Morning Wire - CISA Goes Rogue: How Cybersecurity Became Censorship | 2.25.24

Episode Date: February 25, 2024

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency faces claims it censors the American public and interferes in elections. After the debunked Russian collusion narrative and the Twitter files, some lawmakers now want to see the agency completely dismantled. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, known as SISA, has come under increased fire in recent years over claims it censors the American public and interferes in elections. After it got embroiled in the debunked Russia collusion narrative in the Twitter files, some lawmakers now want to see the agency completely dismantled. In this episode, Daily Wire Culture Reporter Megan Basham talks to Mike Benz, former State Department official and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online about Siza. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Sunday, February 25th, and this is Morning Wire. The following is an interview between Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham, and Mike Benz, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Policy. So thanks so much for joining us, Mike.

You know, to start, can you just give us a brief overview of the formation and purpose of SISA, you know, when it was formed and the justification. that was used for forming it? Yeah, so it was formed at the height of the hysteria of Russia Gate. In November 2018, as an act of Congress that was approved by President Trump, under the justification that Russia may have just hacked the 2016 election. If you remember at the time, they were sort of transitioning from Russian bots and trolls interfering on social media to the idea that maybe the DNC servers had been physically hacked

and maybe this Vermont energy grade had been physically hacked by Russians. Of course, none of that was ever substantiated. But nevertheless, it was in the heat of this that this cyber security agency within the Department of Homeland Security was created by Congress. One thing that's important to keep in mind here is it was never supposed to target misdis or malinformation. When it was created by act of Congress, there was nothing about misdis or malinformation. There was nothing about social media whatsoever in SISISIS's purview. So what they did was a very crooked mission creep, probably the greatest mission creep in

American bureaucratic history in order to make the argument that elections were critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure was under attack by cyber threats. And mis and disinformation on the internet is a cyber threat. When that mis and disinformation is about elections, it is therefore. for a cyber threat to U.S. critical infrastructure and needs to be responded to the way anything on a kill chain architecture

in the cybersecurity landscape is responded to, i.e. you neutralize it, i.e. you censor it. So this was the sort of mission creep of the century, and the way it was pulled off was when Russiagate died in July 2019, when Mueller choked on the stand, they transitioned Sissas purpose from being stopping Russian disinformation, so to speak, or Russian bots and trolls or Russian hacking attempts, to a simple democracy predicate domestically.

And at Cic conferences, in the run-up to the 2020 election, they would openly talk, and I have all these folks clipped, and it's been played in the halls of Congress and entered in multiple lawsuits. They even said their own top VHS advisors were calling for a switch from 80% foreign, 20% domestic to 80% domestic. That is, they deliberately explicitly plotted and carried out the largest domestic censorship events in American history. While actually the assistant unit carrying that out was formerly still called the countering foreign influence task force at DHS. But then a cute thing happened the first week that the Biden administration came into power. in January 2021, they renamed it to the generic office of misdice and malinformation, explicitly giving themselves a charter for both domestic and foreign and papering over the fact

that it was the foreign dirty trick squad there that was responsible for the domestic censorship all along. So let me ask a perhaps somewhat provocative question. Do you believe that this was a pivot or was it part of the intentionality of this department all along? It was the intentionality of the department all along. Now, whether it was going to be that department or one of the other sister ones that they plotted, I think was up in the air until Russiagate died. So this whole group around SISA runs through an organization called the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council bills itself as NATO's think tank.

But it's not really a think tank. It's essentially a clandestine political operation coordinator. It's got seven CIA directors on its board. It gets annual funding from the Pentagon, the state, Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council was also handpicked by SISA to be the so-called domestic disinformation flagger of mail and ballots for the 2020 election and then again to censor COVID-19. But what would happen is, is after they got away with election censorship and there was no political pushback, Sissau then expanded this mandate to

basically start calling everything critical infrastructure. You know, they said public health is critical infrastructure. So if you do misinformation about COVID, now that's the Department of Homeland and security censorship obligation. Our borders are critical infrastructure. So if there's misinformation about irregular migration, then that's under DHS. Purvee. And they wanted to apply this to everything. This all started with this, you know, essentially dirty diplomats roadshow in early

2017, where they blamed the loss of the 2016 election on a free and open internet. And this group that spindles out of this Atlantic Council network went about devising a plan to essentially have a government agency be able to. able to quarterback what they called the whole of society counter miss and disinformation network. And that's just, it's not counter misdisfirmation. This was not about counter speech. This is about censoring speech. So, you know, colloquially, you should just think of it as the whole society's censorship network. What that involved was four separate institutional categories, government, private sector, civil society, and news media and fact checking,

all synchronized in a single network so that each could apply their own proprietary resources and pull their own levers in order to effectuate censorship at scale, because there's a lot of moving parts that are necessary to do all this. But, you know, they initially wanted to do what SISA was doing. I mean, there were Atlantic Council white papers about this from 2018 all the way through 2020. It was under something that they called the forward defense plan against disinformation. It's not offense. It's forward defense. And, you know, these papers, they would say, well, listen, we need the government to be able to herd the cats of this whole society network because we can't just have some pumped up nonprofit group tell Facebook what to do.

We need a government agency to do it. Well, they initially wanted to park it at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which was the formal censorship arm of the State Department created in 2014 to take on ISIS. But they said the problem is, is if we parked at the Global Engagement Center, the State Department can only do this with respect to foreign-facing operations, foreign speech, non-U.S. citizens because the State Department's not allowed to operate domestically. They said, well, this is really kind of an intelligence capacity. And this is the sort of thing that the CIA has a license to do abroad. The CIA can go to the Frankfurt Algemaider in Germany and tell them not to print a story. They're technically not supposed to do that with the New York Times. Right. So that's foreign-facing. You know, the FBI would be able to do this because the FBI has a domestic jurisdiction. But the problem with the FBI is it's supposed to be, by law, the intelligence.

armor the Justice Department. And what we're talking about are really just opinion tweets. There's no act of law breaking. So the only other option that leaves, because we have 15 foreign facing intelligence services, but we only have two domestically. That's the FBI and the DHS. And the magic of the DHS is it doesn't require lawbreaking for the agency to expend resources. So let me just be perfectly clear here to bring this home. What they plotted and what they did was they created an institution within the Department of Homeland Security that combined the foreign-facing Department of Dirty Trick's power of the CIA with the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI. So something you said in your interview with Tucker Carlson seems really crucial to how they're

getting away with this censorship. And part of that was that they were redefining democracy, not to mean government by the will of the people, but to protect democratic institutions. So protecting democracy meant we protect these institutions. Can you expand on that a little bit and why that was so significant to SZA? Yeah. So you may recall, if you are politically aware and paying attention to the news, a lot of strange headlines coming out of typically sort of white shoe foreign policy-oriented places like the Atlantic or op-eds and Newsweek or foreign affairs around how elites need to have more say in elections and how actually, you know, in a strange way, elections might actually undermine democracy. If you look for it, you will find this in places

that you might not, you know, the same place as calling for democracy will, you know, occasionally put out these headlines around how actually elections are a threat to democracy in a certain way. And that doesn't come out of nowhere. That comes out of this post-2016 consensus building architecture that essentially posited that our traditional understanding of democracy was not ready for social media, that there were always these kind of bumper cars on democracy. Now, they did this in a few ways, right? They said, well, the problem with democracy is it leads to demagogues. You know, they will say, you know, Hitler was democratically elected and, you know, and many other dictators were. And the thing that kept democracy working was actually not total

and unfettered freedom in observing just the votes of what people voted for. It was the democratic institutions, you know, everything from oversight institutions within the U.S. government to civil society institutions, which is their sort of catch-all euphemistic phrasing for politically like-minded universities, NGOs, nonprofits, and media institutions. And those basically were able to box out the rise of domestic political forces. that might lead to demagoguery or a strongman authoritarian proclivities and whatnot. And so they said actually democratic institutions are really more important than the voting process itself. When you use that democracy framing, that unleashes this power within our foreign-facing Department of Dirty Tricks agencies,

the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the NGOs form that's pumped up by funding from USA and the National Endowment for Democracy. And what happened here was, is they said, well, what is democracy? Democracy is democratic institutions. Well, what are democratic institutions? Places like the New York Times and the Washington Post and NBC and ABC and CBS. I mean, you can go to USAspending.gov right now, and you can find over $60 million of funding from the National Science Foundation directly to a censorship mercenary army just within the universities alone for censorship grants, paying thousands of people across 60 universities to censor U.S. citizen speech that, quote,

undermines public faith and confidence in democratic institutions, including the media. So I'll give you a great example of this. There's one grant that we published about recently to a new project called Course Correct. It's $5.5 million going from the National Science Foundation to the University of Michigan, for the University of Michigan to work with a bunch of software engineers to create a dynamic disinformation dashboard about speech online that undermines public faith and confidence in the news media. Okay?

Because the news media is a democratic institution according to DHS, the National Science Foundation, you know, DOD, what I call the blob, this constellation of national security. I was going to ask you to define the blob. But yeah, go on. Yeah. So, I mean, that's not my term. That's the term that President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes described when in the second half of the Obama administration, Obama started to have a bit of a fallout with this very powerful faction within Washington. And in feeling like they were losing some of those skirmishes, his deputy national security advisor sort of described what they were up against as the blob. And I think that that's a useful term.

doesn't require you to be a Democrat or Republican or a conservative or liberal to understand this constellation of stakeholders and institutions within D.C. that are essentially the top power block. And what you see here is the same sort of dirty tricks that we were doing to run counterinsurgency operations against little insurgent groups that were trying to run for office in their own elections that the CIA had a carte blanche to rig and that the State Department had cart blanche to fund the political opposition groups. In foreign countries, we're talking about. Yeah, in other countries. Yeah. They brought that home, fully home. And so that was kind of what I was wanting to get at. So when you say, you know, this became about protecting democratic institutions,

they're not talking about the Supreme Court. They're talking about protecting some extra constitutional institutions that came, you know, long after, let's say, FDR? Well, they will include the Supreme Court if the Supreme Court is on their side. For example, when I say, they say that journalism is a democratic institution and that independent news media is a democratic institution, they don't really mean the news media. They mean their political like-minded is there. You know, they'll mean the New York Times, they don't mean Daily Wire. I mean Rob Flaherty, at the White House. Digital Strategy Office literally wrote an email.

This came out in the Jim Jordan weaponization subcommittee subpoenas, literally wrote an email to Facebook telling them to change their algorithm to prioritize the New York Times and to throttle the Daily Wire. We did hear about that, yep. So Daily Wire is not going to be treated as a Democratic institution. But that's the fine print they'll leave out of that, right? In fact, it's actually under this rubric of protecting Democratic institutions. such as independent media that they censor independent media because it's just a branding device

in order to protect their own cartel. So, you know, a lot of people will look at this and I think we kind of slip into the very easy framing of Democrat versus Republican issues, but, you know, based on some of the other interviews I've seen you give, this is much bigger than right versus left or Democrat versus Republican. Am I correct? Completely. Yes, yes.

And this is, and that's such an important point. this censorship industry would not change shape whatsoever under a Nikki Haley presidency. And I'm not trying to single out a particular politician in this case. But what they would say is, listen, you know, we've had this understanding of democracy and it needs to change in light of the role of social media. Because we have a very precarious thing managing the American Empire. If there's some funny truck driver who's popular on social media, they could collapse the entire inheritance of two and a half century. of statecraft. And we need bumper cars around that. We had that in the analog media era because all of the major media institutions of the 20th century came out of the Pentagon. They came out

of the Office of War Information set up in 1942 to fold them into the war fighting apparatus. There was always a dialogue to be able to align that world insurer in order to box out candidates who represented the kind of political threat, the populist threat, the caring about the homeland more than the empire threat that Donald Trump did. And by the way, they would have done the same thing to Bernie Sanders in 2016. You know, 2016 Bernie Sanders was calling for an end the U.S. militarism and a scaleback of all of our interventions and USAID and all of that in order to pay for free health care and free college tuition. He was crushed by the gears of the machine of the Hillary Clinton machine and of the DNC side of the blob. So it's not a partisan thing.

It's much bigger than that. It gets to really the soul of what turns the gears of power in this country. So, you know, I mean, and this may seem a fairly low level summary, but to summarize, it's fair to say then that both parties had an interest in seeing a censorship bureaucracy on the domestic front. That's exactly right. And that's why the head of system, was a Republican. It was Chris Crenz. Now, there was a very strange thing, which was that his top deputy at Cicester was a Democrat, which the White House found quite curious. It was never Trump plus DNC apparatus there within Cicca. And because of that, they were able to sort of create the patina of bipartisanship because nominally, you had Republicans in the same way that nominally,

Liz Cheney was basically the, I know Benny Thompson was the chairman, but Liz Cheney was effectively the face of the January 6th committee. So, I mean, a lot of people are going to naturally have the question when they hear about this. Was the Trump administration not able to stop this? Did it not understand what it was? Or was it sold as something different? They didn't understand it. And at the time, I mean, it's hard for many people to remember now what things were like five years ago,

you know, 2018, 2019. When all this stuff was happening and I was screaming bloody murder about it to every contact in my phone book. You almost got laughed out of the room if you said there was any censorship at all. I mean, if you remember, it wasn't really until kind of mid-20201 that it was conceded that censorship on the internet was a real thing. Frankly, it kind of took Trump himself, if you remember, even before he was kicked off Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Mailchimp, you know, in Pinterest simultaneously.

There was about a month and a half where a very strange thing would happen, which is one of the largest accounts on Twitter in the sitting president of the United States, you would go to his Twitter page and nine out of ten posts would have some fact check affixed to it, or would be, you'd have to go through this, you know, friction-laden interstitial click-through to see the tweet. But the other part of it is people did not want to believe because there was a perception that if it was as bad as I was saying, it would require the kind of struggle that would perhaps too resource intensive or too distracting from things that were happening or was too big to take on or it might require a totally different approach to coalition building or to other elements of public policy.

And even then, still might not win. And it was just, it was like staring at the sun. If it was true, I don't want to know. And it wasn't until it became sort of, the sunlight was so bright that it was melting people's skin that suddenly it was like, oh, wow, okay, all right. It's, okay, it's real. We have to do something about this. And by that point, five years of censorship industry architecture had been laid down and consolidated. You know, the time to scrape it away easily was when the cement was wet. But five years and several billion dollars of capital pumped into it and multiple federal agencies entrenching their spindles, you know, 60 different universities, hundreds of different NGOs, dozens of different censorship mercenary firms, an entire ground-up sort of fact-checking media network alliance rolled into this so-called whole society.

By then, you know, the cancer had metastasized to the heart and the lungs. There was no Tylenol pill you could take. There was no Section 230. And there never was. It requires a degree of, I say this metaphorically, but it's trench warfare that's necessary to untangle the Gordian knot here. There's no one single slingshot pebble that you can even throw at this. this Goliath. It is too big for that. And maybe last question then, I mean, what does that trench warfare look like? And is there the will legislatively to do it? It looks like the same thing

on the side of freedom that was done on the side of censorship. What I've said all along is that the only thing that can take on a whole society censorship network is a whole society freedom coalition that ties together freedom-oriented government folks, you know, the folks in the legislature, for example, or in an executive branch of either, you know, whether that would be a Trump-type figure or an RFK-type figure. In theory, you know, this is a nonpartisan issue. But what I'll say is we should take some heart. Twenty-23 was a year of major, major, major victories. It was the first year we ever won. That is, by the end of 2023, there was more freedom on the internet than there was at the beginning of 2023. That was not true for the entire six, seven years before that.

And every year we would lose by more and more and more. In fact, I talk about this a lot. But in September 2022, the Harvard Misinformation Review, the proprietary censorship journal of Harvard University, published a piece calling disinformation studies, quote, too big to fail. And just one year later, to the date, in September 2023, they published a piece saying that it was now, quote, crumbling because of the combined effectiveness of legal, regulatory, and media pressure on these issues, which relies on the camouflage of darkness to have the political legitimacy for the funding and many other things. So the issue is, since we started winning, they have responded in the same way that the Justice Department responded, you know, when Trump rising in the polls, not dropping

out to what happens. You know, they indict him four times and now he's facing 700 years in prison, and they're bankrupting him with suit after suit of, frankly, BS charges, you know, costing him 500 million. But, you know, these are things that have never been done for two and a half centuries to an American president. No American president ever been indicted, let alone hit with stacking charges equating to 700 years. No U.S. president had ever been targeted with lawfare that way, or sued by a, you know, state attorney general's office for an accounting detail where there were no actual damages because the loan was actually paid off. they breaking that social contract and then radically raising the stakes, that is what is currently

happening with the censorship industry. Since we had all these major wins in 2023 with Elon acquiring Twitter, with the House turning over from Democrat to Republican and a cascade of subpoenas, hearings, and transcribed interviews from eight different congressional committees in total, especially weaponization, oversight, House Homeland Security, and others. And then you had, you know, the Twitter files and all the exposures and media cycle from that. You had the major victories at the trial in an appellate court level in the Missouri v. Biden case, which if the Supreme Court makes a favorable ruling will literally forbid by law the ability for the government to do what's been doing for the past seven years. Then you've got the other cases, everything from the American

First legal case to this new state attorney general back case against the State Department for their role in the censorship industry with Ken Pax in there in Texas. But the response to that has been transatlantic flank attack 2.0. Transatlantic flank attack, it refers to this U.S. political stakeholder plan to get Europe to pass censorship laws and then force the tech companies into compliance with European norms and standards in order to censor U.S. speech. And I watched these people do this in 2017 when they got an SUD pass in Germany. This is part of this whole dirty diplomats road show I referred to earlier when the State Department exiles of the Hillary Clinton State Department after 2016, after she lost, went across the ocean

to NATO and convince all these European countries to start passing censorship laws saying that we have a first amendment here in the U.S., but if Europe moves first, we will close the gap, and this will give us leverage to do so. They're doing the exact same thing right now with something called the EU Digital Services Act, which is basically the NATO censorship law, which bans disinformation on the Internet. That gives them godlike power to say that basically anything political is disinformation and would force Elon Musk to censor it or else forfeit their position in the European market, which is 500 million people. It's a bigger market than the U.S. market. They can't do that. So they keep escalating the stakes and they're effectively unrunning the

First Amendment itself. All right. Well, I mean, we'll probably leave it there, Mike, just because this is so much to digest and you have such an awareness that, you know, today we've only taken off maybe a tiny chunk of it. But hopefully, you know, our contribution, keeps the ball rolling. Great. Well, thank you. I appreciate your time. And talk soon. Thanks so much, Mike. That was an interview between Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham, and Mike Benz, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Policy.

And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.