Tag: dhs

DHS Producing Videos Teaching Citizens How To Identify “Radicalized” Conservatives

America First Legal (AFL) has obtained documents through FOIA request from the Department of Homeland Security which outline a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style video series that DHS intended to release to the public.  The videos were meant to depict different scenarios in which citizens might encounter potentially “radicalized” individuals.  Citizens are then asked to choose what they think should be done about the encounter. 

Most of the scripted scenarios showcase people with conservative beliefs and values as the radicalized threat.  For example, the DHS targeted “suburban Moms” with pro-life beliefs.

The series also targeted “old high school friends” who believe in “conspiracies” as examples of radicalized citizens in need of bystander intervention.

The video scripts, written under the DHS’s Office of Terrorism and Violence Prevention, was part of an internalized memo circulated on January 29th, 2021, only eight days after Joe Biden entered the White House.  The program seems to have been developed in tandem with the “Disinformation Governance Board” which was eventually scrapped due to public opposition.  It reveals an ongoing and disturbing trend within the Federal Government to implement authoritarian measures across the country, first using covid as an excuse, then using the January 6th protests as a rationale.

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DHS Official Gets Life for Using His Federal Authority to Rape, Abuse, and Then Silence Women Victims

In a chilling example of a trusted government official abusing his power to carry out his depravity, a disgraced special agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) was sentenced to life in federal prison for sexually assaulting two women and leveraging his official position to prevent them from reporting his violent conduct. John Jacob Olivas, 48, of Riverside, California, was found guilty of three counts of deprivation of rights under color of law and sentenced to life in prison this week.

It is worth noting that while HSI had individuals like Olivas in their ranks raping women and silencing them, Homeland Security was busy referring to people who questioned the COVID lockdowns as “domestic terrorists.” This disturbing irony highlights the immense power and authority that comes with law enforcement positions and their ability to demonize the innocent while hell unfolds within their ranks.

Olivas sought out a position of authority and used it to prey on women, violating their constitutional rights while abusing them sexually. According to victim testimony, he made it clear to his victims that the police would not be responsive to any report they made about him due to his status as a federal agent. He even threatened them with retaliation, such as making them “disappear,” having their children taken away, and getting them arrested on fake criminal charges.

One victim testified that Olivas tried to rape her “after making it clear to her that the police would not be responsive to any report she would make about Olivas because he was ‘above a cop,’ and ‘untouchable’ and ‘invisible’ to police” because of his federal position, the U.S. attorney’s office statement said.

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Bringing the War on Terror Home to Target Americans for ‘Disinformation’

The U.S. government took the information techniques it learned after 9/11 and has turned them on Americans. America may have lost the Great War on Terror, but our technocratic elites could still win their war against American liberty.

That’s the argument made by Jacob Siegel in a 13,000-word Tablet magazine article titled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” which seeks to explain “a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people” by elitists “who believe themselves to be infallible.”

Specifically, Siegel writes, these “infallible” elitists believe they are saving the world from “disinformation,” which is whatever they view as untruths about Russia, Ukraine, Donald Trump, Covid, climate change, election fraud, Brexit, etc. You name a flavor of disinfo, and they want to save us from it. And they’re operating in the State Department and other federal agencies, in numerous foundations and NGOs, and at a hundred academic “centers” that have sprung up like ‘shrooms since 2016.

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Robot dogs will soon patrol the US-Mexico border

“Robot Dogs” will soon be patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border according to the Department of Homeland Security.

These four-legged robotic quadrupeds weigh in at approximately 100 pounds and look like something out of science fiction horror.

DHS says the machines are critical in patrolling the harsh landscape of the American Southwest.

“The southern border can be an inhospitable place for man and beast, and that is exactly why a machine may excel there,” said DHS Science and Technology Derectorate manager Brenda Long. “This S&T-led initiative focuses on Automated Ground Surveillance Vehicles, or what we call ‘AGSVs.’ Essentially, the AGSV program is all about…robot dogs.” 

Reaction to the armed dogs has been mixed but police view them as just another tool.

“Due to the demands of the region, adding quadruped mechanical reinforcements is a smart use of resources. Despite the dangers, and maybe even using them as cover, there are many types of illegal activity that happen in the harsh border zones,” DHS said in a statement.

Police use of such robots is still rare and largely untested — and hasn’t always gone over well with the public.

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DHS heavily redacted Disinformation Board emails despite claiming agency had nothing to hide

When the existence of the Disinformation Governance Board burst into public view, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said there was nothing sinister to hide and claimed the office was rooted in “best practices.”

A year later, Mayorkas’ department is refusing to let Americans see most of the legal justifications and talking points it created to defend the now-disbanded board from “blowback,” FOIA documents showed. 

More than 100 pages of internal communication between the board’s former executive director, Nina Jankowicz, and her staff were released with heavy redactions to the conservative nonprofit Citizens United. 

What little is visible makes clear that DHS underestimated the negative reaction the board would provoke and was scrambling to find ways to keep the story from being pushed by “hostile” news outlets.

In the FOIA emails, Jankowicz cited “blowback and abuse” after certain media outlets began describing the board as the “Ministry of Truth” as word spread about its formation. 

“There is a fair possibility this could end up on a hostile TV network in the coming days,” she wrote.

Some of the communications show the board’s responses to direct questions posed in a letter from Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), such as what language in the Constitution allows DHS to create such a board and hire staff for it.

Other questions included which parts of DHS would be “responsible for monitoring and collecting data” on misinformation and what “specific actions” DHS intended to take to “counter misinformation.” Each answer was redacted by the department. 

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Homeland Security Department Caught Hiding Evidence of ‘Domestic Censorship Activities’

By now, it should not surprise you to learn that a federal intelligence agency is trying to cover up evidence showing that they are working to censor free speech. The past decade has shown us that the federal government has no qualms with trying to use its power to shape public opinion – especially through censorship.

This time, it is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that was reportedly caught trying to conceal its role in squashing certain political views on Big Tech platforms. Fox News reported:

A federal agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that’s been scrutinized for what critics argue is suppression of dissenting political views under the guise of combating disinformation now appears to be “burying” evidence of its alleged censorship, experts and watchdog groups say.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, has come under fire for working with Big Tech companies to flag and take down social media posts related to elections, COVID vaccines, and a range of other issues that were deemed mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM).

Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, told Fox News his research found that CISA has attempted to hide its involvement in suppressing opinions posted on social media by Americans. The agency’s MDM webpage discusses “foreign influence operations and disinformation … targeting election infrastructure.” It says nothing of focusing on domestic activity.

But this particular page is new and “has a short web archive history” according to the Fox News report, which also noted that it only existed “since late last month.”

However, the old CISA page related to MDM addresses both “foreign and domestic threat actors [using] MDM campaigns to cause chaos, confusion, and division.” It also gives a much wider definition of CISA’s mission as working “in close coordination with interagency and private sector partners, social media companies, academia, and international partners on a variety of projects to build resilience against malicious information activities.”

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DHS has a program gathering domestic intelligence — and virtually no one knows about it

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 — circumventing their lawyers — 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.

The inner workings of the program — called the “Overt Human Intelligence Collection Program” — are described in the large tranche of internal documents POLITICO reviewed from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. Those documents and additional interviews revealed widespread internal concerns about legally questionable tactics and political pressure. The documents also show that people working there fear punishment if they speak out about mismanagement and abuses.

One unnamed employee — quoted in an April 2021 document — said leadership of I&A’s Office of Regional Intelligence “is ‘shady’ and ‘runs like a corrupt government.’” Another document said some employees worried so much about the legality of their activities that they wanted their employer to cover legal liability insurance.

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The Department of Homeland Security Turns 20. Its Legacy Is Disastrous.

To those who don’t remember the events of September 11, 2001, it can be difficult to convey the sense of dread and uncertainty that followed. As horrible as the attacks were, many of us wondered: What’s next?

It was in this context that Congress quickly passed, and President George W. Bush signed, such legislation as the USA PATRIOT Act, less than two months after 9/11. While that law was drafted with the best of intentions—strengthening the nation’s defenses against potential future attacks—in practice, authorities overwhelmingly use it to circumvent Americans’ basic freedoms like privacy and due process.

Similarly, less than a month after the attacks, Bush signed an executive order establishing the Office of Homeland Security. The office would “coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.”

But that was apparently not enough: In June 2002, Bush proposed an entirely new Cabinet department dedicated to “transforming and realigning the current confusing patchwork of government activities into a single department whose primary mission is to protect our homeland.” Bush’s proposal promised that by consolidating multiple agencies under a single director, the new department would “improve efficiency without growing government.”

In November of that year, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which established the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and brought nearly two dozen disparate agencies, including the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), the U.S. Secret Service, and the Coast Guard, under its purview. The newly incorporated department officially opened 20 years ago today, on March 1, 2003.

The department’s stated intent was to prevent terrorist attacks and protect the homeland. Twenty years later, what is there to show for it?

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DHS Censorship Agency Had Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On ‘Red Mirage, Blue Shift’ Election Events

Last week, The Intercept published a set of leaks that drew broad interest in perhaps the most undercovered scandal inside the US government today: the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) quiet move to establish, for the first time in US history, an explicitly inward-facing domestic censorship bureau.

What The Intercept glimpsed, however, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg.

The size, scale and speed of DHS’s censorship operation are vastly larger have been reported. Based on our investigation, below are seven bottom-line figures summarizing the scope of censorship carried out by DHS speech control partners, as compiled from their own reports and videos:

  • 22 Million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
  • 859 Million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
  • 120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;
  • 15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation” often in real-time;
  • <1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
  • Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
  • Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted, due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes that DHS partners openly plotted and bragged tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.

The citations above are from just the DHS censorship network’s impact on the 2020 election cycle alone. That was two years ago, when the narrative management machine referenced by The Intercept was first getting formed. Even the above figures, however, just scratch the surface of the full story.

While The Intercept rightly noted that DHS’s “truth cops“ now take on a range of other topics – such as Covid-19 and geopolitical opinions – it all started from, and grew out of, DHS’s speech control infrastructure set up to censor speech about elections.

That started with the 2020 election. But it continues, importantly, with the 2022 midterm elections, which are ongoing this week.

At Foundation for Freedom Online, for more than six months, we have been publishing and sharing research findings about a wide span of shocking components to DHS’s speech control operations. Our investigation has spurred multiple members of Congress to vow aggressive probes into DHS’s “government censorship by proxy.”

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The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and the National Security State Continues

The steady march of the post-2016 tech censorship campaign has been picking up pace lately, and we’ve just learned of another leap forward. According to recent major reporting from the Intercept, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been involved in efforts aimed at corralling what it refers to as “MDM”: misinformation, disinformation, and “malinformation.”

Documents obtained and made publicly available by the news outlet show that the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been formulating a strategy to combat MDM regarding US elections and other matters. While seemingly unobjectionable on the surface ― who could be against combating false information, which is rife online? ― it raises serious questions about the extent of government involvement in the already-troubling phenomenon of tech censorship.

The conversations detailed in the documents show the federal government, and the DHS specifically, taking a more active role in tech companies’ efforts to suppress MDM. We’ve had some indications this was happening for a while, as when DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC in August that the government was “working with the tech companies” on “strengthen[ing] the legitimate use of their very powerful platforms and prevent[ing] harm from occurring,” and that it was doing so “across the federal enterprise” ― comments that were only reported in right-wing media.

The documents give us details about what that work has entailed. In these discussions, the government did not directly carry out censorship. Rather, they involved government agencies: doing “debunking” and “pre-bunking”; directing the press, local and state governments, and other stakeholders to “trusted resources”; carrying out “rumor control”; boosting “trusted authoritative sources”; giving financial support to its external partners; and improving information literacy. Much of the focus is on elections, with participants talking about using these resources to prevent people being misled about how, where, and when to vote, and stressing that CISA should strictly be a “resource” that at most uses its “convening power.”

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