Lee Fang: “They're searching for fears to tap into”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsYesterday, Public reported on the new House Judiciary Commiteee report on how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been engaged in an effort with big tech companies to censor American citizens. The headline finding was that the people involved knew that what they were doing was wrong. “It’s only a matter of time,” wrote Suzanne Spaulding, a former assistant general counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an email to a colleague, “before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” And, noted the report, CISA scrubbed from its web site any mention of its focus on domestic “misinformation,” after being exposed.One person who knew that what CISA, an agency within the US Department of Homeland Security, was doing was wrong, before almost everybody else in the world, was investigative journalist Lee Fang, who broke the first big story of US government censorship on October 31, 2022 for The Intercept. Some of what was in the House report had been covered before, including by Fang, which the report noted. But much of it was new, including the Spaulding email. Fang’s ground-breaking reporting makes him one of the best investigative journalists working in the U.S. right now. Fang discovers scoops others overlook, including the fact that the Biden administration tried to block the release of evidence showing its censorship, that MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan plagarized a column on spanking, and that the FBI helps the Ukranian government censor information it doesn’t like on Facebook. Be sure to subscribe to his Substack to get his stories as soon as they are published.Now, in an interview with Public’s Phoebe Smith, Fang warns that the government is seeking new excuses to censor Americans. “Even as the threat of Islamic terrorism from Al-Qaeda or ISIS has radically waned,” he explains, the military “needs to justify its existence. So it's searching for new threats and new fears to tap into.”A few hours before Fang’s conversation with Smith, he published another scoop, this time exposing the ties between the late pedophile and sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, and Rep. Stacey Plasket, the member of Congress who disparaged Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger as “so-called journalists.”