Google, Twitter, Facebook Met Government
Officials To Devise Election Measures
By Aaron Kesel | September 10, 2019
Representatives for Google, Facebook and Twitter met with DHS officials at Facebook’s headquarters to devise 2020 election measures against the spread of “fake news” on candidates earlier this week.
The meeting at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, offices involved officials from the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Bloomberg reported.
It is worth noting that the DHS stated in February that the agency would “double down” against election hacking efforts from foreign states according to Chris Krebs, who leads DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The new agency arm of the DHS was created last year in a bill called Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act that was silently passed through Congress as Activist Post reported.
“The department’s election security and countering foreign influence security-related efforts are not going anywhere,” Krebs said. “In fact, we’re doubling down.”
Krebs further told reporters that there “would be more CISA employees protecting election systems in 2020 than there were during the midterms.”
CISA announced last month that its goals were to prioritize election security, cybersecurity at federal agencies, roll out the dangerous 5G networks and the “persistent threat” posed by China in a public document, titled: “Strategic Intent.”
Earlier this year under the Consolidated Appropriations Act, one of the spending bills that was aimed at averting a government shutdown, the DHS received $33 million for election security information sharing initiatives for fiscal year 2019.
Last year, Congress also appropriated $380 million to be distributed through the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission and out to individual states. The money was used to help fund standard security measures such as training election workers on how to spot phishing emails, software patching and ensuring that election results have an audit-able paper trail.
The DHS has been working to help county election officials, advising since last June on how to spend the $380 million election security funds.
As Activist Post previously wrote:
"The DHS’s statement on the creation of CISA shows that the new agency will be “working with partners across all levels of government and in the private sector to secure against the evolving risks of tomorrow.”
The “private sector” would include social media companies like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Unsurprisingly, the government isn’t hiding its partnership with tech companies, and Trump has even bizarrely suggested using Apple and Amazon Echo watches to implement a social credit system similar to China to decide whether or not citizens can purchase firearms. As a reminder to the reader, Amazon is head deep within Washington’s swamp with Pentagon contracts halted and a CIA cloud deal worth $600 million dollars.
That’s not all on the election front. During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this year, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) asked Gen. Paul Nakasone, who leads CyberCom and also serves as director of the National Security Agency, “Would it be fair to say that it is not a coincidence that this election went off without a hitch and the fact that you were actively involved in the protection of very important infrastructure?”
To which Nakasone responded: “securing the midterms was the ‘number one priority’ of CyberCom and the NSA.”
So all three agencies — CISA, CyberCom and the NSA — have been tasked with protecting election integrity to this reporter’s knowledge. Now those same agencies are meeting with Silicon Valley to ask what BIG social will do to prevent disinformation and misinformation spreading online. In other words, the DHS wants to control the narrative that voters get to hear/see while using the most popular social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, and Google’s subsidiary company, YouTube.
DHS is connecting social media companies with local election officials to help them identify disinformation online and prevent it from spreading, according to a report by CNET with Matt Masterson, a DHS senior adviser on election security.
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