{"id":144953,"date":"2022-11-15T14:19:24","date_gmt":"2022-11-15T18:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=144953"},"modified":"2022-11-15T14:22:01","modified_gmt":"2022-11-15T18:22:01","slug":"because-the-democrats-had-to-steal-every-election-in-sight-the-will-be-forced-to-criminalize-all-election-deniers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=144953","title":{"rendered":"Because the Democrats had to steal every midterm election in sight, they will be ‘forced’ to criminalize all election deniers!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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DHS Censorship Agency Had Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On \u2018Red Mirage, Blue Shift\u2019 Election Events<\/h1>\n

Mike Benz
\nFoundation for Freedom Online<\/p>\n

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SUMMARY<\/div>\n
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  • Network throttled millions of posts ahead of 2020 election, blocked \u201cemerging narratives\u201d from reaching \u201cvirality threshold.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • Censors boast on video of getting tech companies to ban entire categories of election speech under threat of \u201chuge regulatory pressure.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • Months before the 2020 election, censors systematically targeted all speech categories that could challenge a future \u201cred mirage, blue shift\u201d election scenario.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Last week,\u00a0The Intercept<\/i>\u00a0published\u00a0a set of leaks<\/a>\u00a0that drew broad interest in perhaps the most undercovered scandal inside the US government today: the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) quiet move to establish, for the first time in US history, an explicitly inward-facing domestic censorship bureau.What\u00a0The Intercept<\/i>\u00a0glimpsed, however, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg.The size, scale and speed of DHS’s censorship operation are vastly larger have been reported. Based on our investigation, below are seven bottom-line figures summarizing the scope of censorship carried out by\u00a0DHS speech control partners<\/a>, as compiled from their own reports and videos:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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      \n
    • \n
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      • 22 Million<\/a>\u00a0tweets labeled \u201cmisinformation\u201d on Twitter;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
          \n
        • \n
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          • 859 Million<\/a>\u00a0tweets collected in databases for \u201cmisinformation\u201d analysis;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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            • \n
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              • 120 analysts<\/a>\u00a0monitoring social media \u201cmisinformation\u201d in up to\u00a020-hour<\/a>\u00a0shifts;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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                • \n
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                  • 15<\/a>\u00a0tech platforms monitored for \u201cmisinformation\u201d often in real-time;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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                    • \n
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                      • <1 hour<\/a>\u00a0average response time between government partners and tech platforms;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
                          \n
                        • \n
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                          • Dozens<\/a>\u00a0of \u201cmisinformation narratives\u201d targeted for platform-wide throttling; and<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
                              \n
                            • \n
                                \n
                              • Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted, due to \u201cmisinformation\u201d Terms of Service policy changes that DHS partners\u00a0openly plotted and bragged<\/a>\u00a0tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and \u201chuge regulatory pressure\u201d from government.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

                                The citations above are from just the DHS censorship network\u2019s impact on the 2020 election cycle alone. That was two years ago, when the narrative management machine referenced by\u00a0The Intercept<\/i>\u00a0was first getting formed. Even the above figures, however, just scratch the surface of the full story.<\/p>\n

                                While\u00a0The Intercept<\/i>\u00a0rightly noted that DHS’s \u201ctruth cops\u201c now take on a range of other topics \u2013 such as Covid-19 and geopolitical opinions \u2013\u00a0it all started<\/a>\u00a0from, and grew out of, DHS’s speech control infrastructure set up to censor speech about elections.<\/p>\n

                                That started with the 2020 election. But it continues, importantly, with the 2022 midterm elections, which are ongoing this week.<\/p>\n

                                At Foundation for Freedom Online, for more than six months, we have been\u00a0publishing<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0sharing research findings<\/a>\u00a0about a wide span of shocking components to DHS’s speech control operations. Our investigation has spurred multiple members of Congress to\u00a0vow aggressive probes<\/a>\u00a0into DHS’s \u201cgovernment censorship by proxy<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

                                The whole story, however, has not all been published in one place. In this report, we seek to provide a comprehensive history and network map of DHS’s public-private censorship network, as told through a deep dive into its first mission \u2014 the censorship of the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

                                Along the way, we will highlight the network’s role in censoring the ongoing 2022 midterm elections.<\/p>\n

                                In the final section of this report, we will cover a particularly disturbing aspect of this story \u2014 DHS’s pre-censorship of speech that could \u201ccast doubt\u201d on a so-called \u201cred mirage, blue shift<\/a>\u201d election scenario, months in advance of such an exact sequence playing out.<\/p>\n

                                Background History & Cast Of Characters<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

                                In this background section, we will present a history and overview of the key players participating in DHS’s extended censorship network, with special attention to its formation in the run-up to the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

                                This story has two main institutional sides: the government within DHS and the non-governmental side consisting of a web of like-minded private sector and civil society partners. Together, this network forms the DHS public-private censorship network that is the subject of this report.<\/p>\n

                                The Government Side: Chris Krebs’s CISA<\/strong><\/p>\n

                                The key coordinating hub for the government side is an \u201cobscure government agency<\/a>\u201d named CISA, which is tucked within DHS, and was\u00a0created by act of Congress<\/a>\u00a0in November 2018, nominally to defend America against cybersecurity threats from hostile foreign actors (e.g., Russian hackers).<\/p>\n

                                CISA’s longform name, the \u201cCybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency\u201d has none of the Orwellian overtones of the \u201cDisinformation Governance Board<\/a>\u201d. CISA took great pains to cloak itself as just a simple, security-focused cybersecurity directorate. CISA’s founding director, Chris Krebs, was fond of telling audiences that CISA was just\u00a0\u201cThe agency that cares so much about security, it’s in our name twice\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

                                CISA’s mission was supposed to be cyber security. Not cyber censorship.<\/p>\n

                                But a funny thing happened on the way to the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

                                First, on January 6, 2017, outgoing Obama Administration DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson\u00a0designated<\/a>\u00a0\u201celection infrastructure\u201d as being \u201ccritical infrastructure\u201d under the purview of DHS protection.<\/p>\n

                                This designation, born out of unsubstantiated claims that Russia had just stolen, hacked or otherwise materially interfered with the 2016 election, tasked DHS with protecting election-related structure, such as polling places, voting machines and computer systems.<\/p>\n

                                CISA’s Internet censorship power grew out of interpreting \u201ccritical infrastructure\u201d beyond its hard physical meaning to apply to meta-physical concepts. By 2019, \u201cforeign disinformation\u201d on social media was\u00a0increasingly framed<\/a>\u00a0as a \u201ccyber threat\u201d to election infrastructure.<\/p>\n

                                Through this framing mechanism, CISA’s \u201ccybersecurity\u201d authority morphed into a \u201ccybercensorship\u201d authority. However, this move was\u00a0initially limited<\/a>\u00a0to CISA only targeting \u201cforeign disinformation\u201d, through DHS’s\u00a0Countering Foreign Influence Task Force<\/a>.<\/p>\n

                                But when the 2016 election-era \u201cRussian interference\u201d Special Prosecutor’s probe ended in July 2019 with former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s failure to find \u201ccollusion\u201d between then-President Trump and outside Russians, DHS and CISA began to change their tunes.<\/p>\n

                                The entire \u201ccountering Russian disinformation on social media\u201d apparatus that had been constructed before July 2019 to censor, throttle and identify \u201cforeign disinformation\u201d was quietly, but entirely, pivoted to focus inward on \u201cdomestic disinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

                                This \u201cForeign-To-Domestic Disinformation Switcheroo<\/a>\u201d on censorship was never widely conveyed beyond DHS doors out to the American people. It was plotted on DHS’s own livestreams and internal documents. DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that \u201cdomestic disinformation\u201d was now a greater \u201ccyber threat to elections\u201d than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.<\/p>\n

                                This meant that, henceforth, any US citizen posting what DHS considered \u201cmisinformation\u201d online was suddenly\u00a0conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure<\/strong>. That was the legal framework under which DHS \u2013 and CISA particularly \u2013 drew their jurisdiction.<\/p>\n

                                To illustrate this, we’ve put together a supercut of DHS censorship network partners switching from a \u201cforeign\u201d to a \u201cdomestic\u201d predicate for censorship between the 2016 election and the 2020 election:<\/p>\n