Chilling revelations on the rise of feds’ Orwellian speech police
By Benjamin Weingarten, New York Post
Imagine an America where the feds surge actual speech police wherever chatter on social media questions the integrity of the vote — speech police who then take to the airwaves to attack those making the claims.
If this sounds far-fetched, consider that last summer a national-security agency actually mulled the idea of deploying a “rapid response team” to local jurisdictions to help election officials fend off “mis-, dis- and mal-information” (MDM)-related “threats,” including through communications — an idea one federal official called “fascinating.”
That revelation comes from a new report from the House Weaponization Subcommittee on a little-known Homeland Security sub-agency called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
And it was followed Tuesday by a blockbuster preliminary injunction from a federal judge barring contact between Team Biden and social-media companies, who cited evidence of a “massive effort” by the White House and federal agencies to “suppress speech based on its content.”
Despite its anonymity, CISA has served as the linchpin of government-led speech policing.
It has coordinated with federal agencies and a coterie of often federally funded “anti-disinformation” NGOs to chide, cajole and collude with Big Tech companies to impose a mass public-private surveillance and censorship regime on the American people.
That regime has silenced those who voice unauthorized opinions and even inconvenient facts on social-media platforms under the banner of combatting “dangerous” MDM.
This amounts to a conspiracy to violate the First Amendment, resulting in rampant election interference, the stifling of crucial debates for example on COVID-19 and the chilling of incalculable amounts of speech on much else — all in service of ruling class power.
Now House Republicans are striking back; the subcommittee’s report is part of the backlash.
By exposing CISA and its partners’ centrality to the censorship regime, Republicans are taking the first step towards terminating it.
The report tells of how an agency tasked with combatting foreign cyberattacks and defending the grid came to target Americans’ tweets questioning mass mail-in balloting as if they were mini-terrorist attacks on “cognitive infrastructure.”
CISA Director Jen Easterly has said “cognitive infrastructure” — that is, what people think — is “most critical,” hence the need for her agency to control Americans’ speech.
Consistent with this view, as the report shows, during the 2020 presidential contest, CISA collected and reported offending content Americans posted about elections to social media companies, which often censored it — a process known as “switchboarding.”
During and after that election, CISA colluded extensively with cut-outs, one of which was CISA-funded, to get content purged.
As its efforts grew more ambitious, CISA formalized its coordination with the cut-outs and social-media companies, convening an Orwellian subcommittee for MDM.
The report adds rich color to this underreported story.
It shows CISA and its partners casting aside concerns about targeting Americans’ speech, even as some expressed surprise and concern.
It shows specific instances of a CISA-funded partner working to get posts, including those of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, taken down by social-media companies.
Perhaps most important, the report shows CISA & Co. knew what the sub-agency was doing was unlawful and “routinely attempted to conceive methods” to “surreptitiously outsource its surveillance and censorship to non-governmental third parties.”
“It’s only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work,” a former CIA lawyer serving on the MDM Subcommittee warned in a May 2022 email.
CISA eventually scrapped the subcommittee and scrubbed evidence of its domestic-speech targeting.
The cover-up would seem to be an admission of guilt.
We still don’t know the full scope of any underlying crimes, but Congress’ probes may reveal them.
That oversight is critical, because lawmakers need a comprehensive picture of the surveillance and censorship regime to inform legislation to dismantle it.
Those efforts in fact have already begun.
The House Armed Services Committee recently adopted an amendment to its annual National Defense Authorization Act halting federal funding to purported anti-disinformation outfits that have gotten conservative outlets blacklisted and demonetized.
The Homeland Security Committee adopted an amendment in its annual appropriations bill — one I supported, including in testimony — defunding any DHS speech-policing activities.
These efforts are imperative to saving free speech in America.
Benjamin Weingarten, editor at large at RealClearInvestigations, recently testified before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Accountability on federal speech-policing.
