New York Times and Other Mainstream Outlets Misrepresent DHS Plot to Violate First Amendment
The idea that the officials within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security worked with a Stanford think tank to censor ordinary Americans and thus interfere in the 2020 elections is a debunked conspiracy theory, say journalists in the mainstream news media. The Republicans spreading that conspiracy theory, say journalists with the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Yorker, are also waging a witch hunt against university researchers who study misinformation. It is for that reason that the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which is home to those researchers, had long refused Republican requests for their emails and data.
However, newly released documents suggest that SIO may have had a very different motivation for not sharing their files with Congressional investigators: they show that the idea for sweeping government censorship, in which the Stanford think tank played a central role, came from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Internet Security Agency (CISA). According to one of CISA’s censorship partners, the so-called “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP), which was ostensibly separate from CISA, was created at its behest:
During 2020: CISA officials and personnel from EIP were often on emails together, and CISA’s personnel had access to EIP’s tickets through an internal messaging system, Jira, which EIP used to flag and report social media posts to Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms.
July 21, 2020: Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Council’s “Disinformation Forensic Research Lab,” (DRFLab), wrote in an internal Atlantic Council email to a colleague stating: “I know the Council has a number of efforts on broad policy around the elections, but we just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA and are in weekly comms to debrief about disinfo, IO, etc.” (Emphasis added.)
April 15, 2020: the DHS-CISA chief of “Countering Foreign Influence Task Force,” Brian Scully, emailed Twitter executives about a “Government-Industry Meeting,” that was held the next day. The issues discussed included election information.
September 30, 2020: There was virtually no separation between CISA and Stanford employees in 2020. An EIP staffer said that Stamos and Krebs were texting each other “with some regularity.”
November 2, 2020: Twitter executives, Scully, and at least one of the Stanford interns were on a Signal text messaging app group together.
November 2020: Stanford’s legal counsel insisted that EIP and SIO “did not provide any government agency… access to the Jira database,” but in one email, Stamos told a Reddit employee, “It would be great if we could get somebody from Reddit on JIRA, just like Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, CISA, EI-ISAC…” Stamos’s statement indicated that CISA had access to EIP’s Jira system.
November 2020: In communications with social media platforms, the House report states, Stamos made it clear “that the EIP’s true purpose was to act as a censorship conduit for the federal government.” In an email to Nextdoor, Stamos wrote that EIP would “provide a one-stop shop for local election officials, DHS, and voter protection organizations to report potential disinformation for us to investigate and to refer to the appropriate platforms if necessary.”
Brookie’s acknowledgment contradicts the claim made by the EIP that the idea for the project “came from four students that the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) funded to complete volunteer internships at [CISA].” Brookie’s email also contradicts the testimony of the SIO’s Director, Alex Stamos, earlier this year, who told Congressional investigators that the idea for EIP was his. The documents revealed that CISA violated the First Amendment and, together with Stanford and the other EIP groups, interfered in the 2020 election.
Read More:
https://public.substack.com/p/new-documents-reveal-us-department
