's, you know, this is way far above the level of left, right, you know, Democrat, Republican, yada, yada. But, you know, what NATO started to do in 2014, This sort of gets us to the deep origins of the censorship industry.
know, free speech on the internet was considered an unalloyed good. It was getting State Department funding. It was getting C-I-A-N-S-A funding. It was getting Pentagon funding for free speech technology. You know, all of the internet anonymity tools that we now know and love, like VPNs, virtual [00:55:00] private
MarcBeckman: Yeah.
MikeBenz: your IP address and end-to-End encrypted chat and tour of the dark web.
You know, these were all darpa, you know,
MarcBeckman: Whole government.
MikeBenz: R& D projects, and then were rolled out commercially in the same way that the internet itself was, in the same way GPS was, in the same way cell phone technology was. And so, you know, this is because The Foreign Policy Establishment loved free speech on the internet so much because it was so effective at, at causing Arab Spring type events, you know, with, with these internet revolutions.
issue is, is in 2014, you know, this gets us to some of the sensitive issues, you know, currently playing out around Ukraine. I know that there's a lot of, you know, reasonable disagreement, I think, on, on both sides of that, so without sort of getting too deep into the, the nuances of it, what happened was, is, In the run up to, 2014 was kind of the seismic geopolitical event that set the stage for what happened in 2022 with Russia's invasion of Ukraine [00:56:00] and a lot of the conflict between the Trump administration and, and, uh, you know, the foreign policy establishment in Washington around Russia policy and around, uh, and around, you know, reorienting U.
S. foreign policy, uh, vis a vis Ukraine and Russia. In 2014, there was a There was an overthrow of a democratically elected government there. There was a, there's a president named Viktor Yanukovych. He was a guy who was stuck between the east and the west. He had signed a lot of commercial agreements with U.
S. energy companies between 2011 and 2013, but at the same time, Ukraine was half Russian,
MarcBeckman: Sure.
MikeBenz: Western half and then you had this Eastern ethnic half and it was split basically down the middle, 50 50, East West, NATO Russia. So Yanukovych was a guy who was basically torn between both worlds.
He had been trying to cut these commercial deals with the East while having these sort of security arrangements with the West. I'm sorry, commercial deals with the West with these security arrangements and political [00:57:00] affiliations with, with the, uh, with the East. And, you know, in, in early 2014 that, that government was overthrown immediately after Yanukovych refused an IMF proposed trade deal and, and Yanukovych sided with, uh, essentially the Russians with the trade deal there.
At that point, there was a, you know, there was a mob, a sort of January 6th style, uh, you know, uh, parliament building. Uh, RAID in the Euromaidan Square there, where tens of thousands of essentially, you know, right wing paramilitary, um, insurgents surrounded the parliament building, ran Yanukovych out of office, and, you know, these, these groups were funded to the tune of five billion dollars by the U.
S. State Department.
MarcBeckman: Wow.
MikeBenz: Nuland, who is the head of the, of the Ukraine Embassy there, It was personally handing out water bottles and cookies to the, to these, you know, rioters as they were doing this. this was, you know, and immediately afterwards, Victoria Newland and Jeff Pyatt, uh, another, you know, major State Department [00:58:00] official were caught on, on hot mic, the next installed president of the, of the government of Ukraine.
But the issue was, is immediately after that, there was a sort of counter coup. The, the government, the, uh, the entire eastern part of Ukraine broke off at that point, declared itself independent, not subject to the new Kiev government. Crimea held a formal ref, referendum to join the Russian Federation.
This was something that the State Department and the foreign policy establishment were not anticipating. There had never been this kind of forceful pushback. Um, to, to such a high level strategic initiative by NATO during the 20th century. It was, it was backstopped by the Russian military, which made it very difficult for there to be a formal entry of, of NATO to retake the, that territory in the east because it would involve potentially World War III.
And the issue was is, five billion dollars of, of, of U.S. State Department funding of media organizations and soft power projection mechanisms, it [00:59:00] still was not enough to sway hearts and minds in Eastern Europe and in Crimea, and so at that point, NATO declared essentially a military media doctrine.
The time was called the Gerasimov Doctrine because they said Valery Gerasimov, this Russian general, was waging military war through control over media and hearts and minds in eastern Ukraine. Then that name changed to something called hybrid warfare, which is this idea that NATO needs to no longer see war as being a kinetic affair.
It's mostly a political and media affair. And this gave rise to a NATO doctrine called From Tanks to Tweets. And you can look this up, you know, uh, Jen Steltenberg, the, the head of NATO, who did this world tour, you know, announcing the From Tanks to Tweets doctrine, which was this idea that NATO was moving from a focus on tanks to a focus on tweets.
And they set up this infrastructure in 2014. These, uh, these, these formal NATO. of Excellence, and they were centers of excellence over strategic communications, meaning [01:00:00] over, over, you know, media communications. Primarily in the social media space. And so, you had this, this newly built NATO capacity, they set these up.
All over Central and Eastern Europe. So they set them up in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, all the way into Germany. This was the same sort of Central Eastern Europe region that was the focus of the Cold War. You know, the biggest Cold War battles raged over, over Germany from the 1940s Germany is the industrial base of the European Union.
It's, it's also one of the major, uh, import pass of Russian, Russian gas through the Nord Stream pipelines, which connected to Germany, and which, which bypassed Ukraine. Uh, but essentially, you know, in 2014, NATO began to say, you know what, this free speech thing was great while it lasted. And we're still going to be highly active in the free speech space, but we need an ability to kill Russian propaganda from being able to penetrate [01:01:00] hearts and minds in Central and Eastern Europe after this Crimea disaster, and after this breakaway, this civil war raging in Ukraine.
And so, under the moniker of stopping Russian propaganda, we're A censorship capacity was built by NATO, but then Brexit happened two years later in June 2016, and the foreign policy establishment that Brexit only happened because of Russian influence on, on social media in the, in, in the United Kingdom.
So now the NATO hybrid warfare went from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Germany, stretching all the way to Western Europe. They made the same argument that Marine lap pen's ar uh, you know, movement in
MarcBeckman: So
MikeBenz: because Marine Lap Pen was also running on a policy of cheap Russian gas as opposed to more expensive, uh, US l and g.
And then they made the argument, of course, that the 2016 election was, uh, you know, was essentially a Russian propaganda exercise. There was a formal CIA memo on January 6th, 2017, you know, saying that there was an [01:02:00] FBI special investigation. This was. ratified by 17 different intelligence agencies. So now you had this, this hybrid warfare doctrine, this military control over social media, you know, not just being some foreign facing esoteric fringe activity on the edge of the Baltics.
now it was stretching all the way across NATO, and this is where you started to have the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence services penetrate every aspect of domestic speech online, starting in 2016.
MarcBeckman: how much influence did the United States have when NATO transformed into this tanks and Did you call it tanks and tweets doctrine?
MikeBenz: From tanks to
MarcBeckman: From, from tanks to tweets. I mean, at that point, I would imagine, Mike, that the United States played a major role, given the fact that we were financing NATO to such an extent, a major role with regards to influencing the policy and then helping to execute on that policy, too.
Is that fair to [01:03:00] assume?
MikeBenz: Yeah, we led the charge, you know, us, us in the UK, you know, London figures very heavily in this, actually, as much as the U.S., you know, the, the U.S. Foreign policy establishment, you know, the State Department, Defense Department, CIA axis is, uh, you know, the blob extends to, to London, if you will, there's, we, we call it the Transatlantic Alliance, it's the Transatlantic National Security State, so if you will, you know, just as whenever you see the State Department You should always think the interagency.
You should always think, whenever you see the State Department, the Pentagon is involved, and the CIA is involved, and you just don't see it yet. Whenever the Pentagon is involved, the State Department and the CIA are involved, and you just don't see it yet. Whenever the CIA is involved, the State Department and the Pentagon are involved.
They always move together, so too it is with U.S. And U.K. statecraft, and this has been a tradition that stretches back to World War II. So whenever you see the Pentagon involved, You're going to see the British Ministry of Defence whenever you see the State Department involved. That means there's been some sort of transatlantic [01:04:00] coordination with the UK Foreign Office, and so too it is with the Central Intelligence Agency and institutions like MI5 and MI6.
And this is partially because when the Lost their formal empire in the 1940s and 1950s. You can make the argument that this, this transition from military empire building to soft power empire building hit the British Empire far, far harder than it hit the British Empire. Any other, any other, um, you know, European empire, you know, the, there was a, you know, there's a French empire in Africa, there's the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Italians, everyone had properties, you know, in the run up to World War II, all over the world, but, you know, the, the, the British empire was probably the largest, and it sort of formally collapsed with the Suez Crisis in 1957.
The Brits had to move Very hard into becoming a financial empire through their offshore banking syndicates and a soft power projection empire, you [01:05:00] know through, through British statecraft and British intelligence in order to maintain an approximated version of the empire that they had in the 20th century and much of that involved for example, the oil and gas space.
So Ukraine story, for example, you know, Victoria Newland, as she was making the speech about the, the $5 billion that they had pumped into Ukrainian civil society and the run up to the 2014 overthrow of that government right behind her were signs for Chevron and ExxonMobil. You know, this was because Chevron had signed a $10 billion agreement with Ukraine's NAFTA gas.
They're, they're publicly held. Uh, State Gas Company, uh, you know, so did Shell, the, the London based, uh, you know, this is Royal Dutch Shell, but it's now just called Shell because it's primarily the UK rather than, you know, the, the UK Dutch enterprise, and Shell had signed a 10 billion dollar agreement to mine the, uh, the shale reserves in eastern Ukraine, so you had it.
You had tens of [01:06:00] billions of dollars, you know, Chevron, Shell, Halliburton, which is, you know, the, the, uh, you know, famously, this Dick Cheney was both CEO and Chairman of the Board of Halliburton. Halliburton signed the agreement in 2000, 2011 to 2013, uh, for the oil and gas processing rights, both in the Crimea, Black Sea region, And in the Donbass, know, east of the Napa River shale reserves there.
So you had in the aggregate about 50 billion of U.S., U.K., oil and gas interests in the precise region that had just been militarily overtaken by the Russians, in the 2014 counter coup. And so you had this deep relationship between oil intelligence, between U.S. And, and U.K. Statecraft in order to, you know, to
MarcBeckman: To preserve?
MikeBenz: with the military, you know, so, so, you know, these are, these are part of the drivers of that story, but you can now understand why it is that NATO took such a vested interest in stopping the rise of political movements.
who wanted [01:07:00] neutrality with Russia because that would, you know, if, if, if the, if the game were to end then, in the sort of post 2014 milieu where you now had all these resources under Russian military occupation, well that now screws up, 50 million in, in, in present investments by some of the largest stakeholders, uh, at the U.
S. Statecraft and Intelligence. And that's leaving aside the agricultural interests, uh, and, and a lot of other long range plans around, um, around defanging the Russian military because, you know, the only reason that the Obama administration was not able to continue with the, uh, The war in Syria, for example, was because Russia provided Syria with these S 400 air defense systems, which they could only produce in terms of their war machine because of their energy exports
MarcBeckman: Right.
MikeBenz: So if you could carve those off, you know, there's a whole hodgepodge of stakeholder interest in doing this, but present politics and culture is really mediated through the, through this kind [01:08:00] of proxy war playing out. You know, several miles above that, above its head.
MarcBeckman: So I mean, it's fair to think then, you know, even if you fast forward to today, we're still seeing these geopolitical macro concepts, across the globe, right? Struggle for power surrounding energy, struggle for power surrounding financial systems. And a lot of that is fueled by, you know, controlling the narrative by controlling the media and, and the information that's reaching, uh, the citizens and, and frankly, the information that's not reaching the citizens too.
MikeBenz: Oh, absolutely. And this is where, again, it starts to get troubling from a civilian standpoint and from a human rights standpoint, Yeah. Let's talk about that. it, it is now, you know, no matter who you are, no matter what party, you know, no matter what your belief system, you're confronted with this ethical issue, this use of social media as an instrument of statecraft, this control over speech.
by a foreign policy [01:09:00] establishment deputized with the Department of Dirty Tricks power. Formally, you know, the Central Intelligence Agency operates under National Security Council Memo 10 2, which says that it can engage in criminal activity, it can overthrow governments, it can control media, as long as it's plausibly deniable.
You know, once these agencies are imbued with this power over speech, And it becomes embedded and mature. The entire administration and ebb and flow of elections comes under its heel. So I'll give you a great example here is the State Department. Now gets readouts of all the social media activity of elections around the world or, you know, basically hot button, you know, if you're in the State Department, you will get SBU emails, you know, sensitive but unclassified emails around the social media activity, you know, the YouTube popularity of different groups that are U.
S. State Department funded. Wow. Department will work with All the social media companies in every election around the world. [01:10:00] So this is another thing, right? We talked about how the blob might be a good thing in a lot of ways, right? That it's, you know, I, I criticize it on human rights grounds. Uh, but you can make an argument that we would not have American prosperity unless we had this bully pulpit to be able to manipulate foreign governments to profit, you know, American citizens, see that. at a number of levels. But you have to understand, there's a regional desk for every country on this planet, okay? Whether that's Middle East, North Africa, whether that's CEE, Central and Eastern Europe, you know, whether that's Sub Saharan Africa, whether that's Western Hemisphere for Latin America, you know, whether that's, you know, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, there is a regional desk every country on the globe.
on every country in the globe, the State Department has a preferred set of winners and losers in every election because every country's government, you know, this is, this is something that's important. You know, I say a lot, but maybe, but not so much publicly, but it's a useful [01:11:00] concept. I like to say there's no such thing as domestic policy, because every country's domestic policy is another country's foreign policy.
What the Philippines decides to do domestically, in terms of who wins or loses an election in the Philippines, is going to influence U.S. Power projection all over the Pacific Rim. You know, who wins an election in Australia is going to impact what we can do with military bases there, what we can do with soft power projection in the South China Sea.
Who wins an election in Tanzania? is going to determine whether we have access to the copper and the aluminum and the titanium and the oil and gas in Tanzania. Different parties, now countries tend by default to be nationalistic. They tend to want what's best for their own people. And when there is foreign exploitation, foreign extraction of their natural resources, foreign control over their ports and dams, foreign control, foreign military bases on that soil, Uh, you know, foreign NGOs.
who, uh, who are, who are eclipsing [01:12:00] domestic organizations in terms of their power over domestic affairs. People tend to resent that, and political movements will form to oppose that, and those will manifest itself in a State Department heat map of opposition to U.S. Interests. Given that every country's election has a, has a preferred set of winners and losers by the State Department, and the State Department's job, How you get promoted in the State Department, how you get, you know, uh, you know, profitable sinecures at think tanks afterwards, or a board of executive spots at, uh, at, uh, you know, commercial companies who depend on the State Department to protect them, depends on how well you do in that region in terms of manipulating that country's elections.
The State Department is now in interwoven in the regional desks of Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and Twitch and Discord and all of the, all of the regional affairs that happen in Tanzania or Congo or [01:13:00] Venezuela or Brazil or, you know, Vietnam or, you know, Australia
MarcBeckman: Sure.
MikeBenz: I mean, you name it, is Ukraine.
They're, the State Department intermediates with that now to be able to put its thumb. In every election on that, this is why the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, it should be very troubling. For example, the National Endowment for Democracy is, is the CIA's premier cutout organization.
There's tens of thousands of NGOs that, you know, that are government organized, non governmental organizations between the State Department, USAID. The National Endowment for Democracy, um, the Defense Department, uh, you name it. We have, you know, we have dozens, you know, and just congressional mandates. U.S.
Institute for Peace. The National Endowment for Democracy is a very famous one. Even the Washington Post, in the early 1990s, described it as a CIA cutout set up to do overtly what the CIA, uh, was getting in trouble for doing covertly, [01:14:00] using a democracy predicate rather than a cloak and dagger policy. Um, you know, uh, formal overthrow.
If we want to overthrow a country's government, but we don't want to be said to be doing that as a matter of U.S. Policy, Sure. we just want to happen independently. What we do is we capacity build, a network of NGOs and civil society institutions and, and, you know, uh, and, and, and activist groups. And that money is intermediated through groups like the National Endowment for Democracy.
Well, the National Endowment for Democracy. has a social media censorship program in a, in something like 120 countries now. now they will call this a counter disinformation program. But, but it's not counter disinformation through counter speech. It's counter disinformation by labeling Domestic political activity in 120 countries as being disinformation.
And they can do this through a number of ways. They can say, well, the Russians want this group to win in Tanzania, or the Chinese want this group to win in, in Congo, or,
MarcBeckman: And therefore it's not in our best, in the [01:15:00] United States best interest.
MikeBenz: They can use that predicate. They can use a hate speech predicate. Oh, this group in, in Venezuela is, you know, is, they, like, they did this in Myanmar, for example, you know.
Well, this group is being, you know, uh, is hateful towards the Rohingya. But behind that are the commercial interests of the Chamber of Commerce, you know, of the oil and gas companies in the region who don't want that company to win because they're running on nationalizing, you know, the oil reserves there or the, or the copper mines.
And so, you know, this, this. This doublespeak that, that our intelligence agencies are deputized to do because they have a formal plausible deniability doctrine. They are, they have a legal obligation to lie. These, these are the same institutions intermediating our diplomacy in the region and are the ones who are, you know, the ones who are tasked with producing disinformation.
are the ones who miraculously are tasked with determining disinformation and censoring disinformation, which coincidentally, you know, happens to be able to put its thumb on the press on every election around the world. [01:16:00] If this, we're in the adolescent stage of this, if this is allowed to full maturity, you're never going to be able to have a domestic election in any country, you know, around the because you're going to run headlong into a, into a You know, statecraft operation if you simply want to vote for a party that you agree with.
MarcBeckman: So, Mike, are you, are you balancing, like, looking, um, into the future, in your mind, are you balancing, because there are clearly, there are benefits to the way that the United States government is effectively coercing and influencing, the economic landscape, the political landscape, and different cultural issues on a global scale.
Are you looking at that and balancing it versus the chilling impact it will have ultimately here domestically in the United States? And you're saying, we don't see that far out. It's ultimately the benefit that we've been getting for You know, all of these decades by, um, you know, pushing our influence across the globe through legacy media, [01:17:00] through current new tech media, it's not going to outweigh the negative impact of what's, what's in front of us.
And if you see it as, um, the negative impact is greater than the benefit, what is that negative impact exactly?
MikeBenz: Yeah, and I'm so glad that you bring this up, actually. I mean, this is a big part of what I do because, you know, the first level is bringing awareness to this issue and trying to stop the excesses of government overreach in this space. And then a lot of times, you know, when I Well, you know, do these lectures or I, or I present this evidence or I make this case, you know, the response is a lot of pitchforks.
Oh, yeah, I tear the whole thing down. God, this is really, really evil. And I totally understand that, that impulse, but you know, the next step is to sort of temper that to say, well, Listen, you know, this may require scalpel work because there, there is a, this is a very complex story that gets at the heart of American power and gets at the heart of American economic prosperity.
[01:18:00] There's, there's a complex interplay here, uh, between the security issues and the human rights issues and the free speech issues. And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of my focus is on translating this in a way that can preserve, uh, certain essential government functions, removing, you know, this sort of excess, power to be able to, you know, do things domestically that are frankly human rights abuses that I can't imagine anybody, uh, no matter what their belief system is, wants to have as a permanent, you know, federal government power or a foreign policy establishment power because that basically puts our foreign facing department of dirty tricks.
In charge of, in charge of, uh, all civilian domestic affairs.
MarcBeckman: It's really interesting also when you think in terms of like, from a tech perspective, Mike, the concept of centralization versus decentralization. It reminds me of conversations I had with engineers and coders in China like five, six years ago that were really bullish on blockchain technology. And a few of them actually said to me, I never thought about it this way.
I [01:19:00] take, maybe here in America, I take it for granted as, you know, as a New Yorker. But they said. I now have freedom because of blockchain and they were really talking about the underlying decentralized ability to transfer, information data, but they were talking about entertainment. They literally said like, we could get Netflix movies now, or we could create something and sell it and be paid however we want with cryptocurrency.
And I wonder to a certain extent, if what you're talking about is also going to have a, it will, it will serve as an impetus to, uh, much more of a decentralized approach to the transfer of information, the transfer of currency between individuals, between entities, and, uh, expanding on a web three blockchain ecosystem.
I think it's going to be important, especially in like, you know, this day and age of cancel culture, where all of a sudden you're seeing, I mean, we, we, we could talk about this all day long, but you've seen, you know, big tech retailers shut down, um, you know, political figures that they don't like. We've [01:20:00] seen.
or even full on social media, right? With Parler, for example, wasn't, um, Parler shut down to, um, a certain extent because they were using third party cloud services. Um, so I think that it's, it's a real interesting place that we're in. just to bring it back to America, I know, I appreciate you've been with us for, for so long.
I just have another question. So right now we have Murthy, uh, versus Missouri in the Supreme Court. And, and the issue is like, Whether or not the United States, coercively censored, Americans vis a vis social media. So how much censorship have we experienced here in the United States, in your opinion, as a result of the government kind of, uh, leveraging social media to, to control the narrative and control the messaging?
MikeBenz: Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't even know that the crux issue of the case is whether the government coerced so much as whether, whether it's a good thing, whether they should be allowed to do so. I mean, it's, it's actually kind of amazing, [01:21:00] you know, the, the goalpost moving that, um, that the federal government's lawyers have, have made there.
They've, they've, they've argued formally that the, uh, that the First Amendment's classical interpretation, You know, it has to be essentially discarded because the, the First Amendment didn't contemplate the implications of, of social media. And, you know, in terms of, you know, there are
MarcBeckman: Wild.
MikeBenz: that case that, that are, that are obviously coercive.
You know, when, when the FBI, you know, uh, you know, tells a company, it takes something down when, when, you know, DHS uses these cutouts to be able to, uh, to use. Threaten government pressure. If they don't do they don't censor this, then the state department is not going to lobby on your behalf against the European Digital Services Act, or the, there'll be an antitrust investigation out of the Senate intelligence committee or out of the banking committee with the, uh, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar threats.
These were all things that were conveyed. This forms the guts of the case and the statement of facts, but then there are the sort of, there, there gradations of, of [01:22:00] coercion. which I think is really where. Where the scalpel will be taken by the
MarcBeckman: I agree.
MikeBenz: terms of how far they go. But, you know, I mean, the government The way the censorship industry works is it takes four categories of institutions in what they call a whole society model.
Now they call it the whole society counter misinformation, counter disinformation, counter malinformation model. Malinformation, you know, misinformation is said to be, you know, it's false, but you didn't know it was false. Disinformation is, it was a lie and you knew it ahead of time, so it's deceptive. And then malinformation is, well, it's true, but it's still misleading in the aggregate.
You know, it's factually true or factually non falsifiable, but it leads people to a misleading overall conclusion where it undermines public faith and confidence. In a, in a critical, you know, US government, uh, initiative. And so these are the, are the, the three sort of categories that are mystic and malformation.
And, and in 2017, the US government began constructing what I called a whole of society [01:23:00] model, uh, for, and I'm just gonna call it the whole Society Censorship Network. Because calling it counter mis dis and mal information is, is, is very disingenuous. It's again, it's not counter speech. It's about taking speech down in one of three forms.
We call it remove, reduce, and form. Remove is just, you know, banning it, suspending it, deleting it. Inform is like affixing a fact check label. And, uh, and Reduce is that, is that huge array of friction techniques throttling its virality, putting it in a purgatory state, making it not searchable, making it not recommendable, yada yada.
So, you know, so it's this whole of society censorship network that was constructed deliberately within the U.S. Government, by the U.S. Government, which, which connects four different categories of institutions. The first is government agencies, which are And I'll get into the specifics of this, but the government agencies, you think of it like a four part quadrant.
Government agencies, private sector companies, civil society institutions, and media allies. Okay, so those four, you've got on the government side, this all started You know, technically you can argue it started with [01:24:00] the State Department's Global Engagement Center in 2014. This was the original sort of toehold, but then the, the folks who constructed this, uh, decided there needed to be a domestic facing one, uh, version of the State Department's Global Engagement Center because the State Department is banned by law from censoring domestic tweets, you know, without some national security predicate like ISIS.
So the very first one that was constructed was, was a censorship agency within DHS called CISA. it's a long name, Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, but it has nothing to do with security, okay? It was a cyber censorship office because they, they argued, you know, their job was to protect critical infrastructure in the cyber realm.
And then they, they declared elections to be critical infrastructure. And then they declared tweets to be a cyber attack. on critical infrastructure if it contained misdisc or malinformation. So, you know, the analogy that I, you know, that I gave on the, on the Tucker, you know, hit and then the Russell brand and, you know, that I've just, I think it's a useful thing to keep in mind is you could literally [01:25:00] be on a toilet seat at 9 30 on a Thursday night and say, you know, actually, I, uh, I don't like the result of this election.
uh, you would be, you would be triggering, you know, if, if, They're, you know, in 2020, they had this thing about delegitimization, anyone who delegitimized election processes, results, or outcomes, you know, was, uh, was, uh, was said to be attacking, undermining critical infrastructure. So, you know, you could be on a toilet seat saying, I disagree with the use of mail in ballots.
And now you're caught up in a DHS cyber censorship web where they're saying you are carrying out. You're carrying out a cyber attack on U.S. Critical infrastructure by undermining public faith and confidence in the use of mail in ballots. They did the same thing for COVID 19. You know, DHS's CISA office put out a formal formerly YouTube video, a six minute YouTube video, instructing young children to report their own relatives, their own family members, for disinformation if they cited CDC data around the fatality rates of [01:26:00] COVID 19.
They
put this up in 2021. They had a young girl named Susan reporting her Uncle Steve. They walked her through how to do it. You click the, click the report to Facebook for disinformation. Because
uncle Steve Wow.
in this, in the video, was citing CDC data to argue that COVID. was no more fatal than the flu They
call that
The Now Information even
though a CDC data and even though it
is factual to information that the
vitality rate is the same it undermine public faith and confidence in severity
of the covid narrative we hope to see you again soon. Every other government agency felt that it had a sort of predicate to do so. So the FBI on the pressure side, the National Science Foundation on funding censorship mercenary firms, the State Department, the Pentagon, it was a whole of government, you know, every government Government agency involved in the national security [01:27:00] space would lend its own proprietary resources to this whole society censorship network.
On the private sector, you know, so that's the first box is government. The second one is private sector. These are the social media platforms. So this meant all of those government agencies would interface with Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and Discord and Reddit and Twitch and
MarcBeckman: Yeah.
MikeBenz: It also meant the, the private sector censorship mercenary firms.
These are, these are like Google jigsaw. This is the pop up industry of private sector companies whose professional products and services are artificial intelligence scan and ban products, or censorship services that they are hired by the platforms, you know, to do in order to basically do favors for the federal government.
So the federal government will do favors for them internationally. You know, as I mentioned, which was my former job to do on their behalf. On the civil society side, these are, these are NGOs, university centers, nonprofits, and community activist groups who are, who work together [01:28:00] with the federal government and who work together with the tech platforms as that third stool.
So there are over 60 universities currently who receive federal funding just from the National Science Foundation, in addition to State Department grants and Defense Department grants. For countering misdisc and malinformation, for censoring, and again, this is not counter speech. So for example, know, the University of Michigan had got a 5.
5 million dollar grant to create a dynamic digital dashboard, uh, for the social, for, for media institutions. To have a heat map of people who are discrediting media online, because media is deemed by the National Science Foundation to be a democratic institution. So if you discredit legacy media, you are carrying out an attack on democracy.
The federal government is saying, well, it's our job to defend democracy. And so there, so again, this is a laundering apparatus because that fourth, that fourth quadrant is media and fact checking organizations.
MarcBeckman: Hmm.
MikeBenz: the major media fact, uh, fact checking organizations are government subsidized. Poynter Institute, for example, is the big umbrella one that all of the major.
Uh, fact [01:29:00] checking, uh, groups are folded under. Well, Poynter Institute is something like 18 different State Department grants alone, in addition to working with the National Endowment for Democracy and other CIA cutouts. But here, just in that one example, of course, correct. Again, there's hundreds of millions of dollars of these grants that, so it's a government subsidized industry.
You have the federal government, the National Science Foundation, Paying a civil society organization, the University of Michigan, to create a censorship heat map for the, for media organizations, so the media organizations can flag it to the social media companies. You know, these sorts of things happen all, happen all over the place.
You know, media literacy is a government initiative. That pumps funding to, uh, you know, into tech companies for, for censoring things that are deemed to make users media illiterate. I mean, there's, there's, the industry itself is so government subsidized. I'll give you just one example. I know I've been going on for some time here, but as early as 2020, when I was sitting in the State Department, I remember reading a lobbying letter.
Now, this is before all the recent pressure [01:30:00] against the federal government on censorship issues. This is at the time there was a lot of talk about Section 230, which is this, you know, it's the Communications Decency Act. It's what allows the safe harbor for
MarcBeckman: Yeah.
MikeBenz: media platforms to not be sued. So, you know, there was a lot of, There was a talk at the time by free speech activists about repealing Section 230 or enforcing Section 230 to treat social media companies who censor First Amendment speech as a publisher rather than as a platform and that would kill their safe harbor.
I remember reading a lobbying letter at the time which argued that there were over 100, 000 U.S. Jobs that were dependent on content moderation and if Section 230 reform went through, it would be akin to shutting down a coal mine in West Virginia would lose their jobs if you got rid of internet censorship.
That was in 2020, that was four
MarcBeckman: That's mind blowing, actually.
MikeBenz: Yeah, well, and but they're not entirely wrong. I mean, there's probably two or three hundred thousand U.S. Jobs in that space now. There's probably going to be a million jobs in the next couple years because of these new state law [01:31:00] mandates. California, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island have all passed mandatory media literacy laws, which, which are going to create hundreds of thousands of professional censorship jobs, uh, as a matter of state law.
So this is going to be, there's going to be millions of people potentially on U.S. Payroll depending on, on the censorship industry. If it's not stopped now. You know, it is going to do economic damage later.
MarcBeckman: Mike, can you put a, um, like a, like a, a market valuation on Censorship Inc?
MikeBenz: Well, you know, the content moderation, you know, trade publications, I think in 2022 pegged it at 8 billion worldwide content moderation. That was two years ago. I'd say it's probably doubled in that time. Um, you know, it is, it's a massive industry because everyone's got a stake in it. Every company has a stake in the flow of information for their own reputation and for government initiatives that protect their investments.
Every major company is a multinational company now, which means they need the State Department to influence elections on their behalf in 180 some countries around the [01:32:00] world. You know, uh, so it's the civil society institutions are dependent on the money in order to get the universities funded in order to have the NGOs funded.
The media institutions are dependent on the, on the government money because that is what protects them against competition from alternative media and that is what, what protects their monopoly in terms of Google search results or in Facebook news feeds. You know, the government is, it's an instrument of statecraft.
So, you know, it's a multi billion dollar industry for a reason because it's about control of society and commercial interests and political interests, you know, at the very heart of it all.
MarcBeckman: Do you think the United States, will ever be in a position where there won't be censorship? Because what you're describing today, it's really showing like a ramp up towards massive censorship and we're already in it, it seems like, but it seems like it's just going to continue to grow. Do you think that there's a way to turn this backwards?
MikeBenz: Yeah, in, in some respects it has been turned backwards, Modestly, you know, in the past year, there's been a, you know, there's been, you know, eight to ten different, pretty incredible [01:33:00] developments in this space that have really created the first, um, cultural and political pushback against the censorship industry in You know, now the eight years of its existence.
Remember before 2016, was never a job. You couldn't be, you couldn't make, you know, 20 million a year, uh,
MarcBeckman: We're living in an
Orwell, uh, book. It's insane.
MikeBenz: But, you know, take heart. There is, you know, just, just this week, the front page of the New York Times on Monday, you know, they mentioned me by name 24 times in a single, in a single piece, you know, arguing that, uh, myself and others, uh, are winning the war on disinformation, are winning successfully because of what's happening right now at the legal.
And at the regulatory and at the policy and at the, and at the, at the media levels, but you know, there's, there's, this is going to be with us for the rest of our lives. The genie cannot be put fully back into the bottle. Um, you know, this is going to be like nuclear weapons in a sense. There's always going to be a threat of it.
It's always going to be lurking in the background. Even right now in the Ukraine [01:34:00] Russia story, you know, this, this is one of these things that's constantly intermediating the battle. You can't go too far in this Yep. Yeah,
going to break out.
MarcBeckman: I see it. I was going to ask you, like, you talk about the, um, situation in Ukraine, but, like, I would imagine right now something similar behind the scenes is happening as it relates to the Israeli government and unseating, um, Netanyahu.
MikeBenz: out. Oh, absolutely. You know, I actually, yeah, we could go on for Yeah, I'm very curious, but,
MarcBeckman: so, so, um, Mike, um, what I do at the end of each show is basically incorporate the name of the show, Some Future Day, into the beginning of a sentence for my guests, and then the guest ends the sentence. So I would love to do that with you. I know I'm putting you on the spot a little bit.
I won't make it too difficult, but, um, are you game?
MikeBenz: I'm game. All
MarcBeckman: right. So in Some Future Day, Government's access to leveraging social media to influence elections globally [01:35:00] will.
MikeBenz: Be contained.
MarcBeckman: Perfect. I love it. Is there anything else, Mike, that you wanted to cover today?
MikeBenz: No, I would just say the best place to follow me is on X at MikeBendCyber. And, uh, my investigative work through, through our foundation is foundationforfreedomonline. com. I'm appreciative with how generous you've been with your time with me and, uh, really enjoyed this conversation.
MarcBeckman: Incredible, incredible insight. Um, I really appreciate it, Mike. It's really great to, to meet you and I, I hope we can continue to, uh, speak and, and get to know each other and have you back on some future day at some time.
MikeBenz: Brilliant. Would love to. [01:36:00]