New Disinformation Office Created by Biden Administration

According to a report by The Intercept, new government and non-government offices are being created to fight foreign disinformation, with the Biden administration elevating disinformation to a national security threat, as codified in its first-of-its-kind National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, published in June 2021.

The Director of National Intelligence has created a new office, the Foreign Malign Influence Center, to oversee organizations like the Pentagon's new Influence and Perception Management Office and at least four organizations inside the Department of Homeland Security alone.

The FMIC, established on September 23 of last year, is authorized to marshal support from all elements of the U.S. intelligence community to monitor and combat foreign influence efforts such as disinformation campaigns. It is also authorized to monitor "the public opinion within the United States."

The effort to counter disinformation has expanded beyond just elections and Russia, as Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, has said that "China, Russia, Iran, etc." are key actors in this space.

The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 approved initial funding for FMIC, which was first established in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020. Congress tasked the center with protecting "political, military, economic, or other policies or activities" of federal, state and local governments, including elections, and domestic "public opinion."

FMIC's director, who is appointed by the DNI, can unilaterally add "any other foreign country" to the list of hostile efforts "undertaken by, at the direction of, or on behalf of or with the substantial support of" Russia, Iran, North Korea or China "with the objective of influencing, through overt or covert means," elections or public opinion.

However, the potential for policing domestic narratives is suggested by FMIC's congressionally determined objective of protecting American "public opinion," despite its name starting with "foreign." Journalists participating in an Aspen Institute exercise before the 2020 election were explicitly told their suspects were "foreign or other adversarial entities," meaning domestic sources.

Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi has criticized the tactic of raising a fuss about a foreign threat to increase regulation and surveillance before slowly adjusting the aim to domestic targets, calling it "the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age."

FMIC's first post-activation mention on Twitter appears to be a Feb. 23 thread on its history by a pseudonymous user who claimed its "mission is identical" to that of the Disinformation Governance Board, the Department of Homeland Security entity shuttered last summer after it became a lightning rod with congressional Republicans.

Brownstone Research wrote that the government simply dropped the Disinformation Governance Board and then reinstituted the planned thought police with a new name in a different governmental agency a month later, and almost no one noticed.