WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) released a bombshell document entitled “COVID-19 Countering Foreign Influence Task Force Reporting and Analysis” that was obtained from litigation against the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The document confirms:
- CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF) relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex to inform its censorship of alleged foreign disinformation narratives regarding COVID-19.
- Unelected bureaucrats at CISA weaponized the homeland security apparatus, including FEMA, to monitor COVID-19 speech dissenting from “expert” medical guidance, including President Trump’s comments about taking Hydroxychloroquine in 2020. Many of these “false” narratives later turned out to be true, calling into question the government’s ability to identify “misinformation,” regardless of its authority to do so.
- To determine what was “foreign disinformation,” CISA relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex’s usual suspects (Atlantic Council DFR Lab, Media Matters, Stanford Internet Observatory) — even those discredited for erroneously attributing domestic content to foreign sources (Alliance for Securing Democracy). CISA even relied on foreign government authorities (EU vs. Disinfo) and foreign government-linked groups (CCDH, GDI) that advocated for the demonetization and de-platforming of individual Americans to monitor and target constitutionally protected speech by American citizens.
The internal CISA CFITF report from 2020 marked “FOUO//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY” begins by stating that Dr. Anthony Fauci “guessed it will probably require 50% to 75% of the population to be immune before achieving herd immunity,” but “continued COVID-19 focused anti-vaccination misinformation … threatens the U.S.’s capacity to reach the inoculation threshold required to achieve herd immunity to COVID-19.”
The report confirms that “CISA and its partners advise[d] citizens to recognize the risk of COVID-19 disinformation … and talk to friends and family about the risk of spreading disinformation,” by directing them to a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “coronavirus rumor control” website.
The CISA report reveals that it collected information through “FEMA Social Listening” and by monitoring “Public Sentiment” on COVID-19 narratives. For example, CISA and FEMA monitored public sentiment and social media discussions regarding President Trump’s comment that he was taking Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). While health “experts” and the pharmaceutical industry suppressed the use of HCQ after President Trump’s comment, a later study would find that HCQ “provided a moderate protective benefit against symptomatic COVID-19 … with no drug-related serious adverse events.”
Other COVID-19 narratives that CISA’s report labeled as “misinformation” — and Facebook and Twitter censored — would also later turn out to be true, including the unproven effectiveness of masks and the Wuhan “Lab Leak” theory.
AFL, the House Judiciary Committee, and cases like Missouri v. Biden have established that CISA conspired with a network of leftist NGOs and Big Tech platforms to monitor, target, and censor Americans’ constitutionally protected speech regarding the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. On the pretext of fighting “disinformation,” the political left advocates using the government to monitor and control what Americans see, hear, and say. The Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine arguably prohibits CISA from monitoring election-related speech because it has no “clear congressional authorization” to do so. At best, CISA perhaps could be said to have derivative legal authority to monitor election “disinformation” — despite the fact that Congress has never provided a legal definition of that term — because of its general mission to secure election infrastructure. But there was no legal basis, derivative or otherwise, for CISA to monitor COVID-19-related speech.
Perhaps to cover up its lawlessness, CISA justified its activities by reference to a “Messaging War against America” from Russia, Iran, and China, relying on Clint Watts at the George Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) for the evidence.
The Twitter Files exposed that former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts and ASD’s infamous Hamilton 68 dashboard had attributed a narrative critical of the FBI’s abusive FISA surveillance of Trump-connected figures to Russian “bots” and “trolls” without evidence. CISA’s report cited the Alliance for Securing Democracy 28 times.
Throughout its report, CISA similarly relies on other biased, left-of-center, and government-funded “fact checkers” to label controversial COVID-19 narratives as “foreign disinformation.” For example, CISA also cited Media Matters (funded by George Soros), the Atlantic Council DFR Lab (funded by eleven U.S. government agencies and has seven former CIA directors on its board), and the Stanford Internet Observatory. AFL is currently suing both the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab and the Stanford Internet Observatory for conspiring with the federal government to conduct a mass surveillance and censorship operation targeting millions of Americans. Referencing the Atlantic Council DFR Lab, CISA, as the U.S. government’s arbiter of truth, states, “Once-accurate information can become misinformation as it ages.”
CISA even relied on British censorship organizations, including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) — which is funded by George Soros and the U.S. and U.K. governments and is best known for feeding conservative website blacklists to advertising companies — and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). AFL recently requested the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate CCDH’s U.S. operation as potential “agents of a foreign principal” that must comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
CISA’s report also cites EU vs. Disinfo, which is part of the Diplomatic Service of the European Union. EU vs. Disinfo is a flagship program of the EU European External Action Service (EEAS)’s East StratCom Task Force (ESTF), which the EU created to combat Russian disinformation. CISA cited EU vs. Disinfo to report on “pro-Kremlin” “conspiracy theories and other disinformation narratives around COVID-19” — especially narratives regarding “The Elites vs. The People” and Bill Gates, who appears 64 times in the report.
America First Legal will keep fighting to combat the left’s censorship and expose the government’s malfeasance.
Statement from Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal Senior Vice President:
“Incredibly, the evidence is that CISA relied on a dangerous, anti-American blob of “authorities” to closely monitor what the American people were saying. Here is even more proof that the federal government worked to stamp out constitutionally protected speech by American citizens dissenting from the COVID-19 directives of “experts” like Anthony Fauci, or promoting alternative treatments like Hydroxychloroquine. CISA was created to protect the homeland from terrorists, not to protect incompetent federal bureaucrats. The incoming Administration must clean house,” said Reed Rubinstein.
Read all the CISA documents here.
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Photo Credit: Adobe Stock Images / YOGI C
