Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, they go ahead and get worse.
The Washington Post is reporting that the DHS compiles “intelligence reports” on journalists covering the Portland, OR protests. In the form of “baseball cards,” in a format, and from an office tasked with gathering and sharing intelligence on foreign terrorists and actors.
They were prompted to do this, we learn, because those journalists and bloggers had the temerity to publish leaked DHS documents showing that the DHS was badly bungling matters in Portland (yeah, we know!) and had a poor understanding of the protests. Methods used by DHS and their assumptions were published and written about. As is often the case these days, a lot of it was put up on Twitter.
The intelligence report targets? The editor-in-chief of Lawfare, and a reporter for the New York Times.
Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists — a reporter for the New York Times and the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare — and noting they had published leaked, unclassified documents about DHS operations in Portland. The intelligence reports, obtained by The Washington Post, include written descriptions and images of the tweets, and the number of times they had been liked or retweeted by others.
Some of the leaked DHS documents the journalists posted and wrote about revealed shortcomings in the department’s understanding of the nature of the protests in Portland, as well as techniques that intelligence analysts have used. A memo by the department’s top intelligence official, which was tweeted by the editor of Lawfare, says personnel relied on “FINTEL,” an acronym for financial intelligence, as well as “Baseball cards” of arrested protesters to try to understand their motivations and plans. Historically, military and intelligence officials have used such cards for biographical dossiers of suspected terrorists, including those targeted in lethal drone strikes.
It appears it is not merely the Portland protests DHS is badly informed upon. I’d say we can ad to that list a total lack of understanding of the First Amendment, and a thorough disregard for the freedom of the press. Once those documents are leaked they become fair game. Publishing anything about them does not make the publisher a fair target of investigation by the DHS.
This is basically secret police territory. This is, beyond doubt an absolute outrage, a misuse of power and cannot go unaddressed.