SUMMARY
- The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarded a $2.6 million contract for “dis-, mis, and mal-information analysis” to Guidehouse Inc, a subsidiary of Bain Capital, in September 2024.
- FEMA is a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), home of the now-terminated “Disinformation Governance Board” and incubator of the Election Integrity Partnership, which censored American political speech during the 2020 election.
- Guidehouse’s anti-disinformation services included contacting social media platforms on behalf of their clients to meet their “counter-disinformation” needs, and cited former intelligence community veterans – including a former CIA chief of staff – as its in-house experts.
- The company also maintained a “proprietary database” of dis-, mis- and malinformation, as well as internal “risk” ratings for websites.
- In 2024, a Guidehouse contractor working for the U.S. Department of State attended an exclusive invite-only gala hosted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the British nonprofit that wants to “Kill Musk’s Twitter.”
- According to Guidehouse, its counter-disinformation services, including its database of disinformation, have since been discontinued.
Despite the decision to terminate its “disinformation governance board” in 2022, the Department of Homeland Security continued to shell out out millions in taxpayer dollars to the censorship industry for years afterwards.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) a sub-agency of DHS, awarded a $2.6 million contract to a private company, Guidehouse, to analyze “misinformation and disinformation” in 2023.
Guidehouse is a multinational business and government consultancy that has received hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. federal government contracts since 2008. Formerly a division of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Guidehouse was acquired by Bain Capital in 2023.
The company has worked with a laundry list of the U.S. government’s most important agencies and sub-agencies: DHS, the Department of Justice, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, The FBI (one of Guidehouse’s largest sources of contracting dollars), the TSA, FEMA, and HHS.
While its contracts cover a variety of purposes, a $2.6 million contract with FEMA that began in September 2023 was in an area familiar to those who monitor online censorship: “MISINFORMATION, DISINFORMATION, AND MAL-INFORMATION ANALYSIS.”
There are already major questions surrounding FEMA’s political impartiality, due to a recent scandal which saw a employee of the disaster relief agency fired after she instructed workers in Florida not to assist homes with pro-Trump signs in their yards in the wake of Hurricane Milton. The agency’s use of “misinformation analysis” – often a pretext for partisan censorship – will add to those questions, as will a recent controversy involving a Guidehouse contractor.
According to Guidehouse, its disinformation contract ended in 2024. Nevertheless, its activities merit a closer examination, as it can tell us more about how the federal government sought to capacity-build the censorship industry under th previous administration.
The Guidehouse Playbook
A link to a 2021 Guidehouse report advertising its counter-disinformation services now returns a 404 page. But Guidehouse has not been able to remove all traces of its report from the web – it remains accessible through online archives.
We also know, through online archives, that Guidehouse’s page advertising its anti-misinformation and anti-disinformation capabilities also advertised the expertise of two of its (now former) employees, Jason Dury and Rodney Snyder.
Both Snyder and Dury, according to their former Guidehouse biographies, are veterans of the intelligence community.
Dury, according to his bio, worked in U.S. intelligence for 25 years, while Snyder was a station chief in the Middle East and chief of staff to two CIA directors. His bio also states he “helped stand up the National Counterterrorism Center.”
This is another example of a long-running theme in FFO’s research: the close involvement of current and former members of the U.S. security and foreign policy state in the counter-disinformation industry.
In its 2021 report, Guidehouse reveals that it “engages” social media platforms on behalf of clients in order to report mis- and disinformation. This kind of “switchboarding” activity – using a private company to relay content moderation requests to tech platforms – has been a major source of controversy for DHS in the past.
These activities, per Guidehouse, include flagging posts for removal.
The report also reveals that Guidehouse retained a “proprietary internal database” tracking alleged mis- and disinformation, as well as engaging in real time tracking of social media platforms, forums, blogs, government databases, and company records. Per Guidehouse, this database is no longer maintained.
Similarly to the media blacklisting company NewsGuard, Guidehouse also identified websites that it considers “higher risk” for spreading mis- and disinformation. Guidehouse did not publicly reveal which websites are on that list — but, presumably, its clients in the U.S. government had access to it.
The disinformation guide also notes that Guidehouse worked to “protect the integrity of the 2020 census” by combating mis- and disinformation surrounding it. This work, according to Guidehouse, involved “engaging with key stakeholders,” without saying whether this involved relaying the posts of American citizens to social media platforms with censorship requests.
Guidehouse has been receiving money from the federal government to assist with census activities since at least 2014. Its most recent census-related contract from the Department of Commerce, which began on April 01 2024 and is currently scheduled to end on 31st January 2025, is worth $66.8 million, with $35.9 million paid out so far.
“Kill Musk’s Twitter”
Erica Mindel is a senior consultant at Guidehouse, contracted to the U.S. Department of State’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. According to her public LinkedIn profile, Mindel has a military background, serving two years in two roles with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) prior to joining the private sector.
As FFO previously covered, Mindel is listed as an attendee of an exclusive invite-only gala hosted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) in June of 2024:
The same leaks which included the invite list, obtained by Racket News, revealed that the top priority of CCDH show that a top priority of the pro-censorship nonprofit is to “Kill Musk’s Twitter.”
This objective, listed three times by CCDH on its internal “annual priorities” for 2024, can be found alongside the items “advertising focus” and “trigger EU & UK regulatory action” — both of which are major sources of pressure on American social media platforms in general, and X in particular.
Even if Guidehouse’s employee was not aware of this specific goal, it’s hard to miss CCDH’s broader objective, stated in its very name, which is the online censorship of social media users – including American social media users – in the name of combating “hate.”
