by Samuel Boehlke at The Federalist
A cybersecurity agency within the Department of Homeland Security has been engaging in censorship and then justifying it under the guise of “critical infrastructure security,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry testified this week before the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Called to testify based on findings in his ongoing lawsuit, Louisiana and Missouri v. Biden et al., Landry said DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has classified American “thoughts, ideas, and beliefs” as “critical infrastructure.” To “control” these “cognitive assets,” Landry added, CISA and “numerous federal agencies” then use private entities to orchestrate what amounts to unconstitutional government censorship: The government flags dissenting beliefs for Big Tech companies to silence in an attempt to bypass the First Amendment.
[READ: Meet The Partisans Who Wove The Censorship Complex’s Vast And Tangled Web]
“It is axiomatic that the U.S. government and its officials cannot … circumvent the First Amendment by inducing, threatening, and/or colluding with private entities to suppress protected speech. Shockingly, this is exactly what has occurred through this federal censorship enterprise,” Landry said.
CISA claims to be the “national coordinator for critical infrastructure security and resilience,” and, among other things, purports to address risks from “foreign influence operations and disinformation.” But as The Federalist’s Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson wrote in these pages last year, “A security and surveillance apparatus originally constructed to keep us safe from terrorists has been transformed into an instrument of domestic surveillance, and is now being used against us.”
Behind all CISA’s legal jargon,…
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