How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda 1/4

November 10, 2023KEK

The FBI put a pause on briefings with tech companies due to an ongoing lawsuit, adding to a broader breakdown in a system meant to guard against influence operations and to ensure election integrity.A once-robust alliance of federal agencies, tech companies, election officials and researchersthat worked together to thwart foreign propaganda and disinformation has fragmented after years of sustained Republican attacks.

The GOP offensive started during the 2020 election as public critiques and has since escalated into lawsuits, governmental inquiries and public relations campaigns that have succeeded in stopping almost all coordination between the government and social media platforms.

The most recent setback came when the FBI put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies about Russian, Iranian and Chinese influence campaigns. Employees at two U.S. tech companies who used to receive regular briefings from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force told NBC News that it has been months since the bureau reached out.

In a testimony last week to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray signaled a significant pullback in communications with tech companies and tied the move to rulings by a conservative federal judge and appeals courtthat said some government agencies and officials should be restricted from communicating and meeting with social media companies to moderate content. The case is now on hold pending Supreme Court review.

“We’re having some interaction with social media companies,” Wray said. “But all of those interactions have changed fundamentally in the wake of the court rulings.”

Wray didn’t elaborate, but sources familiar with the matter told NBC News that all the FBI’s interactions with tech platforms now have to be pre-approved and supervised by Justice Department lawyers.

The FBI told the House Judiciary Committee that, since the court rulings, the bureau had discovered foreign influence campaigns on social media platforms but in some cases did not inform the companies about them because they were hamstrung by the new legal oversight, according to a congressional official.

“This is the worst possible outcome in terms of the injunction,” said one U.S. official familiar with the matter. “The symbiotic relationship between the government and the social media companies has definitely been fractured.”

The FBI declined to comment.

More than a dozen current and former government and tech employees who have been involved in fighting online manipulation campaigns and election falsehoods since 2020 echoed those concerns. Most agreed to speak only on the condition that they not be named, all citing the current climate of harassment against people who work in election and information integrity.

A common theme among those interviewed: The chilling effect that Republican attacks had on the sharing of information about possible interference, which could make it easier for foreign adversaries to manipulate U.S. public opinion and harder for 2024 voters to sort out what’s real from what’s fake.

Beyond the FBI briefings, other coordination efforts have folded after facing pressure from conservatives. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees federal election cybersecurity and has become a favorite target of Republicans, has halted its outreach to Silicon Valley, and the Department of Homeland Security has shuttered a board designed to coordinate its anti-disinformation programs.

(They still want all of us muzzled and arrested. They are still pushing the Russia Hoax etc.They are desperate, because the courts shut them down)

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/gop-muzzled-quiet-coalition-fought-foreign-propaganda-rcna103373

>>19901699

2/4

“Some of these efforts really are designed to isolate people andmake them feel like they can’t communicate with CISA, like they can’t communicate with their peers in other states,” a person who works in state election administration said.

“People feel that things are really, really fraught, and common sense does not rule today,” the person added.

Some politicians are sounding the alarm. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said efforts to stop foreign manipulation of U.S. politics are well within the government’s remit.

“I understand we don’t want to interdict constitutionally protected speech, but what is constitutionally protected speech?” he said. “Certainly foreign agents don’t have constitutionally protected speech because they’re not subject to our Constitution. I presume bots don’t have constitutionally protected speech. American citizens do.”

Microsoft recently said it expects Russia, Iran and China to engage in sophisticated influence operations ahead of the 2024 election. (But Microsoft is trying to interfere with the next election. So they are saying those three countries support Trump, so they are limiting free speech and it’s worth it.)

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee who had vocally pushed for election security coordination after 2016, told NBC News he had “grave concerns” about the setbacks of the system that defends against social media and election manipulation.

“We are seeing a potential scenario where all the major improvements in identifying, threat-sharing, and public exposure of foreign malign influence activity targeting U.S. elections have been systematically undermined,” Warner said.

Before 2016, there was little political will in the U.S. for the government or for tech companies to share intelligence with each other or protect voters from foreign influence campaigns. That year, Russia launched a multifaceted interference campaign that included the Kremlin-tied Internet Research Agency reaching tens of millions of Facebook and Twitter users. Hackers working for Russian intelligence stole and leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, probed an election machine company and stole voter information from the state of Illinois. (Even though the Russia hoax was proved a hoax, they are still pushing it)

In the aftermath, President Barack Obama’s outgoing secretary for the Department of Homeland Security declared elections to be critical infrastructure, a move that drew immediate criticism from conservative election officials. Congress voted for the Department of Homeland Security to spin out its cyber and infrastructure protection efforts into CISA.

Meanwhile, the FBI created the Foreign Influence Task Force, meant to act as an intermediary that ferried information between the U.S. intelligence community and tech companies.The National Security Agency declined to commentfor this story, but its director said in 2022 that the agency had fed intelligence about foreign propagandists to the task force to share with tech platforms.

CISA started holding its own meetings with tech companies, briefing them on election administration nuances and helping set up a “switchboard” system to flag election falsehoods online. The new system allowed a local election official to, for example, communicate to Facebook that a local group was directing people to the wrong polling site, in violation of the company’s policies.

These partnerships between government, corporations and legal and academic researchers were praised after 2020as a crucial part of ensuring a secure election. (By whom were the praised? The media, because they cheated with CISA)

After the election, a victory for the Democrats and Joe Biden, President Donald Trump and many other conservatives refused to accept the loss and lashed out at political enemies. They targeted a number of election integrity operations, including the channels that shared information on disinformation, often accusing them of censoring conservative voices.

>>19901732

Evil Nina raises her ugly head

3/4

Many of them focused on Twitter and Facebook’s decision to temporarily limit the reach of a New York Poststory about Biden’s son, Hunter. Published a few weeks before the election, to the tech platforms it had echoes of when Russia leaked Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg said FBI statements about certain threats fit the pattern of the Hunter Biden story, both later said the agency didn’t specifically say the Biden emails were a foreign intelligence campaign. Digital forensics experts have verified that at least some of those emails were authentic but much remains unknown about the origins of the files.

Since then, Republicans have sent many election integrity efforts into retreat.

Last year, the attorneys general offices of Missouri and Louisiana filed a joint lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that federal government outreach to tech companies about content on their platform — including law enforcement tips about election integrity and Covid-19 — constituted intimidation and a violation of First Amendment protections to free speech.

=The case is still winding its way through the courts. Last month, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court’s ruling in favor of the conservative states’ case while it hears an appeal.

Other efforts have been stopped before they could get started. In March 2022, the Department of Homeland Security created a board to help coordinate its own response to viral falsehoods, prompting outcry from conservatives who claimed the government was policing speech.Nina Jankowicz, a researcher who studies disinformation and technology, was brought in to run the board and quickly became the targetof a debilitating harassment campaign. Homeland Security shut down the board five months later.

Jankowicz said that the decision likely sent a message to federal workers that they might face retaliation for speaking out in a way that upset vocal critics.

“If you’re the one who’s raising the alarm about foreign interference or about something that is disenfranchising people and letting the platforms know, but it might cost you your job or your safety and security, you think twice about doing that,”Jankowicz said.

Biden’s head of CISA, Jen Easterly, a decorated intelligence official who had no prior experience in a public government role, started her tenure with optimism that her agency played a major role confronting disinformation.

“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” she said at a talk hosted by Wired magazine in her first year on the job.

>>19901741

==You see how they twist everything, why is Microsoft so concerned?)

4/4

But Easterly, whofrequently characterizes herself as nonpartisan, soon withdrew the agency from roles that most actively fought disinformation. Aside from maintaining a webpage that corrects common misconceptions about how elections work, CISA now focuses more on goals like protecting poll workers’ physical safety, connecting election officials with cybersecurity resources, and pushing software companies to do a better job building secure programs. (Characterizes herself as non partisan is lying)

CISA stopped briefing platforms about how U.S. elections are administered after the 2022 midterms, a current CISA employee said, though they did not attribute the move to Republican pressure.Two people familiar with the agency said Easterly had pulled back from outreach to social media companies after being surprised by the severity of conservatives’ attacks. (What a fucking lie!)

Republican demonization of the agency hasn’t abated. After the GOP took the House of Representatives in 2022, the House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has spent much of this term focused ongrievances from the 2020 election. It subpoenaed Easterly earlier this year, then issued a report that claimed “CISA metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.”

In a podcast interview on “On with Kara Swisher” in June, Easterly explained that CISA will also no longer help flag state and local election officials’ concerns to social media companies. (Because the freaking court said you broke the law.)

“I need to ensure we are able to do our core mission, to reduce risk to critical infrastructure. And at this point in time, I do not think the risk of us dealing with social media platforms is worth any benefit, quite frankly,” Easterly said, though she did not specify the source of the risk.

“I made a decision not to do that. So we are not doing that. Local election officials can give that to the platforms themselves, and I think that’s the right place for us to be,” she said.(No you didn’t the Court said you couldn’t violate free speech)

Through an agency spokesperson, Easterly declined to comment. In an emailed statement, she said: “Election security is one of CISA’s top priorities, and along with our interagency partners, we’re fully focused on supporting state and local election officials as they prepare for the 2024 election cycle. As we have since 2017, CISA will continue to lean forward and do our part to ensure the American people can have confidence in the security and resilience of our most sacred democratic process.”

Meanwhile, some platforms have cut back on trust and safety teams. Tech companies are still sharing their findings with each other, a Meta spokesperson told NBC News. The exception is X, whose owner Elon Musk released a giant cache of emails and company documents related to its previous trust and safety efforts and also made huge cuts to its trust and safety and election integrity teams. During the Israel-Hamas war, X has left viral terror videos from Hamas go viral and linger on the site for days.

One current X employee, who wasn’t authorized to speak for the company, said they had no remaining faith that the company could handle propaganda campaigns.

“The company no longer has the team, the tools, or the capabilities to identify and mitigate these attacks,” they said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/gop-muzzled-quiet-coalition-fought-foreign-propaganda-rcna103373

>>19901769

“The company no longer has the team, the tools, or the capabilities to identify and mitigate these attacks,” they said.“

But their AI Does, and it reports back

>>19901699

Damn it anons they are still using the Russia Hoax and justifying this innocent agency CISA because they and Homeland Security shut down free speech because their mission is free andfear elections, due to foreign actors.

It’s just so wrong the courts told them they violated the constitution, free speech and other rights,but the Courts and Conservatives are wrong. They are just trying to help.

>>19901699

Oh guess who are the authors of this propaganda piece

Nov. 10, 2023, 8:05 AM EST

By Kevin Collier andKen Dilanian IAC agent

Matthew Roesch was following his victim and demanding money after letting her through an emergency exit, she told The Post.

John Rote allegedly screamed “Get the f–ck away from her” before firing two shots through a subway station.

Woman threatened by homeless would-be mugger wishes ‘hero’ vigilante gunman didn’t fire weapon: ‘I was terrified’

By Khristina Narizhnaya and Katherine Donlevy

Published Nov. 10, 2023, 8:28 p.m.

The woman who was threatened by a homeless would-be mugger considers subway vigilante John Rote a “hero” — but wishes he tried to help without firing a gun in the station.

Speaking to The Post over the phone Friday, the 40-year-old woman, who did not want to be identified, recalled the “pure terror” she felt during Tuesday’s ordeal in the city’s subway system she believes has become increasingly unsafe for riders.

One reason for the sketchy conditions underground, she said, is the lack of serious punishments for repeat offenders — such as the man who tried to rob her — who hang out at subway stations.

The woman’s nightmarish scenario unfolded when while trying to head back to her Queens home, she encountered Matthew Roesch, a homeless 49-year-old, who was allegedly harassing her for money after he held the emergency gate open at the 49th Street station near Times Square, she recalled.

When she tried to walk through, he blocked her way and demanded money, according to court documents.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to give him any money’ and kept walking. He followed me. He kept demanding money and he said, ‘if you don’t give me money, I’m going to take your bag.’ I was trying to walk away from him, but he was following me and getting very close,” the woman said.

Roesch — who is known to police for frequently pulling the scheme — allegedly made moves to snatch her bag when Rote, 43, whipped out the firearmand allegedly fired several rounds across the subway while warning the would-be mugger to leave the woman alone.

“Of course, I am happy that that man tried to help me and that nobody was injured during this incident, butit’s scary to think that people are carrying guns around the city. I understand why people do it, they see it as their only means of protection,” the woman said.

Rote was seen in surveillance footage casually pulling the handgun from his bag and aiming it at the scuffle before shouting: “Get the f–k away from her!”

“It all happened within seconds. It didn’t faze the homeless man, he continued to say, ‘give me money, give me money,'” the woman said. That’s when Rote allegedly shot the second time and continued yelling at Roesch to back away from his victim. Roesch finally stalled, giving the woman the chance to run away.

As about 40 others in the station scattered, she found safety inside an MTA maintenance room after a worker opened the door to check out the chaos. He pushed a large metal cabinet against the door, preventing the gunman or the would-be mugger from following them inside.

“I was terrified, I was feeling fear, panic. I was ready for anything, to fight for my life in any way. The gun was pointed in my direction, and that’s all I saw. It was a feeling of pure terror that I don’t wish on anyone.”

Roesch was arrested after police arrived within minutes and was charged with attempted robbery, but Rote was able to flee before he could be cuffed.

Rote — who has no prior arrests — was arrested at his Manhattan job the following day after an anonymous tipster recognized him from the police-leaked footage. He allegedly admitted to the shooting and told cops he ditched the gun in the East River.

He was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, criminal possession of a firearm, reckless endangerment and menacing, the NYPD said. Law enforcement sources said they don’t think Rote was aiming at the vagrant, and was just trying to scare him off.

Although the woman said she would like to thank Rote for intervening,she said she wishes he left the weapon out of it.

“In this case the man risked a lot to protect me, his safety, and the safety of other people on the platform. Yes, I do think he is a hero, but I don’t know, I would likely think him a bigger hero if he tried to help me without the gun. In my eyes, the gun is a little extreme. It was a very dangerous situation, anything could have happened.”

The woman also slammed the MTA and NYPD, accusing them of doing little to prevent such chaos inside the subways.

She said the incident was the second of two unsettling encounters with homeless people at the 49th Street platform in just one day — her morning started with another man openly masturbating on a bench without shame: “That set the tone for the day.”….

https://nypost.com/2023/11/10/metro/woman-threatened-by-homeless-mugger-wishes-vigilante-didnt-use-gun/

>>19901935

Bongino ruleIt’s not bad enough yet