Excerpt:

Last week’s hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government featured testimony from two investigative journalists about newly released documents.

Journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi discussed the “CTIL Files” — which refer to the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTI League, a key player in the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

The files are based on documents received from an unnamed but “highly credible” whistleblower, according to the journalists, and reveal more details about what they first referred to in March, during previous testimony before the committee, as the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

THE CTIL FILES #1

“Many people insist that governments aren't involved in censorship, but they are. And now, a whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance.” — Michael Shellenberger, 28 Nov 2023 (X) Two additional witnesses testified last week: Rupa Subramanya, a Canadian journalist who writes for The Free Press, and Olivia Troye, a former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser who worked for the Office of Vice President Mike Pence.

The findings contained within the first release of the “CTIL Files” were a focus of the hearings, including allegations that the federal government engaged in “public-private partnerships” that outsourced censorship to private entities to circumvent First Amendment free speech protections.

Subramanya warned that encroaching censorship in the U.S. may lead to a situation similar to that of Canada, where many categories of speech are restricted.

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Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the subcommittee, said during his opening remarks, “One of the most egregious forms of the weaponization that this subcommittee has worked to expose is the coercion of social media companies by the federal government,” crediting the “Twitter Files” with casting light on such examples.

“We wouldn’t know anything that we know today, we wouldn’t have learned and had the reports we’ve had, without the work of Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger [and] other journalists who wrote the Twitter Files and … exposed these efforts,” Jordan said.

“The path for getting this information out has not been easy. Finding the truth never is. Instead, we were obstructed at almost every turn.”

Jordan said that while the subcommittee has previously shed light on multiple instances of federal government censorship of speech, and has “more information forthcoming,” it is nevertheless “impossible to get a full accounting of the government’s censorship efforts” without the cooperation of the “government actors involved.”

He said the subcommittee subpoenaed former White House officials Robert Flaherty and Andrew Slavitt, noting they “have so far refused to sit for interviews despite being directly implicated in emails between the White House and tech companies.”

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