State actors – for real

CNAV has known for many years that the largest technological companies – the Big Tech Firms – have routinely censored conservative opinion. Roughly since Midterms 2018, these firms have seemed to coordinate their efforts. Yet whenever any of them accused of them being State actors, they each responded that they were private firms and were simply acting to protect the Internet as they saw fit. Until today, CNAV could assume only that all these firms were mutually simpatico, and that alone explained the coordination. But an unlikely source reveals the central nexus of that coordination – the United States government. Or to be more specific, the Deep State.

The unlikely source

That unlikely source calls itself The Intercept. They have existed since 2014. Here is what they say about themselves:

The Intercept is an award-winning news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism. Its in-depth investigations and unflinching analysis focus on politics, war, surveillance, corruption, the environment, technology, criminal justice, the media, and more. The Intercept gives its journalists the editorial freedom and legal support they need to expose corruption and injustice wherever they find it.

Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder and philanthropist, provided the funding to launch The Intercept in 2014. Today, The Intercept is also fueled by the generosity of its members — a community of committed readers who financially support its mission and goals — and institutional contributors who support The Intercept’s mission.

Memberships start at $15 for one time, $5 per month, or $15 per year – but can run much higher if the member wants. Their politics is definitely leftist, as a sampling of their articles shows. So they have no brief for President Trump or for any conservative.

The Intercept is therefore the perfect organ to break the story of Big Tech Firms being State actors after all. The extreme sensitivity of this story demands that CNAV give all links through the Wayback Machine, when possible without error.

The State behind the State actors

The Intercept broke their story Monday, and called it “Truth Cops.” They take a tone that suggests they might even be simpatico with the censorship coordination they have discovered. But if they’ve held anything back, what they’ve already revealed should shock anyone who thinks he has the straight scoop.

Regular readers will recall CNAV’s “Ministry of Truth” articles about the formation, scale-back, and shutdown of the Disinformation Governance Board. Make that alleged shutdown, because the Department of Homeland Security did not shut it down. They merely moved it underground. DHS fired Nina Jankowicz, its head. But perhaps her entire tenure, and termination, were all Kabuki Theater.

The real Ministry of Truth is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. They put on an impressive front, pretending to defend the country against hacker gangs, foreign information warfare divisions, or whatever kind of threat they can invent. Whoever writes their script ought to be writing motion picture treatments. Their About page gives their ostensible mission, and also names their Director (Jen Easterly) and her deputy (Nitin Natarajan).

Regular aficionados of the James Bond franchise will recognize at once the “International Brotherhood of Resistance to Oppression” that appeared in thee movie Thunderball. That organization was, of course, a front for the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion (SPECTRE). Whether they meant to or not, The Intercept, with their story, takes us into the boardroom.

Documents identifying the State actors

The Intercept begins with minutes of a meeting of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, held April 12, 2022.

This agenda statement says it all:

The core of CISA’s mission is to safeguard America’s critical infrastructure. The nation has seen the corrosive effects of mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM) across a host of our critical infrastructure in recent years, impacting our election systems, telecommunication infrastructure, and our public health infrastructure. As there is no shortage of entities working on MDM issues, CISA is evaluating how to best engage in the space in an additive way, while safeguarding our credibility as an independent agency ahead of the next election cycle.

The Intercept kindly defines the “information” terms in the above statement thus:

• Misinformation: false information one does not know is false.
• Disinformation: false information one spreads knowing it’s false, i.e., he’s lying deliberately.
• Malinformation: true information shared, in or out of context, to bring harm to others.

As usual, the devil lies in the details. Who decides what’s true or false? Who decides what true information the government must hold back to avoid harm? (Harm to whom?) The Agency, that’s who. The Intercept shares much shorter minutes of a meeting of March 1, 2022.

At this meeting Ms. Laura Dehmlow said:

We need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.

Accountable to whom? To CISA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), especially its Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF).

Facebook provides a back door

Facebook – or Meta, as the parent company now calls itself – appears to be the worst offender. They gave CISA a direct portal that only a government agent may use. This document describes that portal and its operation.

The Intercept said on October 31:

At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live.

And at the time of this writing, here at CNAV, the portal is still live.

The Intercept candidly tells us how dangerous this campaign is:

How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.

This operation did not begin with the Biden administration. President Trump ordered his own SecHomeSec to set it up in 2018. He surely suffered, in this and other contexts, from an appalling failure of imagination. CNAV has formed the opinion that elements of the intelligence community, which made the Department of Homeland Security one of their particular hotbeds, deceived him. They not only deceived him; they betrayed him in the Election of 2020. We know of all these things because the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, together with Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit and others, filed a massive lawsuit and forced their disclosure. The defendants, seemingly everybody from the President down, are too numerous to name.

Twitter was one of those State actors

We may soon learn a great deal more, because Twitter was one of those State actors. According to The Intercept, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s Director of Legal Policy, Trust, and Safety, served on the CISA Advisory Committee. Minutes of a June meeting contain a list of Attendees with a line listing Twitter as an organization represented there.

Someone has redacted the name of that Twitter official, but it could only have been Gadde, per Occam’s Razor.

Two events happened last springtime that at the time CNAV deemed unrelated. First was the beginning of the Twitter War with Elon Musk; second was the “establishment” of the Disinformation Governance Board.

Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; and the third time it’s enemy action. Ian Fleming

Again, The Intercept’s motives are unclear. Are they celebrating, or condemning? Either way, they quote, with remarkable candor, this warning from Adam Candeub, Professor of Law at Michigan State:

When the government suggests things, it’s not too hard to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist. And I would consider such actions, especially when it’s bureaucratized, as essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms.

Which is exactly what we see.

So what do we have?

At best this affair represents mission creep by the agency George W. Bush created to stop foreign Non Government Organizational actors from committing acts of war like the Attacks of September 11, 2001. At worse we see treason against the President, and treason against the United States. We knew the Big Tech Firms were playing the role of State actors. We did not know, until now, that they were literal State actors. Not only did they take instruction from the government; they took an active role in planning a campaign of censorship.

If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages, there is no doubt we would call it censorship.
Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Well, Nadine, why don’t you call it censorship? Does your loyalty to the atheistic and one-world-government agenda of this administration blind you to the authoritarian nature of its methods? CNAV puts it to you that if a government has to take such measures to further its agenda, that alone constitutes grounds to question that agenda. CNAV goes further. We condemn the agenda of this administration, and its allies in Congress, in the strongest possible terms. Everyone, whether government official or agent or “private” executive, who had any part in it, rates investigation and possibly indictment. The President, Vice-President, and the named defendants in Missouri v. Biden rate impeachment. The pathway to the thorough housecleaning of our government begins with your vote.