All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button under the author’s name.
To receive the daily Global Research Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to send/email this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us at Instagram i Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram channel. Please feel free to repost and share Global Research articles widely.
***
Keeping up with the corruption of the Covid regime is like drinking from a fire hose. The volume of fraud, the pace of new discoveries and the breadth of operations are overwhelming. This makes it imperative for groups like the Brownstone Institute to digest the onslaught of information and communicate salient issues and relevant facts, especially given the abandonment of mainstream media.
On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee announced a report about how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “concluded with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans,” adding to the information hose we work to absorb.
The 36-page report raises three familiar questions: first, did government actors work with third parties to nullify the First Amendment; second, censors prioritized political narratives over truthfulness; and third, an incomprehensible bureaucracy hijacked American society.
1. The CISA collusion to nullify the First Amendment
The House Report reveals that CISA, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, worked with social media platforms to censor posts it deemed disinformation, misinformation or disinformation. Brian Scully, the head of CISA’s censorship team, admitted that this process, known as “switchboarding”, would “trigger content moderation”.
In addition, CISA funded the non-profit EI-ISAC in 2020 to strengthen its censorship operations. EI-ISAC worked to report and track “disinformation across all channels and platforms.” In launching the non-profit, the government boasted that it “takes advantage[d] DHS CISA’s relationship with social media organizations to ensure priority treatment of misinformation reports.”
The headquarters’ programs directly contradict CISA director Jen Easterly’s sworn testimony. “We don’t censor anything … we don’t report anything to social media organizations,” Esterly told Congress in March. “We don’t do any censorship.” His statement was more than a lie; he omitted the institutionalization of the practice she denied. The agency’s initiatives were based on a collusive apparatus of public-private partnerships designed to suppress unapproved information.
This should sound familiar.
Alex Berenson had access to thousands of Twitter communications that has discovered concrete evidence that government actors, including White House Covid adviser Andy Slavitt, worked to censure him for criticizing Biden’s Covid policies.
Rob Flaherty, Director of Digital Strategy at the White House private pressure social media groups to remove a Tucker Carlson video reporting the link between the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and blood clots.
Facebook worked with the CDC to censor posts related to the hypothesis of the “laboratory escape” of Covid. Company employees later met with the Department of Health and Human Services to remove the platform from the “misinformation dozen,” a group that includes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
These were not cherry-picked examples: they were part of an institutional collusion to strip Americans of their First Amendment rights. Reporters Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi reported “Censorship Industrial Complex”, a collection of the world’s most powerful government agencies, NGOs, and private corporations that worked together to silence dissent.
The Supreme Court has held that it is “axiomical” that the government cannot “induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what is constitutionally prohibited.” However, CISA has joined the disturbing trend of public-private partnerships designed to impede Americans’ right to information and freedom of expression.
2. Political operatives
Second, these programs were not idealistic attempts to promote the truth; they were calculated programs designed to suppress inconvenient but truthful narratives.
The report describes how CISA censored “misinformation: truthful information that the government believes has the potential to mislead.” Journalist Lee Fang later wrote that the misinformation campaign “highlights not only the broad authority the federal government has to shape the political content available to the public, but also the toolkit it relies on to limit scrutiny in regulating speech.”
In this system, uncensored information has tacit government approval, amounting to a system of widespread propaganda.
“State and local election officials used CISA-funded EI-ISAC in an effort to silence criticism and political dissent,” the report notes. “For example, in August 2022, a government official in Loudon County, Virginia, reported a tweet with an unedited video of a county official “because it was posted as part of a campaign broader to discredit this official’s word.” The Loudon County official’s observation that the account he flagged “is connected to Parents Against Critical Race Theory” reveals that his “disinformation report” does not be more than an attempt at censorship for political reasons”.
Officials supporting the operation remained unrepentant in their goal of advancing political agendas. Dr. Kate Starbird, a member of CISA’s “Disinformation and Disinformation” subcommittee, lamented that many Americans seem to “accept misinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms.”
Of course, the program explicitly violated the Constitution. The First Amendment does not discriminate based on the truth of a statement. “Some misrepresentation is inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation,” stated the Supreme Court’s controlling opinion in United States v. Alvarez. But CISA, led by fanatics like Dr. Starbird, called themselves the arbiters of truth and worked with the world’s most powerful information companies to purge dissent.
This was part of a wider political campaign.
Hunter Biden’s laptop, natural immunity, lab leak theory, and vaccine side effects were censored at the behest of the government. The truth of the reports were not in question; instead, they presented uncomfortable narratives for the Washington political class, which then used the Orwellian label of “misinformation” to cover the evisceration of the First Amendment.
3. The terror of the administrative state
Third, the report exposes the growing power of the administrative state. Federal bureaucrats rely on anonymity and unaccountability. Private industry employees could never oversee a disaster like the Covid response and keep their jobs. It would be like BP’s Gulf of Mexico safety chief getting a promotion after the oil spill.
But unelected officials like CISA officials enjoy ever-increasing power over the lives of Americans without having to answer for their calamities. Suzanne Spaulding, a member of the Disinformation and Misinformation Subcommittee, warned that “it was only a matter of time before someone realized we existed and started asking about our work.”
Spaulding’s comment reflects the power that CISA wields and the benefit that derives from its lack of public exposure. Most Americans have never heard of CISA despite its overwhelming influence on lockouts.
In March 2020, CISA divided the American workforce into “essential” and “non-essential” categories. Within hours, California became the first state to issue a stay-at-home order. This began a previously unimaginable assault on the civil liberties of Americans.
The House Report indicates that CISA was a central player in censoring criticism of the Covid regime in the months and years that followed. The agency is representative of the cabal of censorious and unaccountable officials who engage in public-private partnerships designed to keep us in the dark.
Click here to read the full document.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram channel. Please feel free to repost and share Global Research articles widely.
The featured image is from BI
English 
Español de Venezuela