Congress is telling all the spy agencies that there won’t be a rubber stamp approval of their beloved section 702 but that’s old news. While nobody was looking, the Department of Homeland Security has been running a secret program “gathering domestic intelligence.” That’s only one of the the things politico found out from “a wide-ranging tranche of internal documents.”
Spy networks everywhere
It seems like half the federal government has a spy network watching what Americans are up to. The paperwork Politico obtained “reveal that a significant number of employees in DHS’s intelligence office have raised concerns that the work they are doing could be illegal.”
It’s pretty scary when the spooks are spooked about what they’re up to. It got to the point they were asking their supervisors for liability insurance.
The domestic spy program run by DHS has rules which allow their agents to “seek interviews with just about anyone in the United States.” The only restriction is that they have to “say they’re conducting intelligence interviews.” The thing which has all the civil rights activists going spastic is the way they target prisoners.
New: DHS's Office of Intelligence and Analysis runs a domestic intel collection program. Under the program, for years, I&A intelligence professionals were allowed to seek interviews with people in pre-trial detention without their lawyers present.
— Betsy Woodruff Swan (@woodruffbets) March 6, 2023
They do it without any lawyers knowing about it, either. “They’re allowed to go directly to incarcerated people.” circumventing their lawyers, even liberals whine, “raises important civil liberties concerns.”
The spy program “has been in place for years” but was “paused last year because of internal concerns.” The spies themselves wouldn’t keep breaking the law without their own butts being covered.
The Office of Intelligence and Analysis gathers “information about threats to the U.S., including transnational drug trafficking and organized crime.” That sounds harmless enough. “But the fact that this low-profile office is collecting intelligence by questioning people in the U.S. is virtually unknown.”
Widespread internal concerns
You know the things this secret spy department were doing are shady when the spies feel uncomfortable following orders. Documents and additional interviews “revealed widespread internal concerns about legally questionable tactics and political pressure.”
Complaining about it only made things worse for the employees. “The documents also show that people working there fear punishment if they speak out about mismanagement and abuses.”
One spy called the Office of Regional Intelligence “shady” and said it “runs like a corrupt government.” Employees “worried so much about the legality of their activities that they wanted their employer to cover legal liability insurance.”
DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis is charged by law with sharing emerging threat information with its vast network of partners across the country.
And yet, in the lead up to the Jan. 6 attack, it produced no reports on threats it was seeing. https://t.co/h2LmSuapn3 pic.twitter.com/7ChUAesDEl
— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) December 13, 2022
According to Carrie Bachner, formerly the career senior legislative adviser to the DHS under secretary for intelligence, “the fact that the agency is directly questioning Americans as part of a domestic-intelligence program is deeply concerning, given the history of scandals related to past domestic-intelligence programs by the FBI.”
There is one “key theme” which keeps emerging from the documents Politico examined. In “recent years, many people working at I&A have said they fear they are breaking the law.” Half the workers who responded to a survey in 2020 “said they’d alerted managers of their concerns that their work involved activity that was inappropriate or illegal.” That was a mistake.
When the survey came out again in 2021, “Many employees didn’t even want to fill out a survey on working conditions because they feared being punished for sharing negative views.” The retaliation had been running rampant. “Numerous narrative comments, as well as inquiries prior to taking the survey, indicate the members of the workforce did not want to provide feedback due to fear of retaliation.“
