‘Nerve Center’ of Government Censorship Blocked by Court Order | CLIP | Crossroads

Good evening and welcome to Crossroads. An agency that most Americans have never heard of has been running a whole-of-society censorship operation. This is CISA, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency. It's under the Department of Homeland Security. And on October 3rd, the agency's powers of mass censorship were frozen by a court order. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey wrote on Twitter that the 5th Circuit held yesterday that CISA likely violated the First Amendment when it coerced social media companies into censoring free speech. He added this, Think about that for a second. CISA was weaponized against the very citizens it was designed to protect. Now the case is part of something much larger and something that's going to very likely only end with a future determination from the Supreme Court. It ties to the Missouri v. Biden case. The attorneys general of Missouri and of Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration arguing that the government's contact with social media companies to request removal of content is a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The issue at play is this. Now government censorship is of course unconstitutional. The government can't directly censor you. But private businesses like social networks or news organizations, they have many rights to remove content and to censor users themselves. But what happens when the government requests a private company remove content or censor a user for that matter? Does it still count as a private company doing it? Or does the pressure from the government represent a type of state censorship by proxy? Well, so far it seems the courts agree with the latter. On July 4th, a federal judge in Louisiana determined that the Biden administration was violating standards on protected speech. The court issued a temporary injunction that essentially brought a temporary end to government censorship by proxy of that type. It banned several government agencies from communicating with social media companies. These included the FBI, the Justice Department overall, the Department of Homeland Security. The exception to this was if federal agencies alerted the social networks of crimes or threats to national security or, for example, attempts to influence the elections. The decision was taken by many as a kind of wake-up call. Before that ruling took place, it had been widely alleged the establishment media that they were saying there was no censorship like this taking place. Many had been told that censorship by private companies was not censorship. And folks like myself who were exposing the government hand behind that censorship were largely being written off. But that ruling, coupled with the Twitter files which revealed how the FBI and other agencies were regularly communicating with social networks to censor Americans, that ruling changed things. Of course, the ban on government censorship of that sort did not last in its entirety. The Biden administration has been directly challenging it. And an appeals court in the Fifth Circuit overturned part of it in early September. It argued the ban on government agencies communicating with social media companies was too vague. But the case is, of course, still ongoing. And that being said, the latest ruling is actually even more significant than the July 4th one. It goes beyond just upholding the injunction. It expands it. And even more importantly, it expands that injunction to include a federal agency that functions as the pseudo heartbeat of government censorship, the agency that beats the drums for censorship for all the other agencies, CISA. Now the updated injunction also includes the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and of course, the FBI as well. And again, the battle over censorship, again, it's not over yet. It's very likely to keep going to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. But for now, the systems of government censorship are largely on hold. The government, at least to a very large extent, cannot directly censor you either through its own actions or by proxy currently. Now Attorney General Bailey wrote on X that if you don't remember, the Fifth Circuit already handed out a court order blocking the Biden administration from silencing disfavored viewpoints. He noted that CISA was originally not included in the Fifth Circuit's order. They filed a motion asking the Fifth Circuit to include CISA and that request was granted. So what exactly is CISA? Attorney General Bailey describes it as the nerve center of the vast censorship enterprise, the very entity that worked with the FBI to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story. But is that the case? Well, yes, it is actually. Now in the true spirit of the agency, it looks like they've been scrubbing some of their own public records. They've been removing videos on their operations and they've been redirecting web pages that used to document some of the agency's most concerning practices. But luckily, we have the archives and I'm going to show them to you. CISA actually has a YouTube page. Now a lot of it these days is more just videos from webinars and things like cybersecurity alerts and so on. But it wasn't always that way. They used to have some content detailing some of the agency's most controversial programs. One of the videos from June of 2021 was called countering disinformation in social media. Now if you were to go to the link to that now on YouTube, you're met with this. It's a simple alert saying this video isn't available anymore. When I did a search online, it looks like they scrubbed it from every discoverable part of the internet. But luckily, I played part of it on Crossroads last year. Let me show you that clip. Welcome to cybersecurity 101 classes in session today's lesson, countering disinformation on social media. If you're on social media, you probably know that some information found there is fake or dishonest. How can you tell and who was behind it? Let's take a closer look. Since 2020, there has been a lot of false and inaccurate information about COVID-19. Now remember, that's what they're being accused of. The agency was working with social media companies on censorship. And also a big part of the controversies that CSUN, the Biden administration ran into really overall when it comes to censorship was about targeting people who covered COVID-19. It turned out they even labeled a handful of online commentators the quote, disinformation dozen. Government agencies were communicating with social networks like Twitter and Facebook to silence them and many others. Here's former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki saying as much. There's about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including Facebook, ones that Facebook owns. Third, it's important to take faster action against harmful posts. As you all know, information travels quite quickly on social media platforms. Sometimes it's not accurate and Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts. Interesting. How does the government know that if they're not monitoring people?