Mike Benz: The Stanford Cyber Censorship Squad: Newsguard, GDI, Check My Ads | Video | RealClearPolitics
A little bit more on Francis Fukuyama here. I said in a post earlier that Francis Fukuyama is known as an academic, but his actual career history is a lot more interesting than that. Francis Fukuyama came from the State Department’s policy planning staff. The policy planning staff based out of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), is the coordinating body between the CIA and the State Department. It was created in 1947 with the National Security Act. The Office of Policy Coordination and the policy planning staff is the coordinating body between the CIA and the State Department so that American overt and covert diplomacy is always synchronized. So that the ambassadors in the region sort of know if we’re going to overthrow a country or prop up a government, or what we’re doing in terms of covert funding from the CIA to different media organs or NGOs, what dissident groups or political opposition groups we’re working with.
It is the sacred inner sanctum of the State Department if you will. It is also where a lot of censorship industry heavyweights come from, including Jared Cohen, who you might say really birthed the censorship industry, going from the policy planning staff (the same as Francis Fukuyama was) and going on to create Google Jigsaw’s Perspective API which was the first real weapons-grade AI censorship capacity developed for the private sector after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. So there is a bit of a pedigree of going from the CIA wing of the State Department directly into censorship intrigues.
So Francis Fukuyama was at the policy planning staff there, then he was at the RAND corporation, he’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Johns Hopkins School For Advanced International Studies, and now finally he’s at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, which sits on top of the Stanford Internet Observatory and technically is the Freeman-Spogli Institute with Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Russia. And again, the ambassador coordinates that overt-covert diplomacy, so it is that same wing of kind of State Department/CIA folks. Who else is there? Alex Stamos, who coordinated with the intelligence community from Facebook on Russiagate stuff. And Renee DiResta, who started her career in the Central Intelligence Agency itself.
So the “Stanford cyber censorship squad” that Francis Fukuyama is a part of is obviously a major player in censorship thought leadership. And they were a part of this academic-theoretic wrecking crew for free speech on the internet that said free speech was this great engine of democracy when it was working for us, when we were piping in the internet to other countries to overthrow their governments because now our CIA-backed dissident groups could have free speech to win over hearts and minds and evade state control over media. But now that our own dissident groups or opposition groups to our own policies are opposing us on the internet, now suddenly it is bad for democracy. Ain’t that convenient!
From the End of History to the End of Freedom. That’s a pretty fancy resume.