Government Censorship on Covid Began Before Lockdowns

New documents from America First Legal demonstrate that CISA was censoring covid narratives even earlier than previously thought.

Monitoring of social media by CISA—a branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—for disfavored narratives began in February 2020, a month before most lockdown orders and school and business closures began. My co-plaintiff and the man recently tapped to direct the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, was specifically targeted by the government for censorship. In the weeks that followed, CISA used “social listening” reports from FEMA to track public opinion flag dissenting speech. The government tracked public sentiment to ensure compliance with Covid restrictions. “This included analyzing emotions expressed online,” as Alex Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger at Public recently reported. As the government’s creepy Big-Brother-is-always-watching minions documented in April 2020, “Sadness continues to be the most commonly expressed emotion.” Disgust was also commonly expressed, according to FEMA reports.

Gutentag and Shellenberger explain:

It has been a mystery about when exactly CISA began its push for censorship. Ostensibly, CISA didn’t ask the four censorship NGOs to create the “Election Integrity Partnership” until mid-2020, and those NGOs did not come up with the idea to create the “Virality Project” on Covid until late 2020, after the elections.

Now, newly obtained documents provided to Public by the America First Legal reveal that CISA began its hunt for disfavored speech about Covid-19 as early as the week of February 18, 2020. The new documents, obtained from litigation by American First Legal against the State Department and CISA, show that the latter agency had Covid censorship on its mind long before it decided to focus on election censorship. The documents thus provide the missing link in CISA’s operation to chill disfavored speech.

“Incredibly, the evidence is that CISA relied on a dangerous, anti-American blob of ‘authorities’ to closely monitor what the American people were saying,” said Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal’s Senior Vice President. “CISA was created to protect the homeland from terrorists, not to protect incompetent federal bureaucrats.” While the monitoring of social media narratives may seem innocent, it is the crucial first step in the process of demanding censorship.

These new documents expose the early extent to which the US government repurposed the homeland security apparatus, including DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for domestic control. The documents show that CISA may have sought to counter information from [Jay] Bhattacharya, despite claims by the mainstream media recently that the government never tried to censor him. And the new documents come at a time when the in-coming Trump administration has its eyes set on defunding government censorship activities, including by CISA and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

CISA’s early monitoring of Covid narratives may constitute a violation of what’s known as the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, argues America First Legal, which holds that government agencies must not stray from the specific legal authorities given to them by Congress. The Supreme Court has rejected claims by government agencies to have authority over issues of “vast economic and political significance” without clear congressional authorization. And CISA arguably had no congressional authorization to monitor such Covid-related speech, which was unrelated to cybersecurity, infrastructure security, or election security. As such, CISA may have indeed broken the law.

The authors go on to note, “As is typical for censorship agencies, CISA defined misinformation to include accurate information that might lead people to engage in disfavored behaviors.” How does this work, exactly? Try to follow this twisted logic if you can…

“Once Accurate COVID 19 Data Can Become Misinformation With Age,” explained the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, which is one of the Big Four censorship NGOs, in a report cited by CISA, “Given the rapidly changing nature of the pandemic,” explained DFRLab, “even valid data might be misused simply by being published or amplified several days or weeks after its initial release date.”

Got that? True information that is no longer convenient is “misinformation” in this Orwellian world of government information-control. The Public article goes on to explain the specific censorship of Bhattacharya and our other co-plaintiff, Martin Kulldorff:

CISA tracked public sentiment about a study Bhattacharya had conducted in Santa Clara County, California in April 2020, which showed that the prevalence of COVID-19 antibodies in the population was significantly higher than previously thought. “News outlets and public health experts are raising the concerns about the validity of recent California antibody studies,” CISA noted in its analysis. “Statisticians are questioning the accuracy of the studies, saying the sample was unreliable.”

A few months later, Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Francis Collins, then Director of the NIH, would discuss plans for a “devastating published take down” of the Great Barrington Declaration, an anti-lockdown open letter organized by Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford.

Ultimately, CISA, through the Virality Project, would successfully get Twitter to censor a post by Kulldorff, Bhattacharya’s GBD co-author. CISA’s initial scrutiny of Bhattacharya’s Santa Clara study, Fauci and Collins’ planned “take down,” and the eventual censorship of Kulldorff show the phases through which the federal government scrutinized dissent and shaped public opinion with disinformation and censorship. Under the deceptive pretexts of foreign threats, cybersecurity, and “public-private” partnerships, DHS and other agencies worked to manipulate the public while undermining First Amendment protections.

It’s worth mentioning, the case=fatality and infection-fatality rate numbers in Bhattacharya’s Santa Clara study have since been replicated dozens of times and are widely accepted as accurate. These government bureaucrats had zero competence and no business questioning the accuracy validity of his study. Likewise with Kulldorff’s age-gradient covid risk numbers, which have also been widely replicated by other scientists. CISA and FEMA were totally out of their depth engaging in these epidemiological questions. But for them it was not about science; it was about silencing dissent.

The Public article goes on to explain the ideological origins of the government’s censorship machinery:

The new CISA documents fill out the picture of the Censorship Industrial Complex as a creation of the Obama administration and the Intelligence Community (IC). During his time in office, Obama was instrumental in transforming the IC, including DHS, into highly political institutions. This process married progressive political ideology to one of the core imperatives of the U.S. national security state, which is to to maintain public support for the military-industrial complex in general, and to manufacture consent for various foreign interventions in particular.

The marriage was institutional in addition to being ideological. The Democratic Party and various government agencies merged. The people who staffed CISA were as aggressively partisan and political as the people who worked in the Biden White House. Following the election of Trump in 2016, IC operatives who had cut their teeth learning and doing information operations through social media in the Middle East and Eastern Europe sought to apply their tools in the US, repurposing these tools against the domestic population.

[…]

For both Democrats and the IC, controlling social media platforms was essential to their vision for governance. Starting in 2016, censorship advocates were opportunistic, seizing upon various justifications for censorship, starting with alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election through to Covid and election misinformation in 2020. CISA’s decision to get involved in monitoring public sentiment about Covid as early as February 2020 thus paints a picture of an agency actively seeking justifications to demand censorship, starting with recasting politically and ideologically motivated censorship demands as politically neutral and technocratic.

Confirming this, the recently released 17,019-page final report from the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government described “numerous instances of the federal government being weaponized against the American people.” Among the issues examined, the committee accused multiple federal agencies, including the White House, of engaging in a “vast censorship campaign against so-called mis-, dis-, or malinformation.” It specifically mentioned government efforts to censor true information, government censorship partnerships with universities and foreign intelligence agencies, government efforts to “harass Elon Musk’s Twitter,” and the government’s “attempt to control artificial intelligence to suppress free speech.” According to this report, Americans faced a “two-tiered system of government—one of favorable treatment for the politically-favored class, and one of intimidation and unfairness for the rest of American citizens.” A house so divided cannot stand.

The evidence of lawless and unconstitutional censorship is now overwhelming, regardless of whether the courts act on it or not. It’s time for Congress to “defund the thought police” in the federal government. Voters have indicated clear support for this, as polling data revealed that opposition to government censorship was a major issue in the recent election.

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