House Judiciary Committee: After a Lawsuit by State AGs Trying to Stop the Department of "Homeland Security" from Censoring Americans' Speech, DHS Immediately Outsourced the Censorship to a Friendly Nonprofit

People. Need. To Go. To Prison.

This seems to indicate that the DHS knew what it was doing would not stand up to any legal scrutiny.

So instead, they simply schemed to get a non-government third party to do what the government is forbidden to do itself. That doesn't work. A cop cannot ask a landlord to go into someone's apartment and do a quick search for him. The landlord immediately becomes an agent of the state, with all the same constitutional restrictions -- and requirements of seeking a warrant before a search of the premises -- that the cop has.

The Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency outsourced its "censorship operation" to a nonprofit it funded following a First Amendment lawsuit by Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general, "implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional," according to an interim staff report by House Judiciary Committee Republicans shared with Just the News.

CISA also wanted to use the Center for Internet Security, which operates the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) and Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), as its "mouthpiece" to obfuscate its own role in censorship, the report says.

It cites spring 2022 meeting notes from the subcommittee on "Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation," which was established by CISA's Cybersecurity Advisory Committee.

The notes show that the so-called MDM Subcommittee was "fully aware" of the contemporaneous "severe public outcry" about DHS's Disinformation Governance Board, which was disbanded after a few months, and the AGs' lawsuit against the Biden administration and CISA for pressuring social media to censor disfavored narratives, according to the report.

The subcommittee discussed circumventing the First Amendment by outsourcing these activities to third parties, which would also "avoid the appearance of government propaganda," according to meeting notes quoted by House Judiciary Republicans.

The report characterized this as "laundering" the government's messages through EI-ISAC.

Spaulding emailed Kate Starbird, cofounder of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public and MDM Subcommittee chair, worrying that it was "only a matter of time" before their work was publicly exposed and suggesting they be "proactive in telling our story." Starbird agreed, saying they had "a couple of pretty obvious vulnerabilities."

Biden also empowered CISA -- actual government agency -- to censor "malinformation," which is true information The Regime doesn't want its subjects talking about.

The Biden administration's war on so-called disinformation included a federal initiative to censor "malinformation," information that is true but inconvenient to the Democrat ruling regime.

On Monday, lawmakers on the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government published an interim report on the Department of Homeland Security's "disinformation" programs within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). According to the report, CISA "metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government's domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media," and has steadily expanded the scope of its censorship since 2018.

"In 2022 and 2023, in response to growing public and private criticism of CISA's unconstitutional behavior, CISA attempted to camouflage its activities, duplicitously claiming it serves a purely 'informational' role," the report reads.

CISA ultimately outsourced its dystopian censorship regime to third-party nonprofits and colluded with Big Tech companies to suppress information deemed incorrect or harmful to regime narratives. CISA, lawmakers wrote, "exploited its connections with Big Tech and government-funded non-profits to censor, by proxy, in order to circumvent the First Amendment's prohibition against government-induced censorship."

"This included the creation of reporting 'portals' which funneled 'misinformation' reports directly to social media platforms," the report says.<

The government's disinformation efforts extended to the censorship of "malinformation," defined by CISA as "based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate."

"In other words, malinformation is factual information that is objectionable not because it is false or untruthful, but because it is provided without adequate 'context' -- context as determined by the government," lawmakers explained.

More at the link.

posted by Lamont the Big Dummy at 06:33 PM

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