MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER| June 27, 2023
That question appears to have been answered with a resounding yes by the House Judiciary Committee. Yesterday it released its report, “The Weaponization of CISA: How a ‘Cybersecurity’ Agency Colluded with Big Tech and ‘Disinformation’ Partners to Censor Americans,” on government censorship.
“It’s only a matter of time,” wrote a former assistant general counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an email to a colleague, “before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.”
The “we” in that sentence refers to the network of government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that we and others have dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex. That Complex includes the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
I’ll quote Not a number when he said:
All local authorities and government departments are focused on behavioural change” now. They aren’t interested in giving people what they want. They think their duty is to change what people want using incentives and penalties. It’s all about public control, not public service.