Having only very recently speculated upon the likelihood that the outputs of climate sceptic websites such as Cliscep are being monitored by authorities keen to control the narrative, it might seem a little indulgent to be returning to the subject so soon. To do so may seem like flogging a dead horse, but I’m afraid the commentary that had accompanied my previous article would seem to suggest that the news of that particular equine’s death was greatly exaggerated. The fact is that the truth of the matter is not at all easy to determine. On the one hand, I was offering a detailed account provided by Google’s Gemini that seemed to leave no room for doubt that the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit (now rebranded the National Security Online Information Team) was very active in collating and analysing online arguments made for so-called climate action ‘delayism’ – this being primarily with a view to determining the best way of ‘pre-bunking’ them.  And yet this was stacked up against revelations that there was no evidence that the CDU/NSOIT was engaged in monitoring sites like Cliscep. Indeed, the broader claim was that addressing climate ‘delayism’ fell outside the remit of the CDU/NSOIT.

So, which is it? Are climate change sceptics who are engaging in online debate being monitored by state units or are they not? To attempt to answer that question I need to do more than merely repeat the conjectures of an AI chatbot and instead go a little further into the workings of the CDU/NSOIT. For example, how is it constituted, what is its funding, what is its publicly stated remit, how does it operate and what is its track record? The fact that some of these questions are actually very difficult to answer tells its own story. But, whilst obtaining confirmation of our worst fears may be a difficult task, it is still an essential enquiry because we are simply not in a position to be complacent.

The CDU’s origins can be found in the Salisbury Novichok poisonings of 2018 and the resulting formation of a team created to track hostile state narratives. This was followed in 2019 by the formal establishment of the CDU. There was little fanfare at the time, and the minister in charge of the unit during covid, Oliver Dowden, later failed to mention the unit’s existence when launching the 2023 incarnation of the UK National Risk Register. Furthermore, if you wanted to search it out you would have to look towards the Ministry for Moving on Because There’s Nothing to See Here (or to give it its proper title, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)). At the time, the unit’s primary focus remained the protection of the democratic process, particularly with regard to foreign interference ahead of the 2019 European Parliament elections.

But this was all about to change when the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. From that point onwards, the mission developed towards monitoring so-called domestic disinformation, which is to say online dialogue that challenged the state’s narrative and its chosen raft of interventions. Importantly, the operational strategy involved collaboration with other components of the intelligence community, such as MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and resulted in platforms such as Google and Meta being approached to encourage them to down-rank the offending material.

Following a 2023 Whitehall restructuring, the unit was transferred to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), a departmental title that still failed to quite capture the full import of what the unit was up to. This publicity-shy existence came to an end after the so-called ‘Ministry of Truth Exposé’ of mid-2023, in which investigative journalists from the Daily Telegraph and Big Brother Watch discovered that throughout the Covid-19 pandemic the CDU had been flagging as disinformation completely factual social media posts. Not only that, the accounts concerned didn’t belong to hostile state actors but belonged instead to ordinary citizens, prominent scientists, journalists, and British Members of Parliament. This exposé was quickly followed by a rebranding of the unit, which saw its title changed to the National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT). This was supposedly to reflect the unit’s focus on tracking security threats, but this focus hadn’t really changed. A more cynical and perhaps more germane point would be that the public-facing emphasis on national security concerns would make it much easier for the unit to stonewall Freedom of Information requests. It also wouldn’t have done any harm to have shed the toxic branding that the CDU had attracted.

The opaqueness of operation under which the CDU/NSOIT was now operating prompted one of the MPs that had come under its scrutiny, namely David Davies MP, to seek parliamentary clarification of the unit’s remit, resulting in the following formal response from Sir John Wittingdale:

The Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU), now called the National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), is focused exclusively on risks to national security and public safety.

Preserving freedom of expression is an extremely important principle underpinning the team’s work. The Government believes that people must be allowed to discuss and debate issues freely.

The NSOIT does not monitor the social media accounts of individuals and does not take any action that could impact anyone’s ability to discuss and debate issues freely. When the NSOIT identifies content which is within one of the areas of focus ministers have agreed, is assessed to pose a risk to national security or public safety and which is assessed to breach the terms and conditions of the relevant platform it may share that content with the platform. No action is mandated by the Government, it is entirely up to the platform to determine whether or not to take any action in line with their terms of service. Under no circumstances is content from Parliamentarians or journalists ever referred to platforms. Ministers continue to keep the work of the NSOIT under review and the approach to sharing any content with platforms.

It is this statement that provides the basis for believing the CDU/NSOIT couldn’t possibly threaten the free speech of climate sceptics. It is therefore this statement that requires unpacking.

Firstly, let us consider the claim that the NSOIT does not violate the privacy of social media accounts of individuals. Forgetting for the moment that personal monitoring is precisely what the CDU was caught doing during covid, the new guarantee of anonymity (apparently achieved by using data-washing systems that attempt to strip out personal identifiers, usernames, and metadata from captured posts) now becomes a very easy claim to make and an impossible one to dispute (failing, of course, a future security breach within the NSOIT). Furthermore, it doesn’t even need to be true in order for concerns to remain valid. To understand why that would be so, one has to understand how the NSOIT operates.

Ask the man on the Clapham omnibus what a covert surveillance team would look like and images of nerdy-looking individuals hacking into accounts whilst eavesdropping on headphones might come to mind. The truth, however, is a lot less Hollywood, since the whole thing is automated using AI software. In fact, it is probably quite correct to say that individuals are not monitored, because the real objective of the NSOIT is to aggregate online data in order to track large-scale narratives and trends. If the analysis identifies a co-ordinated ‘threat’ (an advancement within the culture wars, if you will), the NSOIT responds by generating a counter-narrative that brands anything deemed to be harmful as ‘fake news’. Also, as Wittingdale indicated, platforms can be approached and pressured to suppress the offending material. In this regard, the NSOIT leans heavily upon the Online Safety Act to leverage influence. Whether any of this constitutes a threat to freedom of speech depends a great deal upon the criteria used to flag harmful narratives. The system used, i.e. the Counter-Disinformation Data Platform (CDDP), can be easily pivoted in the direction of any narrative of the government’s choosing and, given the veil of secrecy involved, there is really nothing to prevent any online challenge being classified as a security or health risk (thereby falling within the NSOIT’s remit) without the public fully understanding the implications. And that is the reason why Gemini’s conjecture regarding the monitoring of climate change ‘delayism’ gains credibility.

Wittingdale’s emphasis that the NSOIT is focused exclusively on risks to national security and public safety is of no comfort whatsoever to climate change sceptics. The government has made no secret of its belief that climate change is both a national security threat and a significant threat to public health and safety. It logically follows that any narrative that encourages what it sees as ‘delayism’ would qualify as an exacerbating threat that falls firmly within the NSOIT’s purview. The wonder is not that the NSOIT is monitoring and aggregating the outputs of climate sceptic websites with a view to pre-bunking; the wonder is that they would ever deny it. But the fact is that such denial does exist, so we have to consider why this might be the case.

The problem that the NSOIT has is the immense difficulty in deciding between bad-faith obstruction of a policy that is in the nation’s best interest, and legitimate caution based upon sound risk management principles. The NSOIT knows that it cannot get away with branding everyone who disagrees with Ed Miliband as an enemy of the state; furthermore, it knows that we all know that. Hence its enthusiasm for being seen as the good guys who can think of nothing more important than protecting the rights of the public to engage in debate. Whether this reflects the truth of the matter is for the NSOIT to know and for the rest of us to wistfully ponder. There is just nothing in the way the NSOIT is structured and run, and nothing in its track record, that grants it the benefit of the doubt. There is just the doubt.

Such paranoia is not helped by the inability to determine, beyond the most basic details, how the NSOIT is constituted. We know it sits within the Security and Online Harms Directorate of DSIT, and we can presume that it is funded from the DSIT budget. However, the exact annual budget and precise funding levels of the NSOIT are exempt from public disclosure. The UK government holds that revealing specific financial figures would compromise national security by exposing the exact scale and limitations of the state’s anti-disinformation capabilities to hostile foreign actors. That said, the DSIT itself is legally required to remain financially accountable to Parliament. We also know that the DSIT is currently under the ministerial oversight of Peter Kyle MP (Secretary of State for DSIT) and that he is supported by Feryal Clark (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for AI and Digital Government). The senior civil servant in charge is Sarah Conelly and the NSOIT is staffed by a rotating group of UK civil servants augmented by technical experts from firms such as Faculty Science Ltd, Crisp Thinking (UK) Ltd and Fenix Media Ltd (trading as Pulsar). Beyond that, very little is publicly disclosed. This being a case of national security, we are invited to accept that the secrecy is in all our best interests.

The bottom line is that the veil of secrecy that the NSOIT enjoys makes it very difficult to confirm whether it is monitoring the output of sites such as Cliscep, but what one can say for sure is that any protestations of innocence carry much ministerial weight but not so much credibility. Cliscep’s detailed and substantiated challenges to Net Zero clearly place its output in the ‘new denial’ camp created by the government. As such, its output would be a legitimate and obvious target for NSOIT monitoring, albeit as part of an aggregated and non-attributed narrative. The fact that such monitoring does not explicitly feature in the parliamentary statements made regarding the NSOIT’s remit does not provide proof that it isn’t happening. This should be of concern to us all, not so much perhaps because of a denial of freedom of speech or a violation of privacy, but because allowing such speech and then analysing it from the perspective of an assumed insurgency places us all on the wrong end of a pernicious propaganda war that does little to bolster democracy or indeed provide any confidence in governmental benign intent. Those who have a vested interest in covering up anything that would go down badly with the public assure us all that there is nothing to hide, but they do this from behind the information firewall that comes from claiming a national security risk. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise the compromise involved here.