Posted on 11/07/2022 11:52:21 AM PST by Heartlander
When George W. Bush signed the Homeland Security Act in 2002, the goal was to improve national security by strengthening government at various levels and helping them identify and respond to threats, particularly terrorism.
''The continuing threat of terrorism, the threat of mass murder on our own soil, will be met with a unified, effective response,'' said Bush. ''Dozens of agencies charged with homeland security will now be located within one cabinet department with the mandate and legal authority to protect our people.''
The law contained “severe privacy and civil liberties problems,” the ACLU argued, but the legislation enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Only nine Senators voted against it (eight Democrats and one Independent).
Bush tapped Tom Ridge as the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, but public policy experts admitted it was unclear precisely what the new department would do.
''The first challenge is to lower expectations,'' Paul C. Light of the Brookings Institution told The New York Times. ''People should think they will be safer, but remember we have a long way to go.''
One thing not mentioned in the Homeland Security Act is free speech. The word “speech” does not appear on even one of the law’s 187 pages.
Nevertheless, newly-published documents published by The Intercept show the extent to which the DHS is now actively involved in using the power of the US government to shape online discourse and police speech by pressuring private platforms behind closed doors.
“In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government,” The Intercept wrote of one message. “Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that ‘we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.’”
Docs show Facebook and Twitter closely collaborating w/ Dept of Homeland Security, FBI to police “disinfo.” Plans to expand censorship on topics like withdrawal from Afghanistan, origins of COVID, info that undermines trust in financial institutions. https://t.co/Zb3zmI1dQF — Lee Fang (@lhfang) October 31, 2022
According to a copy of the DHS’s capstone report outlining top priorities in the coming years, the department intends to hold media accountable by targeting “inaccurate information” on a range of controversial topics such as “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.”
Though the most overt government attempts to shape and censor online discourse began under the Biden administration, the road to DHS’s “Ministry of Truth” project began under the Trump administration.
That DHS was seeking to police speech and shape online discourse was not in itself a revelation. In April 2022, the Biden administration announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board, but the initiative was paused after just three weeks over widespread public outcry after the board was dubbed “the Ministry of Truth” by critics.
What the Intercept’s story reveals is the overt pressure the government was exerting on private companies to censor speech. For example, the Intercept described a “formalized process” government officials used to flag content on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to throttle or remove problematic content.
The story also shows how the revolving door between government and the corporate world created enthusiasm for DHS initiatives.
“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain,” Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official said to DHS official Jen Easterly in a February text message, according to the Intercept.
Though the most overt government attempts to shape and censor online discourse began under the Biden administration, the road to DHS’s “Ministry of Truth” project began under the Trump administration.
In November 2018, following a series of high-profile cyber attacks, Trump signed into law legislation known as the CISA Act, which created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a standalone federal agency dedicated to fighting cyberterrorism.
Like the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the word “speech” doesn’t appear anywhere in the legislation. Nor do the words “misinformation” or “disinformation.” However, one line in the sprawling law (Section 318) contains these four words: “Social media working group.” It is presumably this line that led CISA to boast of its “evolved mission” to, in the words of the Intercept, “monitor social media discussions while ‘routing disinformation concerns’ to private sector platforms.”
In 2018, to respond to election disinformation, DHS created the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force and began flagging voting-related “disinformation” that appeared on social media platforms—even though the words “election” and “vote” appear nowhere in the CISA Act. By the following year, DHS was employing fifteen full- and part-time staff tasked with “disinformation analysis,” and in 2020 the department’s disinformation focus had expanded to include Covid-19.
In 2021, CISA created a “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation” team—replacing the Countering Foreign Influence Task force—and disinformation agents were now focused on domestic transgressions as well foreign.
A law that had been passed to protect critical infrastructure in the US from cyber attacks was now being used to censor Americans on social media.
The mission creep of DHS is breathtaking. Nowhere in the Homeland Security Act or the CISA Act is the department authorized to police speech, yet since 2018 it has led the broadest and most dangerous assault on free expression in modern American history.
The newly published documents vindicate those who’ve argued the true threat to speech and online discourse is not “misinformation”—as many progressives contend—or woke tech companies—as many on the right have argued—but the government itself.
The reality is, the government is not uniquely benevolent, knowledgeable, or honest. In fact, governments are arguably the most dishonest organizations in history, and the US government is no exception, as some have noted.
“Our government produces lies and disinformation at industrial scale and always has,” journalist Jack Shafer wrote in Politico after the White House unveiled its disinformation board in April. “It overclassifies vital information to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts.”
To find evidence that government is not in the truth business, one need look no further than the DHS, who for the better part of a year targeted online “disinformation” that explored the possibility that the virus may have originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
While the origins of Covid-19 remain uncertain, government officials, media, and social media administrators treated the lab leak theory as a crackpot conspiracy unfit for discussion. For the better part of a year, people who speculated about the lab leak theory on platforms such as Facebook faced censorship and suspension, because of the DHS’s active role.
That the federal government—which had been funding the Wuhan lab and gain-of-function research—might have motives beyond altruism to suppress this narrative was conveniently ignored, as were pertinent facts. This included a US intelligence assessment in early 2020 that acknowledged the virus may have been released accidentally from an infectious diseases lab, as well as reports that State Department officials had previously acknowledged concerns about safety protocols in Wuhan.
By mid 2021 the White House itself had acknowledged the credibility of the lab leak theory, but only after DHS had waged a prolonged disinformation campaign against it.
Twenty years ago when the Department of Homeland Security was created, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold was one of the few Senators to vote against the Homeland Security Act.
"We have to protect both the people and their freedoms," said Feingold while speaking of his broader opposition to the Bush administration’s War on Terror policies.
It’s now clear that Feingold was right when he said the laws failed to strike “the right balance between law enforcement and civil liberties.” In their effort to make people more safe, federal lawmakers created a bureaucracy that is now trampling the very rights it was created to protect, a fact that would not have surprised the 19th Century economist Frédéric Bastiat, who noted the state’s tendency to grow and become an oppressor of rights.
"Instead of checking crime, the law itself [has become] guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!” wrote the author of The Law.
The American Founders, in their quest to create a limited government to prevent this evil, created the First Amendment. It plainly states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…”
We now know the DHS has now been working quietly for years to abridge free speech, and it has done so with no explicit legal authority; the laws Congress passed speak not a whisper about regulating speech.
The Department of Homeland Security needs to be put in check, and it reminds us of an ancient question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guardians)?
Left leaning folks are much more amenable to utilitarian arguments, i.e. what's best for the people as a whole. They fear the individual actions of independent people.
Individualism can go too far, as has gone too far in some areas, but we are not an ant farm that needs to be looked over by Big Queen.
Dubya. The gift that keeps on giving.
So, they are terrified by Trump.
What’s the problem? You SAID you wanted to stop terrorism.
Abolish DHS, FBI.
It’s a winning plank.
George Bush and the GOP...
Our media has become a giant psyop controlled by the deep state/elites. Some Australian researchers did a study and found that of the pro-Ukraine tweets that appeared on Twitter at the beginning of the war, 80% of them were bots. Twitters whole reason for being apparently is to disseminate establishment propaganda, and that’s one of the reasons why they are up in arms over Musk acquiring it.
DHS does not defend our freedom and rights. They have been against that from day one. DHS needs to be shuttered. Parts of DHS that existed prior to the creation of DHS need to be individually evaluated for further existence.
Badges? We don’t need no skinkn badges!
Need to include the ATF and DOE as well.
Another Bush big government Frankenstein’s monster that came back to haunt us.
When ‘W’ started abomination I sensed that this would ultimately be the result.
Bkmk
More people need to wake up to this fact.
And the other question that needs to be asked is:
Why is the government, (along with corporations), attempting to censor Free Speech?
I was one of the few on the right that opposed the Patriot Act from the get go and I took a lot of heat for it. everything I feared would happen at the time happened and then some. Now look at us.
“The DHS needs to be eliminated along with the DOE and the DOE and probably a few other agencies.”
I remember when many(some on this forum) fretted dismally when the Homeland Security Act was pushed by GW and passed in 02.
All sorts of nightmare prognostications in it’s wake 20 years later are only beginning to rear their ugly heads. Amazing how prophetic those folks have been.
One might give such a command, but it is illegal and therefore not an authorization.
Authorizing carries with it "the act of giving ..legal power."
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
Outdated Thinking. (For modern times)
There are three kinds of Laws:
LEGISLATIVE LAWS - the good old kind where representatives of constituents vote on proposals and those passed can become law if the proper party is in power and there are not enough of the wrong party that could “filibuster” it.
Executive LAWS - presidential Executive Orders (whatever the President Wants so long they are President. Can order anything with unlimited budget. Best kind but only when the proper party is in power.
Judicial Law - when Judges decide, or just get a special call, to add conditions, throw out, or just reinterpret old fashioned laws with fixes to what they (or their benefactors ) identify as problems, or if they just feel like it.
Wokestitution 101.
Oh year there are state and local “laws”. They’re cute but meaningless unless the real powers (see above) allow them.
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