Last year, after Nina Jankowicz left the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the newly established Disinformation Governance Board she oversaw was abolished, the DHS issued a statement promising to continue addressing risks to national security while upholding individual rights. The implication was that the government was claiming that what it was doing and would be doing in respect to information curation was legal, at least on the surface. Contrary to popular belief, a staff study by the House Judiciary Committee revealed that the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) personnel had essentially recognized that “its censorship activities are unconstitutional.”
The study itself explained how the DHS was using third companies to outsource its censoring operation in order to get around traditional 1st Amendment issues and “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.” That quote was taken from the minutes of an official government meeting. The Center for Internet Security was explicitly mentioned in the report as CISA’s preferred conduit for information censorship.
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The First Amendment specifically forbids governmental repression of expression in order to safeguard it. Furthermore, it has been proven that the government engaged in a cover-up to hide its function as an information curator. According to the report, CISA took action to have any references to domestic activities aimed at spreading “misinformation” and “disinformation” removed from the website. According to the interim assessment, “CISA still has not adequately complied with a [Congressional] subpoena for relevant documents, and much more fact finding is necessary.”
The DHS’s indirect engagement in information curating was described in the Congressional report as “plainly unconstitutional activities” and “censorship by proxy.” It also mentioned “[o]n numerous occasions, CISA officials and MDM [the Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation team] Subcommittee members acknowledged, both implicitly and explicitly, that CISA was not authorized to conduct the kind of surveillance and censorship it was conducting” and referenced many incriminating statements made to that effect by CISA officials.
Even factual material that the officialdom felt lacked context was subject to this kind of information filtering. One MDM representative bemoaned “unfortunately current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation [that which is factual but lacking context according to the government] as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms.”
Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, Mike Benz, tweeted about the study and his thoughts. “After 15 months of pressure on the CISA censorship scandal, it’s cracking wide open.”
Beyond the interim assessment, Benz went into further depth. He talked about how other nations were also using this system of state-directed information curating. He recorded that “US taxpayers paid to censor foreign elections in Germany. This coordination was done by Alliance of Democracies (a giant rabbit hole of intelligence intrigues I cover in upcoming book). AoD is funded by CIA cut-outs NDI & IRI (both sides of NED) + State Dept NGO blob.”
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Governmental technology censorship is on the rise, which is dangerous for democracies that depend on free speech. The fundamental underpinnings that this intricate network is meant to defend are being threatened.
