New Documents Reveal US Department Of Homeland Security Conspiracy To Violate First Amendment And Interfere In Elections
Emails released by the U.S. House of Representatives, when combined with the Twitter Files, reveal a sweeping and secretive effort by Stanford and DHS officials, two of whom are now business partners
The idea that the officials within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security worked with a Stanford think tank to censor ordinary Americans and thus interfere in the 2020 elections is a debunked conspiracy theory, say journalists in the mainstream news media. The Republicans spreading that conspiracy theory, say journalists with the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Yorker, are also waging a witch hunt against university researchers who study misinformation. It is for that reason that the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which is home to those researchers, had long refused Republican requests for their emails and data.
But newly released documents suggest that SIO may have had a very different motivation for not sharing their files with Congressional investigators: they show that the idea for sweeping government censorship, in which the Stanford think tank played a central role, came from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Internet Security Agency (CISA). According to one of CISA’s censorship partners, the so-called “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP), which was ostensibly separate from CISA, was created at its behest.
In an internal Atlantic Council email sent on July 21 2020, Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Council’s “Digital Forensic Research Lab,” (DRFLab), wrote to a colleague to say the following: “I know the Council has a number of efforts on broad policy around the elections, but we just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA and are in weekly comms to debrief about disinfo, IO, etc.” (Emphasis added.)
Brookie’s acknowledgment contradicts the claim made by the EIP that the idea for the project “came from four students that the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) funded to complete volunteer internships at [CISA].” Brookie’s email also contradicts the testimony of the SIO’s Director, Alex Stamos, earlier this year, who told Congressional investigators that the idea for EIP was his.
There is evidence that DHS-CISA had started interfering in elections several months earlier. On April 15, 2020, the DHS-CISA chief of “Countering Foreign Influence Task Force,” Brian Scully, emailed Twitter executives about a “Government-Industry Meeting,” that was held the next day. The issues discussed included election information.
By November, Twitter executives, Scully, and at least one of the Stanford interns were on a Signal text messaging app group together.
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, it is “axiomatic” that the US government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” Whether it was Stamos or the Director of CISA at the time, Chris Krebs, it’s clear that the U.S. government was directly involved in the Stanford-linked effort to censor Americans.
The documents are revelatory in showing that CISA officials, Stanford officials, and social media executives worked together in secret in ways that not only violated the First Amendment but also interfered in the 2020 elections by attempting to censor protected political speech, particularly that of conservatives and Republicans.
Although we do not know the effects of EIP’s activities on the 2020 election results, and although some of these activities occurred after election day, it’s clear that SIO, EIP, and CISA engaged in viewpoint-based censorship that amounts to attempted interference leading up to the election.
There was virtually no separation between CISA and Stanford employees in 2020. On September 30, 2020, an EIP staffer said that Stamos and Krebs were texting each other “with some regularity.”
Since 2021, former CISA Director Krebs, and Stanford Internet Observatory Director Stamos have owned a consulting firm that works for private equity, aerospace, and satellite companies, among many others.
In 2020, CISA officials and personnel from EIP were often on emails together, and CISA’s personnel had access to EIP’s tickets through an internal messaging system, Jira, which EIP used to flag and report social media posts to Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms.
The Biden administration and journalists have insisted that CISA did not violate the constitution because it was not coercive and merely engaged in “switchboarding” activities, acting as a middleman. But, the new documents reveal that CISA included a threatening disclaimer in its switchboarding communications, which stated that “information may also be shared with law enforcement or intelligence agencies.”
The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) has denied that the EIP tried to censor content or labeled political content as misinformation. “EIP did not make recommendations to the platforms about what actions they should take,” wrote SIO in response to the Twitter Files.
But the Jira system tickets (EIP’s tipline to social media companies) prove that this is a lie. In ticket after ticket, EIP told platforms to remove content, reduce visibility, and suspend users with specific instructions:
“We repeat our recommendation that this account be suspended for the duration of election day from posting additional misleading information about voting.”
“We recommend labeling all instances of the article being shared on Facebook.”
“We recommend that you all flag as false, or remove the posts below.”
“Hi Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter . . . we recommend it be removed from your platforms.”
“We recommend you label or reduce the discoverability of the post.”
“We recommend taking action specifically on this account, such as suspending their ability to continue tweeting for 12 hours.”
Under the guise of a research project, EIP was enmeshed with the federal government leading up to the 2020 election. Four students involved with EIP were even employed by CISA. One Stanford student, for example, worked as a DHS intern “inside the EIP network.”
CISA was not supposed to have involvement in EIP’s flagging activities, but, notes the House Judiciary, numerous Jira tickets mention CISA, and CISA referenced EIP Jira codes when switchboarding.
Stanford’s legal counsel insisted that EIP and SIO “did not provide any government agency… access to the Jira database,” but in one November 2020 email, Stamos told a Reddit employee, “It would be great if we could get somebody from Reddit on JIRA, just like Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, CISA, EI-ISAC…” Stamos’s statement indicated that CISA had access to EIP’s Jira system.
In communications with social media platforms, the House report states, Stamos made it clear “that the EIP’s true purpose was to act as a censorship conduit for the federal government.” In an email to Nextdoor, Stamos wrote that EIP would “provide a one-stop shop for local election officials, DHS, and voter protection organizations to report potential disinformation for us to investigate and to refer to the appropriate platforms if necessary.”
As such, it’s clear from the documents released that CISA violated the First Amendment and, together with Stanford and the other EIP groups, interfered in the 2020 election. Why did they do this? How did they get away with it? And what must be done now?
“CISA” And “CIS” May Be Confusing For A Reason
We roll our eyes at government acronyms as a bad habit of bureaucrats, and most of the time, it probably is. Why do we need so many different agencies? Why are their names so similar?
But sometimes, the confusion may not be an accident. Consider the nonprofit, “Center for Internet Security (CIS).” Given that CISA funds it, why is its name so similar? Why didn’t it choose a different name so people wouldn’t be confused. Perhaps because CISA and CIS wanted people to be confused.
CIS’s job was at the border between government and non-governmental. Could it be that somebody thought it would protect CISA from precisely the accusations of violating the First Amendment that it is now facing?
Consider what CIS did. Throughout 2020, CIS sent reports about alleged “mis- and disinformation” from local government officials to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It did so — apparently — separate from DHS, even though, behind the scenes, the newly revealed emails show, CIS and CISA worked together to plan an additional “misinformation” reporting portal.
But then, somebody inside the US government realized that they had a potential problem. By May 2020, the House Judiciary notes, “planning for a CIS-CISA misinformation reporting portal had hit a roadblock” because, according to notes from a call between Facebook and DHS, “DHS cannot openly endorse the portal.” And so DHS created a work-around: EIP.
DHS, according to the call notes, “has behind-the-scenes signaled that [the National Association of Secretaries of State]/[the National Association of State Election Directors] has told them it would be easier for many states to have ‘one reporting channel’ and CISA and its ISAC [Information Sharing and Analysis Center] would like to have incoming the same time that the platforms do.”
“Less than two months later,” the House Judiciary writes, “the EIP would be established to serve that very purpose.”
By July 2020, Stamos emailed Kate Starbird from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, writing, “We are working on some election monitoring ideas with CISA and I would love your informal feedback before we go too far down this road . . . . [T]hings that should have been assembled a year ago are coming together quickly this week.”
These exchanges suggest that CISA, in a premeditated fashion, created EIP to use as a national portal for alleged misinformation with independent academic veneer, to avoid legal implications of DHS involvement.
CISA, EIP, and CIS engaged in mass flagging because, internal communications suggest, their goal was to target and censor entire “narratives.” Although EIP claims to be only concerned with “mis-” and “disinformation,” it acknowledged that only 42% of its Jira tickets were associated with an external fact-check.
“In other words,” writes the House Judiciary, “EIP analysts were unable to identify a single external source to support its designation of a particular post or narrative as “mis- or disinformation” in a majority of posts it flagged.”
This suggests that most of EIP’s censorship recommendations were not based on well-established truths or falsehoods but on subjective assessments of disfavored viewpoints and statements. Even in cases where fact-checks were available, EIP used them to flag generic or unrelated content.
For example, one flagged Tweet from Republican Party official Harmeet Dhillon that EIP associated with a fact check about signs posted outside polling sites actually did not make claims about the signs and was not disputed by the fact-check.
Media Manipulation
On top of this, emails show that when EIP officials flagged content for censorship, CISA officials were not simply intermediaries but actively discussed what constituted misinformation in emails with social media companies.
One email from a CIS address in November 2020, for instance, sent misinformation reports to CISA, EIP, and Facebook. Explains the House Judiciary report, “the Facebook personnel on the receiving end of this email would understand that CISA and the EIP were receiving the same notifications at the same time.”
Moreover, EIP consistently used the media to pressure social media companies into compliance with censorship. Stamos testified that the SIO used blogposts to draw media attention to “misinformation.” Said Stamos, “So, if we wrote a blogpost that said, ‘This is something viral that’s happening that’s not true,’ you very well could find members of the media going out and then finding that content on five different platforms and then writing about it being up or not.”
The bottom line is this: the DHS, in collusion with Stanford and the media, attempted to conceal a politically motivated election interference project as a legitimate academic endeavor. Stanford has attempted to evade accountability and withhold data from the House Committee, refusing to produce the EIP Jira tickets, which Stanford had sole access to. Stanford counsel claimed that the Jira tickets “concern[ed] only a research project conducted by Stanford students.”
The mainstream media, which was aligned with EIP’s political objectives, continues to participate in the Stanford and DHS conspiracy, defending censorship as “disinformation” research. In one correspondence between SIO personnel and Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, an Alphabet executive expressed concern that SIO and EIP planned to “engage the press.”
All of this suggests that we are more likely to see action from Congress and the Supreme Court, to rein in the Censorship Industrial Complex before we see the mainstream news media acknowledge its existence. But as new revelations showing a tight relationship between government agencies and researchers emerge, it will become increasingly difficult for the media to claim that they were independent, innocent, and being unfairly investigated.
Great reporting. Thank you.
One thing this makes obvious is our government is way too big. All these alphabet agencies, full of over-educated hall-monitor types. Our government needs to be significantly shrunk to protect ourselves from ourselves.
The same Chris Krebs declared that the 2020 election was the most secure in history. Never mind the "Transition Integrity Project", statistical anomalies, and 3AM vote dumps. Keep shining a light on these crony commissars.
PS: Can't make this up - Krebs Stamos Group on Substack at https://intel.ks.group/