When considering the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, one big question is whether the DHS is really the best entity to “monitor and prepare for Russian disinformation threats as this year’s midterm elections near and the Kremlin continues an aggressive disinformation campaign around the war in Ukraine,” as the agency described itself to the AP.
If the threat is coming from overseas, we don’t need to spend a lot of time having a domestic law-enforcement agency monitoring Americans’ social-media use. In the past, the U.S. government used much more direct and effective tools against foreign disinformation campaigns:
Before Election Day 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Cyber Command announced that it would be sending text messages, emails, and pop-ups to Russian operatives meddling in the midterm elections, informing them that their actions were being monitored — sort of a “shot across their bow” to signal that we know who they are, what they’re doing, and how to find them.
Then, on Election Day 2018, the professional trolls at Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg showed up for work and could not access the Internet. At all. For two days, they couldn’t log on to any of their social-media accounts.
Maybe this was U.S. Department of Defense’s Cyber Command. Maybe this was the United States National Security Agency. Or maybe some Russian just tripped over a wire and unplugged something.
What’s nice about unleashing our own cyberassets against those foreign governments intending to spread disinformation is that it doesn’t get into any messy questions of impeding Americans’ freedom of expression or freedom of thought. You’re free to think, say, write, post, and shout whatever you want without the government cracking down on you or restricting your actions, just as the First Amendment guarantees. The U.S. government focuses its efforts on what Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, or other hostile governments are trying to do. (What, are we worried that another remotely driven shutdown of Saint Petersburg troll farms would louse up our good relationship with Russia these days?)
The second big question is: Who will be determining what constitutes “disinformation” that will require DHS action? Probably the worst possible choice would be someone who contended that the 2020 news reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop were foreign disinformation, dismissed the story as a “fairy tale,” contended that President Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 campaign, and who compared the 2016 election to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. In Washington, partisan hacks getting appointed to allegedly nonpartisan positions is probably as unavoidable as the summer humidity. But any official handling a topic as sensitive as what kind of speech and social-media posts are a threat to U.S. national security has to be purer than Caesar’s wife. Otherwise, the national-security goal looks like just another ideological effort to restrict and suppress criticism of the administration.
You can’t be a partisan hack and then step into a role in determining what is “disinformation” and how a law-enforcement agency will respond to it.
Even if you have written whole musical numbers about the topic.