Idaho SOS Partners With CISA In The Name Of ‘Election Security’

Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, is partnering with the federal censorship office Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to talk about “election security.”

McGrane held a press conference on Wednesday with CISA director Jen Easterly in the Idaho state capital, after which the Idaho Republican said he was “grateful for the partnership” in a post on X.

CISA is America’s newest federal agency, established in 2018 in part to protect the American electrical grid and “critical infrastructure” from “cybersecurity threats.” In 2017, this included election infrastructure, which then-outgoing DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson designated as a “critical infrastructure subsector,” as noted in a 2023 federal report. The agency has also been working with Big Tech to silence Americans’ speech and put its thumb on the scale of elections.

The agency is behind the massive push to censor what state-power oligarchs deem to be “disinformation.” West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner told my colleague M.D. Kittle earlier this year that the “disinformation” narrative is a “psychological operation against the American people” that is “as bad as it gets.”

Nonetheless, McGrane seemed to heap praise on CISA.

“As Idaho’s Secretary of State, I am dedicated to protecting our elections and ensuring that every vote counts,” he reportedly said in a Sept. 16 press release. “The support we receive from CISA is invaluable, especially for our rural communities that often lack funding and resources when it comes to cybersecurity. Federal support and expertise help us provide consistent and robust security measures that protect our elections and build trust in the process.”

The House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report last summer detailing how CISA “colluded with big tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans.”

“CISA was originally intended to be an ancillary agency designed to protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats,” the report states. “In the years since its creation, however, CISA metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.”

As detailed in the report, “following the unfounded” Democrat claims of foreign election interference, “particularly” that the Russians “changed the outcome of the 2016 election, CISA expanded its ‘cybersecurity’ role to include countering foreign malign influence operations.”

However, “[i]n January 2021, after President Biden took office, ‘CISA transitioned its [“Countering Foreign Influence Task Force”] to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM,’ or so-called “Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation,’” the report states. “In so doing, CISA admitted that its focus was no longer exclusively on ‘countering foreign influence,’ but was also targeting MDM originating from domestic sources.”

Easterly brought up the prospect of foreign interference at the press conference, saying our “foreign adversaries” are intent upon “undermining American confidence in the security of our elections” and “trying to stoke partisan rancor,” the Idaho County Free Press reported.

It is unclear if McGrane raised any concerns about CISA’s history of reported election meddling and censorship efforts during the press conference, as no full recording was provided by his office. But Easterly did say “[t]he partnership that we have here in Idaho with Secretary McGrane and the entire security team has just been a model, and frankly, a model for election security,” according to the Idaho County Free Press.

Easterly also mentioned “all of [her] travels across the country, sitting down with state and local election officials” in a clip from the presser, and suggested these discussions involve “understanding what … CISA can bring to them.”

While “[d]omestic voices have a right to speak about their concerns,” she said, “influential figures who have large communications platforms … need[] to be very mindful of not doing our foreign adversaries job for them.”

“[I]t’s really important that all of us work together to prevent our foreign adversaries who we know are a very real threat — whether it’s Iran, whether it’s Russia — we don’t want Americans to be duped into being a mouthpiece for our foreign adversaries,” she continued.

When asked about Easterly’s comments and whether “CISA once again plan[s] to try to censor what it claims is “mis-” or “dis-” or ‘malinformation’ on the state and local scale,” a spokesman for the agency told The Federalist that “[t]he premise of [such a] question is mistaken,” as “CISA does not censor free speech.”

When asking McGrane’s office about its partnership with CISA, given the agency’s history, a spokeswoman claimed McGrane “has led the effort to stop the disinformation reporting efforts and coordination with social media companies,” and that the secretary “has made it a point to ensure the focus of CISA in elections is on these efforts.”

“While the prior programs targeting disinformation were out of line with this mission, it has not stopped highly skilled foreign actors from attempting to tamper and interfere with our elections,” the statement given to The Federalist on Thursday continued. “Our coordination with CISA is to protect the security and resilience of our election infrastructure from these attacks. Secretary McGrane believes strongly that the integrity and security of our elections are worth protecting, and this can only be achieved by working together.”

Earlier this year, Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales, a fellow Republican, also met with Easterly to develop a “partnership” with CISA. While initially speaking positively, Morales eventually distanced himself from the censorship agency in a conversation with The Federalist.

As The Federalist has reported, CISA graduated from a mission to “protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats” to, by 2020, “routinely” targeting what CISA officials claimed to be “disinformation” on social media, ramping up in 2020.

CISA was deeply involved with directing social media companies to remove information involving, for example, questions about the administration of the 2020 election or the efficacy of the mandates and measures put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic, as The Federalist has previously reported.

CISA is a subagency of the Department of Homeland Security, which also established the “Disinformation Governance Board” to “streamline the work of colluding with social media providers to shut down speech the government didn’t like or found inconvenient,” as The Federalist previously reported. However, this board quickly dissolved after significant public backlash.

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.