The Department of Homeland Security has apparently been monitoring and
censoring speech on private social media networks that it deems as
dangerous to national security.
Now, when you have the Department of Homeland Security,
when you have the FEDS say that something is a threat to national security,
which is an incredibly vague statement to make, you should be weary, especially
when they are using that talking point to censor our speech as American citizens.
Now, the report by the intercept finds that their actions clearly seek to shape
the narrative on major political issues including foreign policy.
So, with that said, I actually want to go to this video featuring Lee Fong,
one of the intercept reporters,
who went on Tucker Carlson's show to kind of explain the report.
So let's take a look at that and I'll give you more details.
>> We looked at really hundreds of documents that paint a vivid picture
of the FBI, the DHS closely collaborating with the top social media platforms,
Twitter and Facebook to censor various forms of content under the banner
of fighting disinformation and the story shows a couple of things.
One it shows what you just mentioned,
a very cozy relationship between the government and these tech giants.
There's those monthly meetings that you just mentioned but
also just very cozy emails and texts.
Not a very adversarial relationship,
we looked at one text where Microsoft executive text Jen Easterly,
the top dis-info director at DHS appointed by Biden.
Basically saying the private sector needs to get more comfortable
with the government, they are closely collaborating on reports,
talking about the expanded role for DHS and centering really
broad collection of topic areas of policy and political topics.
>> So, let's get to the specifics here, because this is definitely concerning.
And as we know, the First Amendment indicates that the government
is not supposed to get involved in censoring our speech and
it appears that they've been doing this behind the scenes while working with
executives at these social media platforms.
Now, according to the report,
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, this is what's concerning, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and
the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice,
US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of US support to Ukraine.
So, I don't know if anyone else has experienced this.
But if you go on social media right now, and
just simply question whether it's a good idea to pour tens of billions of dollars
in military funding to a country without the necessary accountability,
maybe we should really push for diplomatic negotiations and we still support Ukraine.
But, hey, let's maybe try a different path.
You will get dog piled like crazy, all right?
Someone from the Atlantic Council is going to reach out to you and
say that they're disturbed by your reporting on it.
So, now I'm curious how much DHS is currently playing a role in what
we're seeing in regard to the discourse online with military funding to Ukraine.
The inclusion of the 2021 US 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 Representative Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana and a member of
the Armed Services Committee, adding that finding answers will be a top priority.
But regardless of a Republican investigation,
which I actually care way less about, having the State Department,
having the DHS, essentially shape narratives pertaining to the US
government's foreign policy on social media platforms, is incredibly disturbing.
What do you think, David?
>> No, I think you're right, here's the trouble that I have with this story,
first of all, I think there's something here, right?
There's something about the Department of Homeland Security and
all these government agencies collaborating if that's what they're doing
with social media giants to restrict speech, that's troubling.
Where I have an issue to start though, is I feel like Tucker Carlson's Fox News
program is the last platform this report should be on because it loses credibility.
Cuz Tucker's agenda is not to sort of get at the truth of the matter,
Tucker's agenda is to paint the FBI, DHS is sort of these evil government agencies
which are only trying to squelch all the voices that are out there.
And that's not fair.
Having said that though, to the extent that social media companies are actively
either squelching language or suppressing language or changing their algorithms to
favor certain points of view dictated by the government, that's a problem.
And we've seen the problems with these algorithms on social media, anyway,
when it comes to videos and all sorts of stuff that we post and the idea that
they would actually be going after language, it deserves more investigation.
I just wish the next investigation would not be reported out on Fox.
>> I hear what you're saying.
I kinda wish that it wasn't Tucker Carlson's show that Lee Fong went on,
although he wants to get the info out about what's going on, what's transpiring.
So, I'm not gonna begrudge him.
I have a problem when reporters, especially those who purport to be on
the left, go on Tucker Carlson's show just to agree with him and
nod their head along with his crazy paranoid talking points about whatever,
it is that they're talking about at any given moment.
To be fair to Lee Fong none of that happened in the context of this interview.
And in fact, Tucker Carlson wrap the interview up pretty quickly with this
weird insult toward the intercept even though they've been doing really great
reporting on these types of issues.
So, I wanted to just quickly go to that final video and
then I'll give you more details on this report.
>> I don't know why you did this story at the intercept, I'm just so
grateful that you did.
It's a great story.
It's a huge public service.
I hope you're rewarded for it.
I doubt you will be, but you should be.
Lee Fong, thank you very much.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> Thank you.
>> I mean, I don't know why you guys would do this story.
I mean, I wouldn't expect it over at the intercept even though the intercept
publishes all sorts of groundbreaking stories pertaining to government
surveillance and all of that.
I mean they have a track record for that.
But, obviously, Tucker didn't give him an opportunity to respond to that and
just wrapped up the interview.
But I want to go to the rest of the report because there are other elements that I
think are worth mentioning.
Now, it was exhaustive, and so if you're questioning the credibility because of
an interview on Tucker Carlson's show,
I would just invite you to actually read the original report in the intercept.
It's lengthy and it relies on years of internal DHS memos, emails, and
documents, which were obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, okay?
So, there is a lawsuit currently by the Missouri attorney general, Eric Schmidt,
a Republican who is running for Senate.
And so, through that lawsuit that he filed, the intercept was able to obtain
some documents that show some of the correspondences between the social media
platforms and members of the Department of Homeland Security, stenographic for here.
For instance, in a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official,
warned that the threat of subversive information on
social media could undermine support for the US government.
Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives
from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that quote,
we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.
She's an FBI official.
So, again, she's a member of the government talking about holding
the media accountable and that really does go into unconstitutional
territory considering freedom of press and our First Amendment.
Now, in June the same DHS advisory committee of the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency 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.
Now, I should note that since Musk purchased Twitter, Vijaya has been fired.
But just to continue with what her role in all of this was, 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 the 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.
And again, last Thursday a member of this advisory committee,
Vijaya Gagge, I don't know how you say her name exactly, was let go.
But it is disturbing that she was an executive over at Twitter,
who was kinda egging DHS on, in trying to censor speech on these platforms.
>> And it's difficult.
And I think that the challenge for this story and I get the outrage again over
the collaboration and social media executives working with the government try
to figure out how they're gonna restrain speech and all that sort of thing.
The challenges you need a hook, right?
For I think for most people to understand where is the person, and
there may be somebody out there, who either tweeted something about Ukraine, or
issued a foreign policy paper, or said something about Afghanistan, and
then they got squelched.
And how did they get squelched?
And what was the damage that was caused to them?
That's where I think the outrage can then start to build and
people can then put their hooks into the story.
But as long as it's just sort of government meeting with social media
executives and trying to talk about how they need to be more accountability.
It's all sounds very sort of generic and amorphous.
And look we've seen how difficult it is to try to correct a institution like Newsmax,
or what American News or Fox News which spreads disinformation.
If it's so difficult for a government and for national agencies to figure out how
to monitor and control that, how are they going to possibly do it with social media?
It's not easy.
>> Yeah, it's not easy.
Look for me having the government determine what is and
is not acceptable speech, is not only unconstitutional, it's wrong.
And if you wanna live in a free society where people are not
worried about the government coming after them or censoring the for their speech,
then you should be concerned about what was disclosed in this report.
And it's not surprising to me, I mean the US government has had a long history,
especially, in recent years of wanting to do mass surveillance on Americans.
Edward Snowden put everything in his life on the line to disclose that in
regard to the NSA indiscriminately spying on American citizens.
>> Here's another example that you just triggered for me and
that is the transportation industry, right?
There is perhaps nothing wrong I suppose, after 911 with transportation industry
officials working with the government to try to identify people who might be
on the no-fly list, and trying to track down possible terrorists.
The problem is it went too far, and they started sweeping up all kinds of
thousands, tens of thousands of innocent people and they bungled the names.
And so, you had a lot of innocent people who literally had their opportunity to
travel denied to them because of this collaboration.
And so, there's the problem.
And again, our government doesn't do a very good job of whether it's monitoring
people working with the transportation companies, and
I don't think our government's going to do a very good job of monitoring speech.
And again, I totally agree with your views on the Constitution