[TheIntercept] Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation
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.
“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.
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.
#1
That's been said for some time that the intelligence agencies were in bed with big tech.. There was a tech guy who said he could affect the vote by as much as 15% around the time of the last election (2020). At that time I was dismissive--I'm not so dismissive after watching the 2020 CF and seeing the results of Brazil's current election.
[PJMedia] Things are getting more interesting in the U.S. Senate race between that barnacle-encrusted boat anchor, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), and veterans’ activist and nurse Tiffany Smiley, the Republican. RealClearPolitics has moved the race from “leans Democrat” to “toss-up.” One poll predicts that “right now, the Washington Senate race has become ground zero for a wave election upset.”
We’ll see. That requires voters to actually turn in their ballots in this mail-in ballot state.
Smiley has been ascendant in recent weeks and has received key aid from Mitch McConnell and his Senate PAC money. She has acquitted herself well on the campaign trail and during debates.
A recent poll put Murray up by eight points, but she’s lost that edge recently because of the horrible conditions on the ground in Washington: record gas prices with the intent to raise them even more because of the Democrats’ religious obsession with the weather. Truck drivers need diesel fuel to get goods to customers, and there’s a Democrat-policy-induced shortage. Food is more expensive. Everything is more expensive. Why is America funding both sides of the Ukraine-Russian war? Nobody knows but even Ukraine-flag virtue-signalers in Washington know this makes no sense.
And RealClearPolitics has now listed the race as a toss-up and a statistical tie. After three decades of doing nothing in the Senate, Patty Murray may have to find a real job.
The toss-up designation was prompted by a new Trafalgar poll showing that Murray’s support is at 49.4% with Smiley just a shade back at 48.2% with 2.4% of the voters still undecided.
#1
I always get overly optimistic with the wave stuff. Trying to keep it tempered a bit.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
10/31/2022 10:56 Comments ||
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#2
I'm just looking forward to the thousands of op-ed's saying that democracy is lost and America is now a fascist state. Nothing like a good laugh.
Posted by: Matt ||
10/31/2022 12:51 Comments ||
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#3
#2I'm just looking forward to the thousands of op-ed's saying that democracy is lost and America is now a fascist state. Nothing like a good laugh.
Posted by: Matt 2022-10-31 12:51
....I remember editorials after Ronald Reagan won that actually said the inaugural parade would be led by Brownshirts.
It's the old joke - fascism is always descending on America, but always landing somewhere else.
#5
Just me, but some of this 'red flip' is being overplayed by the Donks and their media running dogs so that some they know they'll hang on will give them enough to say to the donors "well, it could have been worse. you need to send more money"
#7
Just me, but some of this 'red flip' is being overplayed by the Donks and their media running dogs so that some they know they'll hang on will give them enough to say to the donors "well, it could have been worse. you need to send more money"
This. Campaigning is an industry, complete with sinecures.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
10/31/2022 16:57 Comments ||
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#8
Democrats will use the red wave as a reason to get Joe out of power. The question is what to do with Kamala? They have no bench. Newsom is the best they've got and he's a turd most of his state doesn't like.
Obumbles didn't do the donks any favors. His pettiness and desire to be the spotlight sidelined the up and comers and kept the old guard in power. Now the old guard is the old old guard much like the Soviet leadership was at the end. If they don't get some real younger leaders in, they will be in a political wasteland for a decade.
The private corporations that control America’s money supply called the Federal Reserve have lost money for the first time since 1915. The loss was foreshadowed in the Fed meeting in September when it was clear there would be more outgo than income.
The problems were triggered by an overspending Democrat Congress that exacerbated the issues set in motion by the government’s response to the 2008 market meltdown. It will take years to get back in the black. Years. And you’ll your grandkids will pay for it all, because they’re the nation’s cash machine.
"The central bank’s operating losses have increased in recent weeks because the interest it is paying banks and money-market funds to keep money at the Fed now exceeds the income it earns on some $8.3 trillion in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities it accumulated during bond-buying stimulus programs over the past 14 years," The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Fed will continue to manipulate the markets with its monetary policy as per usual.
The Journal reported that "even though the net interest losses have no impact on the Fed’s day-to-day operations, they could cause political headaches down the road, in part because they are large and novel..." Novel — there’s that word again. This is untested territory.
It’s bad enough that the private Fed, whose Board of Governors are government actors, is losing money. But experts like Peter Schiff didn’t think it would happen until next year.
The way the Fed works is that its losses are turned into IOUs and paid later when there’s better cash flow. As Schiff put it, "we live in a world where the Federal Reserve gets to make its own accounting rules. And according to its own accounting rules, any net loss magically turns into a "deferred asset." The immediate effect will be larger budget deficits because "the US government will see a reduction in revenue."
The Journal notes that "the Fed doesn’t mark its assets to market but instead recognizes losses on its securities holdings only if it sells assets. The Fed is currently shrinking its asset portfolio passively, allowing up to $95 billion in securities to mature every month."
The Biden Administration and Democrat Congress are spending taxpayer dollars at an alarming, inflation-inducing rate and now the government "will see a reduction in revenue." Who’s caught in the middle of that monetary see-saw? Us.
Morgan Stanley chief global economist Seth Carpenter told the Journal that "the arrangement is akin to an institution facing a 100% tax rate and offsetting current losses with future income." Don’t try this at home.
The Fed policies have sent tech and other stocks plummeting. Just last week, Meta, the Facebook parent company, lost 70% of its market capitalization. The Journal reported that the net effect of the Fed’s policies of "bond-buying and negative real interest rates drove investors into growth stocks, which inflated tech valuations. Social media companies have also been hurt by lower advertising spending as businesses cut marketing budgets amid economic uncertainty."
Talk about a ripple effect. Ya go bankrupt slowly, then all at once.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[PJMedia] The Fed is losing money. Not a typo.
