Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is actively censoring conservative Americans under the guise of carrying out unaudited “cybersecurity operations.”
Benz said the practice began in 2018 when CISA was created under the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018. It was in full swing during the 2020 election under the guise of being a “cyber security and infrastructure security agency,” which, Benz said, is why the program was funded under former President Donald Trump’s watch.
“At the time, it was sold as a cyber security and infrastructure security agency. It didn’t have the word censorship in its name, didn’t have the word disinformation in its name, and I don’t think Trump was wise to what they were planning to do with the agency, which was to declare tweets to be a cyber attack,” Benz (pictured above) explained on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“I don’t think anyone…could have imagined they would have cooked up a cyber security agency to censor tens of millions of tweets and Facebook posts and YouTube videos in the 2020 election cycle. What they did is they went after all posts that delegitimized the use of mail in ballots. Then they ended up going after vaccine skeptics. They ended up planning to go after skeptics of the Russia-Ukraine war funding and climate change skeptics…If North Korea did this, we’d pass sanctions on that. But here, we’re subsidizing it,” Benz said.
Benz, a leading expert in online censorship, explained his discovery of DHS’ CISA and the Global Engagement Center of the State Department “targeting” of U.S. political opponents by “shipping out the dirty work to firms in London.”
“You have these two rogue agencies, the Global Engagement Center of the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, farming out to this British psychology lab called the Social Decision Making Lab at the University of Cambridge,” Benz explained.
Benz said the psychology lab being funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars is conducting studies for CISA and the Global Engagement Center to identify and figure out how “American conservatives” can be “manipulated” to trust leftist talking points, such as climate change.
“You have hundreds of thousands of dollars of grants that were given to this British lab to do everything from studies on the impact of climate change, on American conservatives beliefs about climate change and how to nudge them. American conservatives’ beliefs about the efficacy of mail in ballots and how to get them to trust mail in ballots. American conservatives’ beliefs about COVID-19 and how to get people to trust what Dr. Peter Hotez or Dr. Anthony Fauci says. These are psychological studies on how to manipulate, specifically targeting, American conservatives,” Benz said.
Benz called the situation a “huge scandal.”
“It’s bad enough that you have a Democrat party in office who is using these funds to do dirty work for laundering censorship of American voices by laundering it abroad. But you have it on explicit political grounds. The Democrat administration is paying a British university lab to do misinformation scanning of the internet about what conservatives are saying on the internet and how they can change their minds,” Benz said.
“It’s being paid for by U.S. taxpayers, hundreds of thousands of dollars. This should have no place in the U.S. government, but it’s being done around the world by this administration. I think it’s a huge scandal,” Benz added.
When it comes to why the program is operating under DHS, Benz pointed out that CISA was deliberately chosen to be operated under DHS instead of the Justice Department’s FBI, as the Justice Department can only act against a U.S. citizen when laws are suspected of being broken.
“The FBI is the intelligence arm of the Justice Department. The Justice Department is not allowed to take action against a U.S. citizen unless there is an act of suspected law breaking. It is not illegal in this country to tweet misinformation on the internet, to post true information or disputed information on the Internet. That is not a Justice Department offense,” Benz explained.
“So they said, ‘Darn, we can’t park it at the FBI to scan and ban tweets on the Internet, but we have 17 intelligence agencies and 15 of them are foreign-facing, but we have two that are domestic facing- one of them is the FBI, but the other one is DHS.’ DHS is not an arm of the justice department. You do not need an act of suspected law breaking for DHS to take action. So they pulled off a cute trick, which is they gave DHS the foreign-facing dirty tricks power of the CIA with the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI without the restriction needed for suspected law breaking and that’s how they got the long arm jurisdiction to regulate opinions on the internet,” Benz added.
In the case that Trump is elected in November, Benz said he would advise the president to “go after this censorship industry apparatus” both at the “budget level” and “personnel level.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Mike Benz” by Mike Benz.
