by Daniel Greenfield
They’re classifying your “threat level,” taking screenshots of your posts, and censoring you.
"Report misinformation," a flier from California's Office of
Election Cybersecurity blares. Social media users are urged to report
"misleading" materials to the Secretary of State's office.
A government office created by California Democrats is monitoring
hashtags, classifying political speech it opposes by “threat level”,
taking screenshots of posts, and then storing the information
indefinitely, before reporting the offending speech to social media
companies for censorship.
“Election Security is our number one priority,” the Office claims.
But its focus isn’t securing elections by fighting hackers or voter
fraud. Instead it’s fighting “the spread of mis- and disinformation”.
That’s an Orwellian way of saying that it’s fighting and censoring
online speech.
“We created the CA Office of Election Cybersecurity to keep your
vote safe - so you don’t have to worry! The Office is a non-partisan
government arm dedicated to ensuring your vote is safe,” Secretary of
State's office unconvincingly tweeted.
What sort of speech is a government office run by Democrats trying
to censor? One example of political speech successfully censored by the
Office of Election Cybersecurity is a tweet that “alleged thousands of
2020 ballots were tossed out".
There's nothing that reassures voters that their elections are safe
like a government office spying on anyone who says that they're not, and
taking immediate steps to silence them.
The Office of Election Cybersecurity isn’t securing the technology
of elections, instead it’s monitoring online speech and flagging views
that the government office disagrees with to be taken down by its
political allies in California’s Big Tech monopolies that dominate
social media.
Jenna Dresner, the senior public information officer for the Office
of Election Cybersecurity, boasted that the government office maintains an internal database of online speech coded by threat level, and that its censorship calls had resulted in removals 77% of the time.
Desner is a member of the Los Angeles County Young Democrats, who
had formerly worked for Rep. Karen Bass, Attorney General Xavier
Becerra, and other Democrat figures. The Office of Election
Cybersecurity operates under Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who was
chosen by Governor Newsom to replace Senator Kamala Harris. And the bill
creating California’s own office of internet censorship was sponsored
by two Democrats.
The internet censorship office was promoted in Padilla’s Vote Safe California campaign run by a consulting firm
featuring the “mastermind” of Biden’s campaign, which developed Biden's
vote-by-mail programs in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and
Wisconsin.
The Office of Election Cybersecurity isn’t non-partisan and it isn’t
keeping anyone’s votes safe. It’s in a position to use government power
to censor questions about election fraud by its party, while working
with a consulting firm involved in one of the most contentious elements
of the election, whose results the office’s boss expects will put him in
the United States Senate.
Corruption is one thing. Government censorship of complaints about corruption is another.
70 years after George Orwell wrote 1984, California Democrats had
created their own Ministry of Information inside the government in a
blatant violation of the First Amendment. The Democrat operatives
running the government censorship office claim that they aren’t engaging
in censorship because they’re not the ones directly censoring online
speech. Yet.
“We don’t take down posts, that is not our role to play,” Dresner
insisted. “We alert potential sources of misinformation to the social
media companies."
That’s the difference between the government sending in jackbooted
thugs to smash up a printing press and putting in a call to the editor
warning him not to print a particular article.
Freedom of Speech doesn’t just refer to the former, but also to the chilling effect of the latter.
"The Bill of Rights was designed to keep agents of government and
official eavesdroppers away from assemblies of people. The aim was to
allow men to be free and independent and to assert their rights against
government," Justice Douglas once wrote. "When an intelligence officer
looks over every nonconformist's shoulder in the library... the America
once extolled as the voice of liberty heard around the world no longer
is cast in the image which Jefferson and Madison designed, but more in
the Russian image."
That’s exactly what California Democrats have in mind by creating
databases of political enemies, ranking them by “threat level”, and
pressuring their allied monopolies to silence them.
Democrats had previously claimed that they were not engaging in
censorship because they were pressuring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and
others to remove general categories of speech in hearings and
statements. That was enough of a chilling effect and an assault on the
First Amendment. But in California, an actual government office is
monitoring speech, treating it as a threat, and directing social media
companies to remove specific speech by individuals.
These days the former liberals who once upheld the “chilling effect”
in Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, and who
denounced McCarthyism, are assembling lists, and censoring their
political opponents to fight the dreaded scourge of “misinformation”.
"It is a fine line between opinion and misinformation," Dresner
admitted. It’s a fine line because misinformation is a political
category invented by the Left to justify its censorship campaign. One of
the two employees of California’s internet censorship office can’t
actually explain the difference between an opinion and misinformation.
That means her office is censoring opinions.
“We aren’t worried about what people are saying in the privacy of
their own homes, we are worried about what they are putting out there
for the world to see,” Dresner insists.
For now. How long until the same Democrat operatives who claimed
that public speech poses a threat to “election security” start making
the same claims about private speech? As public speech is censored and
goes underground, the push will be on to monitor private speech.
If Aunt Mary saying on Facebook that thousands of ballots were
thrown out is a threat to “election integrity”, won’t it still be a
threat when she whispers it to Grandma Sue?
A government office telling the citizenry that it only monitors what
they say in public, not what they say in private, is not reassuring.
The First Amendment was meant to protect public speech, not merely
private speech. American political freedom was built on people putting
their speech “out there for the world to see”. Democrats used to embrace
that. Now they view it as a threat.
California's Office of Election Cybersecurity is the latest attempt
by Democrats to use a fake crisis of disinformation that they invented
as a pretext for political censorship. And the use of a government
office to monitor, record, and track speech for censorship makes it
impossible to classify internet censorship as anything but an
unconstitutional assault on the Bill of Rights.
We’re no longer just dealing with legislators pressuring Facebook
indirectly. A government office is now specifically tracking political
speech and boasting of a 77% censorship rate.
Democrat administrations refuse to implement basic election security
protocols such as voter ID, claiming it’s too onerous, and deny that
election fraud is a problem, but insist that political speech is an
urgent threat and must be met with relentless censorship and
surveillance.
To paraphrase Yakov Smirnoff, "In America, people secure elections. In California, elections secure people."
That is how totalitarian regimes behave and it’s a threat to elections and to the Bill of Rights.
California's Office of Election Cybersecurity is one of the best
possible test cases for fighting political censorship. It’s not an issue
of private companies controlling their own platforms, but of a
government office monitoring speech and classifying the views it wants
to see eliminated.
The First Amendment threat of internet censorship is no longer something that might happen.
It’s here. Now. Republicans just have to decide if it’s a battle
they’re willing to fight. But if they don’t act soon, their own speech
might find its way into a government political threat database.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/californias-internet-censorship-office-watching-daniel-greenfield/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
