Shapes of things: Big Brother’s Playbook edition

I started this series to document our movement toward the world of 1984. Big Tech has featured prominently in it. In Department of Homeland Security documents reviewed by the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang, we see the Biden administration going full Big Brother. Their story reporting on the DHS documents — some leaked, some obtained via Missouri v. Biden, some public — is “Truth Cops.” DHS has gone into the business of policing “dangerous speech” with the cooperation of servants in Big Tech. Techno Fog picks up their story and provides highlights in “Big Brother’s Playbook.”

The Intercept story has a sidebar of “key takeaways” in the form of bullet points:

• Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing.

• DHS plans to target inaccurate information on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

• Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners to report disinformation directly.

Mr. Fog incudes a set of key points in screenshots derived from the court documents. He introduces them with this one:

• DHS is “directly engaging with social media companies to flag MDM” (MDM is defined as mis-information, dis-information, and mal-information). It is doing so “Ahead of midterm elections in 2022” and is readying its efforts with eyes focused on 2024[.]

What is to be said? As a great American once put it, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.” The DHS documents vividly tell us “where we are and whither we are tending.”