Autonomous Agencies and the Spectre of Disinformation

The neutral veil of governance is the prevailing myth of modern politics. An array of agencies, organisations and bodies are legitimated as governing entities because of their neutrality on a number of subjects. Post-politics is the centring of expertise that goes beyond dichotomy. By having entities that govern in an abstract interest (for the public but not for a people), an area of governance is foreclosed from scrutiny. Whether it is called the blob or the deep state, it “comprises ‘a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process’”[1].

Intelligence agencies and the security apparatus, in the abstraction and ambiguity of their remit and breadth and depth of their power, constitute one of the core structures of the deep state. Through a series of real and confected national/international crises, intelligence agencies have expanded their scope and autonomy such that they are effectively autonomous agencies, beholden to limited and feeble chains of command. Postmodernity’s permanency of crisis, construed in the post-Cold War expansion of fourth generation warfare (information warfare, non-state political actors and terrorist networks) and fifth generation warfare (super-empowered individuals and lone wolf terrorists), has provided the platform for the security apparatus to develop into an autonomous bunker state, largely hidden from public view and conceived as a supra-network that integrates informational arrays and attempts to control them through a limited ideological purview. They are the ultimate scrutinisers beyond scrutiny.

This bunker state (a state within a state but also beyond the state as it has international commitments and relations with other agencies as in the Five Eyes programme and the integration of trade agreements with security cooperation deals) has seen its power grow in the 1990s in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the rise of American militias and sovereign citizens (as in Waco or Ruby Ridge), followed by substantial increases in power after 9/11 through the War on Terror and the Patriot Act. Snowden’s and Wikileaks’ revelations showed the extent of this power grab, as autonomous agencies (from the NSA to the CIA) had constructed a legislative machinery surrounding metadata collection, domestic spying and FISA warrants[2] (which were almost always granted). Such autonomy means agencies can pick their targets, collect nearly any form of data, and have no need to justify it. The NSA director can lie to an American legislative body and receive no consequences. And this is not a passive consequence of external events. The intelligence community has been directly or indirectly involved in many these events, allowing them to occur through wilful decisions or incompetent inaction. There are serious questions over the investigation into Oklahoma City concerning the number of potential accomplices and the foreknowledge of the ATF. As a result of the bombing, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was passed which expanded the legal powers of investigators and limited the rights of suspects. Similar questions of culpability surround 9/11, particular the siloing of agency information between the CIA and FBI. The subsequent anthrax attacks against journalists and politicians which heightened security fears and allowed for further expansion of agency power in the Patriot Act were most likely an inside job by the Pentagon, as the anthrax could only have been sourced from the Fort Detrick military lab or a subsidiary. The FBI themselves have a long history of instigating terrorist incidents and fuelling conspiracies[3].

Intelligence agencies in the Five Eyes network all have substantial judicial and budgetary autonomy, with limited mechanisms for accountability outside of select groups of experts and officials, many of whom shared ideological understandings with intelligence officials (as with the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or the IPC in the UK[4]). They wield immense power that is used to further their own ends[5], creating a bunker around themselves and the wider natsec community that is, by its very nature, difficult to penetrate. Outside of internal leaks and the hacking of memos/documents, their internal functioning is locked between their own legislative independence and the secrecy of their oversight. This is the ultimate defence mechanism as it allows them to proclaim neutral expertise while the wider public have no means by which to understand how they arrive at their conclusions. Stories of Russian collusion and interference in the 2016 US election or the Brexit referendum promulgated by intelligence officials are taken at face value while the nature of these conclusions is obfuscatory and based on nonsense like the Steele dossier or pushed by blatantly partisan individuals like Peter Strzok.

Misinformation, disinformation and malinformation (MDM) has become a narrativised extension of this unaccountable autonomy. It has become a unifying storyline that responds to the populist challenges to the deep state, whether in the form of Trump, Brexit or increasing scepticism of government and political power generally. To characterise one’s opponents as purveyors of disinformation is to brand them an enemy that has to be stopped. “Disinformation such as is highlighted as a matter of public concern is quite characteristically regarded as a strategic element of information war”[6]. To put political opposition on a war footing is to present prevailing dichotomies as illegitimate altogether. To question decisions or outcomes, whether that be an election or an agency, is to be an active participant in a war.

Usually a war, even an information war, would be between organised camps. However, the nature of 4GW and 5GW has been a diffusion of the battlespace toward disorganised or non-organised opponents. The dissemination of the internet is the dissemination of communicative authority. Narrative construction can now start from any node of the network rather than from the hub. So “purveyors of disinformation” can now be anyone. This narrative dissemination works both ways, in that it diffuses authority but it also diffuses responsibility or attribution. While states no longer gatekeep information, they can instead gatekeep definition. When narratives run against them or even question their underlying assumptions, such questioning can be dismissed as MDM. The source is unimportant and can be entirely abstract. Attributing election interference to Russian entities like the Internet Research Agency or paid trolls is easy because the narrative is the disinformation, not the actual user. The Twitter Files revealed this absurdity when “Russian actors” identified by the Hamilton 68 dashboard turned out to be American citizens with no evidence of collusion with Russian actors[7].

The intelligence community constitutes a regime, “broadly defined as governing arrangements constructed by states to coordinate their expectations and organize aspects of their behavior in various issue-areas”[8], as they have overarching commitments that extend beyond local or national spaces. States have constructed a normative structure with international ramifications in the areas of trade, diplomacy and security as intelligence agencies have an increasingly broad remit, from economic security to counter-intelligence operations, within which they can act with limited oversight. The information space, and particularly its control of narratives around MDM, is an expansion of this regime into new arenas of action, increasing its concomitant power and autonomy. Being able to define the Department of Homeland Security as a US interior ministry[9] is indicative of this expansion, as security coordination runs through an intravenous bureaucracy with tentacles in every other department and agency.

Construction is the key word here. MDM is a constructed variable whose power comes from the ability to attribute blame and develop a narrative without being questioned on the underlying assumptions/facts. “The [Censorship-Industrial Complex], however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign ‘disinformation.’ It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy”[10]. A unified message can be seen in how it conceives of the information war around MDM as “a ‘whole of society’ effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error”[11]. From this initial position evolves an “‘ecosystem’ theory of disinformation, which holds that views that overlap with foreign threat actors are themselves part of the threat”[12]. This is pure ideological construction, with MDM being the hinge on which the Overton window can be restricted and legitimate opinion defined.

Such ideological construction is evident considering the epistemological underpinning of the friend/enemy distinction elucidated by proponents of MDM as an information war. The primary assumption is the clear distinction between open and closed societies[13]. The US or the West constitute open societies, while opponents, whether domestic or foreign, are closed or opaque. Closed societies must be opened up and those that resist are effectively combatants. However, what counts as open in an open society? Can the actions of the CIA and the secrecy surrounding them really be defined as open? What about the obfuscations of intelligence agencies in the Church and Kerry committees and the Warren and 9/11 commissions? Does the production of such confusion or the lack of will to answer questions not suggest a closed disposition in contradiction to its so-called open society? It raises the issue on the epistemological level of what can meaningfully be described as open vs. closed when the institutional basis for this opposition is so muddy. Do the effects of power-seeking and influence really distinguish so clearly between open and closed societies? Or does power have a spectrum of effects that make distinction a fruitless endeavour unless ideologically-motivated to maintain it?

In an information war, disinformation is defined by ideology. The distinction of open vs. closed is entirely ideological and based primarily on the power of attribution that agencies maintain. So long as a narrative originates from Russia or right wing terrorism or any other spectre they can conjure up, they hold the capacity define the battlespace. “Information superiority involves doing something to the adversary while protecting ourselves in order to control and exploit the information environment”[14]. Legislative oversight or public accountability must be dispensed with when on a war footing. “The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens”[15]. “Everything, from John Podesta’s emails to Trump’s Rust Belt primary victories to Brexit, were to be understood first and foremost as hybrid war events”[16]. Making enemies of ones citizens is the expectation rather than the exception.

Their actions and self-definitions testify to this. The expansion of the DHS since its founding in 2002 has created a fourth branch of US government, an autonomous interior ministry with significant budgetary power[17] and bipartisan support. This is in spite of the Office of Inspector General’s finding that the DHS lacked a unifying strategy[18] for its various activities and agencies. As a result, a vast tranche of taxpayer money goes on an organisation that resists Congressional oversight and has significant remit to define its own goals and KPIs.

The omnipotence of MDM campaigns follows from the obsession of data trawling followed by intelligence agencies since the 90s, and ramped up since 9/11. DHS, NSA and FBI have all engaged in data mining so as to construct policies around terrorism prevention. Fusion centres were developed to nominally coordinate agencies’ work and prevent siloing, but the reality has been a centralisation of information and an even greater unaccountability. The point of fusion centers was to engage all levels of law enforcement and the private sector in maintaining shared data centres which will “‘allow information from all sources to be readily gathered, analyzed, and exchanged’ whenever a ‘threat, criminal predicate, or public safety need is identified’”[19]. Particularly the integration of “risk scores” shows a belief in ranking individual idiosyncrasies into a matrix pattern which can predict the likelihood of someone’s criminality or dissidence. Similarly to MDM, this is a useful mechanism of castigating and tracking ideological foes, as the FBI did with COINTELPRO.

Fusion centre’s outcome was to become “‘information farms’—feeding their own centralized programs”[20]. Their growth encompassed an “‘all-crimes, all-hazards’ [approach] in order to qualify for a broader range of grant monies”[21]. Two defining features of agency autonomy, budgetary discretion and information centralisation. By implementing a data trawling methodology across agencies, a full informatic array was established from which could be picked the delineations of a domestic information war. While all-crimes, all-hazards was the approach, the outcome was selective segmentation of the information space such that a friend-enemy distinction could be cohered. A dual strategy of power expansion and ideological concentration has produced a security state whose primary concern is setting the narrative not through the truth of its actions but the discrediting of political opponents outside its defined status quo.

Take, for example, the broad remit of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that is provided significant discretionary power to police election infrastructure[22] so that any conceivable threat, including innocuous ones, come under its power to control misinformation. Such can be seen in the way CISA, as well as other agencies like the FBI, had backdoor channels into Twitter[23] that gave them substantial power over content moderation which tailed with their wide definitions of MDM. Such government-linked power over a public communication space is worrying, particularly considering the partisan direction it has been used with the Hunter Biden laptop story and its specifications of “trusted sources” almost all of whom are uncritical of the US military-industrial complex and the status quo (i.e. the pre-Trump political consensus). And while it may not be overtly coercive, the capacity for agencies with broad remits to request companies to censor information, ban accounts and throttle traffic around unfavourable stories[24] is censorship by other means, allowing for the ideological goals of security agencies to gain pre-eminence in the decision-making of social media platforms.

The OIG report on the DHS identified particular constraints that CISA has to consider when implementing decisions and censoring MDM:

“- CISA can only counter disinformation that represents a threat to critical infrastructure security and cybersecurity.

– CISA must protect U.S. citizens’ privacy and cannot collect and share disinformation from social media posts if it results in disadvantages to people with a particular viewpoint or involves personally identifiable information.

– CISA and I&A must consider a U.S. citizen’s First Amendment right to free speech in social media and the rights of the readers of posts.”[25]

That an internal review would raise these as concerns in relation to preventing disinformation suggests both a wide remit for potentially controlling MDM and an authoritarian notion of what misinformation is. That “people with a particular viewpoint” is problematic suggests an ideological direction for MDM efforts, which considering its abstract and all-encompassing definition is unsurprising. It suggests a serious disconnect between security requirements and informational control. Further strategic issues are identified by the OIG report – “a more unified strategy is also needed to mitigate the threat of civil unrest from disinformation that may spread rumors about COVID-19 vaccines or increase fear about food and supply shortages, among other things”[26]. That these are things identified as portents of civil unrest implies a wide ambiguity on both the definition of MDM and the power agencies like CISA and the DHS have to police it.

Defining constraints and strategy in this way constructs an enemy within the fold of these issues. That CISA has to consider (rather than respect or be restricted by) privacy issues and free speech rights allows it to develop workarounds by defining its enemies as beyond the reach of these restrictions. MDM is defined separately to free speech, as if a clear line can be run between them that doesn’t involve subjective judgment. Disinformation agents, as enemy combatants in an information war, are not subject to the rights that “ordinary citizens” have. As disinformation can include rumours about vaccines (with no definitional provision on what constitutes a rumour) or fear about supply shortages (which in the context of lockdown policies and supply chain issues were legitimate fears), the friend-enemy distinction propelling these agencies’ actions is entirely spectral. It neither truly exists nor does it ever go away. There is always disinformation so long as the grounds of disinformation are contingent.

The long running fear of right wing terrorism demonstrates the contingency of security agencies’ strategic goals and the ideological construction they involve. Right-wing terrorism is a pathetically small element of crime in America[27]. Neo-Nazi groups are made of maybe 100s of active participants, with a few thousand sympathisers on top. But the definition of right wing terrorism does not stop at neo-Nazism. As the CSIS report shows, right wing terrorism encompasses a large variety of actors, from libertarian militia groups to the Charlottesville protestors. But even taking into consideration this definitional vagueness, it’s still a miniscule number of crimes committed.

Its amplification is a function of ideological positioning by those in the security state and an attempt to foreclose opposition that comes outside a narrow Overton window. By expanding its definitions of subversive actors it expands its power to police them, use them and limit their political legitimacy. The FBI’s use of informants to inflame suspects and set traps indicates an abuse of police power that justifies its own actions i.e. we need arbitrary power and autonomy because of terrorism and subversion that we ourselves cause due to a lack of operational oversight and accountability. Considering the racial overtones of other crimes[28] as well as the increase in black crime post-lockdown[29] and riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death[30], the substantial focus on right-wing terrorism[31] appears as an ideological smokescreen to both discredit opponents of liberal modernity (much as the FBI has done with left-wing groups[32]) and maintain limits on the Overton window so that serious questions regarding the distribution of power and struggles within modernity can be safely ignored.

From this further expansions of power can be legitimised whether or not a problem really exists. Charlottesville led to calls to make domestic terrorism a federal crime[33], vastly expanding prosecutorial power. There has been more death and destruction from BLM-related race riots, yet those don’t make the cut when considering the necessity of federal power. Or take the aftermath of January 6^th, where prosecutors have used shock and awe tactics to round up protestors and jail them in squalid conditions irrelevant of their actual involvement in the events of the day[34]. The ability to describe January 6^th as a coup or insurrection is only further indication of the ideological position of the bunker state autonomous agencies have constructed. Minor property damage and empty threats has been escalated into the worst attack since 9/11. From the outside its laughable but then it doesn’t mean anything. In an information war, how you define your enemies is key. Potential FBI involvement in encouraging protestors to “storm the Capitol”[35] only furthers this contention. The FBI wants to make so-called “enemies of the state” as pariah-like as possible so that their aims can be only tagged alongside terms like terrorist or insurrectionist. That is how enemies, from Trump supporters to antiwar activists, are discredited.

Intelligence agencies are ideologically driven. They are self-selecting networks whose members share educational backgrounds and cognitive biases. Whether conceived as status quo defenders or a self-serving bunker state, their decisions and actions are based on normative predispositions that prevent openness. The irony being that in defending the “open society” they must remain closed off.

The Integrity Initiative are revealing in how they conceive their mission. Their “Guide to Countering Russian Disinformation”[36] makes large normative assumptions about American and Western institutions. There is an implicit assumption that American hegemony is a natural phenomenon and inherently good, rather than a political variable that can be contested. The irony is that intelligence agencies and disinformation initiatives like the Integrity Initiative are gatekeepers, as happy to lie and cajole as they claim their enemies are if it means maintaining their grip on a narrative. Countering disinformation becomes another term for limiting the grounds of politics so that only “acceptable” or “factual” opinions can be legitimate. Statements around Russia adopting “the rule of law, political pluralism, human rights, tolerance and diversity” are indicative of this subsumed normativity. Anyone who questions these things or their adjuncts becomes a purveyor of disinformation and an enemy not just of the West but of civilisation itself. Its year zero thinking in its purest form i.e. the last 20 years represent the apex of progress and to criticise such “progress” is tantamount to treason.

Contrasting Russian intelligence services to Western ones. they reveal the hypocrisy and cognitive blindness that their ideology inculcates. “This became particularly true after representatives of the old Soviet power structures gained a stranglehold on power and wealth, notably those – like Putin – from the KGB or others from the so-called “power ministries”: the Armed Forces or the Interior Ministry, as well as the secret services. These are people who have no moral compass, and for whom liberal ideas are complete anathema, especially for Russia. They will make use of their power to ensure that they continue to enjoy the fruits of the country’s wealth, and then do everything to maintain that situation”[37].

As if American intelligence agencies don’t use violence via proxies to achieve power or control. The Iran-Contra affair is an illustration of an autonomous governmental conspiracy led by North that shipped weapons to Nicaragua and subsidised drug trafficking from Colombia to Los Angeles. Irrelevant of the aims in Latin America, the actions of the CIA, DEA and wider security administration were to prevent political enemies gaining power, which meant strangling their economies, funding dictators and turning a blind eye to atrocities. That a British-American intelligence project fails to reckon with that or even acknowledge it shows both the falsity of its supposed liberal outlook and the naivete to assume that politics and the extension of power can be controlled without violence or bloodshed. At heart, the action of autonomous agencies and the governments and conspiracies that back them are for the maintenance and extension of their power. Whether they be Russian or American, this is the underlying social code. Narrative dressing only aims to obfuscate and obscure that very aim, ironically peddling misinformation. But then that is what is MDM is, a political weapon to draw borders around one’s enemies.

The actions of CISA and Integrity Initiative are demonstrative of this ideology of power. CISA’s recommendations around drafting in outside experts and organisations to minimise the appearance of propaganda and the specific recommendation from Wyman to draft in multiple trusted sources[38] ironically mirrors the efforts of Russian propaganda[39] to draft in multiple sources so as to maximise the trustworthiness of its output. The UK’s Integrity Initiative followed a similar path of covert gerrymandering, concealing its influence over particular journalists and constituting a “network of networks” between intelligence agencies and media organisations[40]. The veil of neutral expertise that these agencies cloud themselves in is entirely mythical, an obfuscatory tool used by Russian and Chinese entities who attempt to hide their fingerprints.

When given such operational autonomy, this allows for their development into ideological blocs that push particular narratives and censor disfavoured information. Disinformation of the Overton window it is produced in. Thus broad definitions of MDM lead to its criminalisation. This leaves the door open for those who “push” particular narratives, such as supposedly Kremlin-inspired narratives (which include everything from scepticism over the BLM movement to questioning Western involvement in Ukraine), to be criminalised as well. As the DHS states, they “will continue research on root causes of radicalization. This funding provides independent, objective evaluation to characterize and further understand terrorism and violent extremism threats based on evidence”[41]. But root causes, like societal tensions or socio-economic factors which lead to situations of “subversive activity”, are criminalised rather than resolved.

While recognising the changing landscape of warfare in 4GW and 5GW, both of which utilise and manipulate the information space, the pertinent question is to what extent the MDM discourse of intelligence and civil agencies does in seriously deflecting or preventing their enemies’ use of misinformation. A question that follows from this is who is the enemy? US agencies obsession with a mythical right-wing threat appears to make an enemy of domestic political opponents, particularly populists.

Security agencies will always exist so long as an international system of states and corporations remains. The bunker state constructed by an autonomous intelligence community beholden to no power that can produce the spectre of disinformation as an ideological tool to limit opposition is not perpetual. It is ideologically built and maintained. “While it is important for a security intelligence service to have a clearly defined statutory mandate, the relevant legislation should be flexible enough to allow the service itself to define its tasks, accommodate recourses and prepare for emerging threats in the nearest future”[42]. The pertinent question is how this balance is struck in relation to the ideological beliefs and goals of intelligence agencies and those inside them. Accountability means nothing if there is congruity between the agency and their oversight mechanisms. The provision of neutral oversight assumes a neutrality in the actions of intelligence agencies. Yet their historical record goes against this assumption. In allowing flexibility in their methods and requiring neutral administration, a door is opened that allows intelligence agencies to define their goals as autonomous structures outside the realm of accountable politics or administrative control.

“A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms”[43]. Disinformation is the mechanism through which these digital swarms are diffused and authorised. The actions of autonomous agencies in tackling MDM reveals one thing – they are political defenders of their bunker state, regulating discourse so that they remain beyond criticism as they retain their mythology of neutral expertise and say they are above politics. They are political entities and nothing more.

[1] Bob Jessop, The State: Past, Present, Future

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/us/how-a-courts-secret-evolution-extended-spies-reach.html

[3] https://www.revolver.news/2021/06/five-cases-of-fbi-incitement/

[4] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7921/

[5] https://reason.com/2018/08/20/why-fbi-directors-want-to-be-autonomous/

[6] https://social-epistemology.com/2021/07/07/conceptualizing-disinformation-tim-hayward/

[7] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation

[8] John Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity

[9] https://www.lawfareblog.com/rethinking-homeland-security-enterprise

[10] https://www.racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial-74b

[11] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation

[12] https://www.racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial-74b