#foreign influence task force

CNN:

In its crusade against federal agencies, the Trump administration is targeting our election system, making potentially dangerous reductions to protections that help keep elections free, fair, and secure. On Friday, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent a memo to all agency staff notifying them that “all election security activities” would be paused pending the results of an internal investigation. The memo also stated that the administration was cutting off all funds to the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center—a Department of Homeland Security–funded organization that helps state and local officials monitor, analyze, and respond to cyberattacks targeting the nation’s election hardware and software.

The work of CISA and the EI-ISAC has been central to election security in the United States for most of the past decade, providing state and local election officials with critical tools and assistance to defend against cyber and physical threats to election systems. These steps and other recent blows to federal election guardrails were foretold in Project 2025. Understanding the playbook will help us be ready to push back when the next shoes drop.

Changes to CISA began shortly after Kristi Noem was sworn in as secretary of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency. Beyond the announced election security pause and defunding of EI-ISAC, the agency also put critical election security staff on leave and targeted them for potential termination. These staff include CISA’s regional election security advisers, who are former state and local election officials that provide on-the-ground security support to current frontline election workers, and members of the agency’s Election Resilience team, who were reportedly targeted because they had previously been involved with the agency’s efforts to communicate accurate information about election security to election officials and the public.

Although state and local election officials from both sides of the aisle have praised CISA for providing such support, President Donald Trump and several other conservatives have criticized the agency ever since Trump’s first appointee to lead CISA, Christopher Krebs, promoted accurate information about the 2020 election, including that the election was secure. (The president continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged.)

According to reports, leaders at the Department of Homeland Security will decide next steps for CISA’s election security initiatives when its review is completed March 6. But given the president’s attacks on CISA’s work, it is not difficult to imagine that the administration will permanently gut the agency’s election security role, as recommended in Project 2025.

Even if CISA nominally continues to offer limited election security support, cutting its staff and deprioritizing its work may mean that the nearly 10,000 local election officials on the ground feel very little benefit from the group.

The new administration’s attacks on federal election security assistance extend beyond CISA or the EI-ISAC. Almost immediately after she was sworn in as attorney general, Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force—another target of Project 2025. The task force was established during Trump’s first term, following Russian actors’ attempts to interfere in the 2016 election by hacking campaign emails, influencing public opinion through social media, and probing for cybersecurity weak points in voter registration systems. Interference from Russia and other countries continues to threaten American elections. In 2024 bomb threats that appeared to come from Russian email domains were sent to polling locations, videos tied to Russia falsely depicted election workers destroying ballots, and hackers tied to Iran successfully obtained and attempted to leak documents from the Trump campaign. Now a critical line of defense against these attacks is gone.

The Trump administration also took aim earlier this month at the Federal Election Commission, the bipartisan agency that regulates campaign finance in federal elections. Project 2025 called for a weaker FEC, arguing that the independent agency should do less to regulate political spending. In an unprecedented move, Trump tried to fire the commission’s chair. The move came just as the FEC is set to adjudicate campaign finance complaints from the 2024 election, many of which involved billionaire Elon Musk’s contributions to and spending on behalf of the Trump campaign.

Each of these maneuvers weakens the guardrails that have kept American elections secure and fair. And again, they may be just the beginning, given other election-related recommendations in Project 2025.

The plan also further advocates targeting public and private institutions like task forces and university researchers that study election lies and attempt to communicate accurate election information to the public. Project 2025 even suggests weaponizing civil rights laws to go after election officials, voting registration groups, and nonpartisan voter-friendly policies.

Fortunately, the pushback against at least some of these efforts already has a blueprint in the pushback against executive orders targeting other government functions. Dozens of lawsuits have already been filed in response to Trump’s executive orders. Public pressure campaigns also appear to have had some success, with leaders in the Trump administration reversing course on policy decisions like the federal funding freeze. Any efforts by the Trump administration to use the Department of Justice or the Federal Communications Commission—as was suggested by Project 2025—to prevent Americans from voting, or exercising their First Amendment rights to tell the truth about elections, can likewise be fought in courts of law and public opinion.

New Post has been published on https://theprogressivemind.org/censorship-when-is-it-warranted-and-why/

Censorship: When Is It Warranted And Why?

Censorship was a big subject in George Orwell’s book, “1984”. At times, I feel like we are living in that kind of an era again. Was George Orwell giving us a warning about what would happen to us as our world began to become more connected?

I tend to err on the side of free speech.

When has the government crossed the line? Censorship is perhaps the most egregious violation of our founding principles.

Unfortunately, people in power don’t care about free speech. They trample all over our rights as a way to maintain control. The only problem that they have is that there are people like me. I speak up when my rights are taken away. Sadly, I am just one guy, so if you are reading this, I am depending upon you to share this information. Tell people what your government is doing to YOU. Do not let them be the arbiters of what can and cannot be said. It is that simple. That is why the First Amendment of our Constitution does not give any stipulation where free speech is not protected. Sure, you cannot yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater, but you get what I am saying.

First, I want to give you a back story to this. I will keep it short, because you may be reading this on your lunch break. After all, a half hour is not enough to digest an in depth piece about something as complex as this.

Censorship is the subject, but what is the excuse?

I never liked Donald Trump, but I felt that his time would pass and Americans would become wise to the con job he was performing on those that fell for his BS. My job as a butcher in Stewart Manor is just outside of the New York City limits. I started feeling symptoms of Covid19 on the 12th of March. It was mostly body aches. Not thinking much of it, believing it was just fatigue from working, I went shopping after work for some odds and ends.  I made it home that evening quite sore. My wife felt my head and knew I had a temperature. Covid19 was just starting to explode in New York and now I was sure that I was the next victim.

If we have not learned anything in our history, the one thing we should cherish is free speech. That allows us to call out our leadership for their handling of Covid19 and other crises. We live in tough times and having a right to speak up is our only way to insure that changes come.

That day would be my last day at work for five weeks. For the first two, I was very sick and the following three, recovering from 20 pounds of weight loss and weakness.

During the worst of it all, I had passed out in my bathroom and was unconscious for about a minute as my wife was yelling out my name. When I looked up, she had thought my eyes were turning grey as they often do as a person is dying. I came to and made it back to bed. That day was my wife’s birthday.

She spent two weeks putting a cold compress on me around the clock and trying really hard to keep me eating and drinking fluids. I did not even have the ability to move out of the bed for about three days straight during the worst of my illness.

Eventually, all started to turn for the better and I was getting ready to start to speak.

As I started to recover and get back to eating, I made a decision. Knowing that this pandemic could have been handled much better by the system, by our government and mostly, by the fascist himself, Donald Trump, I decided that I would have to write about my experience. I launched this blog with my first piece on April 16th. It was a trying time for me and I had a lot of resentment for the system that runs our country. My wife and I could not receive any support from the outside world other than moral support. We were on our own as if we had been abandoned. This blog fast became my outlet for my anger at a system that left all of us behind long before the virus ever came to our shores.

I am fairly certain that most of you who are reading this blog understand why the working class struggles in many ways. Covid19 hit the working class the hardest.  Our values are shot down by establishment members of both parties. Our wages, healthcare and equal pay for equal work are often under attack. Covid19 put me out of work for five weeks. I did not receive one penny of sick pay or any way to recover lost time. Thankfully, I have a wife who does very well, so we made it through this bad stretch without any financial problems.

Fast forwarding a few weeks, I was thumbing through Twitter, one of the organizations who would soon censor content.

I looked through my recommendations of people to follow and I followed an account named Peace Data. While viewing their profile, I clicked on their website link and saw articles about war crimes and human rights violations. I sent them a message telling them how good it was to see fellow writers challenging the system followed by a link to my blog. They reached out back to me and suggested that I start submitting content through their website. The communications were on and my first articles started going up. The first one that I submitted to them was called “The Military Industrial Complex  and The Working Class” followed by a piece outlining the environmental problems brought on by capitalism.

My pieces with this website, called Peace Data were often more in depth than what I would say on my blog. I felt that my blog was a place to be agitational and that Peace Data was trying to establish themselves as a quality place for independent media. I knew that they were foreign, saying that they were based in Germany. They were happy with the work I was sending them and about once every week, I would send another article for them to publish.

My portfolio of free speech kept on expanding through the pandemic.

By the time that the summer had arrived, I had almost a half a dozen pieces published on Peace Data. My blog was suffering a little bit as I took time to submit to them. I was ok with that as my word was spreading to more places on the Internet. It was refreshing that I was able to speak to someone from another part of the world who was able to understand in the moment what was going wrong with America.

FBI Director, Cristopher Wray laid the groundwork for First Amendment violations by establishing the Foreign Intelligence Task Force

I kept on communicating and submitting pieces.

Most of them were critical of the Trump administration, because he was in charge and failing us.

There was an occasional piece on the website ripping Biden and Harris, but it was not exactly hitting them hard. Most of the criticism on the site was about war and capitalism.

As the end of the summer neared, life took over a bit and writing took a back seat to spending time with my wife. Between work and time with my wife, I had little time to write. In addition to writing, I am currently studying to teach English as a second language as a fall back option when my body gives out and I can no longer do physical work. As I got back into writing and building my presence online,

I faced censorship.

Well, not me personally, but Peace Data was. At first, I did not know what to expect. Censorship was going to become a central theme in my life, even though I was not the owner of Peace Data. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all deleted profiles and posts related to Peace Data. Every post that I made of an article on Peace Data had been removed by Facebook. They went after my content, even though they did not go after me. The censorship started from the FBI and went through social media and then the mainstream media and finally towards more independent media.

My wife paid attention to my emails for me while I was working, because she kept on top of things for me while writing for Peace Data. She was proud to see me, a working class man, building something in my life towards a less physically demanding path. That said, I started receiving messages on LinkedIn from news outlets. My wife would let me know about these during the day and I would handle them that night, once I was at home.

The FBI told the social media world to censor Peace Data.

As a rule of thumb, our government is not supposed to question free speech. So why did this happen here? What warranted this form of censorship? Is it ok for the federal government to just say that something online is divisive? When did the government get the power to come after free speech from overseas? Even worse, why are the major social networks going along with this? I personally believe that the next step was even worse. The mainstream media reported about this matter in a very irresponsible and amateur way. It is sad that as a butcher, a member of the working class and a college dropout that I can recognize lousy journalism.

CNN and Reuters were the first outlets to contact me. They wanted to have me give them all of the email addresses from PayPal senders compensating me for my work on Peace Data. The mainstream outlets did not want to hear about my story or my content. They all ran with the narrative that this site was a website designed to divide the left and hurt Joe Biden. There was absolutely no evidence that this was the case, yet they ran with it anyway.

CNN and other major outlets supported the mind controlling censoring of a small operation.

Even if they had evidence, they did not want to share it with me. In fact, they relied on a private intelligence firm to piece together forensics that identified the people at Peace Data as fake people who in reality did not exist.

My counter argument to that one is that if someone wants to say something that challenges power in a way that is dangerous to themselves, isn’t it safer to stay anonymous? After all, much of the content on the website, including writing of my own went after the military industrial complex which makes many people insanely wealthy while destroying the lives of millions of people around the world.

When major news outlets trot out a breaking news story, they often do not look at the circumstances surrounding the story. They put out the sensational story and hope that their prime audience will keep their butts molded to their reclining chairs and their eyes on their screens.

In this case, a CNN reporter reached out to me to communicate. He already had intended to run out with the story that he was told was the truth. I do not believe that he really investigated all angles of this story. He only wanted information about how I was paid for the articles that I had submitted. He never asked me one thing about my experience.

The same thing can be said about reporters from other mainstream media outlets. The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CNN, NBC News and the New York Times all pushed out the same narrative.

This was a Russian trolling operation so the FBI deemed that it should be censored.

Why was this the case? The content didn’t match any of the claims made in the CNN reporter’s reporting. In fact, he stated that…

Intelligence officials told Congress earlier this summer that Russia was spreading false information about Biden. – CNN article.

The content on Peace Data did not show up as anything that would turn progressive voters against Biden. In fact, the fight between the factions of the Democratic party had already existed since long before Hillary Clinton ran for President. The FBI played up misinformation from Russia as an excuse to tell the social media outlets to shut down everything associated with Peace Data. In fact, in 2017, the FBI laid the groundwork to go after free speech.

They established what is called the Foreign Influence Task Force.

The main goal of this office is to go after free speech that challenges a narrative. I will remind you about the text of the First Amendment of our Constitution.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This is absolute. There is absolutely NO challenging this fact. The only reason that nobody has challenged this is that the narrative about Russian interference has been played. Most people who find an attack on free speech to be way BEYOND the pale. It offends most of us, including some of Donald Trump’s supporters.

In other words, the FBI can say that any foreign outlet who is critical of American foreign policy can be labeled by the FBI as a foreign influencer thus leading to social media outlets shutting down their pages, links and accounts of members associated with such organization. This means that people who want to expose war crimes around the world committed in OUR name run the risk of being shut up.

This is NOT a supporting piece favoring Russia, but it IS a piece favoring the right to speech, full stop.

So what did CNN want to report about? They and other mainstream outlets wanted to run with a story about Russian interference in our elections. Did they actually show any content that was damaging to Joe Biden as they stated Peace Data published? Did any other reporters? They did not, but they made that claim that they did. I will eat my words if they produce screenshots from Peace Data showing that other than one article soon after Biden announced his VP pick, Kamala Harris. I can recall only one article critical of the Biden/Harris ticket yet I can say that I saw many anti-Trump articles.

Is this an excuse to go after our freedom of speech? After all, speech is the one tool that people have to challenge power. I was fortunate enough to have conversations with reporters from three news outlets that decided that it was important to look further into the story instead of running with sensationalism. The first one was Jacob Silverman from Slate. He wrote ax excellent piece that explained different angles of this situation. https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/peace-data-russia-disinformation-facebook.html

I then spoke with a couple of reporters from ProPublica who weren’t convinced that this was a story that they were interested in pursuing.

A few days later, I had a meeting on Zoom with Jen Kirby, Foreign and National Security Reporter for VOX. We had a great conversation with a lot of hypotheticals and the philosophical angle to this story. Sure, her angle was supposed to be centered around national security which is ultimately was, but she gave credence to the idea that speech ought to be protected by sharing my views in her article. As seen in her article, the problem with the challenge is not that it was Russia creating the so called disinformation.

Kirby told her readers that MY opinion is that free speech is protected and the danger associated with leaving the power to regulate speech in the state. That shows that her mind was open to seeing the whole picture instead of what the mainstream media pushes out.  You can read her article here. —> https://www.vox.com/2020/9/21/21401149/russia-2020-election-meddling-trump-biden

So how was censorship used by the FBI?

That one is simple. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are some of the most powerful business entities in the world. They cooperate with the most powerful government in the world as well. Originally, social media was meant to be a way for people to share anything and everything, a neutral bulletin board. Over the years, it evolved into a mesh of political ideologies challenging, bickering and in some cases, serving as an echo chamber for people of certain political leanings.

Many of your conspiracy theories that bounce around the web originate in a corner of the web. It is the right of individuals to spread false news. It is the right of the victim of fake news to sue for slander if they can trace the origins of the conspiracy. In fact, most of the conspiracies known today originate right here in America. Q’Anon started in America as we know and Alex Jones rambles all day long about conspiracies.

So why was a website with legitimate content targeted? One may never know. Perhaps there were things that were serious red flags, but did anyone from Peace Data commit a crime against America? I believe that the First Amendment vindicates them as they have a right to post whatever content online that they wish. Were they wrong to publish things that they published in some cases? Yes, probably so, but when does the FBI get to call out that speech when the Constitution is explicit about their lack of a right to take away speech.

One can argue that Facebook and Twitter are private companies with a right to censor.

I have been openly threatened with violence on Facebook. I have reported those comments to Facebook and their answer was that it did not violate any community standards. So, are articles critical of American foreign policy meddling? Is it meddling if someone in another country says something online like “I hope Trump loses and get thrown in jail for his crimes?” I can say it in America. It is MY right, but why isn’t it a right of someone else in another country, even if linked to a foreign government?

So if Facebook and the other social media giants out there resort to censorship on direction from the FBI, then is the FBI guilty of that censorship? One might argue that in a court room. I believe somebody should. Censorship of hate speech is one thing, if it is on social media and the private social media company pulls down the content for violations of their standards. On the other hand, if the FBI or any other federal agency does, it is an action taken to limit freedom of speech in violation of the First Amendment. 

Where do I go from here? We are headed into potentially dangerous times with a dangerous President in power and a stacked judiciary that does not care about the rule of law. The focus on what is called a 200 follower trolling outfit is a huge misuse of resources in our government, but it is also an effective way to stifle dissent.

If this emerges as a pattern and websites with opinion content start to show up and get taken down, our government has set a dangerous precedent. 

I want to invite you to fight against the power to censor content as much as possible.

We are all in this together. Sure, there is a lot of noise out there on the Internet. Conspiracy theories are everywhere. Jacob Silverman and Jen Kirby are both on your side in their reporting. They want you to get the facts and stay informed. They also have integrity and do not wish to push out a story like the broken mainstream media. The biggest media outlets have a strategy to keep you engaged so that their advertisers have as many eyes on their commercials as possible. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal want you to thumb past full page ads. Major online outlets want you to go to their site and follow their clickbait.

Ultimately, all three forces, the government, social media and mainstream media all work together in many ways. It is the reason why you often hear millionaires tell you about what the problems are in the country through the lens of a billionaire. It is the reason why we need checks and balances to protect OUR freedoms. Speech is your only way that YOU can put a check on power. If your government is doing something that you do not like, you MUST speak up. You cannot allow the government to shut down content in any way without sharing the facts to you.

With that said, I ask the FBI to produce those facts to me. If they don’t, then Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee at the FBI is responsible for taking away my right, even if the place that I speak is considered by some to be a Russian troll farm. If I am in the dark on that, so be it, one should prove it. That includes the FBI, social media admins AND the mainstream media. Harm is done when voices are silenced without attention to facts.

You have a right to live a life free of censorship.