The conservative watchdog group filed the complaint following a failed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into this supposed anti-free speech conduct.
Judicial Watch was looking for the contact between the Cybersecurity and Info Security Agency (CISA), a Department of homeland security agency, and the Election of Integrity Partnership, according to the Daily Caller.
According to the lawsuit, Judicial Watch has asked the Washington D.C. District Court to order the DHS to recognize the October 5 FOIA request and “provide non-exempt records relevant to the requests.”
“We’ve essentially had these exposures over the last year that federal agencies, particularly DHS, have been seeking to censor Americans… either direct or indirect,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told the Daily Caller.
Several groups, including CISA, the Democratic National Committee, and the NAACP, could use the EIP to submit “tickets” that revealed election misinformation. In 2021, the EIP issued a report summarizing their efforts to combat disinformation in the 2020 election. According to the study, the EIP shared hundreds of posts with internet platforms, with “35% of the URLs we sent to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube getting either removed, tagged, or soft blocked.”
“This case is intended to delve into that. There are these federal frauds who collaborated to create a system of censorship for social media, and it appears that this Department of Homeland Security department engaged in it, and we’d like to understand what was going on,” Fitton said.
Judicial Watch also sought communications between CISA and the University of Washington’s Institute for an Informed Populace and the Stanford Internet Observatory. The proposal requested communication about the 2020 election as well as “online disinformation and misinformation.”
According to the lawsuit, the DHS reportedly failed to meet the Nov. 3 FOIA deadline.
“When an agency refuses to comply with FOIA in an unconstitutional manner, we have the option of litigating in federal court, which is what we did,” Fitton told the Daily Caller.
Big Tech and Big Government have formed an unholy relationship. These institutions collaborate to undermine free expression in America. Because of America’s strong free speech protections against the actions of arbitrary governments, anti-free speech advocates have outsourced their pro-censorship goal to private corporations in Big tech.
Governments must undoubtedly encounter fierce opposition from freedom activists. Companies that aid the government in carrying out these heinous acts must also be penalized.
The fact that a firm is private does not prevent it from penalties for flagrant violations of Americans’ fundamental civil liberties. Private and public institutions that operate against the interests of the Traditional American Nation must be punished for their treasonous actions. No questions.