To paraphrase someone in here: For those of you with short attention
spans, here is a summary of the C&P to follow.

HawHawHaw!

"Disinformation Governance Board"
HawHawHaw!

I love it. I just bygod love it.
HawHawHaw!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Here comes the Department of Homeland Security — that heavily funded guardian of our national borders, enforcer of the immigration laws,
preventer of terrorism, protector of U.S. coastal waters, keeper of cybersecurity and coordinator of disaster preparedness — with yet
another sweeping assignment. On Wednesday, DHS Secretary Alejandro
Mayorkas announced at a House hearing the formation of a
Disinformation Governance Board, which will carry the agency’s fight
to a new front. The board will battle disinformation.

What will the board do? Where will the war be waged? Information on
the Biden administration’s war on disinformation proved scarce. When
the Associated Press asked DHS for an interview for details, the
department stiffed them, according to the AP’s April 28 story. The
next afternoon, a reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki
for more about the board at a presser, and she was pretty vacant, too.
“I really haven’t dug into this exactly. I mean, we, of course,
support this effort, but let me see if I can get more specifics.”

The press did pry out of DHS the board’s goal to contest
disinformation crafted by Russia as well as the general disinformation (authors unstated) that had deceived immigrants from Haiti and other
places that the U.S. southern border was open. Republicans like Sen.
Josh Hawley of Missouri and conservative media like the Washington
Times flipped out at the announcement, dusting off their Orwell and
combing out their fright-wigs to warn of an impending DHS crackdown on
not just free speech but free thinking. “This is dangerous and un-American,” Hawley said in a statement. “The board should be
immediately dissolved.”

The idea that the Biden administration would pulp the First Amendment
and institute an authoritarian regime through its agents at DHS is
immediately dismissible if only because it is one of the most
ineffectual departments in the president’s Cabinet. Had Biden given
the task to Agriculture or Commerce or another department with a
better GPA in governing, we should be afraid. But DHS couldn’t stamp
out disinformation or erect an American Reich if we reallocated to it
all of the arms we’re currently shipping to Ukraine. It’s peopled by a confederacy of dunces and botch-artists, incapable of carrying out its
current mission. For instance, DHS shrugged off the Jan. 6 warning
signs, according to a Government Accountability Office report. It
failed to share intelligence about the wave of Haitian immigrants who
breached the border in 2021. (Based on its track record, DHS’ content monitors will surely miss any treacherous disinformation the Russkies
ship our way.) The department is so riddled with “copycat” programs
that duplicate duties handled by other federal agencies, Dara Lind
argued in Vox, that it should be abolished, a view held by many. In
2020, former Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wrote an op-ed regretting
having midwifed it with her Senate vote.

But never mind DHS. Who among us thinks the government should add to
its work list the job of determining what is true and what is
disinformation? And who thinks the government is capable of telling
the truth? Our government produces lies and disinformation at
industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies vital information
to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays
thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts.

This is the government that lied about winning the war in Vietnam,
that said the Watergate affair was a “third-rate burglary,” that
fought a secret war in Nicaragua, that lied about a clandestine love
affair in the White House, that used faulty intelligence to force a
war in the Middle East. Even President Barack Obama shortchanged the
truth. Of 600 Obama statements PolitiFact checked during his
administration, a quarter of them fell into the “red zone” of being
false, mostly false, or “pants on fire” false. Not so long ago, 50 intelligence officials — each of them smarter and better informed than
any DHS brainiac — assured the nation that the Hunter Biden laptop
story bore “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information
operation.” How did that work out? The idea that Covid could have come
from a Chinese lab was similarly dismissed as disinformation; now it’s considered a legitimate possibility by the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, we have documented proof from the Washington Post that even
Joe Biden can’t handle simple truths! (We don’t need to reassess the Donald Trump presidency here, do we?)

Making the federal government the official custodian of truth would be
like Brink’s giving a safe-cracker a job driving an armored car. On
top of that, who is going to accept DHS’ determinations? Not
reporters, who are accustomed to government lies. Not the man in the
street. Certainly not the so-called low-information voters the
government would like to diaper and stuff into an escape-proof
playpen. By conjuring the Disinformation Governance Board into
existence, the Biden administration will give itself a referee’s power
to declare some things completely out of bounds. Without stepping out
on the slippery slope, that would give Biden’s people the power to
find some things dangerous or objectionable. After branding something disinformation, it’s only a short slide to suppressing the contested information or replacing it with what Kellyanne Conway fancifully
called “alternative facts.”

If Russian disinformation is a problem, it has been so for almost a
century. As Lawfare reported in 2017, the Russians started sending out
fake defectors in the 1930s to spread disinformation in the West.
After World War II, the Soviets shifted their focus to the United
States. Two years after the surrender of Nazi Germany, Soviet
leadership sought to influence public opinion by covertly funding
newspapers and radio stations around the world and establishing fronts
to nurture communism. It forged documents and attempted to plant them
in credible publications. In one disinformation campaign, it
promulgated the tall tale that AIDS was the product of an American
biological weapons experimentation. And so on.

Somehow we survived the Soviet onslaught without a Disinformation
Governance Board to guide us. Not every particle of disinformation can
be blocked. Anybody who is good at inventing lies can produce
disinformation faster than anybody can shoot disinformation down. (See
this RAND report about the Russian “firehose“ of lies.) Instead of installing a Truth Politburo at DHS, the government should leave the
job of policing disinformation to the competitive organs of the press,
which compete “to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of
the time, and instantly, by disclosing them to make them the common
property of the nation,” as Times of London editor J. T. Delane put it
in 1852.

If DHS so badly needs a paperwork project, it can address a problem
closer to home: set up a bureau to study and eradicate U.S. government disinformation. ----------------------------------------------------------------- https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/29/dont-trust-the-government-00029103

--
bill
Theory don't mean squat if it don't work.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 4/29/2022 6:03 PM, bfh wrote:

To paraphrase someone in here: For those of you with short attention
spans, here is a summary of the C&P to follow.

HawHawHaw!

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/29/dont-trust-the-government-00029103

Even by my standards that seems like a lot of words to say, "WTF?"

TB

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

bfh <redydog@rye.net> wrote:

To paraphrase someone in here: For those of you with short attention
spans, here is a summary of the C&P to follow.

HawHawHaw!

"Disinformation Governance Board"
HawHawHaw!

I love it. I just bygod love it.
HawHawHaw!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Here comes the Department of Homeland Security — that heavily funded guardian of our national borders, enforcer of the immigration laws,
preventer of terrorism, protector of U.S. coastal waters, keeper of cybersecurity and coordinator of disaster preparedness — with yet
another sweeping assignment. On Wednesday, DHS Secretary Alejandro
Mayorkas announced at a House hearing the formation of a
Disinformation Governance Board, which will carry the agency’s fight
to a new front. The board will battle disinformation.

What will the board do? Where will the war be waged? Information on
the Biden administration’s war on disinformation proved scarce. When
the Associated Press asked DHS for an interview for details, the
department stiffed them, according to the AP’s April 28 story. The
next afternoon, a reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki
for more about the board at a presser, and she was pretty vacant, too.
“I really haven’t dug into this exactly. I mean, we, of course,
support this effort, but let me see if I can get more specifics.”

The press did pry out of DHS the board’s goal to contest
disinformation crafted by Russia as well as the general disinformation (authors unstated) that had deceived immigrants from Haiti and other
places that the U.S. southern border was open. Republicans like Sen.
Josh Hawley of Missouri and conservative media like the Washington
Times flipped out at the announcement, dusting off their Orwell and
combing out their fright-wigs to warn of an impending DHS crackdown on
not just free speech but free thinking. “This is dangerous and un-American,” Hawley said in a statement. “The board should be immediately dissolved.”

The idea that the Biden administration would pulp the First Amendment
and institute an authoritarian regime through its agents at DHS is immediately dismissible if only because it is one of the most
ineffectual departments in the president’s Cabinet. Had Biden given
the task to Agriculture or Commerce or another department with a
better GPA in governing, we should be afraid. But DHS couldn’t stamp
out disinformation or erect an American Reich if we reallocated to it
all of the arms we’re currently shipping to Ukraine. It’s peopled by a confederacy of dunces and botch-artists, incapable of carrying out its current mission. For instance, DHS shrugged off the Jan. 6 warning
signs, according to a Government Accountability Office report. It
failed to share intelligence about the wave of Haitian immigrants who breached the border in 2021. (Based on its track record, DHS’ content monitors will surely miss any treacherous disinformation the Russkies
ship our way.) The department is so riddled with “copycat” programs
that duplicate duties handled by other federal agencies, Dara Lind
argued in Vox, that it should be abolished, a view held by many. In
2020, former Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wrote an op-ed regretting
having midwifed it with her Senate vote.

But never mind DHS. Who among us thinks the government should add to
its work list the job of determining what is true and what is
disinformation? And who thinks the government is capable of telling
the truth? Our government produces lies and disinformation at
industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies vital information
to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays
thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts.

This is the government that lied about winning the war in Vietnam,
that said the Watergate affair was a “third-rate burglary,” that
fought a secret war in Nicaragua, that lied about a clandestine love
affair in the White House, that used faulty intelligence to force a
war in the Middle East. Even President Barack Obama shortchanged the
truth. Of 600 Obama statements PolitiFact checked during his
administration, a quarter of them fell into the “red zone” of being false, mostly false, or “pants on fire” false. Not so long ago, 50 intelligence officials — each of them smarter and better informed than
any DHS brainiac — assured the nation that the Hunter Biden laptop
story bore “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information
operation.” How did that work out? The idea that Covid could have come
from a Chinese lab was similarly dismissed as disinformation; now it’s considered a legitimate possibility by the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, we have documented proof from the Washington Post that even
Joe Biden can’t handle simple truths! (We don’t need to reassess the Donald Trump presidency here, do we?)

Making the federal government the official custodian of truth would be
like Brink’s giving a safe-cracker a job driving an armored car. On
top of that, who is going to accept DHS’ determinations? Not
reporters, who are accustomed to government lies. Not the man in the
street. Certainly not the so-called low-information voters the
government would like to diaper and stuff into an escape-proof
playpen. By conjuring the Disinformation Governance Board into
existence, the Biden administration will give itself a referee’s power
to declare some things completely out of bounds. Without stepping out
on the slippery slope, that would give Biden’s people the power to
find some things dangerous or objectionable. After branding something disinformation, it’s only a short slide to suppressing the contested information or replacing it with what Kellyanne Conway fancifully
called “alternative facts.”

If Russian disinformation is a problem, it has been so for almost a
century. As Lawfare reported in 2017, the Russians started sending out
fake defectors in the 1930s to spread disinformation in the West.
After World War II, the Soviets shifted their focus to the United
States. Two years after the surrender of Nazi Germany, Soviet
leadership sought to influence public opinion by covertly funding
newspapers and radio stations around the world and establishing fronts
to nurture communism. It forged documents and attempted to plant them
in credible publications. In one disinformation campaign, it
promulgated the tall tale that AIDS was the product of an American
biological weapons experimentation. And so on.

Somehow we survived the Soviet onslaught without a Disinformation
Governance Board to guide us. Not every particle of disinformation can
be blocked. Anybody who is good at inventing lies can produce
disinformation faster than anybody can shoot disinformation down. (See
this RAND report about the Russian “firehose“ of lies.) Instead of installing a Truth Politburo at DHS, the government should leave the
job of policing disinformation to the competitive organs of the press,
which compete “to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of
the time, and instantly, by disclosing them to make them the common
property of the nation,” as Times of London editor J. T. Delane put it
in 1852.

If DHS so badly needs a paperwork project, it can address a problem
closer to home: set up a bureau to study and eradicate U.S. government disinformation. ----------------------------------------------------------------- https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/29/dont-trust-the-government-00029103

It is interesting that they didn’t see a need for it until Musk bought Twitter. Now that their algorithms are about to be outed this “governance board” can claim false information.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

George.Anthony wrote:

bfh <redydog@rye.net> wrote:

To paraphrase someone in here: For those of you with short attention
spans, here is a summary of the C&P to follow.

HawHawHaw!

"Disinformation Governance Board"
HawHawHaw!

I love it. I just bygod love it.
HawHawHaw!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Here comes the Department of Homeland Security — that heavily funded >> guardian of our national borders, enforcer of the immigration laws,
preventer of terrorism, protector of U.S. coastal waters, keeper of
cybersecurity and coordinator of disaster preparedness — with yet
another sweeping assignment. On Wednesday, DHS Secretary Alejandro
Mayorkas announced at a House hearing the formation of a
Disinformation Governance Board, which will carry the agency’s fight >> to a new front. The board will battle disinformation.

What will the board do? Where will the war be waged? Information on
the Biden administration’s war on disinformation proved scarce. When >> the Associated Press asked DHS for an interview for details, the
department stiffed them, according to the AP’s April 28 story. The
next afternoon, a reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki
for more about the board at a presser, and she was pretty vacant, too.
“I really haven’t dug into this exactly. I mean, we, of course, >> support this effort, but let me see if I can get more specifics.”

The press did pry out of DHS the board’s goal to contest
disinformation crafted by Russia as well as the general disinformation
(authors unstated) that had deceived immigrants from Haiti and other
places that the U.S. southern border was open. Republicans like Sen.
Josh Hawley of Missouri and conservative media like the Washington
Times flipped out at the announcement, dusting off their Orwell and
combing out their fright-wigs to warn of an impending DHS crackdown on
not just free speech but free thinking. “This is dangerous and
un-American,” Hawley said in a statement. “The board should be >> immediately dissolved.”

The idea that the Biden administration would pulp the First Amendment
and institute an authoritarian regime through its agents at DHS is
immediately dismissible if only because it is one of the most
ineffectual departments in the president’s Cabinet. Had Biden given >> the task to Agriculture or Commerce or another department with a
better GPA in governing, we should be afraid. But DHS couldn’t stamp >> out disinformation or erect an American Reich if we reallocated to it
all of the arms we’re currently shipping to Ukraine. It’s peopled by a
confederacy of dunces and botch-artists, incapable of carrying out its
current mission. For instance, DHS shrugged off the Jan. 6 warning
signs, according to a Government Accountability Office report. It
failed to share intelligence about the wave of Haitian immigrants who
breached the border in 2021. (Based on its track record, DHS’ content >> monitors will surely miss any treacherous disinformation the Russkies
ship our way.) The department is so riddled with “copycat” programs
that duplicate duties handled by other federal agencies, Dara Lind
argued in Vox, that it should be abolished, a view held by many. In
2020, former Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wrote an op-ed regretting
having midwifed it with her Senate vote.

But never mind DHS. Who among us thinks the government should add to
its work list the job of determining what is true and what is
disinformation? And who thinks the government is capable of telling
the truth? Our government produces lies and disinformation at
industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies vital information
to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays
thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts.

This is the government that lied about winning the war in Vietnam,
that said the Watergate affair was a “third-rate burglary,” that >> fought a secret war in Nicaragua, that lied about a clandestine love
affair in the White House, that used faulty intelligence to force a
war in the Middle East. Even President Barack Obama shortchanged the
truth. Of 600 Obama statements PolitiFact checked during his
administration, a quarter of them fell into the “red zone” of being
false, mostly false, or “pants on fire” false. Not so long ago, 50
intelligence officials — each of them smarter and better informed than
any DHS brainiac — assured the nation that the Hunter Biden laptop
story bore “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information
operation.” How did that work out? The idea that Covid could have come >> from a Chinese lab was similarly dismissed as disinformation; now it’s
considered a legitimate possibility by the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, we have documented proof from the Washington Post that even
Joe Biden can’t handle simple truths! (We don’t need to reassess the
Donald Trump presidency here, do we?)

Making the federal government the official custodian of truth would be
like Brink’s giving a safe-cracker a job driving an armored car. On >> top of that, who is going to accept DHS’ determinations? Not
reporters, who are accustomed to government lies. Not the man in the
street. Certainly not the so-called low-information voters the
government would like to diaper and stuff into an escape-proof
playpen. By conjuring the Disinformation Governance Board into
existence, the Biden administration will give itself a referee’s power
to declare some things completely out of bounds. Without stepping out
on the slippery slope, that would give Biden’s people the power to
find some things dangerous or objectionable. After branding something
disinformation, it’s only a short slide to suppressing the contested >> information or replacing it with what Kellyanne Conway fancifully
called “alternative facts.”

If Russian disinformation is a problem, it has been so for almost a
century. As Lawfare reported in 2017, the Russians started sending out
fake defectors in the 1930s to spread disinformation in the West.
After World War II, the Soviets shifted their focus to the United
States. Two years after the surrender of Nazi Germany, Soviet
leadership sought to influence public opinion by covertly funding
newspapers and radio stations around the world and establishing fronts
to nurture communism. It forged documents and attempted to plant them
in credible publications. In one disinformation campaign, it
promulgated the tall tale that AIDS was the product of an American
biological weapons experimentation. And so on.

Somehow we survived the Soviet onslaught without a Disinformation
Governance Board to guide us. Not every particle of disinformation can
be blocked. Anybody who is good at inventing lies can produce
disinformation faster than anybody can shoot disinformation down. (See
this RAND report about the Russian “firehose“ of lies.) Instead of
installing a Truth Politburo at DHS, the government should leave the
job of policing disinformation to the competitive organs of the press,
which compete “to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of >> the time, and instantly, by disclosing them to make them the common
property of the nation,” as Times of London editor J. T. Delane put it >> in 1852.

If DHS so badly needs a paperwork project, it can address a problem
closer to home: set up a bureau to study and eradicate U.S. government
disinformation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/29/dont-trust-the-government-00029103

It is interesting that they didn’t see a need for it until Musk bought Twitter. Now that their algorithms are about to be outed this “governance
board” can claim false information.

At the end of the day going forward, I'm sure that it's literally just
a coincidence taken out of context, and due to the significance of the
passage of time, all will become clear as the messaging evolves in the
passage of time going forward - or backwards, when the truths
concealed in history will be efficaciously unearthed and revealed in
the passage of time.

Spin Socky, Jr.
Deputy Assistant White House Press Secretary in Training

--
bill
Theory don't mean squat if it don't work.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

bfh wrote:

To paraphrase someone in here: For those of you with short attention
spans, here is a summary of the C&P to follow.

HawHawHaw!

"Disinformation Governance Board"
HawHawHaw!

I love it. I just bygod love it.
HawHawHaw!
-----------------------------------------------------------

This program was probably imported from China.

--
Frank Howell

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Frank Howell wrote:

bfh wrote:

To paraphrase someone in here: For those of you with short attention
spans, here is a summary of the C&P to follow.

HawHawHaw!

"Disinformation Governance Board"
HawHawHaw!

I love it. I just bygod love it.
HawHawHaw!
-----------------------------------------------------------

This program was probably imported from China.

And reshelved at Walmart in the fertilizer section.

--
bill
Theory don't mean squat if it don't work.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 4/29/2022 6:03 PM, bfh wrote:

To paraphrase someone in here: For those of you with short attention
spans, here is a summary of the C&P to follow.

HawHawHaw!

"Disinformation Governance Board"
HawHawHaw!

I love it. I just bygod love it.
HawHawHaw!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Here comes the Department of Homeland Security — that heavily funded guardian of our national borders, enforcer of the immigration laws,
preventer of terrorism, protector of U.S. coastal waters, keeper of cybersecurity and coordinator of disaster preparedness — with yet
another sweeping assignment. On Wednesday, DHS Secretary Alejandro
Mayorkas announced at a House hearing the formation of a Disinformation Governance Board, which will carry the agency’s fight to a new front.
The board will battle disinformation.

What will the board do? Where will the war be waged? Information on the
Biden administration’s war on disinformation proved scarce. When the Associated Press asked DHS for an interview for details, the department stiffed them, according to the AP’s April 28 story. The next afternoon,
a reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki for more about
the board at a presser, and she was pretty vacant, too. “I really
haven’t dug into this exactly. I mean, we, of course, support this
effort, but let me see if I can get more specifics.”

The press did pry out of DHS the board’s goal to contest disinformation crafted by Russia as well as the general disinformation (authors
unstated) that had deceived immigrants from Haiti and other places that
the U.S. southern border was open. Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and conservative media like the Washington Times flipped out at
the announcement, dusting off their Orwell and combing out their
fright-wigs to warn of an impending DHS crackdown on not just free
speech but free thinking. “This is dangerous and un-American,” Hawley said in a statement. “The board should be immediately dissolved.”

The idea that the Biden administration would pulp the First Amendment
and institute an authoritarian regime through its agents at DHS is immediately dismissible if only because it is one of the most
ineffectual departments in the president’s Cabinet. Had Biden given the task to Agriculture or Commerce or another department with a better GPA
in governing, we should be afraid. But DHS couldn’t stamp out disinformation or erect an American Reich if we reallocated to it all of
the arms we’re currently shipping to Ukraine. It’s peopled by a confederacy of dunces and botch-artists, incapable of carrying out its current mission. For instance, DHS shrugged off the Jan. 6 warning
signs, according to a Government Accountability Office report. It failed
to share intelligence about the wave of Haitian immigrants who breached
the border in 2021. (Based on its track record, DHS’ content monitors
will surely miss any treacherous disinformation the Russkies ship our
way.) The department is so riddled with “copycat” programs that
duplicate duties handled by other federal agencies, Dara Lind argued in
Vox, that it should be abolished, a view held by many. In 2020, former
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wrote an op-ed regretting having midwifed
it with her Senate vote.

But never mind DHS. Who among us thinks the government should add to its
work list the job of determining what is true and what is
disinformation? And who thinks the government is capable of telling the truth? Our government produces lies and disinformation at industrial
scale and always has. It overclassifies vital information to block its
own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays thousands of press
aides to play hide the salami with facts.

This is the government that lied about winning the war in Vietnam, that
said the Watergate affair was a “third-rate burglary,” that fought a secret war in Nicaragua, that lied about a clandestine love affair in
the White House, that used faulty intelligence to force a war in the
Middle East. Even President Barack Obama shortchanged the truth. Of 600
Obama statements PolitiFact checked during his administration, a quarter
of them fell into the “red zone” of being false, mostly false, or “pants
on fire” false. Not so long ago, 50 intelligence officials — each of
them smarter and better informed than any DHS brainiac — assured the
nation that the Hunter Biden laptop story bore “all the classic earmarks
of a Russian information operation.” How did that work out? The idea
that Covid could have come from a Chinese lab was similarly dismissed as disinformation; now it’s considered a legitimate possibility by the
Biden administration. Meanwhile, we have documented proof from the
Washington Post that even Joe Biden can’t handle simple truths! (We
don’t need to reassess the Donald Trump presidency here, do we?)

Making the federal government the official custodian of truth would be
like Brink’s giving a safe-cracker a job driving an armored car. On top
of that, who is going to accept DHS’ determinations? Not reporters, who
are accustomed to government lies. Not the man in the street. Certainly
not the so-called low-information voters the government would like to
diaper and stuff into an escape-proof playpen. By conjuring the Disinformation Governance Board into existence, the Biden administration
will give itself a referee’s power to declare some things completely out
of bounds. Without stepping out on the slippery slope, that would give Biden’s people the power to find some things dangerous or objectionable. After branding something disinformation, it’s only a short slide to suppressing the contested information or replacing it with what
Kellyanne Conway fancifully called “alternative facts.”

If Russian disinformation is a problem, it has been so for almost a
century. As Lawfare reported in 2017, the Russians started sending out
fake defectors in the 1930s to spread disinformation in the West. After
World War II, the Soviets shifted their focus to the United States. Two
years after the surrender of Nazi Germany, Soviet leadership sought to influence public opinion by covertly funding newspapers and radio
stations around the world and establishing fronts to nurture communism.
It forged documents and attempted to plant them in credible
publications. In one disinformation campaign, it promulgated the tall
tale that AIDS was the product of an American biological weapons experimentation. And so on.

Somehow we survived the Soviet onslaught without a Disinformation
Governance Board to guide us. Not every particle of disinformation can
be blocked. Anybody who is good at inventing lies can produce
disinformation faster than anybody can shoot disinformation down. (See
this RAND report about the Russian “firehose“ of lies.) Instead of installing a Truth Politburo at DHS, the government should leave the job
of policing disinformation to the competitive organs of the press, which compete “to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the
time, and instantly, by disclosing them to make them the common property
of the nation,” as Times of London editor J. T. Delane put it in 1852.

If DHS so badly needs a paperwork project, it can address a problem
closer to home: set up a bureau to study and eradicate U.S. government disinformation. ----------------------------------------------------------------- https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/29/dont-trust-the-government-00029103

"Watch: Jen Psaki deflates Peter Doocy’s outrage over Biden’s new Disinformation Governance Board"

"Conservatives are going all-in on attacking a Dept. of Homeland
Security (DHS) agency called the Disinformation Governance Board,
falsely insisting President Joe Biden has created an Orwellian “Ministry
of Truth” that will censor everything online.

It’s their latest attack on actual truth, of course. For starters, the board’s focus is on combatting foreign disinformation, not domestic, and
it would work to help protect national security. It’s also not a new endeavor, but a continuation of work done during the Trump
administration, and conservatives had no issue with it then.

Fox News Peter Doocy on Monday jumped at the chance to further misinform
the far right-wing cable network’s viewers while attempting to paint the President as out of touch and uninformed.

“Does the President know that DHS is putting together this
Disinformation Governance Board?” Doocy asked. (Minutes later he would
accuse it of “censoring internet traffic.”)

“Well, Peter, I think I would note – and I’m not sure if this has been
in your reporting yet – but this is a continuation of work that was done under the prior administration, under the Trump administration, to take
steps to address disinformation, address the use of disinformation and
helping smugglers prompt the movement of more migrants across to the
border,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, schooling the right
wing propagandist.

“I would note that the first example given in the announcement about
this was DHS has worked to understand how ‘misinformation’ spread by
human smugglers that prey on vulnerable populations attempting to
migrate to the United States. So for anyone who’s out there who may be concerned about the increase in migrants to the border, this is the kind
of apparatus that’s working to address disinformation. And again,
continuing the work of the Department of Homeland Security and 2020.
Something we’re currently applauding.”

Almost as if he had heard nothing Psaki said, Doocy steamrolled through
with another question designed for a Fox News clip.

“Just in terms of what the President wants out of this, does he want the people on this board to start censoring information that is not helpful
to him?”

“Well, let me be clear on exactly what this board does, or what the work they’re doing does and in their announcement, which is publicly
available in the Department of Homeland Security website for anyone to
read, it says, ‘the primary mission is to establish best practices to
ensure that efforts to understand and respond to disinformation are done
in ways that protect privacy, civil rights and civil liberties and the
right to free speech.'”

Still not satisfied, Doocy continued, again ignoring everything Psaki
had said.

“Okay, there’s this woman Nina Jankowicz, who is going to be in charge
of the board. She has said that she thinks the Hunter Biden laptop is
Russian disinformation. So should we look forward in the future to her censoring internet traffic about the Hunter Biden laptop?”

“I think I noted exactly what the objective of the board is, including continuing the work of the prior administration. And the woman you noted
has extensive experience and has done extensive work addressing
disinformation, she has testified before Congress testified in Europe.
She has done worked closely with Ukrainians and has unique expertise, especially at this moment we’re facing.”

The answers to Doocy’s questions were already readily available to
anyone who wanted them, like in this Washington Post report."

"https://www.rawstory.com/watch-jen-psaki-deflates-peter-doocys-outrage-over-bidens-new-disinformation-governance-board/"

"The tempest over DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board"

"The Department of Homeland Security’s creation of a Disinformation Governance Board has set off a backlash on the right — even as it’s not entirely clear what the perhaps unfortunately named board will do.

Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas mentioned the creation of the board in
multiple congressional hearings last week. In one, he linked it to
efforts to combat misinformation from human smugglers. In another, he
said it would be used to counter Russian cyber and election
misinformation: “We have just established a mis- and disinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security to more
effectively combat this threat, not only to election security but to our homeland security.”

Amid growing anti-censorship fervor on the right, a bevy of Republicans
have suggested that the initiative amounts to policing speech. Elon Musk declared it “messed up.” Many on the right likened it to the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s book “1984.”

“Rather than police our border, Homeland Security has decided to make policing Americans’ speech its top priority,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) claimed.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) offered some more toned-down skepticism,
citing his own work on combating foreign misinformation.

“I do not believe that the United States government should turn the
tools that we have used to assist our allies counter foreign adversaries
onto the American people,” Portman said. “Our focus should be on bad
actors like Russia and China, not our own citizens.”

But there were (and remain) relatively few details on what the board
will actually do. DHS didn’t issue many specifics — including whether
and how much it might monitor disinformation from “our own citizens” and whether what it would do would amount to “policing" (both of which it
later said the board wouldn’t do). It didn’t initially provide much information late last week, amid repeated inquiries. Despite
Republicans’ expressed concern, they didn’t press Mayorkas in much
detail at hearings Wednesday and Thursday. And the DHS does have a
history of tackling disinformation, including during the Trump
administration."
[snip]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/29/disinformation-governance-board-dhs/

TB

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