The House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (yes, that's its real committee name) held a hearing yesterday you might have missed or tuned out on account of its witness list. But it's worth paying attention to because the far-right GOP's contention that everyone is out to censor their first amendment rights is starting to take aim at info sharing efforts between the private sector and the USG to fight Internet and computer security threats.

The pretext for the hearing is a "story" that ran this week that decried the "Censorship Industrial Complex," one of several new buzzwords echoed by Rep. Jim Jordan and other GOP members asking questions. Bear in mind that the folks pushing this narrative use this term interchangeably to describe any "anti-disinformation efforts":

https://public.substack.com/p/ctil-files-1-us-and-uk-military-contractors

The story and the hearing concerned the insidious censorship threat posed by a shadowy entity called the CTI League, which was allegedly started as a joint public-private partnership but which according to the "Twitter files" useful idiot Matt Taibbi is a cleverly disguised effort to censor republican and conservative views on social media.

In reality, the CTI League was one of several groups that formed around the time of the 2020 pandemic to help respond to the crushing number of phishing and scam websites that were taking advantage of the situation. Here's one example:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/covid-19-has-united-cybersecurity-experts-but-will-that-unity-survive-the-pandemic/

When asked by a GOP committee member to describe the biggest "bombshell" -- the "most alarming thing" -- to come from "the Twitter files," Taibbi answered that the activities of the CTI League were "shocking." He went on to describe how this group maintained censorship spreadsheets with domains numbering in the hundreds of thousands. But he forgot to mention these were PHISHING DOMAINS!!!!!

Here's the giant whopper: Taibbi said there was "a regular, organized stream of communications between the FBI, the Dept of Homeland Security and the largest tech companies in the country," he said. "They had an organized system for flagging content. Not occasionally, but in enormous numbers involving spreadsheets of accounts that ran into the hundreds of thousands. This was shocking to us. This isn't some crazy conspiracy theory. We've already had 4 federal judges rule that this activity violates the first amendment."

Yeah. There was a spreadsheet of a bajillion domains that several thousand security people had access to that everyone agreed were malicious or phishous. CENSORSHIP!
https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-weaponization-federal-government-4

Burning Man-esque Test pattern!

(Am I the only one that loves testpatterns?)

from a 1980's newspaper microfilm reel we are digitizing.

Gosh American film tech was amazing! And our digitization imaging tech is pretty great.

Look at the clarity of 4pt type.

Over the past several months, DDoSecrets has given several outlets embargoed access to a new #Roskomnadzor leak from Cyber Partisans, the #RussianCensorFiles.

The embargo ended yesterday, and the stories have started pouring out. You can find them listed at: https://ddosecrets.org/wiki/RussianCensorFiles

The #RussianCensorFiles include 335 GB of documents and correspondence from the internal network of the General Radio Frequency Center (GRFC) subdivision of Roskomnadzor. #GRFC monitors social media and other open sources in order to implement the Kremlin censorship and provide data for decision makers. They follow Putin's opponents, write denunciations to the FSB & other agencies and block services that help convey truthful information.

Journalists and researchers can request access: https://ddosecrets.org/wiki/RussianCensorFiles

We are working to setup a server which will journalists to view additional information from a #RussianCensorFiles database.