Truth Cops

Leaked Documents Outline DHS's Plans to Police Disinformation

Ken Klippenstein, Lee Fang
October 31 2022, 2:00 a.m.

The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts
to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The
Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and
documents--obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as
public documents--illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to
influence tech platforms.

The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came
into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new
"Disinformation Governance Board": a panel designed to police
misinformation (false information spread unintentionally),
disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and
malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context,
with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While
the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then
shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS
pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate--the
war on terror--has been wound down.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the
U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse.
According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit
filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is
also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and
scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics
of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally
misleading information.

Key Takeaways

* Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance
Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing.
* DHS plans to target inaccurate information on "the origins of the
COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial
justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S.
support to Ukraine."
* Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners
to report disinformation directly.

"Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov't. It's really
interesting how hesitant they remain," Microsoft executive Matt
Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS
director, in February.

In a 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.

DHS's mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around
Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking
shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions
around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents
collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including
current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the
evolution of more active measures by DHS.

According to a draft copy of DHS's Quadrennial Homeland Security
Review, DHS's capstone report outlining the department's strategy and
priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target
"inaccurate information" on a wide range of topics, including "the
origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19
vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the
nature of U.S. support to Ukraine."

"The challenge is particularly acute in marginalized communities,"
the report states, "which are often the targets of false or
misleading information, such as false information on voting
procedures targeting people of color."

The inclusion of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is
particularly noteworthy, given that House Republicans, should they
take the majority in the midterms, have vowed to investigate. "This
makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue," said Rep. Mike
Johnson, R-La., a member of the Armed Services Committee, adding that
finding answers "will be a top priority."

How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly
articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes
disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make
politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous
speech.

The inherently subjective nature of what constitutes
disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make
politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous
speech.

DHS justifies these goals--which have expanded far beyond its
original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation
originating domestically--by claiming that terrorist threats can be
"exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online." But
the laudable goal of protecting Americans from danger has often been
used to conceal political maneuvering. In 2004, for instance, DHS
officials faced pressure from the George W. Bush administration to
heighten the national threat level for terrorism, in a bid to
influence voters prior to the election, according to former DHS
Secretary Tom Ridge. U.S. officials have routinely lied about an
array of issues, from the causes of its wars in Vietnam and Iraq to
their more recent obfuscation around the role of the National
Institutes of Health in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology's
coronavirus research.

That track record has not prevented the U.S. government from seeking
to become arbiters of what constitutes false or dangerous information
on inherently political topics. Earlier this year, Republican Gov.
Ron DeSantis signed a law known by supporters as the "Stop WOKE Act,"
which bans private employers from workplace trainings asserting an
individual's moral character is privileged or oppressed based on his
or her race, color, sex, or national origin. The law, critics
charged, amounted to a broad suppression of speech deemed offensive.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, has
since filed a lawsuit against DeSantis, alleging "unconstitutional
censorship." A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of the Stop
WOKE Act, ruling that the law had violated workers' First Amendment
rights.

"Florida's legislators may well find plaintiffs' speech 'repugnant.'
But under our constitutional scheme, the 'remedy' for repugnant
speech is more speech, not enforced silence," wrote Judge Mark
Walker, in a colorful opinion castigating the law.

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.

The stepped up counter-disinformation effort began in 2018 following
high-profile hacking incidents of U.S. firms, when Congress passed
and President Donald Trump signed the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency Act, forming a new wing of DHS devoted
to protecting critical national infrastructure. An August 2022
report by the DHS Office of Inspector General sketches the rapidly
accelerating move toward policing disinformation.

From the outset, CISA boasted of an "evolved mission" to monitor
social media discussions while "routing disinformation concerns" to
private sector platforms.

Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote:
> The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts
> to curb speech it considers dangerous,

Which right there that should trigger everyone's "but who watches the
watchers" response.

To make up a current news example, in Putin's Russia today, Putin would
consider any news report of a Ukranian counter attack success against
Russian troops as "dangerous" and desperately want to suppress it.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world would consider suppressing any news
report of Ukranian successes as itself being the "dangerous" part.

Those put into a position where they get to decide what is "right" have
enormous power, and some may not utilize that power in a good way.

Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>
> Those put into a position where they get to decide what is "right" have
> enormous power, and some may not utilize that power in a good way.

Indeed, and although that article is firmly US-focused, it also
makes me wonder how the same system could be used to influence
politics in other countries.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote:
> Truth Cops
>
> Leaked Documents Outline DHS's Plans to Police Disinformation
>
> Ken Klippenstein, Lee Fang
> October 31 2022, 2:00 a.m.
>
> The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts
> to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The
> Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and
> documents--obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as
> public documents--illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to
> influence tech platforms.
>
> The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came
> into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new
> "Disinformation Governance Board": a panel designed to police
> misinformation (false information spread unintentionally),
> disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and
> malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context,
> with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While
> the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then
> shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS
> pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate--the
> war on terror--has been wound down.
>
> Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the
> U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse.
> According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit
> filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is
> also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and
> scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics
> of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally
> misleading information.
>
> Key Takeaways
>
> * Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance
> Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing.
> * DHS plans to target inaccurate information on "the origins of the
> COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial
> justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S.
> support to Ukraine."
> * Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners
> to report disinformation directly.
>
> "Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov't. It's really
> interesting how hesitant they remain," Microsoft executive Matt
> Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS
> director, in February.
>
> In a 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.
>
> DHS's mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around
> Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking
> shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions
> around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents
> collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including
> current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the
> evolution of more active measures by DHS.
>
> According to a draft copy of DHS's Quadrennial Homeland Security
> Review, DHS's capstone report outlining the department's strategy and
> priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target
> "inaccurate information" on a wide range of topics, including "the
> origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19
> vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the
> nature of U.S. support to Ukraine."
>
> "The challenge is particularly acute in marginalized communities,"
> the report states, "which are often the targets of false or
> misleading information, such as false information on voting
> procedures targeting people of color."
>
> The inclusion of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is
> particularly noteworthy, given that House Republicans, should they
> take the majority in the midterms, have vowed to investigate. "This
> makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue," said Rep. Mike
> Johnson, R-La., a member of the Armed Services Committee, adding that
> finding answers "will be a top priority."
>
> How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly
> articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes
> disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make
> politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous
> speech.
>
> The inherently subjective nature of what constitutes
> disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make
> politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous
> speech.
>
> DHS justifies these goals--which have expanded far beyond its
> original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation
> originating domestically--by claiming that terrorist threats can be
> "exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online." But
> the laudable goal of protecting Americans from danger has often been
> used to conceal political maneuvering. In 2004, for instance, DHS
> officials faced pressure from the George W. Bush administration to
> heighten the national threat level for terrorism, in a bid to
> influence voters prior to the election, according to former DHS
> Secretary Tom Ridge. U.S. officials have routinely lied about an
> array of issues, from the causes of its wars in Vietnam and Iraq to
> their more recent obfuscation around the role of the National
> Institutes of Health in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology's
> coronavirus research.
>
> That track record has not prevented the U.S. government from seeking
> to become arbiters of what constitutes false or dangerous information
> on inherently political topics. Earlier this year, Republican Gov.
> Ron DeSantis signed a law known by supporters as the "Stop WOKE Act,"
> which bans private employers from workplace trainings asserting an
> individual's moral character is privileged or oppressed based on his
> or her race, color, sex, or national origin. The law, critics
> charged, amounted to a broad suppression of speech deemed offensive.
> The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, has
> since filed a lawsuit against DeSantis, alleging "unconstitutional
> censorship." A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of the Stop
> WOKE Act, ruling that the law had violated workers' First Amendment
> rights.
>
> "Florida's legislators may well find plaintiffs' speech 'repugnant.'
> But under our constitutional scheme, the 'remedy' for repugnant
> speech is more speech, not enforced silence," wrote Judge Mark
> Walker, in a colorful opinion castigating the law.
>
> 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.
>
> The stepped up counter-disinformation effort began in 2018 following
> high-profile hacking incidents of U.S. firms, when Congress passed
> and President Donald Trump signed the Cybersecurity and
> Infrastructure Security Agency Act, forming a new wing of DHS devoted
> to protecting critical national infrastructure. An August 2022
> report by the DHS Office of Inspector General sketches the rapidly
> accelerating move toward policing disinformation.
>
> From the outset, CISA boasted of an "evolved mission" to monitor
> social media discussions while "routing disinformation concerns" to
> private sector platforms.
>
> In 2018, then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen created the Countering
> Foreign Influence Task Force to respond to election disinformation.
> The task force, which included members of CISA as well as its Office
> of Intelligence and Analysis, generated "threat intelligence" about
> the election and notified social media platforms and law enforcement.
> At the same time, DHS began notifying social media companies about
> voting-related disinformation appearing on social platforms.
>
> Key Takeaways, Cont'd.
>
> * The work is primarily done by CISA, a DHS sub-agency tasked with
> protecting critical national infrastructure.
> * DHS, the FBI, and several media entities are having biweekly
> meetings as recently as August.
> * DHS considered countering disinformation relating to content that
> undermines trust in financial systems and courts.
> * The FBI agent who primed social media platforms to take down the
> Hunter Biden laptop story continued to have a role in DHS policy
> discussions.
>
> In 2019, DHS created a separate entity called the Foreign Influence
> and Interference Branch to generate more detailed intelligence about
> disinformation, the inspector general report shows. That year, its
> staff grew to include 15 full- and part-time staff dedicated to
> disinformation analysis. In 2020, the disinformation focus expanded
> to include Covid-19, according to a Homeland Threat Assessment issued
> by Acting Secretary Chad Wolf.
>
> This apparatus had a dry run during the 2020 election, when CISA
> began working with other members of the U.S. intelligence community.
> Office of Intelligence and Analysis personnel attended "weekly
> teleconferences to coordinate Intelligence Community activities to
> counter election-related disinformation." According to the IG
> report, meetings have continued to take place every two weeks since
> the elections.
>
> 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.
>
> Under President Joe Biden, the shifting focus on disinformation has
> continued. In January 2021, CISA replaced the Countering Foreign
> Influence Task force with the "Misinformation, Disinformation and
> Malinformation" team, which was created "to promote more flexibility
> to focus on general MDM." By now, the scope of the effort had
> expanded beyond disinformation produced by foreign governments to
> include domestic versions. The MDM team, according to one CISA
> official quoted in the IG report, "counters all types of
> disinformation, to be responsive to current events."
>
> Jen Easterly, Biden's appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it
> clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to
> combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media.
> "One could argue we're in the business of critical infrastructure,
> and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure,
> so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I
> think, is incredibly important," said Easterly, speaking at a
> conference in November 2021.
>
> CISA's domain has gradually expanded to encompass more subjects it
> believes amount to critical infrastructure. Last year, The Intercept
> reported on the existence of a series of DHS field intelligence
> reports warning of attacks on cell towers, which it has tied to
> conspiracy theorists who believe 5G towers spread Covid-19. One
> intelligence report pointed out that these conspiracy theories "are
> inciting attacks against the communications infrastructure."
>
> CISA has defended its burgeoning social media monitoring authorities,
> stating that "once CISA notified a social media platform of
> disinformation, the social media platform could independently decide
> whether to remove or modify the post." But, as documents revealed by
> the Missouri lawsuit show, CISA's goal is to make platforms more
> responsive to their suggestions.
>
> In late February, Easterly texted with Matthew Masterson, a
> representative at Microsoft who formerly worked at CISA, that she is
> "trying to get us in a place where Fed can work with platforms to
> better understand mis/dis trends so relevant agencies can try to
> prebunk/debunk as useful."
>
> Meeting records of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, the
> main subcommittee that handles disinformation policy at CISA, show a
> constant effort to expand the scope of the agency's tools to foil
> disinformation.
>
> In June, the same DHS advisory committee of CISA--which includes
> Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and
> University of Washington professor Kate Starbird--drafted a report to
> the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in
> shaping the "information ecosystem." The report called on the agency
> to closely monitor "social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream
> media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online
> resources." They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt
> the "spread of false and misleading information," with a focus on
> information that undermines "key democratic institutions, such as the
> courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public
> health measures."
>
> To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest
> in external research to evaluate the "efficacy of interventions,"
> specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can
> be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the
> director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the
> use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a "clearing
> house for information to avoid the appearance of government
> propaganda."
>
> Last Thursday, immediately following billionaire Elon Musk's
> completed acquisition of Twitter, Gadde was terminated from the
> company.
>
> The Biden administration, however, did take a stab at making part of
> this infrastructure public in April 2022, with the announcement of
> the Disinformation Governance Board. The exact functions of the
> board, and how it would accomplish its goal of defining and combating
> MDM, were never made clear.
>
> The board faced immediate backlash across the political spectrum.
> "Who among us thinks the government should add to its work list the
> job of determining what is true and what is disinformation? And who
> thinks the government is capable of telling the truth?" wrote
> Politico media critic Jack Shafer. "Our government produces lies and
> disinformation at industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies
> vital information to block its own citizens from becoming any the
> wiser. It pays thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with
> facts."
>
> DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas alluded to broad scope of the
> agency's disinformation effort when he told the Senate Homeland
> Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the role of the
> board--which by that point had been downgraded to a "working
> group"--is to "actually develop guidelines, standards, guardrails to
> ensure that the work that has been ongoing for nearly 10 years does
> not infringe on people's free speech rights, rights of privacy, civil
> rights, and civil liberties."
>
> "It was quite disconcerting, frankly," he added, "that the
> disinformation work that was well underway for many years across
> different independent administrations was not guided by guardrails."
>
> DHS eventually scrapped the Disinformation Governance Board in
> August. While free speech advocates cheered the dissolution of the
> board, other government efforts to root out disinformation have not
> only continued but expanded to encompass additional DHS sub-agencies
> like Customs and Border Protection, which "determines whether
> information about the component spread through social media platforms
> like Facebook and Twitter is accurate." Other agencies such as
> Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Science and Technology
> Directorate (whose responsibilities include "determining whether
> social media accounts were bots or humans and how the mayhem caused
> by bots affects behavior"), and the Secret Service have also expanded
> their purview to include disinformation, according to the inspector
> general report.
>
> The draft copy of DHS's 2022 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review
> reviewed by The Intercept also confirms that DHS views the issue of
> tackling disinformation and misinformation as a growing portion of
> its core duties. While "counterterrorism remains the first and most
> important mission of the Department," it notes, the agency's "work on
> these missions is evolving and dynamic" and must now adapt to terror
> threats "exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread
> online" including by "domestic violent extremists."
>
> To accomplish this, the draft quadrennial review calls for DHS to
> "leverage advanced data analytics technology and hire and train
> skilled specialists to better understand how threat actors use online
> platforms to introduce and spread toxic narratives intended to
> inspire or incite violence, as well as work with NGOs and other parts
> of civil society to build resilience to the impacts of false
> information."
>
> The broad definition of "threat actors" posing risks to vaguely
> defined critical infrastructure--an area as broad as trust in
> government, public health, elections, and financial markets--has
> concerned civil libertarians. "No matter your political allegiances,
> all of us have good reason to be concerned about government efforts
> to pressure private social media platforms into reaching the
> government's preferred decisions about what content we can see
> online," said Adam Goldstein, the vice president of research at
> FIRE.
>
> "Any governmental requests to social media platforms to review or
> remove certain content," he added, "should be made with extreme
> transparency."
>
> DHS'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.
>
> "The Department has not been fully reauthorized since its inception
> over fifteen years ago," the Senate Homeland Security Committee
> warned in 2018. "As the threat landscape continues to evolve, the
> Department adjusted its organization and activities to address
> emerging threats and protect the U.S. homeland. This evolution of
> the Department's duties and organization, including the structure and
> operations of the DHS Headquarters, has never been codified in
> statute."
>
> The subsequent military defeat of ISIS forces in Syria and Iraq,
> along with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, left the homeland
> security apparatus without a target. Meanwhile, a new threat entered
> the discourse. The allegation that Russian agents had seeded
> disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward
> Donald Trump resulted in the FBI forming the Foreign Influence Task
> Force, a team devoted to preventing foreign meddling in American
> elections.
>
> According to DHS meeting minutes from March, the FBI's Foreign
> Influence Task Force this year includes 80 individuals focused on
> curbing "subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the
> populace and the government."
>
> "The Department will spearhead initiatives to raise awareness of
> disinformation campaigns targeting communities in the United States,
> providing citizens the tools necessary to identify and halt the
> spread of information operations intended to promote radicalization
> to violent extremism or mobilization to violence," DHS Acting
> Secretary Kevin McAleenan said in a September 2019 strategic
> framework.
>
> DHS also began to broaden its watch to include a wide array of
> domestic actors viewed as potential sources of radicalization and
> upheaval. An FBI official interviewed by The Intercept described
> how, in the summer of 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, he was
> reassigned from his normal job of countering foreign intelligence
> services to monitoring American social media accounts. (The
> official, not authorized to speak publicly, described the
> reassignment on condition of anonymity.)
>
> And a June 2020 memo bearing the subject line "Actions to Address the
> Threat Posed by Domestic Terrorists and Other Domestic Extremists"
> prepared by DHS headquarters for Wolf, Trump's acting DHS secretary,
> delineates plans to "expand information sharing with the tech sector"
> in order to "identify disinformation campaigns used by DT [domestic
> terrorism] actors to incite violence against infrastructure, ethnic,
> racial or religious groups, or individuals." The memo outlines plans
> to work with private tech sector partners to share unclassified DHS
> intelligence on "DT actors and their tactics" so that platforms can
> "move effectively use their own tools to enforce user
> agreements/terms of service and remove DT content."
>
> Biden also prioritized such efforts. Last year, the Biden
> administration released the first National Strategy for Countering
> Domestic Terrorism. The strategy identified a "broader priority:
> enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme
> polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation
> often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear
> Americans apart and lead some to violence."
>
> "We are working with like-minded governments, civil society, and the
> technology sector to address terrorist and violent extremist content
> online, including through innovative research collaborations," the
> strategy document continued, adding that the administration was
> "addressing the crisis of disinformation and misinformation, often
> channeled through social and other media platforms, that can fuel
> extreme polarization and lead some individuals to violence."
>
> Last year, a top FBI counterterrorism official came under fire when
> she falsely denied to Congress that the FBI monitors Americans'
> social media and had therefore missed threats leading up to the
> attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In fact, the FBI has
> spent millions of dollars on social media tracking software like
> Babel X and Dataminr. According to the bureau's official guidelines,
> authorized activities include "proactively surfing the Internet to
> find publicly accessible websites and services through which
> recruitment by terrorist organizations and promotion of terrorist
> crimes is openly taking place."
>
> 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, said the FBI official, who did not have permission to
> speak on the record.
>
> The Privacy Act of 1974, enacted following the Watergate scandal,
> restricts government data collection of Americans exercising their
> First Amendment rights, a safeguard that civil liberty groups have
> argued limits the ability of DHS and the FBI to engage in
> surveillance of American political speech expressed on social media.
> The statute, however, maintains exemptions for information collected
> for the purposes of a criminal or law enforcement investigation.
>
> "There are no specific legal constraints on t FBI's use of social
> media," Faiza Patel, senior director of the Brennan Center for
> Justice's liberty and national security program told The Intercept.
> "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."
>
> The first FBI official, whom The Intercept interviewed in 2020 amid
> the George Floyd riots, lamented the drift toward warrantless
> monitoring of Americans saying, "Man, I don't even know what's legal
> anymore."
>
> In retrospect, the New York Post reporting on the contents of Hunter
> Biden's laptop ahead of the 2020 election provides an elucidating
> case study of how this works in an increasingly partisan environment.
>
> Much of the public ignored the reporting or assumed it was false, as
> over 50 former intelligence officials charged that the laptop story
> was a creation of a "Russian disinformation" campaign. The
> mainstream media was primed by allegations of election interference
> in 2016--and, to be sure, Trump did attempt to use the laptop to
> disrupt the Biden campaign. Twitter ended up banning links to the
> New York Post's report on the contents of the laptop during the
> crucial weeks leading up to the election. Facebook also throttled
> users' ability to view the story.
>
> In recent months, a clearer picture of the government's influence has
> emerged.
>
> In an appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast in August, Meta CEO Mark
> Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook had limited sharing of the New York
> Post's reporting after a conversation with the FBI. "The background
> here is that the FBI came to us--some folks on our team--and was
> like, 'Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert that there
> was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,'" Zuckerberg
> told Rogan. The FBI told them, Zuckerberg said, that "'We have it on
> notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump.'" When
> the Post's story came out in October 2020, Facebook thought it "fit
> that pattern" the FBI had told them to look out for.
>
> Zuckerberg said he regretted the decision, as did Jack Dorsey, the
> CEO of Twitter at the time. Despite claims that the laptop's
> contents were forged, the Washington Post confirmed that at least
> some of the emails on the laptop were authentic. The New York Times
> authenticated emails from the laptop--many of which were cited in the
> original New York Post reporting from October 2020--that prosecutors
> have examined as part of the Justice Department's probe into whether
> the president's son violated the law on a range of issues, including
> money laundering, tax-related offenses, and foreign lobbying
> registration.
>
> Documents filed in federal court as part of a lawsuit by the
> attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana add a layer of new detail
> to Zuckerberg's anecdote, revealing that officials leading the push
> to expand the government's reach into disinformation also played a
> quiet role in shaping the decisions of social media giants around the
> New York Post story.
>
> According to records filed in federal court, two previously unnamed
> FBI agents--Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent in the San Francisco
> field office, and Dehmlow, the section chief of the FBI's Foreign
> Influence Task Force--were involved in high-level communications that
> allegedly "led to Facebook's suppression" of the Post's reporting.
>
> The Hunter Biden laptop story was only the most high-profile example
> of law enforcement agencies pressuring technology firms. In many
> cases, the Facebook and Twitter accounts flagged by DHS or its
> partners as dangerous forms of disinformation or potential foreign
> influence were clearly parody accounts or accounts with virtually no
> followers or influence.
>
> In May, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt took the lead in
> filing a lawsuit to combat what he views as sweeping efforts by the
> Biden administration to pressure social media companies to moderate
> certain forms of content appearing on their platforms.
>
> The suit alleges governmentwide efforts to censor certain stories,
> especially ones related to the pandemic. It also names multiple
> agencies across the government that have participated in efforts to
> monitor speech and "open collusion" between the administration and
> social media companies. It identifies, for example, emails between
> officials from the National Institutes of Health, including Dr.
> Anthony Fauci, and Zuckerberg at the beginning of the pandemic, and
> reveals ongoing discussions between senior Biden administration
> officials with Meta executives on developing content moderation
> policies on a range of issues, including issues related to elections
> and vaccines.
>
> Attorneys for the Biden administration have responded in court by
> claiming that the plaintiffs lack standing and that social media
> firms pursued content moderation policies on their own volition,
> without any "coercive" influence from the government. On October 21,
> the judge presiding over the case granted the attorneys general
> permission to depose Fauci, CISA officials, and communication
> specialists from the White House.
>
> While the lawsuit has a definite partisan slant, pointing the finger
> at the Biden administration for allegedly seeking to control private
> speech, many of the subpoenas request information that spans into the
> Trump era and provides a window into the absurdity of the ongoing
> effort.
>
> "There is growing evidence that the legislative and executive branch
> officials are using social media companies to engage in censorship by
> surrogate," said Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George
> Washington University, who has written about the lawsuit. "It is
> axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is
> prohibited from doing directly. If government officials are
> directing or facilitating such censorship, it raises serious First
> Amendment questions."
>
> During the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security, in an
> email to an official at Twitter, forwarded information about a
> potential threat to critical U.S. infrastructure, citing FBI
> warnings, in this case about an account that could imperil election
> system integrity.
>
> The Twitter user in question had 56 followers, along with a bio that
> read "dm us your weed store locations (hoes be mad, but this is a
> parody account)," under a banner image of Blucifer, the 32-foot-tall
> demonic horse sculpture featured at the entrance of the Denver
> International Airport.
>
> "We are not sure if there's any action that can be taken, but we
> wanted to flag them for consideration," wrote a state official on the
> email thread, forwarding on other examples of accounts that could be
> confused with official government entities. The Twitter
> representative responded: "We will escalate. Thank you."
>
> Each email in the chain carried a disclaimer that the agency "neither
> has nor seeks the ability to remove or edit what information is made
> available on social media platforms."
>
> That tagline, however, concerns free speech advocates, who note that
> the agency is attempting to make an end run around the First
> Amendment by exerting continual pressure on private sector social
> media firms. "When the government suggests things, it's not too hard
> to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist," said Adam
> Candeub, a professor of law at Michigan State University. "And I
> would consider such actions, especially when it's bureaucratized, as
> essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms."
>
> "If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages," noted
> Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties
> Union, "there is no doubt we would call it censorship."
>
> From:
> https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/
>