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NEW: Illegal DHS Censorship Nexus EXPOSED In Bombshell Report

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1 year ago

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When Nina Jankowicz resigned from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the newly founded Disinformation Governance Board that she led was disbanded last year, the DHS released a statement saying they will continue to address national security threats while respecting individual rights. The implication, at least at face value, was that the government was asserting what it was doing and would be doing in relation to information curation was constitutional. An interim staff report by the House Judiciary Committee found otherwise, however, and also shockingly found that the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) officials effectively admitted that “its censorship activities are unconstitutional.”

The report itself detailed how the DHS was outsourcing its censorship operation to third parties in order to circumvent typical 1st Amendment concerns and “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.” That citation came from official government meeting notes. The report prominently cited that CISA desired the Center for Internet Security to become its proxy in censoring information.

The 1st Amendment explicitly forbids the government from suppressing free speech. The government also engaged in a cover-up operation to hide its involvement in information curation. To that end, according to the report, CISA scrubbed its own website of references to domestic operations against “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The interim report also observed that “CISA still has not adequately complied with a [Congressional] subpoena for relevant documents, and much more fact finding is necessary.”

The Congressional report referred to the DHS’s indirect role in information curation as “plainly unconstitutional activities” and censorship by proxy. It also noted that “[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 cited various damning messages by CISA officials to that effect.

Such information curation was even applied to factual information that the officialdom deemed lacking context.  One MDM official lamented that “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.”

Mike Benz, executive director for the Foundation For Freedom Online organization, commented on the report, tweeting, “After 15 months of pressure on the CISA censorship scandal, it’s cracking wide open.”

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Benz also detailed material beyond the interim report. He mentioned how this nexus of state-guided information curation was being applied to foreign countries as well. He wrote 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.”

A labyrinthine structure of state technological censorship nexus has been erected. Far from protecting democracies, which are characterized by vigorous free debate, this nexus is eroding them.



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