The U.S. government seems to be dedicated to lies, larceny, and the pursuit of censorship. According to a recent report, offices to target foreign “disinformation,” including a new Foreign Malign Influence Center (emphasis on malign), have started popping up like crazy. The issue? Federal entities supposedly focused on foreign “disinformation” were caught censoring Americans’ free speech.
Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines testified in early May to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC) was recently formed to oversee all the other “disinformation” offices in the federal government after legislation passed last year. According to The Intercept, Haines said, “It encompasses our election threat work, essentially looking at foreign influence and interference in elections, but it also deals with disinformation more generally.” Haines added, “What we have been doing is effectively trying to support the Global Engagement Center and others throughout the U.S. government in helping them to understand what are the plans and intentions of the key actors in this space: China, Russia, Iran, etc.”
If you haven’t heard of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) before, you should have. GEC was founded after the 2016 election and the accusations of Russian interference — which have since been found to be greatly exaggerated. America First Legal exposed how GEC was part of the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech to use foreign intelligence methods to censor Americans.
Then the Washington Examiner exposed how GEC helped bankroll the Global Disinformation Index, a group “secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media” through Disinfo Cloud. So the very fact that Haines cited GEC when discussing federal “disinformation” efforts indicates that these federal entities won’t stick to targeting foreign threats; sooner or later, if it hasn’t already happened, these “disinformation” offices will be weaponized against Americans.
Related: Techno-Hell: U.S. Government Rolls Out AI to Target ‘Russian Disinformation’
U.S. Air Force Reserves intelligence officer Maj. Neill Perry expressed concerns about FMIC (then called FMIRC) in 2022 when he wrote for the West Point-funded Army’s Cyber Defense Review, as The Intercept noted. “The decision to create a new agency is puzzling for two reasons,” Perry explained. “First, the FMIRC [Foreign Malign Influence Response Center, an earlier name for the FMIC] duplicates the mission of the GEC… Second, Congress did not elaborate on how the FMIRC would work with the GEC. In passing this legislation, Congress did not eliminate the GEC or reduce its mission. Not only does the GEC continue to exist, it may soon wield greater resources.” He subsequently added, “In May 2021, the Senate passed legislation that would double the GEC’s annual budget.” Why would we need two GECs? Especially after GEC was found wrongly targeting Americans?
Unfortunately, these sketchy entities, which began to pop up under Donald Trump, have grown more powerful and numerous under Biden. The Intercept explained:
From its perch atop the intelligence community, the FMIC has been designated the U.S. government’s primary authority for analyzing and integrating intelligence on foreign influence, according to a brief entry on ODNI’s website. The FMIC’s acting director, Jeffrey K. Wichman, is a former CIA executive who previously served as chief of analysis for the agency’s Counterintelligence Mission Center…
In the fall of 2017, the FBI established the Foreign Influence Task Force. In 2018, the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] established the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force — which in 2021 was updated to include a misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation team — as well as a Foreign Influence and Interference Branch and last year, the Disinformation Governance Board…More recently, the Pentagon created the Influence and Perception Management Office to oversee its various counter-disinformation efforts.
That’s a heck of a lot of entities to target “disinformation”, especially since it isn’t clear that such activities are at all Constitutional. And again, GEC has been weaponized against Americans.
The Twitter Files revealed that the DHS was also involved in censorship collusion with Big Tech, specifically to suppress certain election-related content. A 2020 Media Research Center survey found evidence that censorship helped steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden. More recently, the Twitter Files uncovered the fact that Americans were mistakenly targeted during a supposed anti-Russian bots campaign.
The proliferation of “disinformation” offices is a threat to Americans’ rights and liberties. If such offices continue to grow, we could be looking at a disturbingly Orwellian crackdown on free speech in the near future.
