Recently, a thread on Twitter posted by a researcher, The Authority, laid out the 2016 U.S. House Resolution 5181, which was later absorbed into the Senate’s 2017 National Defense Authorization Act and passed with bipartisan support.
After nearly six months of in-depth research into some companies and public figures in the State of Michigan, it took only a little bit of reading to understand what I was looking at and how it fit into what I had uncovered, myself.
Little did I understand the degree or magnitude of the risks attached to American artificial intelligence until putting all of the following information in the same place together.
“2/ $20 million dollars was provided for 2017 and 2018 to support civil society groups, journalists, nongovernmental organizations, private companies, and academic institutions to combat Russian Disinformation…
H.R. 5181 is still in effect.
3/ Interagency efforts (whole government approach) were used to track and evaluate narratives. Special Operators were used to collect and relay intelligence reports based on the content citizens broadcasted or post on social media.”
(click photo to enlarge)
4/ The Interagency approach is not exclusive to the United States, as coordination between allied and partnered Nations to combat Russian Disinformation together. Allied partners would fall under the FVEY Umbrella.
Let’s pause for just a moment to review this here, as it will be the foundation and the time period of everything moving forward in this article.
The underlying basis for the entire bill rests squarely on “Russian disinformation” — “Russian disinformation” that has now been definitively shown to have been manufactured by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, itself.
-The bill was introduced in the House on May 10, 2016. Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele to produce the infamous dossier in Spring of 2016, as noted by The New Yorker online.
-Adam Kinzinger is not, and was not, officially a part of the DNC.
Separate agencies coordinated together (as we now know to include crossing traditional jurisdictional lines) to track, evaluate, control, and develop counternarratives.
They operated with think tanks, academic institutions like Michigan State University, civil society groups, and other non-governmental organizations like Facebook, Amazon, or Google.
The focus extended to “allied nations,” (which could truly mean anyone in this era of “cooperation” in lieu of “competition”) and international organizations, namely NATO.
-As early as 2018, a NATO climate activist named Katarina Kertysova was publishing scientific papers on artificial intelligence and disinformation. For example, “How AI Changes the Way Disinformation is Produced, Disseminated, and Can Be Countered.”
The initiatives set forth in Adam Kinzinger’s H.R.5181 are ongoing in every subsequent NDAA since 2017.
In this piece, we’ll look at only one university and how its computer scientists and research departments contributed, whether directly or indirectly, to the public-private-military joint “countering disinformation” program.
While other university research was designed to study shaping narratives, the computer science department also contributed to artificial intelligence development across many different disciplines — including biometric surveillance.
These systems were developed entirely removed from Congressional oversight or regulation, or even a body to carry it out.
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From October 1, 2016 onward, the NDAA, which included Adam Kinzinger’s H.R. 5181, helped to cement research projects with MSU.
The funding came through private companies, research institutes, and the U.S. Department of Defense, themselves.
The Department of Defense and U.S. Intelligence Community would eventually prove to aggregate the entirety of the research and resulting new technologies into their latest systems.
“…The new geometric insights, advanced data structures, and efficient algorithmic techniques will enrich further development in computational geometry and bring fresh ideas to other areas, including machine learning, computer vision, data mining, and bioinformatics…”
National Science Foundation and MSU
Wikipedia calls the NSF, “…an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering.”
They, alone, were responsible for 26 grants and awards between January 2017 and February 2022 in only the Michigan State University Computer Science and Engineering Department.
In November last year, I published a skimmed list of every grant between 2006 and 2022 within the MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering, along with some patents.
In 2016, the NSF published “10 Big Ideas for Future NSF Investments” which laid out the research agency’s vision and strategy moving forward in the “Big Data” era.
“This is the reason behind these 10 "big ideas." They capitalize on what NSF does best: catalyze interest and investment in fundamental research, which is the basis for discovery, invention and innovation.
They are meant to define a set of cutting-edge research agendas and processes that are uniquely suited for NSF’s broad portfolio of investments, and will require collaborations with industry, private foundations, other agencies, science academies and societies, and universities.”
Simultaneously, the NSF, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of Naval Research (ONR), and multiple industry partners began funding the Intelligent Data Analysis (ILLIDAN) Lab at MSU.
Through 2021, some of the “industry partners” included IBM Research, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Tencent, and Samsung.
This with the NSF was occurring at the precise time that Adam Kinzinger was introducing his bill that joined funding for exactly the aforementioned research initiatives, and at the same time that Hillary Clinton and the DNC were also manufacturing the now-proven materially false “Steele Dossier.”
The plans were essentially to develop AI systems to aggregate data from varying sources of data across multiple massive networks, and to create new ways to process that information.
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Let’s cover quickly some key pieces of the puzzle from that period, and how they play into research enabled by Kinzinger’s “disinformation” bill, now part of an annually recurring law.
First Things First
The first grants of interest within this window were a two-year, $175,000 February 2017 NSF grant to Hu Ding, followed by another in March awarded to Jiliang Tang and Jiayu Zhou.
Both Tang and Zhou are Arizona State University PhD. graduates in 2015 and 2014, respectively, and serve top roles in Michigan State’s ILLIDAN Lab.
In summary, the project was specifically aimed at developing unsupervised feature selection and to integrate it into quite literally everything — the very essence of “Big Data” Artificial General Intelligence.
Pivotal Times, Pivotal Researchers
By 2019, MSU’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and their funding from the U.S. Government had reached stratospheric levels.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences acts as one of the many technological intermediaries between the People’s Liberation Army, the People’s Republic of China, the citizens of China, and even Silicon Valley.
Jain had previously spent three years on faculty at Tsinghua University in Beijing, the alma mater of Chinese President and Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, beginning in 2009.
Interestingly enough, fellow Michigander Jocelyn Benson probably brushed elbows with Jain in 2009 at Tsinghua University while she was on carrying out her own election law objectives through Wayne State University in Detroit.
EVEN MORE INTERESTING, another former Michigander, grandfather of Michigan election company, Konnech, and an integral part of their development, Lionel Ni, was also a Visiting Endowed Chair Professor at Tsinghua University AT THE EXACT SAME TIME for the majority of Jain’s time at Tsinghua University.
Separate from all of these crossing paths, all rational indications point to Anil Jain very likely to have participated in at least one People’s Republic of China “Foreign Experts” plan under the communist government’s notorious “Thousand Talents” initiatives.
I’ve previously written in more detail about Anil Jain’s Chinese conflict of interest, and it can be found here.
Anil Jain, also since his tenure in the Chinese capital, served as a member of the Defense Science Board. One of Jain’s PhD students at Michigan State, Arun Ross, is another highly esteemed computer scientist and is deeply involved with government research.
What would seemingly have fallen under the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, Arun Ross and Anil Jain were awarded a $500,000 three-year grant from the NSF.
“Recent work has established the possibility of deriving auxiliary information from biometric data. For example, it has been shown that face images can be used to deduce the health, gender, age and ethnicity of a subject; further, face images have been used to link a pseudonymous profile in the Web with a true profile, thereby compromising the privacy of an individual.
Let’s pause and whittle away the fluff:
Scientists in 2016 were using facial biometric data to evaluate health, gender, age and race of people.
Researchers had already begun leveraging the specific abilityto link a pseudonymous profile with a real profile in 2016.
Continuing:
The objective of this work is to design and implement techniques for imparting security and privacy to biometric data present in the Internet. The proposed techniques will have the ability to impart differential degrees of privacy to biometric data.
In this regard, the following tasks will be accomplished:
(a) a method to modify biometric data such that the modified data can be used for re-identifying an individual but cannot be used to derive auxiliary information about the subject, such as gender and ethnicity;
(b) a method to generate multiple templates from the same biometric data in such a way that these templates cannot be linked using a biometric matcher; and
(c) a method to store the biometric data of a subject across nodes such that individual nodes cannot determine the identity of the subject, but collaboration across nodes is essential for divulging the identity of the subject.
The proposed methods will be evaluated on publicly available face, fingerprint and iris datasets in order to determine their efficacy in the context of cyberspace applications.
Finally, methods to assess the degree of privacy of a biometric image will be developed in order to quantify the amount of private information that can be derived from it.”
Re-Setting The Table
So far, it’s been established that the NDAA, in this instance as far back as 2016, was funding research at MSU that was also performed by some sort of asset to the Chinese government.
It has also been established the framework for the program — a private-public-military partnership; Its directives — artificial intelligence to collect and sort data across all mediums; And its stated goals — to blend all of the developments and produce new resources for the U.S. national security apparatus, specifically.
We’ve covered Adam Kinzinger’s H.R. 5181 that added a full-court press against “Russian disinformation,” spurred by what we know now to be a document of a different kind of “Russian disinformation,” itself and in whole.
Also, identified is one of the many government’s mechanisms, the National Science Foundation, who is behind the whole-of-society drive toward those goals, including Artificial General Intelligence.
Enter The Big, Bad Wolf
Weeks ahead of the implementation of fiscal year 2019’s annual NDAA, Arun Ross spoke at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Identity and Security in Lausanne, Switzerland.
His focus centered primarily on privacy for biometric data and the ethics of its collection and sharing between organizations.
I could find no further record of significant involvement with NATO following his discussion.
About a year and a half after the inclusion of H.R. 5181 into the recurring NDAA, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, with whom many department scientists had affiliations, began lobbying John McCain and the U.S. Senate to establish a formal Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee.
For example, Arun Ross has spoken every year since 2018 at the annual International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR)/International Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)’ Winter School on Biometrics, hosted in Shenzhen, China.
After Ross’ subsequent appearances in 2019 and in 2020 at the same event, Michigan State’s Anil Jain and Xiaoming Liu also joined the roster of featured speakers with him in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
The event has enjoyed sponsors over the recent years including Open AI Lab, Shenzhen University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Back in the States, the Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, originally recommended by the IEEE-USA in 2018, wasn’t actually legislated into existence until the 2021 NDAA when it passed under Section 5104 of the bill.
This was well after the most consequential genomic, language, behavior, and surveillance funding had already been allocated.
The Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee’s panel was to be appointed by the Secretary of Commerce, under the consultation of the Director of Science and Technology, Secretaries of Defense, Energy, State, the U.S. Attorney General, and Director of National Intelligence.
What all of this means is that the infrastructure to facilitate these technologies and the systems behind them, the research, the critical development had already been completed before independent advisors on artificial intelligence, specifically, were brought into the legislative and oversight conversation in 2021.
That means that all of the research we are about to fly through was performed with no official Congressionally-approved expert oversight or guidance.
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It’s vitally important to pay attention also to what the NSF, DoD, US Intelligence Community and the private sector have been funding since 2017, as their master plan openly stated its objectives in integrating artificial intelligence into every research focus.
Here is a look at the entirety of the research projects that funneled through Michigan State within our timeframe of late 2016 until the present. All MSU-announced grants from 2006-2021 are available here.
The Main Event
The same year that Kinzinger’s H.R. 5181 was incorporated into the NDAA, and the year following Michigan State’s initial dive into Artificial General Intelligence — 2017 — the U.S. Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and private sector began dumping fortunes into Michigan State’s computer science department.
Leading off receiving the 2017 investments were Anil Jain and Jiayu Zhou for a grant titled, "Large-Scale Information Fusion from Multiple Modalities" from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), which moved directly into a four-year Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) grant announcement of, “Presentation Attack Detection: Solutions for Fingerprints, Face and Iris Systems.”
Anil Jain and Jiayu Zhou were awarded a three-year, 2020 ONR grant for $525,000 titled “Deep Learning: Integrating Domain Knowledge and Interpretability,” followed by a public-private grant from the NSF and Amazon for developing what are essentially DEI- and ESG-compliant systems.
After these project launches, the AI research flood gates opened.
Here is a graphic highlighting the most important of the collection of grants that the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, and social media companies have inevitably benefitted greatly from since.
Is it not then safe to surmise that the very same NDAA that was:
funding the integration of artificial intelligence into every facet of the U.S. national security apparatus,
funding technologies to combat the spread of disinformation, and
funding technologies to identify terrorists, and even mitigate biological and environmental threats
was also integrating artificial intelligence into social media and information platforms like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. who were also utilizing these same scientists, departments, and research grants?
So why is it that Congress, DHS, FBI, Department of Defense have long identified the People’s Republic of China as a hostile foreign state-actor who looks to steal and profit off of the United States, while on the other hand feeding universities millions upon millions for decades to employ the communist nation’s scientists and academics?
Why would Congress and the Department of Defense fund Chinese assets at a university with active ties to Chinese Military-linked universities — especially when the projects deal with such consequential research? See below what I mean.
Have a look at just a few of the partnerships MSU was operating under during the time that disinformation (and artificial intelligence systems through which to deploy them) began underpinning the NDAA of 2017.
What’s both interesting and disturbing about Michigan State’s partnerships is that so many of them also cross with even just the few that the FBI featured in a bulletin themselves, just over a year before Adam Kinzinger’s H.R. 5181 was absorbed into the NDAA of 2017.
In fact, MSU Professor Jiliang Tang’s PhD student during much of this time was a graduate of Zhejiang University named Wei Jin.
Michigan State University was under an academic agreement with the school at time.
Almost There
One final grant that has become gratuitously more curious to the circumstances laid forth in this article is this particular four-year grant from IARPA, landing as recently as 2022.
The grant was to develop ways to identify people from media captured at long distances or from a drone…
…and to develop additional methods to correct atmospheric turbulence in the media.
Were they correcting anomalies that occur over multiple tens of thousands of feet of atmosphere? Like a surveillance drone? Or a weather balloon?
As of 2019, Michigan State, Purdue, and the University of Oregon all ran full-scale Confucius Institutes on their campuses, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
The University of Texas also maintained a Confucius Institute at the time, but not at its Austin campus, only in Dallas and San Antonio.
Since the publishing of the 2019 GAO report, Michigan State, Purdue, and Oregon, all three maintain a relationship with the People’s Republic of China, though in other, more vague capacities.
According to a 2022 National Association of Scholars report, MSU partnered with the Open University of China (another noted vein of academic talent) and joined the Great Lakes Chinese Consortium; Purdue University is partnered with Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Oregon maintained a formal relationship with the same school it was partnered with through the Confucius Institute.
I’ve previously written extensively about Michigan State’s involvement with the CCP, as it pertained to a narrow window of subject matter.
This is an entirely separate issue from election software.
Are the Chinese “spy balloons” ours? And were universities performing this research by flying the balloons over the U.S.?
Or was it a government surveilling citizens with DOD-PLA technology that neither government is willing to admit to building (or stealing from each other) together?
In June of 2021, the World Economic Forum began openly, publicly asking the multi-trillion dollar question that their consortium of global acolytes had been funding and answer to for at least five years already:
Just two weeks later, it was being reported of artificial intelligence’s deployment into the public space to control the flow of narratives and information.
I’m not sorry if you disagree with that verbiage.
No matter your politics, no matter your creed, race, language, social status, or gender, we are at a crossroads as one nation.
What happens from here is up to the people who have ever dared to imagine a future.
That’s it. A future.
Many of you on social media are young enough that you may read this and have nothing to reflect back to, nothing that can relate:
Reach out to people who disagree with you online. Ask them questions. Laugh at their jokes. Be people to one another again.
Remember what it’s like to not have the answers the other person is looking for.
The only way to beat disinformation is with more information.
The only way to stamp out lies is with truth.
The only way for us to move forward constructively in this new era as a nation cannot be done through half-measures and do-gooder short-sightedness.
The popularly proposed “Internet Bill of Rights,” is not enough. That is a conversation that should have been had 20 years ago.
We need a Digital Bill of Rights, and we cannot wait 20 years for people to catch on. This is happening. This is here. This is now.
We must now protect the data that constitutes our everyday lives, not just on the internet, but in everything we do and how we exist and function, digitally.
I will provide detail on a personal vision for this at some time in the future.
Another central focus of the “national security state” that I did not touch on in this article is artificial intelligence in research and procedures to “fix” genomes.
The U.S. Government is using artificial intelligence to shut down your free speech.
The U.S. Government is using artificial intelligence to flag and identify “domestic terrorists.”
The U.S. Government is using artificial intelligence to match those accounts to the real-world users (a crossover from the digital world to pursue physical world consequences).
The U.S. Government is using artificial intelligence to shape the way you perceive the world in real time, and without your knowledge or consent…
…and they’re doing it while funneling the talent and technology back-and-forth to their sworn enemy.
These are the systems used throughout Covid-19, the 2020 elections, and in the wake of January 6th.
The systems were built without oversight, finished them just in time, and launched their full-scale, AI-guided, social engineering and surveillance operation just as Joe Biden’s shoe touched the threshold of the Oval Office.
If this isn’t in front of a Congressional committee, you need to start asking yourself, Why?, And soon.
Fantastic work! 🔥