Seems the DHS has a secret program to spy on American citizens
For years, the Department of Homeland Security has run a virtually unknown program gathering domestic intelligence, one of many revelations in a wide-ranging tranche of internal documents reviewed by POLITICO.
Those documents also reveal that a significant number of employees in DHS's intelligence office have raised concerns that the work they are doing could be illegal.
Under the domestic-intelligence program, officials are allowed to seek interviews with just about anyone in the United States. That includes people held in immigrant detention centers, local jails, and federal prison. DHS's intelligence professionals have to say they're conducting intelligence interviews, and they have to tell the people they seek to interview that their participation is voluntary. But the fact that they're allowed to go directly to incarcerated people â circumventing their lawyers â raises important civil liberties concerns, according to legal experts.
That specific element of the program, which has been in place for years, was paused last year because of internal concerns. DHS's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which runs the program, uses it to gather information about threats to the U.S., including transnational drug trafficking and organized crime. But the fact that this low-profile office is collecting intelligence by questioning people in the U.S. is virtually unknown.
IMHO, when your own employees are afraid they're breaking the law by doing their jobs; and those same people fear punishment if they speak up, says a lot about the ethics of this bullshit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09, @09:36PM (3 children)
It seems like the government gets called out on mass surveillance once a decade or so, and nothing ever really changes. It simultaneously proves that conspiracies exist, but that they don't exist for very long, at least not specific conspiracies. The more general conspiracy to erode our rights is not hidden. It's readily apparent to anybody who's observant, and thus I don't consider it a conspiracy in the more common use of that word.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday March 09, @10:29PM (2 children)
Who grants those rights you speak of?
The edge of ċ¤Şç cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Friday March 10, @01:06AM
Rights are not granted. They are an intrinsic part of being human. The Founders were quite emphatic about that. To the extent that they can be said to be granted, they were said to be "endowed by the Creator", and if you don't believe in a deity, then refer back to what I said at the top. They even went so far as to explicitly state in the Bill of Rights that the enumeration of rights doesn't imply that rights are limited to those enumerated.
Of course there was a lot of hypocrisy early on, but it's the understanding that rights are fundamentally a part of being human which leads to the hypocrisy being eliminated.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday March 10, @06:07PM
As far as the Constitution of the United States of America goes, the people, and the 2nd amendment says their weapons.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Thursday March 09, @11:03PM (1 child)
Google has one.
Apple has one.
Amazon has one.
Tik Tok has one.
Anyone with money can buy the above data, even if they didn't have their own spying program, and all they need is a Purchase Order/PO.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 10, @05:18AM
Reminds me of Asimov's relativity of wrong. Thinking that an intrusive US government program is equivalent to customer data collection from a business is a deep error to make, especially when the latter is so widespread and sold to any bidder. The more people who know, the less value the data has to a covert actor. For example, there's no point to blackmail, if everyone already knows all the gory details.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Friday March 10, @12:30AM (1 child)
After I retired from the Air Force, I work for 10 more years as a DoD civilian. I designed and built a large scale database to store and retrieve just this sort of data. Seriously, you don't think military and Intel are doing this sort of thing "off grid"? Please
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday March 10, @03:25AM
About 20 years ago, I happened to overhear a conversation between two owners of little local ISPs. One was complaining to the other about how the NSA just waltzed in and informed him that they would be attaching their black box to his backbone, and if he didn't like it, tough.
So... yeah. I am sooooo astonished.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.