The onslaught of reporting about the federal government’s collaboration with social media platforms to restrict content has been alarming. Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” have shown how the FBI, White House, and other powerful institutions developed a cozy relationship with the social media company, involving routine meetings and instructions on suppressing what they considered “misinformation.”
An October report from the Intercept revealed that this relationship is still going, thanks to the Department of Homeland Security. The department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been directing content it considers to be “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation” to Twitter and Meta, leading Meta to create a special portal specifically for government officials to report unwanted content.
Like much of the bloated administrative state, CISA is out of control and sorely lacks accountability. Preventing this fascistic merge of the public and private should be a top priority for Congress. But the Washington Post reported last week that, amazingly, the House Homeland Security Committee is poised to debate whether to expand the agency in the coming year. The discussions will likely include a policy plan by Rep. John Katko (R-NY) to increase its workforce, “aggressively grow cybersecurity capabilities,” and help it further “build strong relationships across the government, private industry, and other key cyber organizations.”
This lack of caution regarding CISA’s potential was evident from its creation in 2018, as noted by Robert Romano from Americans for Limited Government. After giant hacking incidents against U.S. companies caused a great scare, Congress passed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act with unanimous consent, with former President Donald Trump signing it into law. As it typically goes with the government’s swift “solutions” to a crisis, the legislation created long-term problems of its own.
The bill explicitly gave CISA permission to assist “private sector entities” in “the deterrence, prevention, preemption of, or response to, terrorist attacks against the United States.” With little to no caveats, the DHS may combat whatever it vaguely defines as online threats to national security. This quickly turned CISA into “a switchboard for routing disinformation concerns to appropriate social media platforms and law enforcement” in 2018, according to its website. While such policing of speech may violate the First Amendment, as a Republican lawsuit argues, Congress didn’t seem to pay this threat much attention when it created the agency in the first place.
The overlap with private entities in CISA’s censorship mission runs deep. Ahead of the 2020 election, CISA teamed up with four research groups in the Election Integrity Partnership to help social media firms monitor “election misinformation.” The EIP boasted of a 35% success rate in getting the platforms to remove or suppress content throughout its operation, which faced “unclear legal authorities” and “very real First Amendment concerns,” one of the groups admitted.
The activist bureaucrat in charge of CISA at the time was Chris Krebs, whom Trump fired in November 2020 for disputing his election fraud claims. But Krebs had the last laugh, as CISA and the EIP had already been controlling what social media users could and could not say about the election for months. Yet he failed to prevent a nine-month Russian hack that infiltrated dozens of corporations and the National Nuclear Security Administration — a threat that CISA would be well within its right to respond to if it only had its priorities in order.
Despite the cancellation of the DHS’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board earlier this year over bad optics, we have every reason to believe that CISA’s Thought Police are still at work in our social media feeds, as shown in documents obtained by the Intercept. Going forward, they hope to push government narratives on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” as “infrastructure” that must be defended from contrarian speech.
The GOP is painfully silent on its role in creating this Frankenstein monster, and blaming the radicals in the Biden administration for further exploiting it won’t solve anything. If Republicans in Congress help to expand CISA without correcting its design flaws, the agency will continue accepting the lack of a clear “no” as an implicit “yes” regarding its censorship activities, and the GOP will be complicit in the silencing of the public through the use of their own tax dollars.
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Hudson Crozier (@L0neStarTrooper) is the senior contributor to Upward News and a student reporter for the College Fix. His work has also been featured in the Federalist, the Western Journal, and Red Liberty Media.
