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A subcommittee of the House’s Homeland Security Committee held a hearing on May 11 called “Censorship Laundering: How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Enables the Silencing of Dissent.” Chairman Dan Bishop (R-NC) said the hearing would examine possible government overreach in a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program that could be used to monitor mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM) posted online by American citizens.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten was one of the panelists and testified about his belief that CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, censors the speech of conservative Americans.
Recently, I was invited to testify before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Accountability for a hearing entitled “Censorship Laundering: How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Enables the Silencing of Dissent.” That hearing centered on the role of CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in censoring the speech of Americans, first on election integrity, then on COVID-19, and now seemingly on every contentious issue directly and by proxy.
“CISA has served as a censorship conductor, driving regular meetings between security agencies and social media companies aimed at encouraging the platforms to combat purported myths and disinformation — that is, to censor disfavored speech, as the government so deems it and by the government that regulates them, and they have. CISA has served as a censorship switchboard, in its words, collecting purported misinformation from government and non-government actors in the form of tweets, YouTube videos, and even private Facebook messages and relaying the flagged content to the platforms to squelch it. And CISA has served as an architect of the broader public-private censorship regime, helping originate, consult, network, and partner with often government-linked third parties to themselves serve as First Amendment circumventing mass surveillance and mass censorship enterprises.“
These efforts have been integral to the broader war on wrongthink that I often return to here in my Straight Arrow News commentaries.
