Constitutionalist Americans cheered the rapid “demise” of the Orwellian “Ministry of Truth,” but it appears the celebration may have come too soon.
According to leaked documents obtained by journalists Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang at The Intercept, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) supposedly short-lived Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) is not defunct, as the public had come to believe. Rather, it has simply been renamed and reorganized, and will continue to exert a censoring presence on speech in America.
The DGB was the subject of widespread public scrutiny from the moment it was announced on April 27. Only three weeks later, the board was shelved and its appointed chief, Nina Jankowicz, resigned.
Many political observers and citizens worried that the DGB, with its vague mission of combating the subjective notion of “disinformation,” would amount to little more than a tool for the Biden administration to censor and suppress the voices of detractors, thereby eroding the constitutional right to free speech. The DGB was often compared to the “Ministry of Truth” from George Orwell’s novel 1984.
Once DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas supposedly officially closed the DGB permanently in August, it appeared the story was over. But leaked documents from DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) paint a different picture.
The documents in question consist of a report from the agency’s advisory committee published in June. The report states that CISA “is positioned to play a unique and productive role in helping address the challenges” of “disinformation.”
The advisory committee included Vijaya Gadde, who served as Twitter’s chief of policy, trust, and safety. The report makes clear that she assumed a major role in crafting the disinformation work at CISA.
Additionally, Gadde shared insider information about Twitter with other members of the CISA committee. She even recommended that the agency consider “how many counter-narratives” it could put out in reaction to individual incidents.
Notably, Gadde is one of the many Twitter employees who was laid off on October 28 after Elon Musk took over at the social media giant.
The Intercept reports of CISA’s goals on the disinformation front:
In June, the same DHS advisory committee of CISA — which includes Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and University of Washington professor Kate Starbird — drafted a report to the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in shaping the “information ecosystem.” The report called on the agency to closely monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.” They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt the “spread of false and misleading information,” with a focus on information that undermines “key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or … other sectors such as the financial system, or public health measures.”
To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the “efficacy of interventions,” specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
A remark by Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, provides insight into how the agency seeks to combat disinformation.
“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” Easterly said at a conference in November 2021.
According to The Intercept, CISA has gradually expanded the scope of what it considers “critical infrastructure.” Last year it took aim at “conspiracy theorists” who believe 5G towers spread Covid-19, justifying its actions with the argument that such theories “are inciting attacks against the communications infrastructure.”
Of course, that’s the fallback of all totalitarian regimes. Anything and everything can be tied back to national defense or public safety in some way; thus, the government is justified in surveilling, monitoring, and interfering in all aspects of speech.
It should have been suspected that the administration would preserve the unconstitutional powers of the DGB under the deceptive guise of another agency. When tyrants grab hold of power, they never let it go willingly.
