One of the big questions that those of us involved in exposing the secret U.S. government censorship effort have been asking ourselves over the last few months is: did the people involved know that they were breaking the law?
That question appears to have been answered with a resounding yes by the House Judiciary Committee. Yesterday it released its report, “The Weaponization of CISA: How a ‘Cybersecurity’ Agency Colluded with Big Tech and ‘Disinformation’ Partners to Censor Americans,” on government censorship.
“It’s only a matter of time,” wrote a former assistant general counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an email to a colleague, “before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.”
The “we” in that sentence refers to the network of government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that we and others have dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex. That Complex includes the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Its leader, Kate Starbird, responded to the former CIA official, Susan Spaulding, by saying, “Yes. I agree. We have a couple of pretty obvious vulnerabilities.”
But one day later, Starbird dismissed the notion that she and her colleagues were doing anything wrong. The real problem was, she explained, that “current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms” and that CISA may face “bad faith criticism” for its censorship.
What is “malinformation”? It’s accurate information that might lead people to come to the wrong conclusions — or do things that Starbird, Spaulding, and their allies didn’t want them to do, like not getting vaccinated against Covid-19.
In truth, America’s taxpayer-funded censors view themselves not only as the good guys but as superheroes. One of the leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex, Jen Easterly, the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security, has as her Twitter photo a cartoon image of herself as a superhero complete with a cape.
