US Senators Roger Marshall, Bill Hagerty, and Eric Schmitt have sent a letter to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), regarding its involvement in flagging online content.
CISA is an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the three Republicans want to know how it is preparing for the November elections – given, as they spell it out in the letter, CISA’s “past mistakes that put the agency in direct conflict with the First Amendment.”
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
The senators specifically want to know how CISA is organizing and working now, to avoid repeating those same mistakes – namely, monitoring, flagging, and censoring political speech.
Even more specifically – the point is to make sure that there is acknowledgment from CISA that it will not engage in the same kind of activities, this electoral cycle around.
The letter cites the House Judiciary Committee reports as the basis for the senators’ belief this type of censorship was happening back in 2020.
“Breathtaking scale and scope” is how the three senators interpret the Committee’s reports so far, indicating that censorship had indeed been carried out in collusion between government, and private, Big Tech companies.
The letter points out that the Committee found that CISA was in cahoots (“working”) with the Election Integrity Partnership, EIP, which got established ahead of the 2020 ballot to, in its own words, “empower the research community, election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, social media platforms, and others to defend our elections against online behavior harmful to the democratic process.”
But the senators quote the Committee that found these lofty proclaimed goals in reality translated to “a consortium of disinformation” that had the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) at its helm. According to the letter, CISA’s role in EIP was “vital.”
Just to illustrate the pains the current White House seemed to have gone to try to obfuscate the entire endeavor: CISA was performing its “vital” role along with yet another entity not readily identifiable as part of the US government apparatus, but clearly acting as a part of it – the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which the senators say was “housed” within the US Department of State.
To avoid any near future, and in general, “abridging of speech” effort similar to what was unfolding around the last US presidential election, the senators would like to make sure DHS officials were truthful when they assured Congress that the practices had stopped.
“It would be helpful to have a response in writing to the questions below to ensure that CISA’s prior assurances are honored as we enter the last weeks of the 2024 election cycle. If we are to restore and maintain trust in our elections for all Americans, the time to act is now. We request a response to these questions no later than COB on October 22, 2024,” the letter concludes.
