The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'oil painting of a wall of faces.'
Today, July 3, is Julian Assange's 52nd Birthday. He is sitting in a prison cell for publishing true information.
Here in the States, the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government recently released a chilling report titled "The Weaponization of CISA: How a 'Cybersecurity' Agency Colluded with Big Tech and 'Disinformation' Partners to Censor Americans." The report examines an obscure US government agency's attempts to censor public discourse in collusion with Big Tech.
From the report:
Founded in 2018, CISA was originally intended to be an ancillary agency designed to protect "critical infrastructure" and guard against cybersecurity threats. In the years since its creation, however, CISA metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government's domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media. By 2020, CISA routinely reported social media posts that allegedly spread "disinformation" to social media platforms. By 2021, CISA had a formal "Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation" (MDM) team.
Reading this, a couple of things jumped out at me. First, I'd never heard of CISA, which makes sense because the agency apparently went to great lengths to hide its activities with the express purpose of shielding them from official and public scrutiny. Second, they were sending disinformation reports to social media platforms, which suggests that they were colluding with these companies to stifle free speech, a blatantly unconstitutional activity. Here's another excerpt:
Even so-called "malinformation"—truthful information that, according to the government, may carry the potential to mislead—could not escape the scrutiny of CISA's MDM "experts." In an e-mail exchange between MDM Subcommittee members Starbird and Spaulding, Spaulding wrote: "As I've read more about malinformation, I think you’re right that it could fit the kinds of risks we are concerned about. The challenge may be that because it is not false, per se ... it is much trickier from a policy perspective." Spaulding proposed a "compromise": "that [malinformation] is part of CISA's current scope but that our recommendations, at least at this stage, are focused primarily on countering false information." Starbird responded that "malinformation is perhaps the hardest challenge in this space." Starbird then lamented that "unfortunately current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as 'speech' and within democratic norms" and that CISA may face "bad faith criticism" for censoring content that is true.
According to Wikipedia, "malinformation is information that is based on reality but it is used to inflict harm on a person, organisation or country. Examples of malinformation include phishing, catfishing, doxing, swatting and revenge porn." These examples seem like obviously harmful activities, but the CISA MDM Subcommittee members quoted above were clearly talking about something else. The were talking about free speech within democratic norms, which differentiates the malinformation they were considering from the malinformation described by Wikipedia.
The CISA MDM Subcommittee members weren't just talking about free speech within democratic norms, they were lamenting this free speech, and complaining that they might attract criticism if they censor this speech. If that's the kind of thinking that became common in intelligence circles during the pandemic, that's cause for great concern. It's easy to picture a future where any information that challenges the official story, true or not, is labeled malinformation and censored by people like this.
Perhaps the most troubling thing I read in the report was this quote from CISA Director Jen Easterly: "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." On the surface, this might sound reasonable. But deeper consideration reveals a terrifying authoritarian subtext. This government agency is trying to take responsibility for our cognitive infrastructure. They seem to want nothing less than to control what we think and how we think it.
What surprises me the most about this report is that it came out at all. It plainly documents widespread attempts by a shadowy government office to police our cognitive infrastructure. There are likely other government offices behaving in a similarly unconstitutional manner. Although we have censorship-proof tech, most Americans favor centralized platforms that are vulnerable to this sort of government manipulation.
This isn't a problem we can vote our way out of. None of the intelligence officials involved were elected to their positions. What we need, I think, is to figure out how to change the culture within the security state. There must be a faction within this network of offices that recognizes the importance of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I wonder if there's a way to support this faction against its nanny state adversaries?
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