Morning Wire XX
[0] The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as SISA, has come under increased fire in recent years over claims it censors the American public and interferes in elections.
[1] After it got embroiled in the debunked Russia collusion narrative and the Twitter files, some lawmakers now want to see the agency completely dismantled.
[2] In this episode, Daily Wire Culture reporter Megan Basham talks to Mike Benz, former State Department official and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online about Siza.
[3] I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor -in -Chief John Bickley.
[4] It's Sunday, February 25th, and this is Morning Wire.
[5] The following is an interview between Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham, and Mike Benz, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Policy.
[6] So thanks so much for joining us, Mike.
[7] You know, to start, can you just give us a brief overview of the formation and purpose of SISA, you know, when it was formed and the justification that was used for forming it.
[8] Yeah, so it was formed at the height of the hysteria of Russia Gate in November 2018 as an act of Congress that was approved by President Trump under the justification that Russia may have just hacked the 2016 election.
[9] If you remember at the time, they were sort of transitioning from Russian bots and trolls interfering on social media to the idea that maybe the DNC servers had been physically hacked.
[10] and maybe this Vermont energy grid had been physically hacked by Russians.
[11] Of course, none of that was ever substantiated.
[12] But nevertheless, it was in the heat of this that this cyber security agency within the Department of Homeland Security was created by Congress.
[13] And one thing that's important to keep in mind here is it was never supposed to target misdis or malinformation.
[14] When it was created by act of Congress, there was nothing about misdis or malinformation.
[15] There was nothing about social media whatsoever in SISIS's purview.
[16] So what they did was a very crooked mission creep, probably the greatest mission creep in American bureaucratic history in order to make the argument that elections were critical infrastructure.
[17] Critical infrastructure was under attack by cyber threats.
[18] And mis and disinformation on the internet is a cyber threat.
[19] When that mis and disinformation is about elections, it is therefore.
[20] a cyber threat to U .S. critical infrastructure and needs to be responded to the way anything on a kill chain architecture in the cybersecurity landscape is responded to, i .e. you neutralize it, i .e. you censor it.
[21] So this was the sort of mission creep of the century, and the way it was pulled off was when Russiagate died in July 2019, when Mueller choked on the stand, they transitioned Sissa's purpose from being stopping Russian disinformation.
[22] so to speak, or Russian bots and trolls or Russian hacking attempts to a simple democracy predicate domestically.
[23] And at Cicconferences and the run to the 2020 election, they would openly talk, and I have all these folks clipped and it's been played in the halls of Congress and entered in multiple lawsuits.
[24] They even said their own top VHS advisors were calling for a switch from 80 % foreign, 20 % domestic to 80 % domestic.
[25] That is, they deliberately, explicitly, plotted and carried out the largest domestic censorship events in American history, while actually the SISC unit carrying that out was formally still called the countering foreign influence task force at DHS.
[26] But then a cute thing happened.
[27] The first week that the Biden administration came into power in January 2021, they renamed it to the generic office of misdisc and malinformation, explicitly giving themselves a charter for both domestic and foreign and papering over the fact that it was the foreign dirty trick squad there that was responsible for the domestic censorship all along.
[28] So let me ask a, you know, perhaps somewhat provocative question.
[29] Do you believe that this was a pivot or was it part of the intentionality of this department all along?
[30] It was the intentionality of the department all along.
[31] Now, whether it was going to be that department or one of the other sister ones that they plotted, I think was up in the air until Russiagate died.
[32] So this whole group around SISA runs through an organization called the Atlantic Council.
[33] The Atlantic Council ills itself as NATO's think tank.
[34] But it's not really a think tank.
[35] It's essentially a clandestine political operation coordinator.
[36] It's got seven CIA directors on its board.
[37] It gets annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
[38] The Atlantic Council was also hand -picked by SISA to be the so -called domestic disinformation flagger of mail -in ballots for the 2020 election.
[39] and then again to censor COVID -19.
[40] But what would happen is, is after they got away with election censorship, and there was no political pushback, CISA then expanded this mandate to basically start calling everything critical infrastructure.
[41] You know, they said public health is critical infrastructure.
[42] So if you do misinformation about COVID, now that's the Department of Homeland Security's censorship obligation.
[43] Our borders are critical infrastructure.
[44] So if there's misinformation about irregular migration, then that's under DHS pervian.
[45] They wanted to apply this to everything.
[46] this all started with this, you know, essentially dirty diplomats roadshow in early 2017, where they blamed the loss of the 2016 election on a free and open internet.
[47] And this group that spindles out of this Atlantic Council network went about devising a plan to essentially have a government agency be able to quarterback what they called the whole of society counter -miss and disinformation network.
[48] And that's just, it's not counter -miss disinformation.
[49] This was not about counter -speech.
[50] This is about censoring speech.
[51] So, you know, colloquially, you should just think of it as the whole society's censorship network.
[52] What that involved was four separate institutional categories, government, private sector, civil society, and news media and fact -checking, all synchronized in a single network so that each could apply their own proprietary resources and pull their own levers in order to effectuate censorship at scale, because there's a lot of moving parts that are necessary to do all this.
[53] But, you know, they initially wanted to do what SISA was doing.
[54] I mean, there were Atlantic Council white papers about this from 2018 all the way through 2020.
[55] It was under something that they called the forward defense plan against disinformation.
[56] It's not offense.
[57] It's forward defense.
[58] And, you know, these papers, they would say, well, listen, we need the government to be able to herd the cats of this whole society network because we can't just have some, you know, pumped up nonprofit group tell Facebook what to do.
[59] we need a government agency to do it.
[60] Well, they initially wanted to park it at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which was the formal censorship arm of the State Department created in 2014 to take on ISIS.
[61] But they said the problem is, is if we park into the Global Engagement Center, the State Department can only do this with respect to foreign -facing operations, foreign speech, non -U
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