Here we go. Doing this again. To say we’ve had distractions would be an understatement and hardly fair considering the sabotage we’ve experienced over the years. But that didn’t start with this project. So, I stopped waiting for that to stop and got back to work.
The system is broken, completely and utterly, but only a section of our population notices it. Why? Not because they’re oblivious, though they are occasionally. They’re only oblivious, because they’re unaffected. It was no different in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Communist China or preWWII Germany. In any horrible situation, from car crash to assault, a variable percentage of onlookers will just pass by, unaffected, without engaging or speaking up.
In 2010, I began my first foray into the defense against disinformation, and I don’t think at that time, any of us had insight into what we would be facing now. Though we were an international team of NGO employees, savvy online and even more experienced in the communications chaos around international conflict, I don’t think any of us saw this coming.
The system is broken, and I hope not irreparably. It can seem like a weekly news story: some federal agency partnered with some corporation to target Americans, mostly completely innocent. Sometimes the targeting is based on false narratives, misinformation and disinformation propagated and amplified by those same government institutions.
Moreover, in many cases trust in the Third Estate, the free press, as an institution on which most Americans have traditionally relied to rise above the political, partisan fray has been destroyed. The country needs a free press to provide truth and honesty. When they are not or cannot, our constitutional republic withers and so do our freedoms. In the many tales of government overreach and weaponization, however, the third estate is featured more often than not as a critical participant in misinforming and misleading America. This fact was ceremoniously exposed in The Twitter Files.
Thirteen years and an MS in Computer Forensics later, here I am trying again to make a difference, again.
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