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posted by martyb on Friday March 15 2019, @12:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the Both-Sideism dept.

Homeland Security’s Intelligence Overreach: Two Cases Illustrate Risks to Civil Society:

Two stories this week show how the Department of Homeland Security is deploying its intelligence apparatus against activists, journalists, and human rights lawyers. While this type of political surveillance rightly raises serious concerns, it is hardly surprising given the immense growth in DHS’s intelligence gathering programs during and since the Obama administration, and the lack of meaningful standards, safeguards, and oversight of their operation.

[...]NBC7 San Diego published a leaked copy of a set of slides titled “San Diego Sector Foreign Operations Branch: Migrant Caravan FY-2019, Suspected Organizers, Coordinators, Instigators and Media,” dated January 9, 2019. The document, which appears under a U.S.-Mexican seal, is essentially a surveillance target list with photographs of 59 people, 40 of whom are identified as U.S. citizens, all of whom seem to have some connection to migrant caravans heading from Central America to the United States. “Alerts” have been placed against the information of 43 people, including 28 Americans. DHS kept dossiers on the targets as well, including one that was shared with NBC 7 on[sic] Nicole Ramos, an attorney with a legal center for migrants and refugees in Tijuana, Mexico.

DHS claims it was tracking people who were in the vicinity of violence near the border in November 2018 and just wanted to talk to them as part of its investigation of those incidents. This justification rings hollow; it is much more plausible that the agency was tagging people based on their perceived involvement with the caravan, not as potential witnesses to any incident of violence.

[...]Far from the southern border, officers of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of DHS in New York City were also keeping tabs on protests. Documents obtained by The Nation via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request included a spreadsheet of public protests, titled “Anti-Trump Protest Spreadsheet 07/31/2018.”

The document covered protests during the two-week period from July 31 to August 17, suggesting that such monitoring may be undertaken on a regular basis. It also showed the number of people who had signed up for the protests on Facebook, indicating that ICE was monitoring social media to follow political movements.

DHS claims it was monitoring leftist activists in New York to provide agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit with “situational awareness” information in case they were traveling through the city “on work or personal time.” Again, the title of the document gives away what is likely the agency’s true intent: the list is not about protests or demonstrations in general, it is focused on “anti-Trump” (and anti-ICE) political activity.


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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday March 16 2019, @02:18AM (4 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday March 16 2019, @02:18AM (#815211) Journal

    By using "The Fourth Estate" I was drawing them as separate from the government or the church or the people.

    That's what I understood you to mean. In general, they're just another wholly captured cog in the oligarchy. Calling them the, or a, "4th estate", gives them credit they most definitely have not earned.

    And asking if that's enough for journalists to be actively financing a foreign invasion. Do you believe that?

    They're no more or less guilty of such financing than are, for example, congress and the presidents. They're certainly not the top level of such goings-on.

    I do think that some of them have served as "useful idiots" to foreign interests. Putin comes to mind pretty much immediately. And of course, the media has been helping to fluff the drug war, which benefits, and is also responsible for creating, criminal foreign (and domestic of course) interests.

    --
    "Faith": The possessive form of "Superstition."

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  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:39AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:39AM (#815261)

    You (clumsily) sidestepped the question.

    Do you believe that American journalists (specifically, the ones on which DHS has been spying) are *personally* financing an invasion -- that is, an armed conflict against the government of the US at the behest or direction of one or more foreign governments -- as GP claimed?

    Not news outlets. Not entertainment corporations, specific, individual *American citizen* journalists. And not "spin" or "doing their masters' bidding" either, but digging into their own pockets to provide weapons, supplies and logistical support for armed attempts to take territory from the US.

    It's a simple and straightforward question. Yes or No?

    • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday March 16 2019, @05:20PM (2 children)

      by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday March 16 2019, @05:20PM (#815507) Journal

      You (clumsily) sidestepped the question.

      No, I just ignored it, because that wasn't what I was talking about. I was only seriously interested in the tangental issue of your use of "fourth estate" and how that relates to the media's generally bad behavior WRT actually informing the public of the news. That's still the case.

      However, as you seem particularly curious about my take on your question:

      Do you believe that American journalists (specifically, the ones on which DHS has been spying) are *personally* financing an invasion

      I have very low confidence that the answer to that is yes. I don't "believe" anything here, there are no directly related facts for me to assess.

      There are indirectly related facts:

      Given the propensity of "homeland security" to act unconstitutionally, raise false flags and conduct various kinds of security theater — all of which are known facts — I have moderate confidence that this is either one (or more) of those, or something along the lines of powerful government actors having arranged to keep tabs on people that are some kind of an annoyance to same in the hopes that they can silence or otherwise squash those people if they turn anything up that they can use against the people on that list. Of any kind.

      Or IOW, I have moderate confidence that the government is considerably more likely to be the bad actor in the specific context of your question. Basically because they usually turn out to be. When there's no direct knowledge, the bet on outcome goes to the most common result until the facts show otherwise.

      WRT another directly related issue, the public has long accepted that the government may keep lists of people without there being any authorized form of due process. There is widespread clamoring for more of it right now, too, most noticeably in the area of gun control.

      There are no-fly [wikipedia.org], no-buy [treasury.gov], criminal history [wikipedia.org], registration / tracking / restriction [wikipedia.org], ownership [wikipedia.org] and other lists of various natures, most of which have not even the shadow of due process or legitimate constitutional cover for at least some of those on the list. The general question of "is this type of thing legitimate" has even been to SCOTUS, the majority of which has in turn rubber-stamped said list-keeping and use thereof with the sophism "registration is not punitive [wikipedia.org]", as it is civil law, not criminal law, therefore perfectly okay to do.

      So while the idea of the federal and/or state government(s) keeping arbitrary, non probable-cause or judicial sentence-related based lists is odious in the extreme as well as a blatant violation of the sense and intent of the US constitution's 4th amendment [wikipedia.org], there's significant precedent, much of it specifically tuned to inflame the public, that makes it extremely unlikely that any of this will change. If the government wants to keep a list of media (or any other) persons for any particular reason at all, they definitely can, and the odds are excellent that they will.

      Niemöller's poem [wikipedia.org] is not generally the first thing that comes to mind when your typical media consumer is faced with some form of overblown "OMG!" That also applies when the media is busily constructing or amplifying same.

      And, inasmuch as the media has been deeply complicit in the promotion and encouragement of precisely this kind of government list-keeping, it is somewhat amusing to me that they have now been hoisted upon their own petards [wikipedia.org], even as it serves as another example of government action wildly out of compliance with the constitution that authorizes its very existence.

      Will the media learn anything from this other than "ouch"? I honestly doubt it.

      --
      If the grass is greener on the other side of the fence,
      the water bill is probably higher as well.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 17 2019, @03:41AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 17 2019, @03:41AM (#815673)

        No, I just ignored it, because that wasn't what I was talking about.

        Well then. I guess you'll have a lot of conversations with yourself, if you're going to completely change the subject.

        • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday March 17 2019, @04:44PM

          by fyngyrz (6567) on Sunday March 17 2019, @04:44PM (#815933) Journal

          I guess you'll have a lot of conversations with yourself, if you're going to completely change the subject.

          I didn't change the subject. I simply addressed the part of what you said that was actually interesting to me. You'll note I started with a quotation from your post, where you said that 'we do call them "The Fourth Estate,"' when in fact, "we" do not. I call them "a mundane part of the oligarchy." Because that's what they are.

          Carry on. 😊

          --
          Just because someone is offended...
          doesn't mean they're right.