FBI and DHS Leaders Get Roasted for Pressuring Big Tech to Attack Americans’ Free Speech
Jose Nino
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At a recent Senate Homeland Security Committee on “Threats to the Homeland,” the chiefs of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were criticized for their agencies’ efforts to convince Big Tech giants to attack Americans’ free speech rights.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul kicked off the roast session by pointing to the 1976 Church Committee final report that highlighted decades of “widespread abuse by federal intelligence agencies against US citizens” and expressed his fear that currently “our federal government is still undertaking many of the same tactics that the Church Committee found to be unworthy of democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of totalitarian regimes.”
He continued by calling attention to the ways the FBI, DHS, and other federal agencies behaved “in a manner that is outside the scope of their authorities, wasting taxpayer dollars and infringing on the rights of Americans.” The Kentucky Senator alluded to the Fifth Circuit’s discovery that the FBI and other federal agencies likely infringed on the First Amendment when forcing Big Tech companies to censor speech and noted that the bulk of speech the FBI flagged for censorship was actually truthful in nature.
Paul specifically targeted the FBI’s “misuse [of] its authority” under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Tom Parker of Reclaim the Net noted that this is “a warrantless surveillance law that the FBI has used to spy on millions of Americans, including a senator, a state senator, and a judge.”
Paul then grilled DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the meetings DHS held with social media companies to talk about content moderation, which were highlighted throughout the federal government social media censorship case, Missouri v. Biden. Mayorkas described these meetings as “a public-private partnership to speak of the threats to the homeland so that those companies are alert to them” but Paul called attention to how the DHS has targeted content about the Wuhan virus and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Kentucky Senator subsequently asked Wray a similar set of questions. Wray revealed that the FBI is still “having some interaction with social media companies” after the Fifth Circuit’s injunction that bans the FBI and several other federal agencies from placing pressure on social media companies to censor speech that is constitutionally protected.
After criticizing Wray and Mayorkas for their respective agencies’ role in pressuring Big Tech to censor American, Pau shifted his focus on the revelation that the FBI paid off Twitter to the tune of millions of dollars.
Wray responded by noting that none of these payments were allegedly used for content moderation and asserted that they were part of a plan to reimburse social media companies’ “expenses to produce information” for the FBI.
In response to this development, elected officials have made efforts to put forward legislation that mandates the Department of Justice (DOJ) to report all payments being made to social media companies.
More elected officials need to follow in Paul’s footsteps by calling out government agencies’ nefarious plots to undermine Americans’ civil liberties. For too long, government agencies have been given a pass for their unconstitutional actions.
It’s time to turn up the heat and drop the hammer on them.
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