Posted on 12/26/2024 4:42:42 AM PST by MtnClimber
Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration.
And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security for 2020 and 2022, which, if you understand the implications of that, should make you spit out your coffee upon learning.
More than any other agency, it became the operationally relevant government during this period. It was the agency that worked through third parties and packet-switching networking to take down your Facebook group. It worked through all kinds of intermediaries to keep a lid on Twitter. It managed LinkedIn, Instagram, and most of the other mainstream platforms in a way that made you feel like your opinions were too crazy to see the light of day.
The most astonishing court document just came out. It was unearthed in the course of litigation undertaken by America First Legal. It has no redaction. It is a reverse chronicle of most of what they did from February 2020 until last year. It is 500 pages long. The version available now takes an age to download, so we shrunk it and put it on fast view so you can see the entire thing.
What you discover is this. Everything that the intelligence agencies did not like during this period – doubting lockdowns, dismissing masking, questioning the vaccine, and so on – was targeted through a variety of cutouts among NGOs, universities, and private-sector fact-checkers. It was all labeled as Russian and Chinese propaganda so as to fit in with CISA’s mandate. Then it was throttled and taken down. It managed remarkable feats such as getting WhatsApp to stop allowing bulk sharing.
It gets crazier. CISA documented that it deprecated the study of Jay Bhattacharya from May 2020 that showed that Covid was far more widespread and less dangerous than the CDC was claiming, thus driving down the Infection Fatality Rate within the range of a bad flu. This was at a time when it was widely assumed to be the black death. CISA weighed in to say that the study was faulty and tore down posts about it.
The granularity of their work is shocking, naming Epoch Times, Unz.org, and a whole series of websites as disinformation, often with a crazy spin that identified them with Russian propaganda, white supremacy, terrorist activity, or some such. Reading through the document conjures up memories of Lenin and Stalin smearing the Kulaks or Hitler on the Jews. Everything that is contrary to government claims becomes foreign infiltration or insurrectionist or otherwise seditious.
It’s a very strange world these people inhabit. Over time, of course, the agency ended up demonizing much authentic science plus a majority of public opinion. And yet they stayed at it, fully convinced of the rightness of their cause and the justness of their methods. It seems never to have occurred to this agency that we have a First Amendment that is part of our laws. It never enters the discussion at all.
AFL summarizes the document as follows.
- CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF) relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex to inform its censorship of alleged foreign disinformation narratives regarding COVID-19.
- Unelected bureaucrats at CISA weaponized the homeland security apparatus, including FEMA, to monitor COVID-19 speech dissenting from “expert” medical guidance, including President Trump’s comments about taking Hydroxychloroquine in 2020. Many of these “false” narratives later turned out to be true, calling into question the government’s ability to identify “misinformation,” regardless of its authority to do so.
- To determine what was “foreign disinformation,” CISA relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex’s usual suspects (Atlantic Council DFR Lab, Media Matters, Stanford Internet Observatory) — even those discredited for erroneously attributing domestic content to foreign sources (Alliance for Securing Democracy). CISA even relied on foreign government authorities (EU vs. Disinfo) and foreign government-linked groups (CCDH, GDI) that advocated for the demonetization and deplatforming of individual Americans to monitor and target constitutionally protected speech by American citizens....SNIP
Things that make you go hmmm… Why was this created during Trump’s first term?
> The late George Carlin was way ahead of this … <
And the original Uncle Ben was ahead of them all.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
- Benjamin Franklin
any Federal agency violating American’s civil rights should lose all eligibility for further funding and should automatically “sundown” its charter into history
should not even be a question
Merry Christmas.
5.56mm
“The clear answer upon which we agreed: the law-abiding citizen, armed first and foremost with the Declaration of Independece and United States Constitution.”
Until it is ODERED otherwise... Unfortunate truth. They are extorted into following orders whether they like them or not. And if they don’t the rest of their foreseeable lives will be destroyed.
Ordered...
“Thank goodness at least one judge believed otherwise and forced the agency to cough it up.”
and therein lies a problem....
The irritating thing is this was well known, well before May 2020. It was a week in March when COVID went in the space of one week from being a minor item of interest about the disease starting to break out in places like New York, to all schools (etc) shut down everywhere and people going into panic mode.
Due to a fluke I had been paying attention to the very first reports out of China in the first half of January, and then to the arrival of the first cases in the US in late January. It was in late February on a phone call to my wife that I specifically stated, "It has escaped containment [in the US] and is going to sweep the population. But don't worry, for us [healthy adults] it will either be unnoticeable or be comparable to a bad flu." If I could figure that out on my own before the end of February, surely any real expert by that point would have known the same.
DOGE it
There were no restrictions in the new law and NO oversight. It was wide open to abuse.
Homeland should be scrapped along with FEMA - too many stupid commie types running things...
Recognize, not denazify.
These are communists.
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