Republicans Fear Imaginary Spying, Ignore Data Collection on 75% of Americans

Republicans believe they’ve found a new boogie man to keep their conspiracy-loving followers engaged, namely the Department of Homeland Safety Disinformation Governance Board, a project so new it hasn’t even begun operating yet.

The professional congressional crybabies have dubbed the project the Ministry of Truth, a nod to George Orwell’s dystopian novel "1984.” They don’t know what it’s supposed to do, but are willing to spread their own disinformation, like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who is already on the record, saying that the new board will be "policing Americans’ speech."

The interagency working group has no enforcement powers, and is envisioned as using publicly available sources, information shared by other federal agencies and research by academic institutions to identify disinformation that could pose a threat to the United States.

It will be overseen by a board made up of leaders from several agencies within DHS, including the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. An information sheet issued by DHS says the board will share its information with agencies within the department and release quarterly reports to Congress and oversight committees.

I’ll come back to the potential for abuse with the above, but first let me cover the known quantity, a nameless entity within another DHS agency  –US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice)-- that’s already acquired information on more than 75% of Americans.

It operates largely in secret with minimal public oversight, and amassed a formidable armory of digital capabilities allowing its agents to “pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time”.

Researchers at Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology compiled data gleaned through Freedom of Information request, along with a review of more than 100,000 previously unseen Ice spending transactions to produce American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century,

From the Guardian:

• The agency operates an enormous dragnet of information stored by state and local government, utility companies, social media platforms and private data brokers. The end result is that Ice enjoys almost universal reach, with its intelligence weaponised through the use of powerful algorithmic tools for searching and analysing data.

• Almost all of that activity, the report points out, is done in the absence of warrants and in secret, beyond the purview of federal and state authorities.

ICE is using its capabilities to bypass localities that instituted laws limiting law enforcement cooperation on civil immigration matters. 

Via the Los Angeles Times:

• When state officials discovered that the agency was using a state system to view driver’s license information, legislators passed Assembly Bill 1747 in 2019, which prohibits ICE from gaining access to the system for civil immigration enforcement purposes.

• But ICE found a way around this too. The Georgetown report suggests that ICE may have accessed driver’s license data collected by California DMV through LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a data broker. Documents show that the California DMV directly sells its data to LexisNexis. Since March 2021, ICE has contracted with LexisNexis to access driver records.

• Soon after AB 1747 passed, its author, then-Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), told news outlets that she hoped the law would help protect Californians’ personal information from ICE.

• “Every time we create a law in California, ICE figures out a way to get around this,” she acknowledged at the time.

Do you know what’s not in any of the dozens of media reports on the ICE entity? Comment from any Republican of any flavor. 

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When Republicans hear the word misinformation, they assume the well-trod ground established by their brethren in the quack supplements industry is endangered. Both groups use the same type of ad messages, swap mailing lists, and mostly defraud its consumers.

Rick Perlstein did a deep dive into this world back in 2012. Paul Krugman updated it last year with all the anti-vaxxer overlap.

• Once you’re sensitized to the link between snake oil and right-wing politics, you realize that it’s pervasive.

• This is clearly true in the right’s fever swamps. Alex Jones of Infowars has built a following by pushing conspiracy theories, but he makes money by selling nutritional supplements.

• It’s also true, however, for more mainstream, establishment parts of the right. For example, Ben Shapiro, considered an intellectual on the right, hawks supplements.

• Look at who advertises on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. After Fox itself, the top advertisers are My Pillow, then three supplement companies.

The Russian foray into suckering Americans was driven by the accessibility of spreading such information through social networks. It’s been the province of the far right going back to the early days of the John Birch Society.

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Coming back to this nameless working group about to be established at DHS, it has two possible paths going into the future. One, it will fall apart because each of its member agencies are already collecting the same information, or two, it will develop an analytic capability of high enough quality to feed into enforcement events of its member agencies.

It’s a bi-partisan maxim that there can never be too many duly authorized agents running around with badges and guns. There are currently 65 U.S. federal agencies and 27 offices of inspector general that employ full time personnel authorized to make arrests and carry firearms.  

The conservative critique of this iteration within DHS has a lot less to do with spying on the American public than it does with keeping tabs on right wing extremist groups, many of whom have a (wink, wink) relationship with their congresscritters..

Here’s the BIG Fear of right wing lawmakers:

• Nina Jankowitz, the board’s executive director, has come under scrutiny from conservative critics who claim she’s partisan. Critics point to her support for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign and other past comments. 

This stated fear is nothing short of fundraising fodder, since all the “bubbas” at the aforementioned agencies simply aren’t going to do the bidding of an administrator who –gasp– had a different point of view.

If you want to take the evil out of DHS, a good place to start would be dismantling it.  And before some troll seizes upon my point of view, let me say that many of these agencies perform good and necessary functions, like stopping punk Congresscritters from carrying guns on airplanes.

Don’t Email me at: WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com for a while