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Subject
P000603
Source
GDELT news · original
Published
Tuesday, May 26, 2026

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But because of the false reporting, the MAGA world took it on faith that CISA was commanding a vast censorship empire which simply never actually existed. Either way that made it ripe for the chopping block. Rand Paul, in particular, wanted to destroy the whole thing , falsely believing it was engaged in censorship.
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Plaintext stories at Techdirt. Sign In Register Preferences Techdirt TechDirt GreenHouse Free Speech Error 402 Ctrl-Alt-Speech Deals Jobs Support Techdirt Stories filed under: "plaintext" Expand All Posts Collapse All Posts ‘The Worst Leak I’ve Witnessed’: A CISA Contractor Left AWS GovCloud Credentials Sitting In A Public GitHub Repo (Mis)Uses of Technology from the whose-cybersecurity-are-we-talking-about? dept Tue, May 26th 2026 11:06am - Mike Masnick The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was one of the few genuinely good things Donald Trump was talked into doing during his first term. It was an agency within the Department of Homeland Security that was focused on coordination between the government and industry when there were larger cybersecurity threats that needed coordination to deal with in a manner that protected Americans. It was staffed with genuinely competent people who understood cybersecurity risks, and who did serious work keeping critical systems safe and secure. Everything started to go south in late 2020 when its then-director, Chris Krebs, made the factually accurate statement that the 2020 election had been incredibly secure. That MAGA narrative violation made it so Trump had to fire Krebs and for MAGA to decide that this factual statement was the equivalent of treason . From about that point onwards, CISA has been basically seen by the MAGA world as suspect, and that was helped along by some bad reporting and conspiracy theory nonsense pretending that CISA was involved in “censoring social media,” something that was not even remotely true. The real story was that, given CISA’s involvement in sharing cybersecurity threat information across industries, there were some efforts to see if they could also coordinate information sharing for things like election disinformation: not as a tool of censorship, but if an election official in some random area saw someone posting information telling people to (for example) “vote by phone” or whatever, there would be a way to route that issue to the relevant internet company to review against its own guidelines. But because of the false reporting, the MAGA world took it on faith that CISA was commanding a vast censorship empire which simply never actually existed. Either way that made it ripe for the chopping block. Rand Paul, in particular, wanted to destroy the whole thing , falsely believing it was engaged in censorship. However, he barely needed to do anything because the Donald Trump / Kristi Noem DHS moved many CISA officials away from actually worrying about cybersecurity to… processing deportation paperwork for ICE . And then, of course, came the firings, gutting the agency . But, you know, having people who actually understand the basics of cybersecurity is probably useful for the [checks notes] cybersecurity agency of the United States. And as a recent Brian Krebs (unrelated to Chris Krebs) report details,
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