Apollonian
Guest Columnist
DHS Censorship Agency Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On Election
NATION HAL TURNER 11 NOVEMBER 2022 HITS:Link: https://halturnerradioshow.com/inde...n-banning-speech-that-casts-doubt-on-election
Unfortunately, this country is headed for a horrible outcome. No self-governing society can suffer the strain to civil society that comes from loss of regime credibility. This overt and actual illegal censorship, in violation of the First Amendment, must be brought to a halt. How that takes place, really doesn't matter anymore.
The US Department of Homeland Security is actively engaged in the deprivation of American's constitutionally protected free speech rights. They are using our own tax money to strip away our rights. The full report, done by the Foundation for Freedom Online, appears below:
DHS Censorship Agency Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On Election
SUMMARY
- Network throttled millions of posts ahead of 2020 election, blocked “emerging narratives” from reaching “virality threshold.”
- Censors boast on video of getting tech companies to ban entire categories of election speech under threat of “huge regulatory pressure.”
- Months before the 2020 election, censors systematically targeted all speech categories that could challenge a future “red mirage, blue shift” election scenario.
What The Intercept glimpsed, 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 DHS speech control partners, as compiled from their own reports and videos:
- 22 Million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
- 859 Million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
- 120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;
- 15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation” often in real-time;
- <1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
- Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
- Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted, due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes that DHS partners openly plotted and bragged tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.
While The Intercept rightly noted that DHS's “truth cops“ now take on a range of other topics – such as Covid-19 and geopolitical opinions – it all started from, and grew out of, DHS's speech control infrastructure set up to censor speech about elections.
That started with the 2020 election. But it continues, importantly, with the 2022 midterm elections, which are ongoing this week.
At Foundation for Freedom Online, for more than six months, we have been publishing and sharing research findings about a wide span of shocking components to DHS's speech control operations. Our investigation has spurred multiple members of Congress to vow aggressive probes into DHS's “government censorship by proxy.”
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 — the censorship of the 2020 election.
Along the way, we will highlight the network's role in censoring the ongoing 2022 midterm elections.
In the final section of this report, we will cover a particularly disturbing aspect of this story — DHS's pre-censorship of speech that could “cast doubt” on a so-called “red mirage, blue shift” election scenario, months in advance of such an exact sequence playing out.
Background History & Cast Of Characters
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.
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.
The Government Side: Chris Krebs's CISA
The key coordinating hub for the government side is an “obscure government agency” named CISA, which is tucked within DHS, and was created by act of Congress in November 2018, nominally to defend America against cybersecurity threats from hostile foreign actors (e.g., Russian hackers).
CISA's longform name, the “Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency” has none of the Orwellian overtones of the “Disinformation Governance Board”. 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 “The agency that cares so much about security, it's in our name twice”.
CISA's mission was supposed to be cyber security. Not cyber censorship.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 2020 election.
First, on January 6, 2017, outgoing Obama Administration DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson designated “election infrastructure” as being “critical infrastructure” under the purview of DHS protection.
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.
CISA's Internet censorship power grew out of interpreting “critical infrastructure” beyond its hard physical meaning to apply to meta-physical concepts. By 2019, “foreign disinformation” on social media was increasingly framed as a “cyber threat” to election infrastructure.
Through this framing mechanism, CISA's “cybersecurity” authority morphed into a “cybercensorship” authority. However, this move was initially limited to CISA only targeting “foreign disinformation”, through DHS's Countering Foreign Influence Task Force.
But when the 2016 election-era “Russian interference” Special Prosecutor's probe ended in July 2019 with former FBI Director Robert Mueller's failure to find “collusion” between then-President Trump and outside Russians, DHS and CISA began to change their tunes.
The entire “countering Russian disinformation on social media” apparatus that had been constructed before July 2019 to censor, throttle and identify “foreign disinformation” was quietly, but entirely, pivoted to focus inward on “domestic disinformation.”
This “Foreign-To-Domestic Disinformation Switcheroo” 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 “domestic disinformation” was now a greater “cyber threat to elections” than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.
This meant that, henceforth, any US citizen posting what DHS considered “misinformation” online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure. That was the legal framework under which DHS – and CISA particularly – drew their jurisdiction.
To illustrate this, we've put together a supercut of DHS censorship network partners switching from a “foreign” to a “domestic” predicate for censorship between the 2016 election and the 2020 election:
DHS's Foreign-To-Domestic Disinformation Switcheroo
So CISA's self-invented censorship powers against “foreign disinformation” went from being pointed outward against supposed Russian bot accounts to being pointed inwards at tens of millions of US citizens simply talking lawfully about their own elections.
The main character in the CISA side of this story is its then-director in 2020, Chris Krebs. After the 2020 election, CISA's leadership baton was handed to current head Jen Easterly, covered below.
Since this is a story about government censorship and abuse of power, Chris Krebs's public statements on censorship issues provide insight into the founding intent of the government censorship operation that first grew out of Krebs setting it up. Here are eight data points useful to bear in mind:
- Krebs said in April 2022 that the Hunter Biden laptop still looked like Russian disinformation and that Krebs didn't care whether it was or wasn't Russian disinformation; the important positive thing, he stressed, was that news media did not cover the laptop during the 2020 election cycle
- Krebs, who administered the federal side of the 2020 election after DHS effectively nationalized election infrastructure on January 6, 2017, said that every lawyer who represented conservative clients on claims concerning 2020 election irregularities should be permanently disbarred and banned from legal practice for life.
- Krebs said he hopes conservative media outlets are bankrupted and forced to pay billions in damages in the ongoing lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. He stressed the same fate should apply to anyone in the news media who questioned US voting machines during the 2020 election, which he helped administer.
- Krebs said he personally canceled his DirecTV subscription in protest of conservative-leaning OANN having been allowed to have a platform on cable.
- Krebs said that the sitting President in 2020, Donald Trump, was a national security threat because he espoused domestic “disinformation.”
- Krebs said he feels equally passionate about the need to censor critics of government Covid-19 protocols as he does about censoring critics of government election administration issues.
- Krebs is so passionate about censorship he even called for a social media crackdown on the sale of humor tee-shirts that make jokes about Covid-19.
- Krebs has repeatedly said on record that “misinformation” is the single biggest threat to election security. Note that Kreb's role in government was not supposed to be as arbiter of truth; he was supposed to be a cybersecurity expert from Microsoft. Yet US domestic citizen opinions on social media became, in Kreb's estimate, the top “cyber” security threat facing the US, replacing foreign hacking and malware.
First, shortly before President Biden's inauguration, Krebs started a private consulting firm with former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, simply called “Krebs Stamos Group.”
Stamos, covered extensively below, was perhaps the top figure overseeing the entire private sector side of the public-private censorship enterprise that Krebs and Stamos jointly built to censor populist political voices during the 2020 election.
It was Stamos who, according to his own group's report, pitched the idea in July 2020 for DHS to even create a government censorship apparatus in the first place. Although, as we will cover, there is reason to believe such plans between Krebs and Stamos may have started considerably earlier than that reported date.
We will cover this Krebs-Stamos government-academia censorship relationship further below.
Krebs's other role right after leaving CISA was becoming chair of the Aspen Institute's “Commission on Information Disorder,” to galvanize a stronger “ whole-of-society” approach to censoring rumors and misinformation on the Internet.
Thus, Krebs – the original government censor – transitioned seamlessly through the revolving door of industry, into lucrative partnerships with private sector censorship professionals and prestigious civil society groups whose stated goal is decreasing the freedom of US citizen speech on the Internet.
Today, Krebs's seat at the head of CISA is now occupied by Jen Easterly, a former military intelligence official who was deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA) for counterterrorism. She appears to be taking her military intelligence experience squashing foreign terrorists from Tehran and using it to squash American populists on Twitter.
In October 2021, Easterly and Krebs held a 30-minute taped discussion for CISA's “Cybersecurity Summit 2021: Continuity of Excellence” summit, in which they mutually agreed that Krebs's construction of a “counter-misinformation” conglomerate with the private sector was among the top structures to preserve and expand at DHS going forward.
Easterly's inheritance of Krebs's censorship machine appears to be corroborated in the ongoing State Attorney General “big tech collusion” lawsuit versus the Biden Administration. There, the court recently ruled that Easterly can be deposed because of her “first-hand knowledge” of the censorship “nerve center” run out of CISA, her seeking “greater censorship… done by federal pressure on social media platforms”, and her reported statements that CISA's “most critical infrastructure is a cognitive infrastructure.”
Before discussing the private sector side, it should be noted that the government apparatus at DHS is now larger and scattered beyond just CISA. As we have previously reported.
Let's now move on to the private sector side of the equation. To whom did Chris Krebs and CISA outsource the task of mass social media censorship of the 2020 election? Who runs the private sector side and how is it all structured?
The Election Integrity Partnership
The main institutional character on the private sector side we will focus on in this story is a “counter-disinformation” collective called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). EIP is made up of four of the most powerful and politically well-connected social media monitoring and mass-reporting groups in the world. Their respective directors were all early industry pioneers in the rise of the censorship industry after the 2016 election.
The four entities comprising EIP are two universities, an influential foreign policy think tank, and a private social media analytics firm. They are, respectively:
- Stanford Internet Observatory;
- Washington University's (UW) Center for an Informed Public;
- The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab; and
- Graphika.
- Washington University's (UW) Center for an Informed Public;
Each of the four entities comprising EIP is also deeply connected to the US military and foreign policy establishment. These four institutions further came into the 2020 election cycle with deep pre-existing connections to the major social media companies' content moderation teams, having worked together on censorship issues since the field first began developing in 2017.
It is very helpful to understand EIP's network and operations in depth, because it was through EIP that DHS built the infrastructure for its current role as government coordinator of takedowns and throttling of US citizen speech online.
Just to make this all perfectly clear up front, below is EIP leader Alex Stamos explaining the whole DHS-EIP partnership was set up to outsource censorship through EIP, “to try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves” because the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations”:
EIP - "Fill The Gaps In Gov't" "Lacked Funding & Legal Authorization" for Censorship
“Lack of legal authorizations” is a nice way of saying “illegal.” At best, legally dubious. So right there, you have Stamos directly saying the government couldn't do it, so the government deputized Stamos's politically like-minded outside network to do the dirty work.
Above, you may have heard Stamos euphemistically refer to EIP's disinformation “research”, but it's important to understand EIP did not just do “research”: they manually flagged posts and personally pressured for policy changes. That is active censorship, not passive research:
EIP - Bragging That They Pushed The Envelope On Censorship Policies; Threat Of Regulation
And below is Stamos being interviewed by The New York Times on August 26, 2020, right after EIP and DHS completed their planning sessions agreeing for EIP to do the censorship dirty work federal government insiders wanted done but weren't allowed to do themselves. Stamos here describes how he had already lined up the tech companies to join the public-private censorship apparatus so EIP could quickly go straight from scanning posts to banning them:
Alex Stamos - EIP Contacted Tech Companies After DHS Censorship Pitch
Full quote from clip above, for reference:
So right there with those two clips above alone, you have Krebs's partner Stamos describing how DHS and EIP will collectively get around the presumed illegality of direct government censorship by outsourcing it to EIP, and then EIP pre-loading a multi-platform censorship network directly with the tech platforms — all to squash a target set of US voters talking about their own elections.“We have reached out and we have had two-way conversations with all of the major platforms. Right, so we've had really good conversations with all of the major platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit… so that's been good. So I think our goal is that if we're able to find disinformation, we'll be able to report it quickly, and then collaborate with them on taking it down. There's a good precedent for this, which is that all four of these organizations have worked on research projects side by side with tech platforms.” (Emphasis added)
Note that Stamos brags “there is a good precedent” that this plot to censor domestic speech will work because “all four” of the EIP organizations worked with the tech platforms to take down foreign speech previously.
It's as if they see no difference between a social media user being a US citizen or being a hostile foreign nation-state when it comes to speech about US elections.
It is important to understand (and we will cover the numbers below) that this is way bigger than just censoring one story, like the Hunter Biden laptop, for “Russian disinformation.” This is taking the entire digital speech throttling apparatus built to stop “Russian interference” after the 2016 election, and turning it lock stock and barrel against US citizens talking about US elections, for every election forevermore.
The Intercept revealed a “Facebook portal” the government can access to flag content, but what's already in use by DHS and EIP is much, much worse.
Below, you'll see DHS, EIP and social media companies all on a shared real-time chat app (Jira Service Desk) to coordinate speech takedowns all as a single, seamless unit. Below are two sample screenshots EIP provided in their own report for the example of their work to censor posts sharing the 2020 election #Sharpiegate narrative, which concerned alleged voting irregularities related to the use of overbleed markers.
Note that “EI-ISAC” in this chat below is DHS's “cyber mission control”, who the rest of the world thought was just a 24/7 cybersecurity center having nothing to do with coordinating the censorship of trending narratives on Twitter.
Censorship collusion screenshot #1:
Censorship collusion screenshot #2:
Notice that in the above conversation, the redacted “Government partner” didn't even fully dispel the narrative tagged as “misinformation”. They actually appear somewhat to confirm citizen concerns. “Government partner” at 11:27 AM and 11:32 AM says sharpies may invalidate votes, but “the machines (by Federal law) are required to kick that ballot back” and that could “invalidate” votes after giving a warning. So if warnings were not given or officials didn't follow federal law, votes indeed may have been impacted by the markers.
FBI officials are supposed to follow federal law when filling out FISA warrant applications to spy on people. Sometimes the law isn't followed. Should there be a government censorship bureau to pre-ban all social media narratives that suggest someone might not be following federal law?
The point is: we don't know, and even the censors didn't know the ground truth with certainty. And yet the entire narrative was censored off the Internet anyway, in real-time, in shady back rooms, in cahoots with DHS, and unbeknownst to the entire rest of the country participating in election discourse.
EIP, in their own report, shows they throttled 822,477 tweets alone on the #Sharpiegate topic. And that's just Twitter — not including YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms named in the tickets above. That means millions of posts were impacted.
And EIP had over 600 tickets like this just for the 2020 election alone. (And then they went and helped the government censor Covid)
Also, why are the names of the government partners on EIP's tickets redacted? What's with the secrecy? Don't they work for us?
We refer to Stamos's EIP network in this report statically as just “EIP” because our focus is election censorship, but it is important to understand that the specific network around EIP plays an extraordinary role in government censorship well beyond just in the election context.
For example, government censorship roles and EIP censorship jobs are a revolving door. For example:
CISA chief Chris Krebs founded a two-man firm with EIP Stanford Alex Stamos;
- CISA chief Krebs's top CISA deputy, Matt Masterson, joined EIP Stanford;
- EIP Stanford's Alex Stamos is on CISA's “Cyber Hygiene” advisor subcommittee;
- EIP Stanford's Renee DiResta gives lectures at CISA disinformation summits;
- EIP UW's Kate Starbird heads CISA's “disinformation” advisor subcommittee;
- EIP network affiliate Maria Barsallo Lynch was just hired by CISA to help censor the 2024 election
- EIP Stanford's Alex Stamos is on CISA's “Cyber Hygiene” advisor subcommittee;
DHS and EIP aren't just a revolving door of government censorship personnel. They're also a revolving door of government censorship priorities.
For example, while EIP started out censoring elections for Chris Kreb's CISA, after the 2020 election, EIP changed its name and re-branded as an entity called the “Virality Project” (VP). VP did the exact same government censorship job EIP did, except censoring Covid-19 instead of censoring elections. And now the tight-knit network is back calling themselves EIP again, censoring the 2022 midterm elections this week.
To make this perfectly clear, below is a formal CISA conference lecture in 2021 given by Alex Stamos's top EIP Stanford lieutenant Renee DiResta, who explains this part of this revolving door to government partners at DHS:
As we will cover in a future report, VP ended up censoring, with its government partners, 66 unique social media narratives going viral online concerning Covid during the 2021 calendar year. Not 66 posts. 66 entire narratives. That had the effect of impacting millions of posts and potentially altering the entire political trajectory of the American citizenry's response to the Covid pandemic.
Let's now turn to the specific four institutions and myriad leaders comprising EIP, because the public statements and professional history of the censors is a useful lens from which to understand the intent of the censorship.
Stanford Internet Observatory:
The Stanford Internet Observatory (“SIO” or “Stanford disinfo lab”) is an academic center set up in June 2019 for the purposes of promoting Internet censorship policies and for doing real-time social media narrative monitoring of targeted political and social causes.
During the 2020 election, SIO had 50 “misinformation” analysts at the university assigned to monitor conservative social media posts after SIO began its partnership with CISA.
Before receiving a $3 million government grant from the Biden Administration in 2021 after censoring the Biden Administration's political opposition in 2020, SIO was originally funded by private foundations such as Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Omidyar Network, and the Charles Koch Foundation.
SIO is run by its director Alex Stamos and its research manager Renee DiResta.
Stamos is the former Chief Security Officer of Facebook (now Meta) who led Facebook's response to alleged “Russian disinformation” after the 2016 election. He left the social media giant in 2018 after reportedly clashing with top brass.
Stamos's quite explicit goal is to end the era of the traditional free and open Internet and move toward a controlled “cable news network” model where socially impactful views must first be authorized by a gatekeeper:
Alex Stamos - Goal Is To Turn Social Media Companies Into Cable News Gatekeepers
In case there's any ambiguity as to Stamos's worldview on censorship, in the clip below from June 2021, Stamos states quite plainly that the target for censorship is simply ordinary people with large follower accounts who have the ability to impact public narratives:
Alex Stamos - The Target Is Ordinary People With Large Social Media Followings
As noted above, Stamos has a close personal and business relationship with Chris Krebs and the broader DHS-CISA “disinformation” network. In December 2019, Krebs, then head of CISA, traveled from Washington, DC to California (when Stamos's Stanford lab was just three months old) for a personal roundtable with Stamos and his new “misinformation” team at Stanford (they specifically discussed “election security” for the 2020 election, which includes “misinformation”).
When Chris Krebs was terminated from CISA after the 2020 election, Chris Krebs immediately started a two-man business consultancy firm with Stamos in January 2021 called Krebs-Stamos Group. Krebs the government side, Stamos the private sector side.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, while Chris Krebs was running CISA, Stamos was a frequent panel speaker on CISA “disinformation” panels.
In December 2021, with Jen Easterly at CISA's helm, Stamos was directly made a member of CISA's private sector advisory committee, where he has regular meetings with CISA brass.
Stamos's top lieutenant at the Stanford disinfo lab is research manager Renee DiResta.
DiResta, as noted above, gave a 15 minute keynote lecture at a taxpayer-funded October 2021 CISA summit, in which DiResta described how EIP and DHS worked together to censor social media narratives at scale before, during and after the 2020 election,
The prominent role Renee DiResta plays in EIP – a government-partnered Internet censorship consortium – is particularly worrisome and disturbing.
Before DiResta became research manager at the Stanford disinfo lab, she was research director for a now-notorious, scandal-laden and disgraced political hatchet firm known as New Knowledge LLC.
In December 2018, the New York Times exposed that DiResta's Democrat donor-funded small cybersecurity firm, New Knowledge, had clandestinely created thousands of fake “Russian bots” (user accounts generated with a virtual private network (VPN) to simulate a Russian IP address) on Twitter and Facebook then mass subscribed those fake “Russian bots” to opposition Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore's campaign.
DiResta did this – or at least the small firm where she was a director did this — in the heat of the Nov. 2017 Alabama special election, which substantially decided the party control of the US Senate. It was a race in which Moore narrowly lost, and for whose loss New Knowledge – in its own report — took credit.
At the time, mainstream news genuinely thought Roy Moore was being backed by Russians. But it was just DiResta's professional disinformation firm interfering in the election.
See, e.g., Fox News's coverage here:
The scandal was so outrageous that DiResta's future co-partner in the EIP censorship coalition, the Atlantic Council, called out how egregiously disastrous and morally repugnant the depths of her company's deception was in effectively rigging the Senate vote with fake Russian bots:
Atlantic Council Acknowledges New Knowledge Scandal (Dan Fried and Alina Polyakova)_1
The inauthentic Russian bot activity DiResta's firm generated was forensically detected by Facebook, who banned the CEO of DiResta's firm from Facebook, as well as four other DiResta associates.
According to the New York Times, DiResta's firm had bragged in an internal report after Moore lost the election: “We orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”
That report (available in part here) appears to show DiResta's company avidly tracking mainstream media pickup of their plot to deploy fake Russian bots then paint their political opponent as a Russian stooge.
Meanwhile, at the time in Nov. 2017, DiResta had the chutzpah to appear on live TV as an expert on “social media disinformation” — opining on disinformation in the very Senate race her firm was secretly conducting “black hat” false flag cyber operations on behind the scenes. The whole time on TV, she never disclosed a word about the most heinous social media election disinformation campaign ever caught red-handed in the modern era — her own.
Renee DiResta Nov. 2017 - False Flagging Roy Moore In Her Own Op On National TV
Yet despite what is perhaps the most dubious pockmark possible for a self-professed expert on “Russian disinformation”, DiResta would go on to be a lead author of the Democrat-led Senate Intelligence Report on “Russian disinformation in the 2016 election” in November 2019.
DiResta's discredited firm also told the Senate Intelligence Committee that a “Russian troll farm” had secretly supported Jill Stein's Green Party candidacy in 2016 with Facebook meme pages. This claim had the effect of delegitimizing Jill Stein's vote tally, which CNN suggested was responsible for Hillary Clinton's failure to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
In a heated January 2019 exchange, Jill Stein called out CNN's uncritical amplification of New Knowledge “Russian Facebook meme” allegations. This exchange is also useful to demonstrate how this censorship consortium targets the populist left as well as the populist right:
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