“It’s only a matter of time,” wrote 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.”

The “we” in that sentence refers to the network of government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that we and others have dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex. That Complex includes the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

Its leader, Kate Starbird, responded to the former CIA official, Susan Spaulding, by saying, “Yes. I agree. We have a couple of pretty obvious vulnerabilities.”

But one day later, Starbird dismissed the notion that she and her colleagues were doing anything wrong. The real problem was, she explained, that “current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms” and that CISA may face “bad faith criticism” for its censorship.