Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
In June of 2023, the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report detailing how CISA came to surveil and censor Americans' speech on social media.
The report, "The Weaponization of CISA: How a 'Cybersecurity' Agency Colluded with Big Tech and 'Disinformation' Partners to Censor Americans," outlines collusion between CISA, Tech Companies, and government-funded third parties to conduct censorship under color of law through proxy agents, and to intentionally obscure CISA's role in these unconstitutional activities.
On January 6, 2017, outgoing Obama DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson re-categorized “election infrastructure” as “critical infrastructure,” putting it under the protection of the Department of Homeland Security and CISA.
By 2019, social media “disinformation” of all kinds had become a threat to “election integrity,” making CISA a domestic censorship authority.
Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Youtube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and Verizon met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives. According to NBC News, these meetings were part of an ongoing initiative between the private sector and government to discuss how tech companies handle misinformation.
The “Twitter Files” revealed that the State Department’s Global Disinformation Center attempted to insert itself into Twitter’s review and censorship process and, when those efforts failed, the Global Disinformation Center pushed its unsupported claims of disinformation to the media.
The “Twitter Files” revealed that the State Department’s Global Disinformation Center attempted to insert itself into Twitter’s review and censorship process and, when those efforts failed, the Global Disinformation Center pushed its unsupported claims of disinformation to the media.
Rep. Mike Johnson, who has since been elected speaker of the House, said very bluntly that the federal government used Twitter to censor American's speech, saying, "Twitter was basically an FBI subsidiary before Elon Musk took it over… The Twitter files should be a matter of bipartisan concern for every member of Congress and every American citizen because it is a bedrock principle of our Constitution that the government does not get to decide what speech is acceptable or true."
The State Department’s full role in these activities is yet unknown, but what is currently known is that the State Department at the very least provides heavy financial support for these censorship activities; a recent report from the Foundation for Freedom Online found that the National Science Foundation was a major donor to the state censorship regime.
A search of government contracts and grants for the keywords “misinformation” and “disinformation” from fiscal years 2016 through 2023 reveals 538 federal grants and 36 federal contracts awarded to a wide range of organizations. Only nine of either were awarded from 2008 to 2015.
Internal State Department documents obtained by DC Examiner show that the State Department instructed employees to deny claims that the Global Disinformation Index was participating in the censorship of Americans or American media outlets.
The House Judiciary report revealed differently, showing that CISA facilitated the censorship of Americans both directly and through intermediaries like Election Integrity Partnership and Global Disinformation Index, and also revealed:
CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded non-profit (EIP) after CISA and the Biden Administration were sued in federal court, implicitly admitting these censorship activities are unconstitutional.
CISA wanted to use the same CISA-funded non-profit as its mouthpiece to "avoid the appearance of government propaganda."
Members of CISA's advisory committee said it was "only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work."
In response to mounting public scrutiny, CISA scrubbed its website of references to domestic surveillance and censorship activities.
The “CISA-funded non-profit counter-disinformation collective” that works with Homeland Security is the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, which is run out of Stanford’s Internet Observatory.
EIP is made up of two influential universities, Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, an influential think tank, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and an influential analytics firm, Graphika.
Three of these four organizations that partnered with Stanford to run the Election Integrity Partnership, which pushed Twitter to censor American media in advance of the 2020 election, were also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.
According to the archived GDI website, advisory panel members included Ben Nimmo, the global lead at Meta; Franziska Roesner, a University of Washington professor; and Camille Francois of Niantic, which has previously been tied to the CIA.
Ben Nimmo was a founding member of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and a senior fellow for that lab. He was also “the first director of investigations at Graphika.”
Nimmo is a former journalist and NATO press officer, and speaks a number of languages, including Russian, French and Latvian. He is based in the United Kingdom.
Camille Francois also serves as the chair of Graphika’s advisory board and is identified on Graphika’s webpage as its “Chief Innovation Officer,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. François is French, and holds a master's degree from the Paris Institute of Political Studies and a master's degree in international security from Columbia University.
She served as the special advisor to the CTO of France within the prime minister's office, and is an affiliate of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Francois previously worked at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google dedicated to exploring threats to open societies, and joined Niantic in 2021 as their global director of trust & safety.
Franziska Roesner is on the faculty at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public as an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, where she co-directs the Security and Privacy Research Lab.
Her research focuses on computer security and privacy for end users. She received her PhD from the University of Washington in 2014 and her BS from UT Austin in 2008.
Stanford’s Internet Observatory launched on June 6, 2019, to “focus on the misuse of social media,” and within two years and with the help of a lot of government funding, grew from an initial part-time team of three to a full-time team of 10 assisted by some 76 student research assistants.
In 2020, Stanford announced the creation of the Election Integrity Partnership, which “brought together misinformation researchers” from across the four aforementioned organizations.
Stanford and Clemson were the two main universities identified as part of the “Twitter Files,” censorship saga. Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub webpage identifies members of its “Disinformation Working Group,” revealing other prestigious universities attached to the censorship project, such as:
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Lab, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Duke University, Bowdoin College, the University of South Carolina, Vanderbilt University, Georgetown University, and Wilfrid Laurier, a Canadian University supported by a Facebook grant.
The University of Buffalo, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University are also involved in the disinformation project, according to a Clemson News release revealing the launch of a project titled “Disinformation Range to Improve User Awareness and Resilience to Online Disinformation.” The government is supporting these efforts through a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
DHS created the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee (hilariously also known as CSAC - “SeaSack”) in June 2021 “to advance CISA’s cybersecurity mission and strengthen the cybersecurity of the United States.”
CSAC then established a “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation” Subcommittee, more commonly known as the “MDM Subcommittee.”
The MDM Subcommittee, which has since disbanded, brought tech companies together with “misinformation experts,” including:
Vijaya Gadde, former Chief Legal Officer at Twitter, was “involved in censoring [the New York] Post’s Hunter Biden laptop” story. Gadde was also “behind the decision to permanently ban former President Trump from Twitter.”
Gadde was fired from the company in October 2022, shortly after Elon Musk completed his buyout of Twitter. Musk later joked, after firing more than half the staff, that apparently when you are not trying to police everyone’s speech, you don’t need as many employees.
Before joining Twitter in 2011, Gadde spent nearly a decade working at the Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. She was also senior director in the legal department of Silicon Valley technology firm Juniper Networks. Gadde earned her Juris Doctor from the New York University School of Law in 2000.
Vijaya Gadde suggested in June 2022 that her CISA colleagues "meet with" the Global Disinformation Index, among other groups, the Washington Examiner reported.
Suzanne Spaulding, former assistant general counsel and legal adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, who also served as the Under Secretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, which became CISA on November 16, 2018, when President Trump signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018.
Ron Green, chief security officer for Mastercard, former deputy chief information security officer at Fidelity Information Services (FIS), former director at Blackberry, former senior vice president at Bank of America, former special agent in the United States Secret Service and officer in the United States Army.
Green serves on the board of directors for SailPoint Technologies, chairs the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council, and is chair of the U.S. Secret Service, Cyber Investigation Advisory Board.
Jeff Moss, founder and President of DEFCON Communications, which organizes and manages the annual DEFCON information security conference.
Stephen Schmidt, Chief Security Officer for Amazon. Prior to joining Amazon, Mr. Schmidt had an extensive career at the FBI, where he served as acting Chief Technology Officer, Section Chief, responsible for the FBI’s technical collection and analysis platforms, and the FBI’s Cyber Division, responsible for the technical analysis of computer and network intrusions.
Alex Stamos, Director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a member of the EIP, and a Partner in the Krebs Stamos Group. Chris Krebs was CISA’s founding director.
Dr. Kate Starbird, Associate Professor and Co-Founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. CIP was a member of both the “Election Integrity Partnership” and the “Virality Project,” which “monitored COVID 19 narratives.” Starbird served as the Chair of the MDM Subcommittee.
The Election Integrity Project, in their own report, say they throttled 7,157,398 tweets just on the subject of Dominion Voting Systems, just on Twitter. This does not include YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms named in government censorship help tickets. Many millions of posts were censored.
Not only were millions of posts censored, but tech platforms went along with EIP’s premise that posts only need to be “misleading” to be “misinformation” subject to censorship.
They processed censorship tickets that included claims of mail dumping; mistreated, shredded, or dumped ballots; non-eligible people casting ballots (such as dead voters); ballots cast on behalf of others; and voting multiple times by mail.
Their subjective determinations of what was misleading, misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation were never subject to any due process scrutiny by a judge or by public referendum of some kind.
The partnership with EIP was set up as a run-around because the government lacked the legal authorization to censor or suppress American citizens. In other words, the government isn’t allowed to do it, so they enlisted someone else to do it for them (which they also aren’t allowed to do).
EIP, in its own report, says that they classified 22 million tweets (21,897,364 individual posts) as unique “misinformation incidents” between August 15, 2020 and December 12, 2020.
To calculate this misleading figure, EIP took a total of 859 million tweets discussing “misinformation narratives” that they identified as suspect, then applied statistical inference algorithms to decide that 22 million of the 859 million total posts could be classified as a “misinformation incident” at a “high level of confidence.”
Each “misinformation incident” was grouped within a larger “misinformation narrative” before EIP pressured social media companies to censor entire narratives at population level scale using network maps and narrative analysis that EIP provides under the color of CISAs legal authority from the Department of Homeland Security.
There are dozens of narratives EIP has targeted for wholesale censorship. EIP noted in their report,
The primary repeat spreaders of false and misleading narratives were verified, blue-check accounts belonging to partisan media outlets, social media influencers, and political figures…
CISA was put in charge of election security, so the same agency in charge of election security is claiming the power to censor questions about election security, even if they’re from accounts belonging to verified Americans or American media outlets.
EIP notes in their report that,
“The meta-narrative of a “stolen election” coalesced into the #StopTheSteal movement, encompassing many of the previous narratives. The narrative appeared across platforms and quickly inspired online organizing and offline protests, leading ultimately to the January 6 rally at the White House and the insurrection at the Capitol.”
A narrative their attempts to control did nothing to prevent, and which despite their attempts to control, devolved into what the media has called “a riotous insurrection” for which more than a thousand Americans have been arrested and in the largest collective sedition prosecutions since the Great Sedition Trial of 1944; over 400 Americans have been convicted and sentenced, with about 275 to prison and over 100 sentenced to house arrest.
In a blog seemingly published to attempt some damage control, EIP’s partners from the Washington University’s Center for an Informed Public write:
We disagree with the framing of the EIP’s work as “censorship” — and are troubled by broader efforts to equate research about misinformation and disinformation with “censorship.”
They also say that
One dimension of the EIP’s work was to alert social media platforms to misleading claims about election processes, discovered in the course of our analysis efforts, that may have violated their policies.
What this coy sounding contradiction means in practice is that any United States citizen who posts an opinion on the internet that a random unelected government funded think-tank employee and/or an unelected Homeland Security beaurocrat decides is “disinformation” or “misinformation” or “malinformation,” that citizen is conducting a cyber attack against critical American infrastructure by spreading ideas that our government doesn’t like and thinks might be dangerous, and can and should be censored under color of law.
That is the legal framework from which the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency draw the legal authority which they lend to the EIP.
In their report, EIP wrote that “Fact-checking of narratives had mixed results; non-falsifiable narratives presented a particular challenge.” Non-falsifiable narratives are also known as personal opinions.
In 2023, the National Science Foundation awarded the EIP a grant to study the spread of rumors and disinformation online; this grant will build on the work that the EIP did in collaboration with CISA. EIP’s declared goals are to stop these narratives from hitting a “virality threshold” so that they never reach the distribution level necessary for real life protests, legal challenges, or mainstream news coverage.
DHS views this as a growing part of its role in “law enforcement.” While “counter-terrorism remains the first and most important mission of the Department,” the Department of Homeland Security’s “work on these missions is evolving and dynamic” and must adapt to threats “exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online” including from “domestic violent extremists.”
DHS will “leverage advanced data analytics technology and hire and train skilled specialists to better understand how threat actors use online platforms to introduce and spread toxic narratives intended to inspire or incite violence, as well as work with NGOs and other parts of civil society to build resilience to the impacts of false information.”
The broad definitions available to define terms like “threat actors” and “critical infrastructure,” which apparently includes Americans and their social media posts, “misinformation,” and “disinformation,” which apparently includes true stories in American press outlets and American social media users, are a clear and obvious violation of the first amendment right to free press and free expression, as well as fourth, fifth, and fourteenth amendment rights to due process and freedom from warrantless search and seizure.
According to DHS meeting minutes from March of 2022, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force has 80 individuals focused on “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”
One FBI official The Intercept interviewed on the subject in 2020 was quoted as saying, “Man, I don’t even know what’s legal anymore.”
The FBI official, who spoke with The Intercept on condition of anonymity, described being reassigned, monitoring American social media accounts instead of foreign intelligence services even as it alleges that true stories, like the New York Posts coverage of the Hunter Biden Laptop story, which the Department of Homeland Security claimed was false Russian propaganda when it was a true, if largely unimportant, story.
Another FBI official described being reassigned from international terrorism - Al Qaeda and the Islamic State - to “domestic terrorism,” where they worked as secret police on social networks, chat rooms, online forums, bulletin boards, and blogs to detect and disrupt “domestic terrorism”, according to the anonymous FBI official.
Accounts flagged as dangerous were often parody accounts or accounts with virtually no influence to speak of. One such “potential threat” to “critical U.S. infrastructure” led to FBI warnings about an account that was dangerous to “election system integrity,” to an official at Twitter.
The “potential threat” to “critical U.S. infrastructure” which was supposedly a huge danger to “election system integrity” was a Twitter user with 56 followers, a bio that read “dm us your weed store locations (hoes be mad, but this is a parody account),” and a banner image of Blucifer, the 32-foot-tall horse sculpture at the Denver International Airport.
“We wanted to flag them for consideration,” a government official wrote to a Twitter rep. The Twitter rep responded, “We will escalate. Thank you.”