Free Republic

Members of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) advisory committee on combating “misinformation” privately cast critics of their work, including those who raised the alarm over government censorship of free speech, as malign actors, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. An advisory panel under the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA), called the Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation Subcommittee, issued recommendations to CISA in June on how to address threats to “critical functions” of democracy, including public health measures, the financial system, elections and the court system. The subcommittee recommended CISA detect “informational threats,”...

Tactics OverviewCultivate Fake or Misleading Personas and Websites: Disinformation actors create networks of fake personas and websites to increase the believability of their message with their target audience. Fake expert networks use inauthentic credentials (e.g., fake “experts”, journalists, think tanks, or academic institutions) to lend undue credibility to their influence content and make it more believable.Create Deepfakes and Synthetic Media: Synthetic media content may include photos, videos, and audio clips that have been digitally manipulated or entirely fabricated to mislead the viewer. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools can make synthetic content nearly indistinguishable from real life. Synthetic media content may be...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) met weekly with large social media platforms to collaborate on moderating content, according to a deposition this week from FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan. Chan, who was one of the two FBI agents who contacted Facebook ahead of its censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop warning of potential Russian disinformation operations, said that the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) officials met weekly with social media companies to remove specific accounts ahead of the 2020 presidential election, according to his deposition cited by Missouri Attorney General...

Elon Musk’s release of information detailing how Twitter suppressed speech during the 2020 presidential election is only the beginning of the story, according to one Texas congressman. “Investigations are coming,” Republican Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas tweeted Friday. -snip- Earlier Friday, journalist Matt Taibbi released internal Twitter communications that showed Twitter employees took down tweets at the behest of the Biden campaign and the Trump White House. Taibbi noted that because the Twitter staff was overwhelmingly liberal, there were “more channels” to censor speech available to the left. As Nehls promised an investigation, others noted that the liberal media was...

House Oversight Committee Republicans are kicking off an investigation into what they they called a “taxpayer-funded censorship campaign” at the Department of Homeland Security. Since 2020, the federal agency has been under fire for working with big tech companies to censor certain viewpoints mainly related to election integrity. The GOP launched its investigation after Monday's report by The Intercept dove into how the Feds had begun pressuring tech companies on a range of issues, including COVID-19, the vaccine for it, and Ukraine. The Center Square obtained a letter from the group, led by ranking member Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. The...

The FBI team that was in communication with Facebook before the social media company censored the original Hunter Biden laptop story has been identified, according to a new court filing. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, identified the team as the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), according to an updated complaint entered late on Oct. 6. Meta named the team after receiving a subpoena in a case alleging the federal government pressured Big Tech firms to censor users. “Pursuant to the third-party subpoena, Meta has identified the FBI’s FITF, as supervised by Laura Dehmlow, and Elvis Chan as involved in the...

"This release includes bug fixes, increased stability and performance improvements." The routine software update may be one of the most familiar and least understood parts of our digital lives. A pop-up window announces its arrival and all that is required of us is to plug everything in before bed. The next morning, rather like the shoemaker and the elves, our software is magically transformed. Last spring, a Texas-based company called SolarWinds made one such software update available to its customers. It was supposed to provide the regular fare — bug fixes, performance enhancements — to the company's popular network management...

The private consortium that reported election "misinformation" to tech platforms during the 2020 election season, in "consultation" with federal agencies, targeted several news organizations in its dragnet. Websites for Just the News, New York Post, Fox News, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Epoch Times and Breitbart were identified among the 20 "most prominent domains across election integrity incidents" that were cited in tweets flagged by the Election Integrity Partnership and its collaborators. The Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the State Department, and liberal groups such as the Democratic National Committee, also flagged purported misinformation through the consortium.

Subpoenas went out Wednesday to local election officials and a former Republican Party chair in a rural Georgia county, with attorneys seeking to find out how a covert team of 2020 election conspiracy theorists were able to improperly access and copy a voting system server last year. The eight subpoenas, issued by attorneys representing voting rights activists in an ongoing lawsuit, were greenlit by U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg. She expressed “great concern” last week about the unauthorized access of a voting system server following an investigation by The Daily Beast that revealed details about who was involved in this...

In a stunning admission, CISA reports that voting machines are vulnerable to tampering and hacking. After two-plus years of denials from multiple government officials, politicians, and the legacy media, the much delayed Cyber & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) report “identifie[d] vulnerabilities affecting versions of the Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite ImageCast X.” The report warns the vulnerabilities present in the system software represent risks that “should be mitigated as soon as possible.” CISA also reported that ” it has no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in any elections.” CISA Director Jen Easterly stated the same in a Tweet...

CISA has released an Industrial Controls Systems Advisory (ICSA) detailing vulnerabilities affecting versions of the Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite ImageCast X, which is an in-person voting system used to allow voters to mark their ballot. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities would require physical access to individual ImageCast X devices, access to the Election Management System (EMS), or the ability to modify files before they are uploaded to ImageCast X devices. Jurisdictions can prevent and/or detect the exploitation of these vulnerabilities by diligently applying the mitigations recommended in ICSA-22-154A, including technical, physical, and operational controls that limit unauthorized access or manipulation...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation says it is aware of reports that unauthorized emails from a legitimate FBI address were sent to thousands of organizations. "The FBI and CISA are aware of the incident this morning involving fake emails from an @ic.fbi.gov email account," the FBI said in a statement Saturday. "This is an ongoing situation, and we are not able to provide any additional information at this time. The impacted hardware was taken offline quickly upon discovery of the issue. We continue to encourage the public to be cautious of unknown senders and urge you to report suspicious activity...

Got this email at work today

Top officials at a U.S. federal cybersecurity agency are urging a judge not to authorize at this time the release of a report that analyzes Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Georgia, arguing doing so could assist hackers trying to “undermine election security.” The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was recently provided an unredacted copy of the report, which was prepared by J. Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society.The report discusses “potential vulnerabilities in Dominion ImageCast X ballot marking devices,” or electronic voting devices, according to the government.While CISA supports public disclosure...

A judge is withholding the release of an audit report of Dominion voting machines in Georgia. Now the federal government and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has inserted itself into the case and is asking the judge to delay the report longer.We reported on this case previously. Per our report a week ago:A federal judge is being urged to release a report that, despite the secrecy surrounding it, appears to indicate there are potential flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment used in Georgia.“The public deserves to know the context of J. Alex Halderman’s claims and his testimony...

ATLANTA (AP) — A federal cybersecurity agency says a report by an expert who says he’s identified security vulnerabilities in voting machines used by Georgia and other states shouldn’t be made public until it has had time to assess and mitigate potential risks. The report has been under seal since July in federal court in Atlanta, part of a long-running lawsuit challenging Georgia’s voting machines. Its author, J. Alex Halderman, said in sworn declarations filed publicly with the court that he examined the Dominion Voting Systems machines for 12 weeks and identified “multiple severe security flaws” that would allow bad...

The former head of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Christopher Krebs, said that the Republican Party was in a “death spiral” owing to its allegiance to former President Donald Trump. Mr Krebs, who famously contradicted Mr Trump’s claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election before being terminated from his post last year, is a self-described lifelong member of the GOP. On Sunday, he spoke with CBS’s Face the Nation about his party and the former president’s ongoing efforts to sow distrust about US voting systems. “This is a death spiral. They’ve lost control, and they...

Christopher Krebs, the former director for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), still finds himself at the center of American cybersecurity issues despite the fact that his run at CISA ended with his firing by President Trump after the 2020 election.Many observers and most in the media attempted to portray the firing as a vengeful act by the outgoing president who was upset that Krebs failed to acknowledge the evidence of voter fraud that the Trump legal team has worked so hard to collect in the days following November 3, 2020. The incident that wound up sealing Krebs’ fate...

Chris Krebs has stated in the past and testified yesterday that there was no voter fraud through “hacking” that occurred during the 2020 election. For complete transparency, I did not watch his testimony nor have a read a transcript. Why would I? This is the same guy who didn’t notice the largest cyber-attack in world history happening against multiple federal agencies for months.Krebs was fired last month from his position as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The agency is tasked with preventing the exact type of massive cyberattack that has been underway since March, perhaps earlier....

The scale of a sophisticated cyberattack on the U.S. government that was unearthed this week is much bigger than first anticipated. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a summary Thursday that the threat “poses a grave risk to the federal government.” It added that “state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations” are also at risk. CISA believes the attack began at least as early as March. Since then, multiple government agencies have reportedly been targeted by the hackers, with confirmation from the Energy and Commerce departments so far.