DHS Has Assembled A Rogue's Gallery Of Oxygen-Thieving Turd Burglers To KEEP US SAFE!!!

DHS.GOV  |  Today, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) Ken Wainstein, and Counterterrorism Coordinator Nicholas Rasmussen announced the establishment of the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group (Experts Group). The group is comprised of private sector experts who will provide their unique perspectives on the federal government’s intelligence enterprise to DHS’s I&A and the Office of the Counterterrorism Coordinator.

“The security of the American people depends on our capacity to collect, generate, and disseminate actionable intelligence to our federal, state, local, territorial, tribal, campus, and private sector partners,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas. “I express my deep gratitude to these distinguished individuals for dedicating their exceptional expertise, experience, and vision to our critical mission.”

“The Homeland Intelligence Experts Group is being formed at a time of unprecedented challenge, with the U.S. intelligence enterprise facing threats from a range of malign actors, to include foreign nation-state adversaries, domestic violent extremists, cyber criminals, drug-trafficking cartels and other transnational criminal organizations,” said Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Ken Wainstein. “The Experts Group will be an invaluable asset as we navigate through this evolving threat and operating environment and continue to strengthen our efforts to protect the Homeland.”

“The homeland threat environment is more diverse, dynamic, and challenging than at any point in our post 9/11 history, with threats tied to an array of different terrorist and violent extremist ideologies and narratives,” said Counterterrorism Coordinator Nicholas Rasmussen. “The experience, expertise, and perspective offered by Experts Group members will undoubtedly put the Department in a strong position to confront this threat landscape, and we are grateful for the willingness of the Experts Group members to serve in this important capacity."

The Experts Group will provide DHS with a wide range of views and perspectives, with a membership that includes former senior intelligence officials, journalists, and prominent human rights and civil liberties advocates.

The Experts Group members are the following:

• John Bellinger, Partner, Arnold & Porter (Former Legal Advisor, Department of State and National Security Council)
• John Brennan, Distinguished Fellow, Fordham University School of Law and University of Texas at Austin (Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency)
• James Clapper, CNN National Security Analyst (Former Director of National Intelligence)
• Rajesh De, Partner, Mayer Brown (Former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy and NSA General Counsel)
• Thomas Galati, Senior Vice President, East Coast Security Operations, NBC Universal (Former New York Police Department, Chief, Intelligence and Counterterrorism)
• Tashina Gauhar, Senior Director, Compliance, Strategy and Policy, The Boeing Company (Former Associate Deputy Attorney General and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, National Security Division, Department of Justice)
• Asha M. George, Executive Director, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense (Former Subcommittee Staff Director, House Committee on Homeland Security)
• Karen Greenberg, Director, Center on National Security, Fordham University School of Law
• Emily Harding, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the International Security Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies (Former Deputy Staff Director, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence)
• Paul Kolbe, Senior Fellow and former Director of the Intelligence Project, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center (Former Operations Officer, Central Intelligence Agency)
• David Kris, Co-Founder, Culper Partners LLC (Former Assistant Attorney General, National Security Division, Department of Justice)
• Michael Leiter, Partner, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center)
• Elisa Massimino, Executive Director, Human Rights Institute, Georgetown Law
• Gregory Nojeim, Senior Counsel and Director, Security and Surveillance Project, Center for Democracy & Technology
• Francis Taylor, Principal, Cambridge Global Advisors (Former Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, DHS)
• Caryn Wagner, Former Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, DHS
• Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief, Lawfare            

The Experts Group will meet four times annually and leverage the expertise of each member to provide input on I&A’s most complex problems and challenges, including terrorism, fentanyl, transborder issues, and emerging technology.

For more information on I&A’s vital work, please visit Office of Intelligence and Analysis | Homeland Security (dhs.gov).

Is Twitter Actually An Intelligence Gathering And Propaganda Tool?

CTH  |  Once you change your reference point and review the Twitter File release from a different perspective, things make sense.  DHS doesn’t operate on the backbone of Twitter, in this scenario Twitter is operating on the backbone of DHS.  The information and content on Twitter exist, or not, by the permission and authority of the national security state, DHS.

Influencing public opinion take on the priority dimension.  Created narratives, established by media partners, can be enhanced or throttled (think Russiagate). Public perceptions can be uplifted or deemphasized.  Political candidates can be boosted or dismissed.

Control over the public conversation is not simply in the hands of the Twitter ‘safety council’ executives, the platform content is shaped by the guiding hand of the controlling interest – the government.  Under this scenario the defining of disinformation, misinformation or malinformation by DHS/CISA takes on a new level of influence.

So why did they permit it to be sold?  Again, control.

Every non-Twitter, non-DHS controlled, information and discussion site is a watering down of the influence of Twitter.  The inability to influence a platform like Truth Social would be particularly troublesome.  So, launder the handling of the DHS platform to Elon Musk and create the illusion of a refresh.

Twitter 2.0 now rebrands with a renewed ability to influence.  Not accidentally, a pro DeSantis shaping is part of the objective.  In the eyes of the control state, Rumble and Truth Social represent the threat of Donald Trump. Meanwhile Twitter and YouTube represent the controlled alternative, Ron DeSantis.

There are trillions at stake.

The ‘magic’ inside Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop is the intelligence community ability to shape, mold and create the illusion of choice.  Remember, shaping opinion is the goal and within that dynamic some voices must be removed, throttled and controlled, while other voices must be amplified.

♦ Elevator Speech: Twitter is to the U.S. government as TikTok is to China. The overarching dynamic is the need to control public perceptions and opinions. DHS has been in ever increasing control of Twitter since the public-private partnership was formed in 2011/2012.  Jack Dorsey lost control and became owner emeritus; arguably, Elon Musk has no idea, well, at least no more of an idea than he does about the financial underwriting of the purchase itself.

The larger objective of U.S. involvement in social media has always been monitoring and surveillance of the public conversation, influencing public opinion, and then ultimately controlling the outcomes.

Tens of millions of Brazilians are on the streets in protest of their fraudulent election.  Do you see those voices on Twitter?

The Twitter social media company residing on the backbone of DHS would help explain why.

the truth about the crackdown on Occupy

Guardian | The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality. US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

Your Betters Consider Your “Cognitive infrastructure” Part Of Their Remit

theintercept  | Under President Joe Biden, the shifting focus on disinformation has continued. In January 2021, CISA replaced the Countering Foreign Influence Task force with the “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation” team, which was created “to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM.” By now, the scope of the effort had expanded beyond disinformation produced by foreign governments to include domestic versions. The MDM team, according to one CISA official quoted in the IG report, “counters all types of disinformation, to be responsive to current events.”

Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.

“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain,” Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS director, in February.

In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.”

“We do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions, and we independently evaluate content in line with the Twitter Rules,” a spokesperson for Twitter wrote in a statement to The Intercept.

There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

DHS’s mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS.

According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

“The challenge is particularly acute in marginalized communities,” the report states, “which are often the targets of false or misleading information, such as false information on voting procedures targeting people of color.”

The inclusion of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is particularly noteworthy, given that House Republicans, should they take the majority in the midterms, have vowed to investigate. “This makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue,” said Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., a member of the Armed Services Committee, adding that finding answers “will be a top priority.”

How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.

 

DHS can't afford to operate the drones "gifted" to them by congress...,

Wired | It was a really thoughtful gesture, but officials with the Department of Homeland Security kinda wish Congress had held onto the gift receipt for those spy drones.

In a gift-giving mix-up that outdoes any of your worst Christmas sweater stories, Congress this past August approved a very generous $32 million appropriation to the DHS for the acquisition of three new Predator drones, meant to bolster the Department’s border-monitoring efforts.

Department officials were surprised, to say the least. See, new Predators weren’t exactly on their surveillance gear wish list.

“We didn’t ask for them,” an unnamed official told the Los Angeles Times.

DHS is already struggling to operate their seven existing drones. Officials acknowledge that they are short on pilots and maintenance — right now, they can only pay to fly the drones five days a week. So now DHS is in a mad scramble trying to figure out how they can successfully incorporate three more vehicles into the roster.

That means more than just pilots: Each drone also requires a maintenance crew, intelligence analysts and pricey satellite bandwidth.

“That is year-by-year, hand-to-mouth living,” another unnamed official said of hard-knock times at the department, which has been forced to move money from other projects just to keep their surveillance initiative, which will eventually boast 18 to 24 drones monitoring U.S. borders and waterways for everything from illegal immigrants to drug runners, operational.

One of the drones is scheduled to be delivered to Corpus Christi, TX today. The other two will be dropped off in Arizona and Florida later this year.

The DHS might not be happy, but the drone endowment will no doubt have some parties squealing with delight: The appropriation was the result of ongoing lobbying from the so-called “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Caucus,” a group of several dozen congressmen, many of whom hail from Southern California — a hot-bed of drone development and home to General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the company that makes the Predator drone in question.

Already, General Atomics has scored $240 million from DHS’ Customs and Border Protection since 2005 for the manufacture of the unmanned aerial vehicles — and generously enough, they’ve handed $1.6 million of it over to the campaign funds of several Congressional members on the drone caucus.

“This is a symptom of how surveillance technology is spreading around the U.S.,” Jay Stanley, a senior privacy and technology analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said. “A lot of times it is not being pulled by people on the ground. It is being pushed from above by people who want to sell it.”

DHS denies significant role in occupy crackdowns..,

Video - DHS fetching around for something to make themselves appear useful

Examiner | Since I published my initial story about how several federal law enforcement agencies had been providing logistical advice to local authorities on how to handle the 'Occupy' protests, I have been attempting to get an official response from the Dept. Of Homeland Security (DHS).

I've spoken to several high-ranking DHS officials on background in the last 24 hours, and they stressed several things to me.

First, despite some press reports to the contrary, the only official DHS role in any 'Occupy' arrests took place in Portland. In that case, officers from Federal Protective Services (which is tasked with protecting federal buildings) assisted the Portland Police Bureau in clearing the federally-owned Terry Shrunk Plaza. Officers from FPS did make several arrests, although it's not clear how many.

I was also assured that FPS officers only had jurisdiction on federal property and would only make arrests after the situation has been deemed unsafe or unsanitary by the General Services Administration (GSA). That agency is that is the permitting authority for protests on federal property.

When I tried to get a sense of how much involvement the department may have had in assisting local tactical plans, I was told DHS is not actively coordinating with local governments or police agencies on the 'Occupy' evictions.

What isn't clear to me is what is meant by "actively" coordinating. That definition leaves a lot of room for advice, both tactical and otherwise.

I sent Homeland Security officials several questions, hoping to get a clearer picture of the scope of the department's involvement in any coordination efforts between federal and local law enforcement officials.

Mayorkas Lawfare Censorship Advisory Board's Signatories To The Huntergate Laptop Coverup

dailycaller  |  Top Republican lawmakers requested information from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas regarding an agency group that will include former intelligence officials who signed a letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian information operation,” according to a copy of a Thursday letter first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

DHS tapped former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former CIA Operations Officer Paul Kolbe, all of whom signed an October 2020 letter casting doubt on the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, to join the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group. In response, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green and Republican Texas Rep. August Pfluger are demanding to know DHS’ selection process for the group’s members, according to a copy of the letter. 

The Hunter Biden laptop contents were authenticated by the Daily Caller News Foundation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS News and other media outlets. No evidence currently exists to suggest the laptop was a Russian disinformation operation.

“Multiple members of this Homeland Intelligence Expert Group have shown an utter disregard for the truth, not to mention brazen political bias. Does Secretary Mayorkas really think appointing leading Russian-collusion hoaxers will increase trust in his department? Clearly, he doesn’t care,” Green said in a statement to the DCNF.

Both Clapper and Brennan have been previously criticized for misleading the American public. On multiple occasions, Clapper gave incorrect information to Congress.

Clapper gave “inconsistent testimony” about contacts he had with the media while in office, Republicans charged. Additionally, Brennan denied that CIA officials had hacked the computers of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, a statement that was later proven false.

“James Clapper and John Brennan have no place in positions of power—much less on a board of so-called experts where they will surely continue to serve as partisan Democrat operatives disguised as national security officials. The Department of Homeland Security must dispense with its disinformation boards and expert groups and focus on the real national security issues facing our country—such as the thousands of illegal migrants crossing our southern border on a daily basis,” Pfluger, who serves as the chairman of the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence, said in a statement to the DCNF.

The group will meet four times per year to advise DHS on intelligence and national security efforts regarding issues such as “terrorism, fentanyl, transborder issues, and emerging technology,” DHS said.

DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

 

 

The NPIG Has Been Waiting Since The Outset Of Its Panicdemic To Implement Covid Domestic Terrorism Strategery

house.gov |  Dear Assistant Secretary Neumann:

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to upend American lifein new and unpredictable ways, we seek an understanding ofhow DHS is preparing for and mitigating potential homeland security threats from bad actors, such as violent extremists in the United States and abroad, who may seek to exploit vulnerabilities stemming  from this metastasizing crisis.

To  that  end, we would  like  to  know how  the  Office  of  Threat Prevention and Security Policy is coordinating DHS prevention efforts to account for the evolving threat landscape under the specter of COVID-19. Recent media reports have highlighted how white supremacist extremists across the world are discussing ways  to  take  advantage  of  the  COVID-19  pandemic  to  advance  violent  ends,  including,  in  some  cases, accelerating society toward mass violence by sowing chaos.

ISIS, too, appears to be interested in exploiting the  crisis: in  the  March  19,  2020,issue  of  the  ISIS  magazine Al-Naba’,  an  editorial  urged adherents to leverage the pandemic to free prisoners from the “prisons of the polytheists and the camps of humiliation,” arguing that Western countries’ security forces are preoccupied with the crisis and their financial resources are being drained.

Federal law enforcement entities have published similar warnings. The Federal Protective Service, under DHS,released  an  intelligence  brief, entitled  “White  Racially  Motivated  Violent  Extremists  Suggest Spreading the Coronavirus,” warning that white supremacist extremists have discussed the “obligation” to spread COVID-19 to law enforcement and minority communities.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s field office in New York reportedly released an alert warning local police agencies that white supremacist extremist groups were encouraging members to intentionally spread the virus to police officers and Jews.

Extremists have,  of course,long made calls  to  violence against vulnerable groups. However, as the uncertainty, fears, and anxiety engendered by this pandemic strain our social fabric in many ways, we must renew our efforts to guard against vulnerabilities that bad actors may exploit.The Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violencestates that DHS will “counter terrorists and violent extremists’ influence online” and “develop prevention frameworks... to identify and respond to individuals at risk of mobilizing to violence.”

We seek to understand how this framework is being  implemented across  the  Department in  light  of  the  reports highlighting  extremists’  interest  in exploiting the current crisis here and abroad. To that end, we respectfully request an overview of the Department’s efforts to address and prevent any exploitation of the COVID-19 pandemic by violent extremists, including any efforts with foreign partners. In addition, we ask to receive any products that DHS has disseminated to state, local, tribal, and territorial partners regarding this threat. We look  forward  to  continuing  our  partnership with  you in  tackling these  serious  issues. Thank  you  for your attention to this important matter.

the case for abolishing welfare/wpa for another two million or so economically unproductive scrubs with security clearances...,

Bloomberg | On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano resigned to take up a post running California’s university system. With her departure, there are now 15 vacant positions at the top of the department. That suggests it would be a particularly humane moment to shut the whole thing down. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks. It owes its continued existence to a vastly exaggerated assessment of the threat of terrorism. The department is also responsible for some of the least cost-effective spending in the U.S. government. It’s time to admit that creating it was a mistake.

In 2002 the George W. Bush administration presented a budget request for massively increased spending on homeland security, at that point coordinated out of the Office of Homeland Security. “A new wave of terrorism, involving new weapons, looms in America’s future,” the White House said. “It is a challenge unlike any ever faced by our nation.” In proposing a new cabinet-level agency, Bush said, “The changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.” Because of “experience gained since Sept. 11 and new information we have learned about our enemies while fighting a war,” the president concluded that “our nation needs a more unified homeland security structure.”

More than a decade later, it’s increasingly clear that the danger to Americans posed by terrorism remains smaller than that of myriad other threats, from infectious disease to gun violence to drunk driving. Even in 2001, considerably more Americans died of drowning than from terror attacks. Since then, the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in the U.S. or abroad have been about one in 20 million. The Boston marathon bombing was evil and tragic, but it’s worth comparing the three deaths in that attack to a list of the number of people in the U.S. killed by guns since the December 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn., which stood at 6,078 as of June.

This low risk isn’t evidence that homeland security spending has worked: It’s evidence that the terror threat was never as great as we thought. A rather pathetic Heritage Foundation list of 50 terrorist plots against the U.S. foiled since Sept. 11 includes such incidents as a plan to use a blowtorch to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and “allegedly lying about attending a terrorist training center”—but nothing involving weapons of mass destruction. Further, these are alleged plots. The list of plausible plots, let alone actual crimes, is considerably smaller. From 2005 to 2010, federal attorneys declined (PDF) to bring any charges against 67 percent of alleged terrorism-related cases referred to them from law enforcement agencies.

That hasn’t stopped a bonanza of spending. Homeland security agencies got about $20 billion in the 2002 budget. That rose to about $60 billion (PDF) this year. Given that spending is motivated by such an elusive threat, it’s no surprise a lot is wasted. The grants made by DHS to states and cities to improve preparedness are notorious for being distributed with little attention to either risk or effectiveness. As an example, economist Veronique de Rugy has highlighted the $557,400 given to North Pole, Alaska, (population 1,570), for homeland security rescue and communications equipment. “If power companies invested in infrastructure the way DHS and Congress fight terrorism, a New Yorker wouldn’t be able to run a hair dryer, but everyone in Bozeman, Mont., could light up a stadium,” de Rugy complained.

Or take the U.S. Coast Guard—which recently got in hot water with the U.S. Government Accountability Office because it was 10 years into a 25-year, $24 billion overhaul to build or upgrade its 250 vessels, had spent $7 billion on the project, and had only two new ships in the water to show for it. Reassuringly, the head of the Coast Guard admitted, “We weren’t prepared to start spending this money and supervising a project this big.”

The DHS also runs the U.S. Secret Service, an agency that just spent an estimated $100 million guarding a weeklong presidential trip to Africa. That would be more than the entire economic output of Tanzania during Barack Obama’s visit. The Secret Service traveled around the continent with 56 vehicles, including three trucks full of bulletproof glass. The cancellation of a planned Obama family safari at least meant there was no need for the assault team armed with high-caliber rounds against the threat of Taliban-sympathizing cheetahs.

The problem with DHS is bigger than a bloated budget misspent. An overweight DHS gets a free pass to infringe civil liberties without a shred of economic justification. John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University, notes that the agency has routinely refused to carry out cost-benefit analyses on expensive and burdensome new procedures, including scanning every inbound shipping container or installing full-body scanners in airports—despite being specifically asked to do so by the GAO. Again, it’s unsurprising that the result of a free hand in enforcement has been excessive and counterproductive security measures, as I’ve argued before: like TSA agents taking away a GI Joe doll’s four-inch plastic gun because it was “a replica,” and deterring so many passengers from airline travel that more than 100 people have died on the roads because they substituted a dangerous means of transportation (driving) for a safe one (flying). Fist tap Arnach.

What Good Is Twitter As An Intelligence Gathering Tool If Everyone Isn't Free To Participate?

CTH  |  Twitter is simply a discovery vector to reveal the larger dynamic of DHS being in control of social media.  That was the DHS/ODNI problem James Baker was trying to mitigate by his filtration of the released documents.  The “Twitter files” are one tentacled element in a much larger story.

#1 Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop and #2 The Fourth Branch of Government

To put it in brutally honest terms, The United States Dept of Homeland Security is the operating system running in the background of Twitter.

You can debate whether Elon Musk honestly didn’t know all this before purchasing Twitter from his good friend Jack Dorsey, and/or what the scenario of owner/operator motive actually is.  Decide for yourself.

For me, I feel confident that all of the conflicting and odd datapoints only reconcile in one direction.  DHS, via CISA, controls Twitter.

Wittingly or unwittingly (you decide) Elon Musk is now the face of that govt controlled enterprise.

If you concur with my researched assessment, then what you see being released by Elon Musk in the Twitter Files is actually a filtered outcome as a result of this new ownership dynamic.  And with that intelligence framework solidly in mind, I warn readers not to take a position on the motive of the new ownership.

Put simply, DHS stakeholders, to include the DOJ, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), are mitigating public exposure of their domestic surveillance activity by controlling and feeding selected information about their prior Twitter operations.

If TikTok is a national security threat, then TikTok is to Beijing as Twitter is to Washington DC.

The larger objective of U.S. involvement in social media has always been monitoring and surveillance of the public conversation, and then ultimately controlling and influencing public opinion.

Everything The Biden Administration Does Seems Designed To Give Americans The Finger

jonathanturley  |  We previously discussed the defunct Disinformation Governance Board and its controversial head Nina Jankowicz. After the outcry over the program, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas finally relented and disbanded the board while insisting that it was never about censoring opposing views. Jankowicz has sued over the portrayal of her views. Now, Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) has exposed just how broad the scope of the censorship efforts were under the board in combatting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM). This range of authority in what the agency called the “MDM space,” included targeting views on racial justice and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

New documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) argued that the agency could regulate speech related to “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” as well as “irregular immigration.”

Those subjects stretch across much of the “space” used for political speech in the last few years.

Notably, within DHS, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” I testified earlier on this effort.

So DHS asserted the authority to target viewpoints on racial justice, Ukraine, and other political subjects, including views based on fact but viewed as misleading in context.

What is also troubling is the continued effort to conceal these censorship activities. Homeland redacted much of this information on a now defunct board under FOIA Exemption 7(E), which protects “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations.” That claim is itself chilling.

After the demise of the board, National Public Radio ran an interview entitled “How DHS’s disinformation board fell victim to misinformation.”

As the title suggests, NPR just repeated the view of Jankowicz despite the objections of many of us in the free speech community. Jankowicz insisted “we weren’t going to be doing anything related to policing speech. It was an internal coordinating mechanism to make sure that we were doing that work efficiently.” Yet, what were the criminal investigations, prosecutions, and enforcement efforts now being claimed as connected to this work?

Recently, a court found that the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts constituted “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” Those words by Chief U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty are part of a 155-page opinion granting a temporary injunction, requested by Louisiana and Missouri, to prevent White House officials from meeting with tech companies about social media censorship.

A Better Description For A Fascist Police State Network Could Not Be Written

counterpunch |  A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC).  In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”

The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”

Remember, this vast yet centralized operation — what Verheyden-Hilliard describes as “a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people” — was in this case deployed not against some terrorist organization or even mob or drug cartel, but rather against a loose-knit band of protesters, all conscientiously and publicly committed to nonviolence, who were exercising their Constitutionally-protected right to gather in public places and to speak out against the crimes and abuses of the corporate elite and the politicians who are bought and paid by that elite.

history shows that mass spying is always aimed at crushing dissent

zerohedge | In 1972, the CIA director relabeled “dissidents” as “terrorists” so he could continue spying on them.

During the Vietnam war, the NSA spied on Senator Frank Church because of his criticism of the Vietnam War. The NSA also spied on Senator Howard Baker.

Senator Church – the head of a congressional committee investigating Cointelpro – warned in 1975:

[NSA's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.

This is, in fact, what’s happened …

Initially, American constitutional law experts say that the NSA is doing exactly the same thing to the American people today which King George did to the Colonists … using “general warrant” type spying.

And it is clear that the government is using its massive spy programs in order to track those who question government policies. See this, this, this and this.

Todd Gitlin – chair of the PhD program in communications at Columbia University, and a professor of journalism and sociology – notes:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has unearthed documents showing that, in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies were busy surveilling and worrying about a good number of Occupy groups — during the very time that they were missing actual warnings about actual terrorist actions.

From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant criminal activity.’”

Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 coordination centers known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily. As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’”

It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber. That city’s police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either. The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of…Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.

***

In Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, intelligence was not only pooled among public law enforcement agencies, but shared with private corporations — and vice versa.

Nationally, in 2011, the FBI and DHS were, in the words of Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, “treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.” Last December using FOIA, PCJF obtained 112 pages of documents (heavily redacted) revealing a good deal of evidence for what might otherwise seem like an outlandish charge: that federal authorities were, in Verheyden-Hilliard’s words, “functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.” Consider these examples from PCJF’s summary of federal agencies working directly not only with local authorities but on behalf of the private sector:

• “As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.”

• “The FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to… [22] campus police officials… A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.”

• An entity called the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector,” sent around information regarding Occupy protests at West Coast ports [on Nov. 2, 2011] to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report contained “a ‘handling notice’ that the information is ‘meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…’ Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor.”

• DSAC gave tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest,” which it defined as running the gamut from “small, organized rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting.” ***

• The FBI in Anchorage, Jacksonville, Tampa, Richmond, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Birmingham also gathered information and briefed local officials on wholly peaceful Occupy activities.

• In Jackson, Mississippi, FBI agents “attended a meeting with the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest for ‘National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day’ on December 7, 2011.” Also in Jackson, “the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a ‘Counterterrorism Preparedness’ alert” that, despite heavy redactions, notes the need to ‘document…the Occupy Wall Street Movement.’”

***

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee learned … that the Tennessee Fusion Center was “highlighting on its website map of ‘Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity’ a recent ACLU-TN letter to school superintendents. The letter encourages schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season.”

***

Consider an “intelligence report” from the North Central Texas fusion center, which in a 2009 “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” described, in the ACLU’s words, “a purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department, and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the United States, which would ‘provide an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish.’”

***

And those Virginia and Texas fusion centers were hardly alone in expanding the definition of “terrorist” to fit just about anyone who might oppose government policies. According to a 2010 report in the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department Inspector General found that “FBI agents improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that turned out to be ‘factually weak.’” The Inspector General called “troubling” what the Los Angeles Times described as “singling out some of the domestic groups for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended ‘without adequate basis.’

Subsequently, the FBI continued to maintain investigative files on groups like Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker, and the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, cases where (in the politely put words of the Inspector General’s report) “there was little indication of any possible federal crimes… In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘acts of terrorism’ classification.”  Fist tap Big Don.

ain't a damn thing funny about a $6 Billion warsocialist epic fail....,

theregister |  The US government's firewall, named Einstein, is not as smart as its name would suggest.

A report [PDF] by the General Accounting Office (GAO) into the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS) has concluded that it is only "partially meeting its stated system objectives." Which is a polite way of saying it sucks.

Among the extraordinary pieces of information to emerge are the fact that the system – which has cost $5.7bn to develop – does not monitor web traffic for malicious content, just email. It can't uncover malware on a system and it doesn't monitor cloud services either.

The system also carries out only signature-based threat assessment and intrusion detection i.e. it's a dumb terminal waiting to be told what to find rather than looking for unusual activity. And that means it is wide open to zero-day attacks.

If that wasn't enough, the department behind the system – the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – hasn't included anything to measure the system's own performance so it doesn't even know if it's doing a good job or not. And it is failing to ask for or share information with other agencies, effectively making it blind.

It is hardly surprising then that the uptake of Einstein has not exactly been stellar. The report notes that federal agencies have adopted the NCPS "to varying degrees."

There are 23 agencies that are actually required to implement the system but the GAO found that while those agencies were routing "some" traffic to the system, only five of them were using the system to deal with possible intrusions.

"This occurred in part because DHS has not provided network routing guidance to agencies," the report notes. "As a result, DHS has limited assurance regarding the effectiveness of the system."

Which is a roundabout way of saying that sysadmins want nothing to do with it.

Ukrainian Stooge Crowdstrike Fabricated All Russian Hacking Claims

Counterpunch |  The investigation methods used to come to the conclusion that the Russian Government led the hacks of the DNC, Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta, and the DCCC were further called into question by a recent BuzzFeed report by Jason Leopold, who has developed a notable reputation from leading several non-partisan Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for investigative journalism purposes. On March 15 that the Department of Homeland Security released just two heavily redacted pages of unclassified information in response to an FOIA request for definitive evidence of Russian election interference allegations. Leopold wrote, “what the agency turned over to us and Ryan Shapiro, a PhD candidate at MIT and a research affiliate at Harvard University, is truly bizarre: a two-page intelligence assessment of the incident, dated Aug. 22, 2016, that contains information DHS culled from the internet. It’s all unclassified — yet DHS covered nearly everything in wide swaths of black ink. Why? Not because it would threaten national security, but because it would reveal the methods DHS uses to gather intelligence, methods that may amount to little more than using Google.”

In lieu of substantive evidence provided to the public that the alleged hacks which led to Wikileaks releases of DNC and Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta’s emails were orchestrated by the Russian Government, CrowdStrike’s bias has been cited as undependable in its own assessment, in addition to its skeptical methods and conclusions. The firm’s CTO and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank with openly anti-Russian sentiments that is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who also happened to donate at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.

In 2013, the Atlantic Council awarded Hillary Clinton it’s Distinguished International Leadership Award. In 2014, the Atlantic Council hosted one of several events with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who took over after pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in early 2014, who now lives in exile in Russia.

In August, Politico reported that Donald Trump’s favorable rhetoric to Russia was concerning Ukraine, who have been recovering from Russian interference in their own country’s revolution.  The article cited, “Russia wants Trump for U.S. president; Ukraine is terrified by Trump and prefers Hillary Clinton.” Trump recently appointed Atlantic Council Chairman Jon Huntsman as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, which Vox called a “baffling” choice, and Democrats and anti-Russian hysterics haven’t bothered to attempt to criticize, scrutinize or insinuate ties between Huntsman and Russia.

hurricanes, tornados and plague, OH MY!!!

The Scientist | A much-contested plan to build a $450 million government biodefense research lab has hit another snag: A group of Texas research organizations that lobbied for San Antonio to house the lab says it will sue the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over its choice of site -- Manhattan, Kansas.

The Texas Biological and Agro-Defense Consortium earlier this week (April 22) filed a notice of its intent to sue DHS, a required step for suits against the government. They argue that the choice of Kansas for the site of the National Bio and Agro Defense Facility (NBAF), which would handle the world's most dangerous pathogens, was based on political machinations and overlooks the danger frequent tornadoes would pose to the facility.

John Kerr, chairman of the group, said that locating NBAF in Manhattan, Kan., would be "grossly irresponsible, the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with Mother Nature," according to the Associated Press.

Kerr argued that although DHS had initially ranked the Texas site slightly higher than Kansas, the agency's secretary in charge of choosing the site, Navy Admiral Jay Cohen, gave Kansas preference -- due to ties with Kansas officials involved in the process -- by making numerous visits there, the AP reports. Kansas officials deny the claim of political preference.

Kansas Bioscience Authority president Tom Thornton said in a statement: "...the Department of Homeland Security deserves commendation, not litigation, for the extremely comprehensive and fair process it undertook to ensure the success of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility. Only Kansas offers a credible pathway to jumpstart the NBAF's critical mission."

We earlier visited the intrinsic foolishness of situating a BSL-4 pathogen research and containment facility in the middle of hurricane alley, that goes double for tornado alley...,

totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent...,

guardian | It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves. 

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations' knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).

As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, put it, the documents show that from the start, the FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a "terrorist threat":

"FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) … reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat … The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country."

Verheyden-Hilliard points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it "police-statism":

"This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI's surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a "Bank Fraud Working Group" met in November 2011 – during the Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its "domestic terrorism" unit. The Anchorage, Alaska "terrorism task force" was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Michigan "joint terrorism task force" was issuing a "counterterrorism preparedness alert" about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Michigan, the FBI and the "Bank Security Group" – multiple private banks – met to discuss the reaction to "National Bad Bank Sit-in Day" (the response was violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state's Occupy members' details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis FBI tracked OWS under its "joint terrorism task force" aegis, too. And so on, for over 100 pages. Fist tap Arnach.