The Civic Node

The Jawboning Papers

4 min read

Argument

CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), created in 2018 to protect election infrastructure from foreign hackers, was systematically transformed under the Biden administration into a government censorship switchboard — flagging American citizens’ social media posts and pressuring platforms to remove speech the administration found inconvenient. This is “jawboning”: using informal pressure, regulatory threats, and bureaucratic leverage to get private companies to do what the Constitution explicitly prohibits government from doing directly. The piece argues this infrastructure persists regardless of who holds power, is now being replicated in AI governance frameworks, and that decentralized platforms and legislation with teeth are the only structural remedies.

Structure

  1. The glitch — Ted Cruz’s October 8, 2025 Senate hearing; Alex Berenson and Sean Davis as witnesses; the jawboning mechanism defined
  2. The source code — CISA’s redefinition of “infrastructure” to include “cognitive infrastructure” (speech); the switchboarding operation; Facebook’s Nick Clegg emails; DHS bulletin equating “misinformation” with terrorism; Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court ruling
  3. The upgrade — AI governance frameworks (Biden’s AI Executive Order, NIST guidance) as the next censorship architecture; decentralized alternatives (Nostr, Lens Protocol, Filecoin, Arweave); Cruz’s legislative proposals (COLLUDE Act, Censorship Accountability Act)
  4. The debug — personal experience of institutional gaslighting during mental health crisis; connection between bureaucratic paternalism and family-system dynamics

Key Examples

  • CISA defined “cognitive infrastructure” as within its mandate, allowing it to surveil and flag speech about elections and public health
  • Berenson’s Twitter ban: internal emails showed “Mr. Berenson’s Tweets should not have led to his suspension” — he hadn’t broken rules; banned hours after Biden said platforms were “killing people”
  • Nick Clegg (Facebook) internal email summarizing White House pressure: sacrificing some users’ speech was “the price they had to pay” to maintain good government relations
  • DHS February 2022 bulletin: briefly redefined “terrorism” to include “misinformation,” equating speech with violence
  • Murthy v. Missouri: Supreme Court ruled 6-3 for Biden administration; Barrett wrote plaintiffs lacked standing because they couldn’t prove direct causation — effectively making jawboning judicially unchallengeable
  • CISA’s own term for the operation: “switchboarding”
  • Cruz’s proposed legislation: COLLUDE Act (revoke Section 230 for platforms that censor at government request), Censorship Accountability Act (allow citizens to sue officials who violate First Amendment through third-party coordination)
  • Cruz’s framing: “CISA’s unchecked censorship serves as a cautionary tale for future policy related to artificial intelligence”

Connections

  • CISA — Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; the institutional vehicle for the censorship operation
  • Ted Cruz — Senate Commerce Committee chair; convened the hearing and is leading legislative response
  • Alex Berenson — journalist; primary witness; his Twitter deplatforming is the case study
  • Sean Davis — CEO of The Federalist; testified about systematic throttling of conservative media
  • Nick Clegg — Facebook/Meta executive; his internal emails documenting the coercion dynamic
  • Murthy v. Missouri — Supreme Court case that made jawboning legally unchallengeable under current precedent
  • Section 230 — the statutory lever giving government leverage over platforms
  • Biden Administration — the political actor that expanded CISA’s mandate into speech surveillance
  • First Amendment — the constitutional provision being circumvented
  • Nostr, Filecoin, Arweave — decentralized infrastructure alternatives that could be censorship-resistant

What It Leaves Open

  • Whether Cruz’s proposed legislation passes, and whether it survives constitutional challenge
  • Whether decentralized alternatives (Nostr, etc.) can ever achieve sufficient network effects to compete with centralized platforms
  • Whether the Trump administration uses the same CISA infrastructure against different targets — the piece flags this risk explicitly (“the mechanisms don’t disappear when administrations change”)
  • The AI censorship build-out: which specific “safety” frameworks embed government-aligned content filtering, and how to distinguish legitimate safety from political filtering
  • The Murthy v. Missouri standing problem: what would make future cases legally viable?

Newsletter Context

This is the strongest political-power piece in the published catalog. The jawboning mechanism is analytically clean — it’s censorship with constitutional deniability built in, and the Murthy ruling made it judicially untouchable. The piece’s most important insight is structural: CISA was created under Trump, expanded under Biden, and will be available to whoever comes next. That’s not a partisan point, it’s an institutional one. The AI governance extension is the most forward-looking angle — the censorship infrastructure is being baked into model training and output filtering before the public knows it exists.

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