Congress must rein in the Big Tech Frankenstein it helped create | Daily News Byte

Congress must rein in the Big Tech Frankenstein it helped create

 | Daily News Byte

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TThe onslaught of reporting on the federal government’s cooperation with social media platforms to restrict content has been alarming. Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” showed how
FBI
,
White House
and other powerful institutions developed a cozy relationship with the social media company, including routine meetings and instructions on countering what they saw as “disinformation.”

October
the report
from the Interception revealed that this connection is still ongoing, thanks to the Department of Homeland Security. The department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency directs content it deems “misinformation,” “misinformation” or “misinformation” to Twitter and the Met, prompting the Met to create a separate portal for government officials to report spam.

Like most bloated administrative states, CISA is out of control and severely lacking in accountability. Preventing this fascist merger of public and private should be a top priority for Congress. But

The Washington Post
reported last week that, astonishingly, the House Homeland Security Committee is poised to debate whether to expand the agency in the coming year. Discussions are likely to include a
policy plan
Rep. John Katko (R-NI) to grow its workforce, “aggressively increase cybersecurity capabilities” and help it further “build strong relationships in government, private industry and other key cyber organizations.”

This lack of caution regarding the potential of CISA was evident
since its origin
In 2018, as noted by Robert Romano of Americans for Limited Government. After a massive hack
incidents
against us
companies
caused much fear, Congress unanimously passed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, and former President Donald Trump signed it into law. As is usually the case with government quick “fixes” to a crisis, the law itself created long-term problems.

The bill specifically authorized CISA to assist “private entities” in “deterring, preventing, preventing, or responding to terrorist attacks against the United States.” With little or no warning, DHS can crack down on anything it vaguely defines as online threats to national security. This quickly turned CISA into a “central clearinghouse for routing misinformation issues to appropriate social media platforms and law enforcement” in 2018.
website
. While such control of speech may violate the First Amendment, as a Republican
lawsuit
argues, Congress did not seem to pay much attention to this threat when it created the agency.

The overlap with private entities in CISA’s censorship mission is profound. Ahead of the 2020 CISA elections
joined together
with four research groups in the Partnership for Election Integrity to help social media firms
monitor
“election disinformation.” EIP boasted a 35 percent success rate in getting platforms to remove or suppress content during its work, which faced “vague legal authorities” and “very real First Amendment issues,” one of the groups acknowledged.

The
activist bureaucrat
the head of CISA at the time was Chris Krebs, who was fired by Trump in November 2020 after challenging his claims of election fraud. But Krebs had the last laugh, as CISA and EIP have been controlling what social media users can and can’t say about the election for months. Still, it failed to prevent a nine-month Russian hack that infiltrated dozens of corporations and the National Nuclear Security Administration—a threat that CISA would be right to respond to if only it had its priorities in order.

In spite of
cancellation
of DHS’s short-lived Disinformation Management Board earlier this year for poor optics, we have every reason to believe that CISA’s thought police are still at work in our social media feeds, as shown in documents obtained by Interception. In the future, they hope to push the government’s narratives about “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of US support for Ukraine” as “infrastructure” that must be defended against dissenting speech. .

The GOP is painfully silent about its role in creating this Frankenstein’s monster, and
blaming
the radicals in the Biden administration will not solve anything for further exploitation. If congressional Republicans help expand CISA without correcting its design flaws, the agency will continue to accept the lack of a clear “no” as an implicit “yes” to its censorship activities, and the GOP will be complicit in silencing the public through the use of its own tax dollars. .

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM REBUILDING AMERICA

Hudson Crozier (
@L0neStarTrooper
) is a senior associate
Upward News and student reporter for College Fic. His work is also presented in federalist, the Western Journal, and Red Liberty Media.



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