U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is looking to shake things up when he takes over as chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and his sights are set on a key cog in the regime’s censorship machine.
Paul, a fierce critic of the government’s abuse of civil liberties, will be in a position to take on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an agency that has been outed for playing an integral role in the shutting down of free speech on social media and could finally face accountability now that voters have stripped Democrats of total control over the federal government.
“I’d like to eliminate it,” Paul told Politico, referring to CISA. “The First Amendment is pretty important, that’s why we listed it as the First Amendment, and I would have liked to, at the very least, eliminate their ability to censor content online.”
“While it’s unlikely we could get rid of CISA, we survived for what, 248 years without them,” the senator added. “I think a lot of what they do is intrusive, and I’d like to end their intrusions into the First Amendment.”
Senator Paul also said “Everything is on the table” when asked about how he may reorganize the cybersecurity agency’s powers when the next Congress begins its work with the Senate now back in the GOP’s hands.
“There needs to be more scrutiny, and we will have hearings where [CISA officials] will have to come in and defend the meetings that they were having with social media [companies],” he added, according to Politico.
CISA’s current chief rejected any suggestion that the agency engages in censorship.
“CISA does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship. Such allegations are riddled with factual inaccuracies. Every day, the men and women of CISA execute the agency’s mission of reducing risk to U.S. critical infrastructure in a way that protects Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy,” CISA senior advisor for public affairs Ron Eckstein told Fox News Digital in a statement.
“In response to concerns from election officials of all parties regarding foreign influence operations and disinformation that may impact the security of election infrastructure, CISA mitigates the risk of disinformation by sharing information on election security with the public and by amplifying the trusted voices of election officials across the nation,” Eckstein said, defending the agency.
Because of course, the government doesn’t directly censor the free speech of Americans, that would be unconstitutional. Instead, it uses the “public-private partnership” to have Big Tech do its dirty work.
Matt Taibbi says CISA outsourced censorship to the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership:
“What we see in the Twitter files is that Twitter executives did not distinguish between DHS or CISA and this group EIP. For instance, we would see a communication… pic.twitter.com/7n4QLbFUbp
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 9, 2023
As could be expected, Democrats – who are fierce advocates of political censorship for obvious reasons – are worried about any threat to the agency.
House Homeland Security Committee ranking member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) expressed concern about eliminating the agency when asked Thursday.
“CISA has in my opinion done a good job in defending the .gov domain, and it’s not the first time that I’ve heard that there is some opposition, but you’ve got to have it somewhere,” Thompson was quoted by Politico.
“He added that even if CISA were replaced, he would want some form of countering misinformation to be given to any potentially new entity,” the outlet reported, without noting that “misinformation” has come to mean anything that contradicts the Democrat and Deep State narrative.
CISA was established in 2018 during President Donald J. Trump’s first term.
