Tag: dhs

U.S. Government Monitoring Pregnant Moms’ Social Media Posts

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) premier law enforcement agency monitors expecting parents’ online posts about their pregnancy and reproductive health issues, according to internal emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the online privacy activist group, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

The U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), the DHS agency that conducts criminal investigations and enforces U.S. immigration laws, is one of a handful of government agencies that use a software tracking tool called SocialNet.

SocialNet pulls citizens’ online data from a host of websites, including BabyCenter, a reference and pregnancy tracking site where new and expecting parents can post information about their health and pregnancy experiences.

Eva Galperin — cybersecurity director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world — said the revelation is “concerning.”

“When people post about their pregnancies to BabyCenter, they’re usually doing it without the expectation that ICE or the local police are checking up on the status of their pregnancy,” Galperin told The Defender.

“ICE could potentially be reading information about your reproductive health and about your pregnancy or your children,” she said, adding that this is particularly concerning due to the current political climate surrounding pregnancy and abortion.

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A Nation of Snitches: DHS Is Grooming Americans to Report on Each Other

“There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.”—Professor Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler

Are you among the 41% of Americans who regularly attend church or some other religious service?

Do you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law?

Do you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car?

Are you among the 44% of Americans who live in a household with a gun? If so, are you concerned that the government may be plotting to confiscate your firearms?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the government and flagged for heightened surveillance and preemptive intervention.

Let that sink in a moment.

If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you have just been promoted to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

I assure you I’m not making this stuff up.

So what is the government doing about these so-called American “extremists”?

The government is grooming the American people to spy on each other as part of its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, or CP3 program.

According to journalist Leo Hohmann, the government is handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”

As Hohmann explains, “Whether it’s COVID and vaccines, the war in Ukraine, immigration, the Second Amendment, LGBTQ ideology and child-gender confusion, the integrity of our elections, or the issue of protecting life in the womb, you are no longer allowed to hold dissenting opinions and voice them publicly in America. If you do, your own government will take note and consider you a potential ‘violent extremist’ and terrorist.”

Cue the dawning of the Snitch State.

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DHS Uses Social Media Surveillance Tools To Detect Peoples’ Emotions

More and more reports are coming out detailing US government agencies’ desire to expand and “refine” their surveillance operations by including detection of sentiment and emotion, by using “AI”-powered software.

One of them is Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and which, according to internal documents obtained through freedom of information act (FOIA) requests, hired a third party in order to scan online posts for “risk terms and phrases.”

The company that provides this tool, Fivecast, does so in multiple languages. Fivecast also sells surveillance of video and image material through what it calls AI-enabled object recognition.

The company’s marketing itself as being able to scrape data for these purposes not only from large platforms such as Facebook and Reddit, but also 4chan, 8kun, and Gab.

It apparently doesn’t stop there, because there is also anti-trafficking and anti-propaganda capability baked in there somewhere, at least according to what are said to be leaked statements made by one employee.

404 Media reports about all these findings stemming mostly from a number of FOIA documents it has had access to, adding that CBP responded to the outlet’s queries by stating that data used in the process is “open source” (meaning, publicly available online).

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Georgia fired a state trooper for his conduct. Now he leads Seward County’s Homeland Security task force.

The Seward County Homeland Security task force, sometimes using the controversial practice of civil asset forfeiture, seized $11.8 million from Interstate 80 drivers through civil and criminal forfeiture in its first 32 months.

The Seward-based head of that law enforcement task force trains and supervises officers – despite being barred from becoming a Nebraska police officer himself.

Blake Swicord was fired as a state trooper in Georgia after selling guns to a pardoned felon and allegedly sending sexually explicit texts and photos from his police-issued phone. Swicord, who claims he was wrongfully terminated, then was arrested on suspicion of battery following an alleged domestic violence incident with his then-girlfriend.

The Nebraska agency in charge of law enforcement training has twice denied Swicord admission, saying he didn’t meet the good character requirement for entry. That agency said Swicord failed to disclose his arrest or his firing on his application, as first reported by the Lincoln Journal Star. On Friday, the Nebraska Supreme Court dismissed his latest appeal.

Homeland Security officials told the Flatwater Free Press this week that they had no knowledge of Swicord’s previous dismissal or arrest when he was first placed into a Homeland Security role in 2019. They said they learned of Swicord’s troubles in April 2021, when an assistant U.S. attorney told the agency that the Nebraska Supreme Court had denied Swicord’s first appeal in his quest for police certification.

Swicord will remain in his job as task force coordinator as he continues his legal battle, Seward County Sheriff Mike Vance told a reporter during Tuesday’s Seward County Board meeting.

Vance has previously said he would have to let Swicord go if he can’t become a Nebraska police officer. Vance and dozens of Swicord’s colleagues have praised the 27-year police veteran for his leadership, interdiction skills and professionalism.

“Since his employment with my agency, Mr. Swicord has shown nothing but the upmost integrity and professionalism,” Vance wrote supporting Swicord in 2019. “After conducting this extensive background check I feel very sure that Mr. Swicord is a man of integrity and very honest at all times.”

The Police Standards Advisory Council, which oversees law enforcement certification in Nebraska, has acknowledged Swicord’s qualifications. It also ruled twice that he can’t go through training to become a Nebraska police officer.

“His actions in the application process demonstrate to this body that the petitioner cannot be considered to be a person who can be characterized as being truthful, honest or trustworthy,” the council wrote in its 2019 decision.

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FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES ROUTINELY UNDERCOUNT USE-OF-FORCE INCIDENTS

TWO YEARS AFTER the murder of George Floyd ignited worldwide protests against police brutality, President Joe Biden ordered federal law enforcement agencies to update their policies on use of force. A new report, however, finds that the nation’s largest law enforcement agency ignored the spirit — if not the letter — of that order. 

The Department of Homeland Security has failed to accurately compile data on use-of-force incidents, according to a report issued Monday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, or GAO. “We found the data were not sufficiently reliable for the purposes of describing the number of times agency law enforcement officers used force,” the watchdog agency wrote. 

DHS updated its use-of-force policy in February to limit the use of no-knock entries, require more frequent training, and ban chokeholds unless deadly force is authorized. The changes brought DHS into compliance with Biden’s May 2022 executive order, which required federal law enforcement agencies to align their use-of-force practices with new Department of Justice policy. The order also included guidelines for improved data collection and reporting on federal agencies’ use of force.

GAO’s report, authorized by Congress last year, determined that several agencies under DHS have been regularly undercounting use-of-force incidents. From April 2022 to July 2023, GAO audited four DHS agencies: Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Protective Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service. “If officers used force multiple times during one event, the agency counted only one instance of force,” said Gretta Goodwin, a GAO director for homeland security and justice.

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Homeland agency expanded authority to wage ‘domestic surveillance and censorship,’ House report says

Secret documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show that a Department of Homeland Security agency “expanded its mission to surveil Americans’ speech on social media, colluded with Big Tech and government-funded third parties to censor by proxy, and tried to hide its plainly unconstitutional activities from the public,” according to an interim staff report released Monday night.

The findings add details to reporting by Just the News about the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its work with private entities to remove, throttle and label purported misinformation on elections, Hunter Biden and COVID-19 — efforts that might even constitute election meddling and sometimes target true content.

The “severe public outcry” in spring 2022 against DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board, shuttered a few months later, so alarmed CISA and its advisors that they “tried to cover their tracks” on censorship and surveillance, which “included scrubbing CISA’s website of references to domestic ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,'” the report says.

By outsourcing its “censorship operation” to a CISA-funded nonprofit in the wake of First Amendment litigation by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, CISA was “implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional,” House Judiciary Republicans said.

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THE FEDS HAVE THOUSANDS OF STADIUM LIGHTS ON THE BORDER. SWITCHING THEM ON WOULD DEVASTATE DESERT ECOSYSTEMS.

THE TALLEST PANELS of border wall between the U.S. and Mexico stand about three stories high. On the ground, the partitions have a long and troubled record of blocking natural waterways and severing wildlife migration corridors, but the environmental impacts don’t stop there.

When the sun goes down, the wall’s ecological footprint expands up and out, with lights reaching into the sky and illuminating cross-border habitats. Most of that illumination is concentrated near population centers and ports of entry, but with the flip of a switch, that could easily change.

According to a new survey, federal contractors have placed nearly 2,000 stadium-style lights in southern Arizona alone in recent years, imperiling some of the most ecologically complex and celebrated public lands in the United States.

In a report published Tuesday, the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based environmental organization, revealed the placement of more than 1,800 lights on federal land in the Sonoran Desert between 2019 and 2021, including wildlife preserves that are home to at least 16 threatened or endangered species. The new lights are not yet in use, and according to the report’s authors, they never should be.

“The scientific record clearly shows that artificial light at night can have costly, even deadly effects on a wide variety of species including amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, insects and plants,” the group said. “High-intensity lighting in these priority conservation areas would be devastating to the rich biodiversity of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico.”

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Billionaire Biden Donor Bankrolled 2020 Election Social Media Censorship Effort

The Department of Homeland Security’s controversial social media censorship effort during the 2020 election was propped up by a partisan billionaire. 

Newly obtained documents, acquired through a public records request, confirm that Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, financed a specialized portal maintained by the Center for Internet Security (CIS). This portal was used to facilitate the swift removal of predominantly conservative messages on Twitter and Facebook during the previous presidential election.

Omidyar, previously identified as one of the largest donors to campaign groups supporting Joe Biden’s presidential bid, donated $45 million to the “Sixteen Thirty Fund” in 2020. This dark money group mobilized Democratic voters and financed pro-Biden Super PACs. However, Omidyar’s direct involvement in the DHS partnership, which is now facing increased scrutiny, remained undisclosed until now.

The funding provided by Omidyar to CIS was used to establish a Misinformation Reporting Portal (MiRP). A team from CIS continuously monitored this portal 24/7 from September 28 to November 6, 2020, as revealed in a post-election report, “Election Infrastructure Misinformation Reporting.” The Democracy Fund, Omidyar’s foundation, supported the creation of the MiRP through a direct grant, according to the report.

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DHS Sought To Assign Social Credit Style “Risk Scores” To Social Media Users

In a sharp spotlight on the interplay between national security and individual privacy, newly disclosed documents have unveiled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered into a contract with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2018 to develop a project, dubbed “Night Fury,” designed to analyze and assign “risk scores” to social media accounts.

The Brennan Center for Justice procured these documents through a public records request, and Motherboard was the first to report on them. Project Night Fury aimed at utilizing automation to detect and evaluate social media accounts for connections to terrorism, illegal opioid distribution, but also disinformation campaigns.

The DHS document stated, “The Contractor shall develop these attributes to create a methodology for developing a ranking, or ‘Risk Score,’ associated with the identified accounts.”

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New DHS Training Videos Reveal How Far The Biden Administration Will Go To Eliminate Opposition

Consider the following scenario.

You meet up with your friend from college. While you went on to make a career for yourself in HR, she married right after graduation and started her family. You are disturbed by how she has changed over the last 10 years. She has doubts about the 2020 presidential election and Covid vaccines, speaks highly of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, and refuses to drink Bud Light. She has also become quite religious, attending potlucks and Bible studies, and laments how immoral and unsafe the world has become. You later discover she expresses her dangerous views to a sizable crowd of followers on social media.

You have a few choices on how to respond:

(1) You cut off all communication with her and report her to federal authorities for spreading misinformation.

(2) You confront her about the falsehoods and try to correct her in a kind yet firm manner.

(3) You try to investigate by talking to her husband and children as well as some of her friends.

According to documents obtained by the America First Legal Foundation, agents at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were in the process of producing short videos for these kinds of scenarios for “bystander training.” Other videos involved “a white teenage male who hurls ‘racial epithets’ and flashes a gun at his girlfriend and a young environmental activist.” Apparently, the leaders of the DHS believe these are the types most at risk of committing acts of terror — not jihadists, radical Marxists, or demented incels who are almost always the main perpetrators of such violence.

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