FOIA Files: Arizona State University

Our latest FOIA disclosures reveal that the Department of State was issuing grants to "anti-disinformation" researchers at ASU.

Oct 07, 2024

What’s going on at Arizona State University?

Our latest Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) results show that the university has done significant work on “disinformation” for the State Department. But of what sort? Back in January, Gabe Kaminsky of The Washington Examiner reported that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) had given three direct awards to ASU. But the redacted documents uncovered by Kaminsky don’t explain the purpose of the awards.

Last month, the House Committee on Small Business released a report that details the lengths to which the GEC has gone to evade congressional oversight. The committee sent the GEC a subpoena in June, only to be told that it would take the State Department another twenty-one months to produce the requested documents.

What might be underneath those redactions? According to the committee:

The Global Engagement Center (GEC), an interagency body housed within the U.S. Department of State (State), circumvented its strict international mandate by funding, developing, then promoting tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.

In early 2023, not long after Racket first published the Twitter Files, we began filing FOIA requests with a number of government-funded “anti-disinformation” entities. One of the FOIA productions we received came from Arizona State University (ASU), home of the Center on Narrative, Disinformation and Strategic Influence. The Center seeks to “safeguard the United States, its allies and democratic principles against malign influence campaigns” by researching “how narratives shape reality and how manipulations of the information environment threaten democratic norms and institutions.”

As reported by Matt Taibbi in Twitter Files #17, the GEC used its initial budget of $98.7 million to fund at least thirty-nine different “anti-disinformation” organizations, the names of which were redacted in an inspector general’s report.

This is the same GEC that was caught bankrolling the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British outfit that sought to cut off advertising revenue to websites it accused of peddling “disinformation.” As reported by Kaminsky in The Washington Examiner, the GDI aimed to “remove the financial incentive” it claimed was motivating those sites to spread “disinformation.” The GEC also funded Disinfo Cloud, a database of resources used by the State Department to “push back against foreign propaganda and disinformation.” The GEC funneled $100,000 to the GDI through Park Advisors, the firm charged with developing Disinfo Cloud.

Both previous FOIA requests and new sources confirm that ASU was one of the entities that contracted with the Global Engagement Center. In 2018, the GEC awarded ASU a grant of $497,538, and it tasked university researchers with generating resources to identify and analyze “Russian state-sponsored disinformation efforts.” The end goal was the “development and/or refinement of techniques and automated tools for identification and analysis of digital disinformation and propaganda.”

In 2020, as part of its Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued an agreement that designated ASU as a subcontractor and the New York-based software company Kitware as a contractor. The two entities would collaborate on a project called Semantic Information Defender (SID), with ASU Professor Scott Ruston serving as principal investigator. (Ruston is now a special assistant to the U.S. Navy’s vice chief of naval operations. He previously served as director of ASU’s Center on Narrative, Disinformation and Strategic Influence.)

Under this arrangement, Kitware received funding from DARPA, but it was required to reimburse ASU for certain expenditures. The SID subcontract was worth $848,513, and according to a press release from Kitware, its purpose was to develop a system that would help intelligence professionals detect “falsified media” and analyze the algorithms used to create such media.

Ruston did not respond to Racket’s request for comment. However, Joshua Garland, who serves as the Center’s interim director, provided the following details about the SID project:

It is funded by the Dept. of Defense, and the goal is to create algorithms to detect, characterize and attribute media that has been manipulated and/or created by AI.

Garland’s comments about the Defense Department might explain why Lockheed Martin is listed as a party in the associate contractor and proprietary information agreement.

ASU also held a contract with the Office of Naval Research. However, this project, titled “Fusing Narrative and Social Cyber Forensics to Understand Covert Influence,” actually appears to have an international mandate. Its goal is to study the rise of pro-China narratives in East and Southeast Asia, with a focus on Indonesia and the Philippines. Interestingly enough, this proposal comes with a subaward amendment that lists ASU as a pass-through entity and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock as a subrecipient.

These productions, which we’ve made available here, are heavily redacted and feature a ton of contractual jargon. Nevertheless, they illustrate how the State Department and the Defense Department appeared to disregard their foreign policy directives and allocated their energies and millions in taxpayer funding toward waging an “anti-disinformation” campaign with domestic applications. Is it any surprise that the State Department was recently caught trying to discredit Taibbi and Kaminsky?

Below is a page-by-page guide to these disclosures. Note that this production contains multiple duplicate copies, especially toward the second half.

On page one, you’ll find a GEC grant worth $497,538.
On page two, you’ll find the purpose of the grant.
On page 37, you’ll find ASU’s subcontract agreement with Kitware.
On page 64, you’ll find the SID subcontract, which lists DARPA as the prime awarding agency.
On page 78, you’ll find a list of key personnel, all associated with ASU.
On page 119, you’ll find the associate contractor and proprietary information agreement.
On page 142, you’ll find an Office of Naval Research grant worth $1,796,653.
On page 189, you’ll find an Office of Naval Research grant worth $374,025.
On page 206, you’ll find a subaward amendment that lists ASU as a pass-through entity and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock as a subrecipient.
On page 210, you’ll find a subaward amendment that lists Texas A&M University as a pass-through entity and ASU as a subrecipient.