Thread by @MikeBenzCyber

1. The DHS censorship scandal, which is far more shocking than the #TwitterFiles, is a tale of "Censorship Blackwater."

Just as DOD outsources "dirty work" overseas to private military contractors, DHS began outsourcing censorship "dirty work" to private mercenaries at home.

2. To help bring this DHS censorship scandal to life, it's instructive to see how DHS's "Blackwater" group, Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), sicced out and censored individual influential voices to take them out of the political influence equation for the 2020 election.

3. EIP and insiders at CISA (DHS's cyber agency) were freaking out in summer 2020 that Trump's social media megaphone was going to derail the political viability of using mass mail-in ballots for the election 5 months away.

June 22, 2020, this Trump tweet sent them into a tizzy:

4. On June 23, 2020, the very next day after Trump's tweet calling mass mail-in ballots "the scandal of our times," CISA & EIP had what they said was their "First discussion" of the censorship outsourcing operation EIP would do, mass flagging all criticism of mail-in ballots:

5. Again, I've played this clip a million times, but for those new here, CISA & EIP were explicit in confessing they knew CISA didn't have the legal authority to do the censorship directly, so EIP would be deputized to "fill the gaps" of things unconstitutional for DHS to do:

6. Now this part is EXTREMELY important:

EIP, DHS's "Blackwater" mercenary censorship group, didn't just mass flag posts. They did that. A ton. But it was way worse.

They COERCED (and bragged about it!) social media companies to EXPAND THEIR CENSORSHIP POLICIES:

7. I really can't emphasize this point enough.

DHS's "Censorship Blackwater" group didn't simply flag posts violating existing TOS.

They STRONG-ARMED the platforms into changing their TOS, and then mass flagged posts under the new policies they pressured them to adopt:

8. The man you heard confessing the whole plan above is Alex Stamos.

Thanks to EIP's status as DHS's formally deputized disinformation-flagger, Alex Stamos's censorship requests were given special priority, on par with the FBI and DHS itself. The latest TwitterFiles reveals:

9. There's so much more to this scandal but I started this thread bc I'll be talking about it on the Charlie Kirk Show & wanted to show examples of EIP targeting @charliekirk11 personally.

This is how DHS's "Blackwater" group justified censorship requests to Twitter censors:

10. DHS's deputized attack dog EIP further targeted @charliekirk11 as a "repeat misinformation spreader" for "asking questions" about the Sharpiegate narrative, which EIP bragged about pressuring Twitter/Facebook/Insta/YouTube/TikTok to all jointly censor at the narrative level:

11. More EIP targeting of Charlie Kirk @charliekirk11:

What democracy can survive a domestic intelligence agency, DHS, deploying private censorship squads to neutralize political opposition?

Democracy is a contest for hearts and minds. No access to hearts & minds, no democracy.