The War on [Domestic] Terror EXPOSED

The curtain has been pulled back even further on the coordinated efforts to stifle First Amendment rights. Last week, we published a thorough article exposing the coordinated efforts of government agencies and tech companies to silence dissenting opinions, attack specific people and organizations, and control what information you can find online. 

Earlier this week, The Intercept published a damning report that sheds further light on just how far this conspiracy goes. You may remember back in April when we published an article about the Biden Administration’s newly announced “Disinformation Governance Board (DGB)”.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas spoke about the “just established” governance board during a congressional hearing on Wednesday, arguing it would help reduce domestic threats to the United States.

During the hearing, Ohio Congresswoman Lauren Underwood said that “foreign adversaries attempt to destabilize our elections by targeting people of color with disinformation campaigns.”

“A newer trend that we saw in the 2020 election and already in the 2022 midterms is that disinformation is being heavily targeted at Spanish-speaking voters, sparking and fueling conspiracy theories,” she added.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shuttered the board in May after it had been operational for less than a month. But newly-leaked documents (along with discovery documents from a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry show that the DGB is still alive and well – even if the board itself no longer exists.

In particular, the DHS sub-agency CISA, or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has been most active in efforts to combat “mis-, dis-, and mal- information,” or what it abbreviates as “MDM.” 

In particular, the DHS sub-agency CISA, or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has been most active in efforts to combat “mis-, dis-, and mal- information,” or what it abbreviates as “MDM.” The report makes use of recently leaked or unsealed internal documents, giving a view into the kinds of conversations corporate executives and government officials have had over how to handle potentially harmful online narratives and sensitive topics. Minutes from a March meeting between FBI and CISA officials and execs from JPMorgan Chase and Twitter show feds and corporate leaders discussing how to approach state-sponsored disinformation campaigns on major platforms.

In the March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.”

“We do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions, and we independently evaluate content in line with the Twitter Rules,” a spokesperson for Twitter wrote in a statement to The Intercept.

There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

As of Oct. 31, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login was still live – despite the public uproar earlier this year when attorneys general in 20 states threatened legal action unless the Biden administration immediately disbanded the “Orwellian” Disinformation Governance Board.

Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, told The Defender that collusion between the U.S. government and media companies to censor U.S. citizens is nothing new — but it’s become a “catastrophic trend.”

Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” told The Defender:

“The Intercept’s reporting validates what many knew was being undertaken by the Department of Homeland Security, despite the scrapping of its Disinformation Governance Board.”

Rectenwald said the coordination between government and media companies validates his claim that social media companies are not merely “private companies” but are “state and uni-party apparatuses” — what he has called “governmentalities” — that “augment the state by adding precision, scope, and penetration to state power.”

The government reported nearly 4,800 social media posts to the respective platforms during the election. More than a third were then either removed or labeled as potential misinformation. Hostile foreign actors spreading disinformation is certainly a real thing, but the vast majority of online misinformation is likely to be much more drab.

 In one amusing example cited by The Intercept, the DHS forwarded accounts to Twitter that could be mistaken for official government entities; one, with fewer than 60 followers, featured the Twitter bio, “dm us your weed store locations (hoes be mad, but this is a parody account).”

CISA, along with the FBI, met regularly with social-media entities as recently as August. Notes show that during these meetings, platforms such as Twitter were requested to “process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.”

Vijaya Gadde, former general counsel for Twitter who was fired this week as part of Musk’s efforts to clean house, was part of an advisory committee overseeing CISA at the time. During her tenure, Gadde helped draft a report advocating that  the body expand its role in the “information ecosystem.”

You can’t make this stuff up, folks. (Well… Maybe George Orwell could.)

As The Intercept pointed out, the Privacy Act of 1974, created after the Watergate scandal, restricts the government’s ability to collect data from Americans as they exercise their First Amendment rights.

Civil liberty groups have contended the statute limits the ability of the DHS and the FBI to surveil the political speech of Americans on social media, but the statute has exemptions for information collected for the purposes of a criminal or law enforcement investigation.

Faiza Patel, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept, “There are no specific legal constraints on the FBI’s use of social media. The attorney general guidelines permit agents to look at social media before there is any investigation at all.”

“So it’s kind of a Wild West out there,” she added.

Journalists Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang explain that the extent to which the DHS initiatives affect Americans’ daily social feeds is unclear. During the 2020 election, the government flagged numerous posts as suspicious, many of which were then taken down, documents cited in the Missouri attorney general’s lawsuit disclosed. 

And a 2021 report by the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University found that of nearly 4,800 flagged items, technology platforms took action on 35 percent — either removing, labeling, or soft-blocking speech, meaning the users were only able to view content after bypassing a warning screen. The research was done “in consultation with CISA,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives. According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative, still ongoing, between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.

Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020. Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to “process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.” In practice, this often meant state election officials sent examples of potential forms of disinformation to CISA, which would then forward them on to social media companies for a response.

Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, told The Defender that collusion between the U.S. government and media companies to censor U.S. citizens is nothing new — but it’s become a “catastrophic trend.”

Miller continued: “Thus, for going on three years now, it’s been treated as a crime against humanity to question any of the ‘COVID measures’ forced on all humanity by governments worldwide — especially COVID ‘vaccination,’ which is itself a crime against humanity, and yet it’s dangerous to say as much.

“Likewise, it’s now treated as (somehow) a crime against democracy, and a dire threat to ‘national security,’ to question the results of an election, with those who do so-called ‘election deniers,’ — as if disbelief in the official outcome of a presidential or congressional race is somehow tantamount to Holocaust [original emphasis] denial.”

Glenn Greenwald, journalist, author and lawyer, also pointed out there is a problematic narrative circulating that regards censorship as both justifiable and morally necessary.

Greenwald, one of the three editors who in 2014 co-founded The Intercept, wrote in an Oct. 28 Substack post:

“Look to any government or society in which censorship prevailed — either today or throughout history. This narrative about why censorship is not just justified but morally necessary is always present.

“Nobody wants to think of themselves as a censorship supporter. They need to be supplied with a story about why they are something different, or at least why the censorship they are led to support is uniquely justified.

“And it works because, in the most warped sense possible, it appeals to reason. If one really believes, as millions of American liberals do, that the U.S. faces two and only two choices — either (1) elect Democrats and ensure they rule or (2) live under a white nationalist fascist dictatorship — then of course such people will believe that media disinformation campaigns, censorship, and other forms of authoritarianism are necessary to ensure Democrats win and their opponents are vanquished.

“Once that self-glorifying rationale is embraced — our adversaries do not merely disagree with us but cause harm with the expression of their views [original emphasis] — then the more suppression, the better.”

“And that is exactly what is happening now,” Greenwald added.

HS’s expansion into misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation represents an important strategic retooling for the agency, which was founded in 2002 in response to the 9/11 attacks as a bulwark to coordinate intelligence and security operations across the government. At the same time, the FBI deployed thousands of agents to focus on counterterrorism efforts, through building informant networks and intelligence operations designed to prevent similar attacks.

But traditional forms of terrorism, posed by groups like Al Qaeda, evolved with the rise of social media, with groups like the Islamic State using platforms such as Facebook to recruit and radicalize new members. After initial reluctance, social media giants worked closely with the FBI and DHS to help monitor and remove ISIS-affiliated accounts.

FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee that law enforcement agencies needed to rapidly “adapt and confront the challenges” posed by terror networks that had proven adept at tapping into social media. Intelligence agencies backed new startups designed to monitor the vast flow of information across social networks to better understand emerging narratives and risks.

Another FBI official, a joint terrorism task force officer, described to The Intercept being reassigned this year from the bureau’s international terrorism division, where they had primarily worked on cases involving Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group, to the domestic terrorism division to investigate Americans, including anti-government individuals such as racially motivated violent extremists, sovereign citizens, militias, and anarchists. 

They work on an undercover basis online to penetrate social networking chat rooms, online forums, and blogs to detect, enter, dismantle, and disrupt existing and emerging terrorist organizations via online forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs, websites, and social networking.

This censorship may well have cost MILLIONS of lives over the past 2 years. We watched as all the life-saving work to which we’ve dedicated our lives became increasingly harder to find and access. In addition to having our social media channels blocked, banned, and deleted, we’ve also suffered attempted hacking attacks on our sites and even direct censorship inside our audience’s personal accounts.

America is currently laying the infrastructure for hate and dehumanization that weaponizes their agenda to “fact-check” and “debunk” any dissenting voices or free speech by tying it to terrorist threats or potential acts of violence.

Once the government has adequately classified anyone who disagrees with them as rebels and terrorists, they can begin the detention of those citizens. When the majority of a population sees others as non-human threats to the nation, they’ll support any means necessary to remove them from society. 

The slippery slope is real. The propaganda machine is running at full steam. 

Fortunately, the collusion, censorship, and corrupt practices that have become commonplace in this nation (and abroad) are finally coming to light. 

Want to fight back? Here’s how:

1 | Education is KEY to breaking free and restoring our freedoms and liberties – so the FIRST step is to WATCH our upcoming docu-series Propaganda EXPOSED [UNCENSORED] to learn the truth that sets us free … and then SHARE it with your loved ones. This is the ONLY way we will beat the censorship that has kept our life-saving content from those that need it most. (You can reserve your spot to watch the entire series for free here.)

2 | Comment in the federal register about your concerns and experiences with the COVID shot. Even stating your opposition is meaningful. (Here’s a crash course in public commentary.)

3 | Vote for candidates who will protect health freedom, freedom of speech, and parental rights. (This is a great resource.)

4 | Support your local campaigns by going to rallies, volunteering for door-to-door canvassing, and donating to organizations that promote your rights. (Here’s a great place to start.)

5 | Talk to everyone. The upcoming midterm election is critical for our freedoms and will impact the level to which your vote counts. Midterm elections have historically had very low turnout. Mobilizing like-minded people can have a HUGE effect – especially when it comes to local offices. (Here’s a great article written by pro-vax people. While we don’t agree with them, the approach they recommend is ideal for reaching across the aisle.)

6 | Join local organizations. Personally, we support Stand for Health Freedom, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting informed consent in medical care for individuals and families by helping Americans protect their fundamental rights by engaging in the political process. Find an organization that is aligned with your beliefs. We’re all stronger together.