Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

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It's not invisible, nor is it much of a secret. Nor does it "control" anything in particular. Much of the coordination against trump by NGOs funded through USAID, publicly, is just online -- you can just go watch recordings of the conferences.

It's just an institutional consensus about Trump's style of populism which gave profound motivation to a large number of groups, to organise against his perceived threat. The issue is how the US government was involved -- not the activity itself -- , eg., leaning on mass media organisations to censor americans -- unconstitutional, and widely documented. You may think it's "for the good", but either way, its unconstitutional for the US gov. to do that. The US gov cannot demand social media censor americans, it's a prominent part of the bill of rights.

The US gov. funds many programmes under the guise of aid, or sponsorship of "democracy" or "independent media", or, eg., "healthcare".

Consider how egreious it would be for the US gov to lie about funding healthcare, but instead to use that as a guise for one of your "impossible, movie plot lines..."

Oh wait, ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...

FYI, this happened to the far-left in the 60s & 70s, leading to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee --- it's just now happening to Trump and the far-right. Kinda funny the right have discovered it, after decades of calling the left nutjob conspiracy theorists.

> Consider how egreious it would be for the US gov to lie about funding healthcare, but instead to use that as a guise for one of your "impossible, movie plot lines..."

Sorry, what part of the CIA hatching hare-brained schemes is incredulous? (You should have linked to acoustakitty.)

People like to pretend the intelligence agencies don't operate this way today, and this was some past insanity.

I mean, even more relevant would be the leaked recording of state department officials discussing who to replace the elected president of ukraine with in 2013.

I just chose the HIV thing, since it's relevant how we interpret USAID's programmes -- in particular, ones which fund the NGOs that run censorship campaigns and kompromat collection (eg., the occrp).

None of this is very remarkable, of course. The more concerning thing is how this has become turned inward on the USA itself via the internet, mass media, and so on.

> People like to pretend the intelligence agencies don't operate this way today

Who? How do you think soft power works?

> how this has become turned inward on the USA itself

The CIA isn’t conducting political campaigns at home. To the extent we have intelligence operations running amok in our bureaucracy, it’s DOGE.

Honestly, this edginess-seeking behaviour reminds me of students in New York and San Francisco convinced they’re being silenced. No, the truth is nobody cares.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...

...oops, the law preventing that was amended under obama, to allow it. Drat.

(cf. the original Smith-Mundt act preventing it, and the Modernization Act of 2012 allowing it again. The original, of course, created because law makers were terrified of what would happen if this was turned inward.)

Did you know we also have NPR and PBS? A literal public-TV censorship board?

Also, we’re talking about the CIA. Your conspiracy theory has them waiting for a law to be repealed before acting? Do you think a single DOGE bro hired a lawyer before acting?

> because law makers were terrified of what would happen if this was turned inward

What nonsense. Where did you read this? We had a massive and celebrated domestic propaganda board during the Great Depression and WWII.

You can just read the wikipedia on it,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act#Congre...

And note the FBI's concerns there at the end too. This isnt about NPR. It's about The State Department and the intelligence services which were localised under the department at the time.

Let's just be very simple about this though. We have in 2012 a repeal of a law which existed to ban the state department ("the war office" in old-speak) from propagandizing US citizens. And as the 2010s progress, gov. officials demanding social media companies censor americans. We have NGOs created with USAID and DARPA funding to enable mass censorship and profiling. And we have, during the pandemic, the deployment of all of this machinery at once.

Now, this is the indisputable, publicly obvious, everyone-can-see it layer. Now imagine one layer deeper: how does this actually play out in terms of executive action?

I am, fyi, not right wing; and not pro-trump.

> You can just read the wikipedia on it

Smith-Mundt was a restriction on State. It did nothing to restrict the CIA, or USAID for that matter.

It was also motivated by concerns that State harboured communist sympathies. Saying the Act was motivated by concerns around "what would happen if [American propaganda] was turned inward" is factually false, unsupported by contemporaneous accounts of the bill's backers.

> I am, fyi, not right wing; and not pro-trump

Didn't think you were (and neither am I).

Deep State comes in two flavours. One is the lizard-man crap that appeals to people who can't handle uncertainty. The other is a hypothesis about power in America. The section of the latter that overlaps with the left is based on a sub-hypothesis: that money buying messaging equals power.

The problem with this linkage is it's empirically false. Jeb Bush outspent Trump. Harris outspent Trump. Cambridge Analytica was 2016's AI scare (and Democrats' turn at election denial). Money buys power, but through direct messaging, the acquisition of proximity and--sometimes--bribes.

> we have, during the pandemic, the deployment of all of this machinery at once

And? Nothing happened. People who dissented had the space in which to dissent. They did so openly, peacefully and in spaces old and new.

To put it bluntly, we don't give our adversaries abroad that room. To the extent DOGE might help America, it's in showing us what a real deep state looks like. I'm hoping it doesn't come to it. But someone's e.g. Social Security or government-contract payments failing after an offensive tweet, not due to civic action or private citizens' actions, but due to a Kafkaesque arm of the state--that is the power of the deep state.

It's not in my interest to discuss the actions of the intelligence system in the US/UK, so I wont. I'm inclined never to address the subject again, to be honest.

Tulsi Gabbard's hearing may be a tiny bit illuminating. The DOGE wrecking ball might lead to a new Church-committe-style hearing, there's already hearings in the house on the "censorship-industrial complex" but they're too naive at the moment. DOGE still think the "DEI" funding of USAID has something to do with being leftwing (rather than, say, the funding counter-government movements).

Meh. In many ways, it's all too late now. "How should the intelligence services conduct themselves?" has never been a question open to democratic debate, nor one any mass media outlet would dream of posing. Today, esp. it isnt one we citizens should raise -- leave it to whomever is able to roll the dice "at the top".

> USAID has something to do with being leftwing (rather than, say, the funding counter-government movements)

Yes, against our allies. Literally how soft power works. (As well as funding insurgencies against our adversaries’ proxies.)

Zero evidence it’s been used domestically. Which makes sense, because that would be dumb. Use those resources to attack directly.

> "How should the intelligence services conduct themselves?" has never been a question open to democratic debate

This is just excusing laziness. I’ve worked on privacy and intelligence bills, including giving comment and adding revisions at the federal level. The problem is it’s boring work and like two constituents call about it. The IC has been weak since the Iraq War and never put up a fight directly; they relied on their neocon warhawks to be their surrogates. Which mostly worked because the overlap between people who care about this and people who are nihilistic about civics to the point of being electorally irrelevant is huge.

I think this weakness is out of date. The privatisation of mass culture via social media (, the internet, etc.) provides highly asymmetric rewards for action via these "private" entities which can be strong-armed and hands-bloodied in participation in relevant "consensus-building NGOs".

Absent trump's election, the whole apparatus deployed to against media companies (targeting their ad networks to defund, strong-arming censorship, strong-arming participation etc.) would have went completely institutionally unaddressed.

> that would be dumb

Sure, given that your opponent can be elected your boss -- which happened, and now he's taking a wrecking ball to every agency which concerned itself with these tactics.

However, at the time it did not seem dumb. It seemed that trump was an existential threat to democracy. That may have even been to a degree true, but the dirty tricks approach has radicalized the far-right against the state in ways which used to be confined to the (previously targeted) far-left.

The CIA has done a ton of bad shit - especially in other countries - over the past 50 years, but that’s a completely separate matter from a “deep state” controlling things and trying to prevent Trump’s election.

OK, well I was choosing one of you "movie plot" cases to show you that the CIA does not care if it runs movie plot programmes.

The mechanism of anti-trump coordination has yet really to be briefed out, and wikiepedia will be dragged kicking and screaming before there's an article on it. Give it a decade, perhaps.

For now, if you want examples here's the atlantic council (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Council) -- training journalists to treat emerging rightwing politics as disinformation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSAz0agYEeI

A lot of rightwing stuff that circulates is disinformation -- there are plenty of examples of it. Trump is an inveterate liar about almost everything (this is easily fact-checked), and his followers have adopted the same strategy (lies are powerful because they are usually more shocking and travel faster than a boring fact-check).

Not to say that other politicians don't lie or distort the truth, but Trump has taken this to a whole other level.

The issue isn't whether that's true or not (personally, I think you're 80-90% correct). If private citizens, or organisations, want to get together and develop political counter-narratives that's fine -- entirely within the constitution, and always a good idea.

The issue here is the top-down astroturfing from state-sponsored orgs whose boards are the last x heads of the CIA/etc.

At the moment there is no strong firewall between private polticial organisation, and state power, within the USA. You may think that's fine if its being used against trump, but it isnt.

Not least, since the example the AC gave in that video was trump tweeting "witch hunt" about the russia investigation -- calling this disinformation. Now, who was right? Trump. There was no Trump-Russia conspiracy, it was a witch hunt.

The only thing the muller report found was trump obstructed the investigation, it completely exonerated any supposed connections to russia. Then you might ask: where did all these intelligence dossiers come from?

And why is the atlantic council training journalists to label trumps poltical speech about this investigation as disinformation? (HINT: to enable its censorship etc.)

>The only thing the muller report found was trump obstructed the investigation, it completely exonerated any supposed connections to russia.

It did not exonerate him, quite explicitly. [1] The report found a lot of evidence of trump team making contact with Russians. You say yourself that the investigation was obstructed.

There was also this indictment on co-ordinated Russian funded interference in NA pundit/social media space. [2] Not to mention similar groups (I'm not sure about the status of the investigation in [2] at this point) have already been dismissed [3].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49100778

[2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-ind...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/nx-s1-5293521/foreign-influen...

> Trump. There was no Trump-Russia conspiracy, it was a witch hunt.

We know today that the 2016 Trump Campaign:

- Had over 100 meetings with Russian officials, lied and said they had 0

- Amplified information hacked by Russia, implored for more publicly

- Met with Russian spy at Trump's home to discuss relaxed relations in return for dirt on Clinton, later lied about the existence of that meeting

- Shared internal campaign polling data with a Russian intel officer.

These facts are not in dispute by anyone, and are presented in the Mueller Report, and the Senate Intel Committee Report on Russian Active Measures. From Wikipedia:

  The Senate Intelligence Committee assessed that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's "high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services" was a "grave counterintelligence threat".[50] The foremost individual was Manafort's employee Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian.[50] The committee identified Kilimnik as a "Russian intelligence officer"; describing that Manafort and Kilimnik had a "close and lasting relationship" even through the 2016 election.[53] Manafort repeatedly tried to "secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik", including "sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy".[53]

I don't know about you, but that sounds like collusion to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/report-sele...

Sure, it turns out there was no big Trump/Russia conspiracy. But there were a lot of signs of Russian interference in the elections that was certain worth an investigation -- which did its job and then submitted its report, like lots of other special investigations. When you think about it, it's much more of an important topic to investigate than whether Clinton got a blow job in the Oval Office. So I disagree that it was a "witch hunt" and therefore agree that Trump's labeling it as such was disinformation. Basically 90% (pulled that number out of the hat, but feels pretty close) of what Trump said while in office was incorrect, disinformation, or straight out lies. I mean, he's so far outside the normal distribution that there's no other president to compare him with. So yeah, I'd be training journalists to label Trump's speech as disinformation too.

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