"Homeland agency expanded authority to wage ‘domestic surveillance & censorship’"

ecret documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show that a Department of Homeland Security agency "expanded its mission to surveil Americans’ speech on social media, colluded with Big Tech and government-funded third parties to censor by proxy, and tried to hide its plainly unconstitutional activities from the public," according to an interim staff report released Monday night.

The findings add details to reporting by Just the News about the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its work with private entities to remove, throttle and label purported misinformation on elections, Hunter Biden and COVID-19 — efforts that might even constitute election meddling and sometimes target true content.

The "severe public outcry" in spring 2022 against DHS's Disinformation Governance Board, shuttered a few months later, so alarmed CISA and its advisors that they "tried to cover their tracks" on censorship and surveillance, which "included scrubbing CISA’s website of references to domestic 'misinformation' and 'disinformation,'" the report says.

By outsourcing its "censorship operation" to a CISA-funded nonprofit in the wake of First Amendment litigation by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, CISA was "implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional," House Judiciary Republicans said.

The majority on the committee and its Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee said they are still investigating the extent of the public-private efforts that developed out of the five-year-old agency.

Outside groups are also seeking answers, with varying success. The feds heavily redacted communications between Disinformation Governance Board staff and its leader Nina Jankowicz, hiding most of the legal justifications and talking points it created to defend the unit from "blowback."

CISA is now "a domestic intelligence and speech-police agency, far exceeding its statutory authority" and having "metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media," the House Judiciary GOP report says.

Arguably the worst part of CISA’s censorship efforts:

The cover-up.

CISA has attempted to conceal its unconstitutional activities from the American public and remove evidence of wrongdoing. pic.twitter.com/U7VSi2rKmy

— Weaponization Committee (@Weaponization) June 26, 2023

After 15 months of pressure on the CISA censorship scandal, it's cracking wide open.

CISA: "Only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work."

They weren't ready for @FFO_Freedom, @mtaibbi, @shellenberger, @America1stLegal, @lhfang & more https://t.co/PvLg6EC1PX

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) June 26, 2023