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For years a quiet bureaucracy inside Foggy Bottom pretended its mission was to guard Americans from foreign propaganda, but documents now show it was built with tools that could be turned inward. The Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, renamed the Global Engagement Center, was created under President Obama and later expanded — a bureaucratic seed that grew into a censorship apparatus funded with your tax dollars.
Thanks to aggressive discovery by independent outlets and brave litigants, we learned that this outfit didn’t just study foreign actors — it paid private vendors to run a proof-of-concept that swept up American media. Evidence shows the State Department-backed testbed tied together three companies — PeakMetrics, Omelas, and NewsGuard — and ran a trial from December 14, 2020, to January 7, 2021, in which Blaze Media was explicitly included as a target. That’s not national security; that’s political surveillance of the domestic press.
Don’t let anyone distract you with weasel words about “tracking narratives” or “combating foreign disinformation.” The same government contest that produced these pilot projects handed out tiny contracts and pilot funding to those firms so they could productize tools that classify and downgrade news sites. The intended customers were agencies and tech platforms — but the product was turned on American outlets, and that’s exactly the abuse the lawsuit exposed.
We should be clear-eyed about what happened next: litigation forced accountability. The plaintiffs secured a consent decree that binds the State Department and curtails its ability to bankroll or endorse technologies meant to suppress or demonetize constitutionally protected speech — a rare legal win that places guardrails around an out-of-control administrative state. This settlement is a victory for free speech, but it’s a temporary check, not a cure.
The rot goes deeper than one experimental dashboard. Corporate rating outfits and “disinformation” indices that the government funded were quietly labeling patriotic, conservative outlets as risky or unreliable, steering ad dollars and traffic away from dissenting voices. That is how a supposedly neutral, taxpayer-funded program becomes an ideological blunt instrument used to bankrupt opposition and control public conversation.
Americans who love liberty should not sleep on this. We must keep the pressure on Congress to defund any program that hands censorship tools to contractors, demand full transparency about every grant and pilot, and elect leaders who will dismantle this Deep State machinery for good. If we cherish the First Amendment, the work starts now — at the ballot box, in the courts, and in the court of public opinion.
