An eye on a mobile screen with various social media applications, indicating spying by intelligence agencies using social media platforms. Illustration: Zeinab Al-Hajj/Al-Mayadeen English.
By Kit Klarenberg – Sep 24, 2024
On September 13, an extraordinary document was released via litigation against the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is an August 2021 slide deck presentation by Britain’s shadowy, spook-infested Counter Disinformation Unit, to the White House National Security Council’s Interagency Policy Committee, which regularly gathers together Washington’s spying services to coordinate on national security matters. The contents amply expose how London’s long-running use and abuse of security and intelligence agencies to warp online perceptions is, by design, spreading the world over.
The presentation, which has never hitherto been publicly revealed, was delivered by CDU operatives on August 10, 2021. At this time, the NSC was meeting daily to discuss policing and suppression of pandemic-related speech within and without the US. The British were seemingly invited to offer the Council best practice guidance on battling “disinformation” and “misinformation”, based on their experiences of managing the CDU, which was founded in 2019. Initially operating in total secrecy, London’s “intelligence community” has been central to its efforts since inception.
The Biden administration’s untrammelled censorship push during the COVID-19 pandemic was absolutely rabid and brazen. Overt state policing of social media so enraged and terrified average US citizens, that Mark Zuckerberg felt compelled to issue a major mea culpa. In August, he admitted senior US officials successfully “pressured” Facebook to remove untold swaths of dissenting content throughout this period, in almost every case completely egregiously. Meta’s CEO unconvincingly pledged to “push back” against any similar government bullying in the future.
As the world’s foremost purveyor and enforcer of mass censorship, Britain’s CDU was inevitably of enormous interest to the Biden administration. Yet, suppression is just one component of the Unit’s—and by extension London’s—neverending quest for narrative control, and dominance, both on- and offline. As we shall see, psychological warfare, stalking, and harassment are all part of the CDU’s clandestine toolkit. The newly-released file reveals British intelligence is exporting this sinister “counter-disinformation” credo to every corner of the globe.
Due to the nigh-total conspiracy of official silence cloaking the CDU to date, the document provides unprecedentedly candid insight into the Unit’s activities and modus operandi. The details are certain to have enormous relevance throughout Europe and North America, for the Unit’s tendrils and structure now extend throughout the world. The international proliferation of this very British censorship, surveillance and manipulation mechanism could well account for so many information ecosystems becoming effective wings of the Anglo-American national security state since the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Domestic dissent’
In the slide deck, CDU is predictably described in anodyne terms. It states the Unit “works across Departmental boundaries and is mandated to provide the most comprehensive picture possible about the extent, scope and impact of disinformation during times of heightened risk.” The Unit is said to have “stood up an operational response to counter disinformation during the 2019 European elections, the 2019 UK General Election,” and had been extremely active since March 2020 “in response to Covid-19.”
An accompanying diagram places the CDU at the very core of the British state, and deep state. Internal “monitoring” and “open source” teams within major government departments feed reports on “disinformation” to the Unit, which then receives “support” from “agencies”—a euphemism for Britain’s security and intelligence services—and vice versa, before coordinating with Whitehall on how to “respond.” Often, this entails ordering social media companies to throttle or purge content, or particular users/accounts.
It could also extend to “non-platform interventions,” such as “proactive and reactive communications.” Their nature is unstated, but it may be instructive that the CDU works in close tandem with the newly-created and similarly opaque Government Information Cell, “to identify and counter Russian disinformation targeted at UK and international audiences.” The Cell “brings together expertise from across government”, including “experts” on “analysis, disinformation, and behaviour and attitudinal change” drawn from the security and intelligence services, and directly coordinates with major social media platforms.
“Behaviour and attitudinal change” is also the beat of 77th Brigade. The British Army’s psychological warfare unit worked in lockstep with the CDU throughout the pandemic. The Brigade’s online operations are as opaque as they are apparently vast. This includes maintaining a sizable militia of real, fake, and automated social media accounts to disseminate and amplify pro-government messaging, while monitoring and discrediting the British state’s enemies, be they domestic or foreign.
After 77th Brigade’s 2015 launch, it was repeatedly claimed by officials the unit not only didn’t conduct information warfare operations targeting British citizens, but was legally prohibited from doing so. When in April 2020 then-British military chief Nick Carter announced the Brigade was “helping to quash rumours from misinformation, but also counter disinformation” related to the COVID-19 pandemic, it raised obvious anxieties these safeguards were being breached. Such concerns were quietly confirmed in June that year by an Army spokesperson:
“The [Ministry of Defence] has been working within the Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit to tackle a range of harmful narratives online. As a UK government unit, [77th Brigade] have two primary audiences—government departments and British citizens, as well as anyone else seeking reliable information online.”
In January 2023, an ex-Brigade whistleblower revealed how longstanding domestic laws and civilian protections were routinely circumvented by the CDU and 77th Brigade, throughout the government’s crusade against pandemic dissent: “To skirt the legal difficulties of a military unit monitoring domestic dissent, the view was that unless a profile explicitly stated their real name and nationality they could be a foreign agent and were fair game. But it is quite obvious that our activities resulted in the monitoring of the UK population…These posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated.”
In the process, an untold number of people within and without Britain were subjected to psychological manipulation strategies honed for use in battlefields, against enemy militaries. Accordingly, the online profile of a 77th Brigade veteran who oversaw “countering dis- and mis-information during the COVID19 crisis” states he was deployed straight from a tour of West Asia, where they “successfully implemented behavioural change strategies against ISIS.”
It wasn’t just average citizens on the receiving end. Investigations by Big Brother Watch indicate the CDU and 77th Brigade kept a very close eye on the online statements of government ministers, elected lawmakers, academics, journalists and citizens. Their crime? Opposing vaccine passports, lambasting poor state financial support for businesses, questioning the modelling used to justify a second lockdown in November 2020, and criticising NATO, among other non-pandemic matters. What response the British state cooked up in each case is left to our imaginations.
‘International engagement’
In April 2024, British parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued a report, Misinformation and trusted voices. It contained a scathing section, which described the CDU as “one of the most opaque units in government outside of the security services.” Despite receiving assurances from Whitehall officials that the CDU did not “drill down into individuals” or censor material, and simply “identified narratives…gaining traction in a particular area,” the Committee remained deeply suspicious. It declared: “We are concerned about the lack of transparency and accountability of the CDU and the appropriateness of its reach. We recommend that the Government commission and lay before parliament an independent review of the activities and strategy of Counter Disinformation Unit [sic] within the next 12 months.”
There is as yet no indication that such a review has been initiated in Britain. Nonetheless, it is surely of the utmost urgency similar probes are conducted in a great many other countries, to gauge contacts between the CDU and foreign governments, and the extent to which this may have informed the latter’s approaches to stifling inconvenient truths and dissenting viewpoints. Several slides in the declassified presentation refer to the Unit’s “international engagement.”
One refers to the CDU collaborating “with partners to counter disinformation.” This includes, “sharing ideas and open source intelligence; building coalitions; sharing lessons learned; exploring and delivering programmes and joint campaigns; multilateral cooperation to counter disinformation.” Another boasts of the Unit’s “bilateral engagement with 20+ countries,” “international training and capability,” and “joint working” with the Five Eyes global spying network.
These excerpts strongly suggest the CDU is a key nucleus for Western governments to collude in influencing online discourse, and maintain narrative unanimity on national security matters. The Bucha incident may provide a case in point. It’s been confirmed the CDU censored online content related to alleged massacre. Western countries, led by Britain, framing mysterious killings in the occupied Ukrainian town as a targeted genocide by Russian forces was fundamental to sabotaging fruitful peace negotiations between Moscow and Kiev in May 2022.
In this context, slides on London’s “wider disinformation policy work” at home take on a particularly disquieting character. These sections discuss how the CDU’s operations interact with a wider domestic legislative framework, which allows authorities “to take action against companies that fail to comply with the government’s online speech regulations,” while prosecuting and penalising alleged disseminators of “disinformation”. The content resembles a sales brochure, outlining the sweeping benefits of these restrictive laws and sweeping powers, encouraging clients to follow Britain’s example.
An accompanying map depicts the CDU’s overseas relationships, with countries across Europe and North America, and even as far afield as Colombia. If any constituent governments have taken draconian measures of any kind to tackle the alleged plague of “disinformation” in recent years, there is a high likelihood they acted based on a script drawn up by British intelligence, and continue to do so today.
Kit Klarenberg
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
