Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday gave some of his clearest explanations yet for the role of the department’s new Disinformation Governance Board that has been targeted by the GOP.
The board, rolled out just a week ago, is designed to coordinate ongoing disinformation efforts at various Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies and ensure free speech protections, but Republicans have sought to cast it as a way for the government to censor citizens.
“What this working group seeks to do is actually develop guidelines, standards, guardrails to ensure that the work that has been ongoing for nearly 10 years does not infringe on people’s free speech rights, rights of privacy, civil rights and civil liberties,” Mayorkas told lawmakers on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“It was quite disconcerting, frankly, that the disinformation work that was well underway for many years across different independent administrations was not guided by guardrails,” he added.
DHS has to contend with a wide variety of disinformation, from smugglers seeking to gain clients by mischaracterizing the status of the border to scammers seeking to take advantage of victims of natural disasters.
“We become involved when disinformation poses a threat to the security of our country,” Mayorkas said, or shows a “connectivity to violence.”
Similar efforts are underway elsewhere in the federal government, including at the State Department, whose Global Engagement Center is designed to monitor and expose foreign disinformation efforts that could undermine U.S. security.
“We observed that there are not policies that guide that work across the department, that the operating agencies such as Customs and Border Protection, FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency], Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, their efforts are not necessarily harmonized,” he said.
The board has not yet had a meeting in its weeklong tenure, but many Republicans have seized on its newly appointed leader, Nina Jankowicz, and borrowed a phrase from George Orwell’s novel “1984” to describe it: “Ministry of Truth.”
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Mayorkas clarifies role of new DHS disinformation board https://t.co/L3pkSa7HTj pic.twitter.com/77a5LJvpmT
— The Hill (@thehill) May 4, 2022
"Until this week, the U.S. government was perfectly clear that countering disinformation means only foreign disinformation. In every administration until this one, the countering disinformation mission…had no domestic role whatsoever."https://t.co/ohCW9CVjXm
— John Schindler (@20committee) April 30, 2022
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