On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America Reports,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) argued that the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board “gives tools for government to expand its scope of the surveillance state” that people have already expressed concern about.
Biggs said, “[Y]ou already have speech that’s regulated in some ways. You can’t commit slander or defamation. We regulate that. But what we don’t regulate [is] people expressing opinion, and that’s what this is going to get into. They’re going to say, oh, you have an opinion here, it’s heterodox, it’s not orthodox, and thus you’ve violated this. And so, they’re going to attack that. That’s the concern, and it actually gives tools for government to expand its scope of the surveillance state that so many people have been concerned about the expansion of the surveillance state. So, I view it as a very problematic program that they want to do, and I think we’re going to have to fight back pretty hard to see if we can put that genie back into the bottle.”
Biggs added that DHS was already “looking at disinformation from foreign sources, but now, they’re going to target Americans who say — like if you say something that I think Hunter Biden might be a problem for the Biden administration, is that misinformation, is that disinformation? No, that’s simply an opinion. Who’s going to draw the line between opinions and disinformation? hopefully not this person.”
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