Arizona State University (ASU) recently received some negative exposure on one of the most popular and influential podcasting platforms in the world, the Joe Rogan Experience.
Famed podcaster Joe Rogan interviewed Mike Benz, a former State Department official who founded and currently runs the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) as its executive director, in December. FFO says its aim is to protect Americans from internet censorship through “educational reports, legal assistance, and public policy analysis.”
Benz claimed ASU, which he called the “John McCain University,” was a prime example of institutions designed to advance the government’s domestic censorship efforts. Specifically, Benz discussed at length ASU’s disinformation program, the Center on Narrative Disinformation and Strategic Influence (NDSI), within the university’s Global Security Initiative (GSI).
Benz also mentioned the background of ASU President Michael Crow: his ongoing, 25-year chairmanship of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm for proprietary investments in early stage technology companies.
“Technically this is Arizona State University, but you’ll see that it is an intelligence program. […] Its job is to assist the intelligence community with this work,” said Benz. “This is a multimillion-dollar censorship center, currently still up and running at Arizona State University, funded by us.”
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxqP8_EtIeeln9n4PixLe9eDSiFfpe_Y0L?si=UtfCH6I2etYdjqt8
Benz offered some numbers off the cuff, claiming ASU received a $1.6 million grant from the Pentagon for censorship work, $300,000 in grants from the State Department, almost $500,000 in additional government grants from an adjacent statecraft intelligence entity.
One ongoing project funded by over $1 million from the Defense Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the Semantic Information Defender (SID), a project assessing the national security risks of AI language models like ChatGPT.
Another main project of NDSI is the Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program, funded by DARPA to create technologies that can detect, attribute and characterize disinformation characterized as national security and other threats.
Federal spending data indicates that ASU was granted $1.2 million from the Defense Department for social media research to combat disinformation and foreign influence; $300,000 from the National Science Foundation for combatting disinformation and racial bias, particularly Asian Americans; $82,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for tracing community-based knowledge on TikTok to resist algorithmic governance to combat disinformation; $78,000 from the State Department for mapping and analyzing public awareness of disinformation threats through an intelligence dashboard and proposing actionable policy recommendations; and $76,000 from the National Science Foundation to study disinformation and content moderation in local communities online.
Total outlays from these grants, per federal data, only amounts to about $262,000. The only outlays occurred from the two National Science Foundation awards of $300,000 and $76,000.
Benz said NSDI’s insidiousness derives from the “dirty tricks” of its language. He noted that the program doesn’t claim that something specific is wrong, but rather that any acts which serve to diminish public faith and confidence in news media, government, and science ultimately qualify as attacks on democracy.
Benz claimed the program was “effectively, the ghost of John McCain, the founder of the CIA side of the GOP after Reagan reoriented the [intelligence community] around the NGO complex.”
70 percent of GSI funding comes from the Defense Department, Homeland Security, and the Intelligence Community, and 26 percent comes from other government resources. The GSI has over $210 million in research expenditures since 2015.
