ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE that happened on Friday, the U.S. Department of the Treasury confirmed to Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) that it has used political watchwords in searches throughout its surveillance of Americans’ financial transactions. The admission was made in a letter to Scott, who is ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee. Examples of the watchwords used by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, include “MAGA,” “Antifa,” Trump,” “Biden,” “Kamala,” “Schumer,” or “Pelosi.” Banks were to surveil private financial transactions after Jan. 6, 2021 protests at the Capitol, according to a letter Fox News Digital received.
The terms weren’t used in isolation, but instead, used alongside other data that banks regularly use as part of their anti-money laundering (AML) programs to detect and report suspicious activity. That such surveillance has been ongoing isn’t new, but what the search terms are is. It is clear they were based on political ideology alone, which is what makes it particularly pernicious and offensive. That such acts by the government violate Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights under the Constitution was ignored, perhaps because it wasn’t expected to ever be discovered.
Only days before, on Tuesday, we learned more about just how far-reaching the government has become in our collective lives. It’s not only surveillance (such as with Homeland Security or FinCEN), it’s also censorship (such as with Twitter or Amazon) and propaganda (as with Ukraine or Russia.) Under Joe Biden’s regime, we now know the National Science Foundation expended vast millions into artificial intelligence-powered censorship and propaganda ‘tools’ in order to suppress online speech ‘at scale.’ The NSF further went to serious efforts to conceal its censorship from the media. We only learned this from a report issued by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The report states the NSF granted multi-millions of dollars to university and non-profit research groups, ostensibly to quell alleged ‘misinformation’ regarding Covid-19 and the 2020 election. In a press release, the Judiciary Committee said: “The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop A.I.-powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others.”
The Judiciary Committee reached its conclusion through non-public documents it, and the Select Subcommittee in the Weaponization of the Federal Government, obtained. These documents also indicate the researchers and non-profit organizations knew very well that their acts constituted ‘content moderation’ and ‘censorship,’ but continued the work anyway. They have also stonewalled efforts by the House committees to obtain further information for literally years. At this point, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has subpoenaed the NSF to obtain communications it had with the private companies and non-profit groups.
Lee Fang is an investigative journalist who has reported extensively in surveillance and censorship. He also presented his views in the Weaponization committee on Tuesday, which he called, ‘Examining the threat to the First Amendment posed by artificial intelligence and the federal government.’ In his presentation, he said a British A.I. firm named ‘Logically’ came to the U.S. market looking for “contracts to monitor and remove alleged social media misinformation in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.” The company reportedly conducted censorship for Great Britain during the pandemic, and wanted to expand its market. It bragged about its relationship with Meta, parent of Facebook and Instagram, and how it could automatically suppress ‘misinformation.’
In other words, the government was contracting out its desired censorship to private concerns in order to try to evade detection and culpability. This is expressly unconstitutional, however. After reports surfaced on what the NSF was doing, it strategized means to obfuscate its actions and developed a media strategy to blacklist media outlets reporting on it.
The Daily Caller’s Supreme Court reporter, Katelynn Richardson, testified about this, and something it has cryptically named ‘Convergence Accelerator:’
“After I reported on Convergence Accelerator grants shortly after their announcement, the NSF devised an official media strategy instructing research teams to highlight the ‘pro-democracy’ nature of their projects. I only know this thanks to emails unveiled in a report this committee put out today.”
Greg Lukianoff, President an C.E.O. of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), believes leftist bias is inherent in existing A.I. and generates a “massive body of official facts that we can’t actually trust.” He, too, testified:
“[T]he most chilling threat that the government poses in the context of emerging A.I. is regulatory overreach that limits its potential as a tool for contributing to human knowledge. A regulatory panic could result in a small number of Americans deciding for everyone else what speech, ideas, and even questions are permitted in the name of ‘safety’ or ‘alignment.’”
He did a show-and-tell to illustrate his point. He asked Chat GPT to write a poem about why certain members of the Weaponization committee were the best politicians in the country. Chat GPT did so for Democrats, but not for Republicans. (Lukianoff self-describes as left-leaning.) FIRE, he added, is filing a brief with SCOTUS warning of the perils of ‘jawboning,’ or using government pressure to coerce social media platforms to censor speech.
The report by the Weaponization committee, called ‘The Weaponization of the National Science Foundation: How NSF is Funding the Development of Automated Tools to Censor Online Speech ‘At Scale’ and Trying to Cover Up its Actions,’ can be read here.
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