Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales met with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)’s top First Amendment shredder last week, taking pictures and chatting about “election security.”
It was a “productive” meeting, according to a positive press release from the secretary’s office. CISA Director Jen Easterly, Morales, and other state and federal election security officials discussed everything from “high level technology capabilities” to “combatting foreign threats, protecting election administrators, and the process of distributing accurate information about election infrastructure security.”
All smiles and good feelings. And collaboration. Lots of collaboration.
“As Indiana’s Chief Election Officer, we cannot be complacent in how we conduct our elections, and we must take precautions against any potential threats,” Morales said.
But what if the threat is coming from the constitution-crushing federal agency you’re collaborating with?
‘Insidious’ Assault on Elections
There was nothing in the press release about CISA working with Big Tech to silence speech and interfere in U.S. elections. Whether Morales voiced any concerns about the suppressive activities of the notorious Department of Homeland Security agency is not clear. The secretary of state’s spokeswoman did not return The Federalist’s two requests for comments Monday and Tuesday.
I asked Morales’ office the following questions in an email:
Does the secretary have a comment on the alarming activities of CISA in silencing free speech and information about election law violations and irregularities in elections?
Is the secretary concerned that working with a government agency that has sought to stifle and block the distribution of “accurate information about election infrastructure security” could be problematic?
Does the secretary have concerns that working with this agency could lead to the same speech-suppressing outcomes in the name of combating “disinformation” — and that doing so could be disastrous, not only for conservatives but for the basic tenets of the First Amendment?
Morales’ peer and fellow Republican, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, earlier this year called out CISA and fellow deep state agencies for collaborating on the “worst election inference” in U.S. history.
“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” Warner told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the February meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired.
Censorship ‘Nerve Center’
CISA, as The Federalist has extensively reported, was established in 2018 to ostensibly “protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats.” It moved into the nefarious business of information management by partnering with Big Tech to silence speech that it deemed to be “disinformation,” “misinformation,” or the Orwellian-sounding “malinformation.” CISA worked behind the scenes to censor those who questioned everything from the administration of the 2020 elections to the government’s iron-fisted handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A report released last fall by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details just how CISA “Colluded With Big Tech And ‘Disinformation’ Partners To Censor Americans.”
CISA “has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries,” the congressional report states, going on to assert that the shadowy agency has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.”
A federal lawsuit filed by then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, uncovered troubling conversations between the Biden administration and private companies about the pathways for removing information the government deemed false or misleading. Last year, Louisiana District Judge Terry A. Doughty slapped a preliminary injunction on the speech cops, asserting that deep staters from the Biden White House to the FBI, CDC, and CISA appeared to have engaged in “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
The Biden administration quickly appealed, “ironically arguing that by being barred from censoring disfavored speech by social media proxy, the government itself was being censored,” as Ben Weingarten wrote in The Federalist.
In early September, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld much of the lower court’s injunction, asserting that evidence showed the existence of “a coordinated campaign” of unprecedented “magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life.” The appeals court initially spared CISA, but extended the injunction to the agency in a revised opinion a few weeks later.
In October, the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court signed off on a Biden administration request to put a hold on the injunction while the high court takes up the case. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch called the court’s order “unreasoned” and “highly disturbing.” During oral arguments in March, a majority of the justices expressed concerns that checking the government’s power to press Big Tech to do its bidding could prevent the government from protecting the public.
‘Our Continued Partnership’
Unconstrained, the same agencies that lied about the Hunter Biden laptop story and moved to smear it as “disinformation” in the weeks before the 2020 election are looking to jump back into the speech-suppressing arena. As The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood reported earlier this month, the FBI and CISA have resumed conversations with Big Tech platforms. They’re talking about “removing disinformation on their sites as the November presidential election nears,” according to NextGov/FCW.
Here we go again.
Now, Easterly and the rest of the gang at the “nerve center” of government surveillance and censorship are calling on state officials and local officials, ostensibly to help with “protecting the integrity of elections and increasing voter confidence,” according to the Indiana secretary of state’s office.
“I’ve had the privilege of spending time with Chief Election Officials across the country of both parties and witness how tirelessly they work to ensure that their citizens’ votes are counted as cast. It’s why I have confidence in the integrity of our elections, and why the American people should as well,” Easterly said in the press release. “I’m especially grateful for Secretary Morales’ leadership and look forward to our continued partnership as we work together to ensure the security and resilience of our election infrastructure.”
