The back story. . .
Reuters - The US Department of Homeland Security's command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.
It claims the data is only collected for 'situational awareness'
The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to 'collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.'
The document adds, using more plain language, that such monitoring is designed to help DHS and its numerous agencies, which include the US Secret Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency, to manage government responses to such events as the 2010 earthquake and aftermath in Haiti and security and border control related to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The DHS official said that under the program's rules, the department would not keep permanent copies of the internet traffic it monitors. However, the document outlining the program does say that the operations center 'will retain information for no more than five years.'
EPIC -EPIC's FOIA lawsuit forced the DHS to disclose 285 pages of records. The documents include contracts, price estimates, Privacy Impact Assessment, and communications concerning DHS Media Monitoring program. These records make public, for the first time, details of the DHS's efforts to spy on social network users and journalists.The records reveal that the DHS is paying General Dynamics to monitor the news. The agency instructed the company to monitor for "[media] reports that reflect adversely on the U.S. Government, DHS, or prevent, protect, respond government activities."
The DHS is attempting to "capture public reaction to major government proposals."
The DHS instructed the social media monitoring company to generate "reports on DHS, Components, and other Federal Agencies: positive and negative reports on FEMA, CIA, CBP, ICE, etc. as well as organizations outside the DHS."
The DHS instructed the company to "Monitor public social communications on the Internet." The records list the websites that will be monitored, including the comments sections of [The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, Wired, and ABC News.]"
Another bad idea from Cass Sunstein
At the beginning of the current administration, we warned readers of some of the people advising Barack Obama. One of them was law professor Cass Sunstein. Here are some clips from the time:
Center for Progressive Reform - Barack Obama [has] selected Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein to direct the White House Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In a report, a group of CPR member scholars expressed serious concern about Professor Sunstein's support for the very methods used to weaken and defeat badly needed regulations. Among the concerns:
- Sunstein is a stout supporter of cost-benefit analysis as a primary tool for assessing regulations, despite its imprecision and the ease with which it is manipulated to achieve preferred policy outcomes;
- He supports such cost-benefit approaches as the widely condemned "senior discount" method for undervaluing the lives of seniors in cost-benefit analyses, an approach even the Bush Administration was forced to disown;
- He rejects the "precautionary principle" as a basis for regulating, thus ensuring that dangerous pollutants and products will be given the "benefit of the doubt," rather than well-grounded concerns about health and safety;
- He supports the centralization of authority over regulatory decisions in the White House...
- He has written that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration might be unconstitutional.
CPR President Rena Steinzor, one of seven co-authors of the report, warned that "Unless he turns over a new leaf, or unless President Obama keeps a careful eye on OIRA, we fear that Cass Sunstein's reliance on cost-benefit analysis will create a regulatory fiefdom in the White House that will deal with needed regulations in very much the same way that the Bush Administration did."
.But one of Sunstein's worst ideas seems to have come to fruition in the DHS McCarthyesque monitoring of websites. This is from a 2008 paper he wrote on "conspiracy theories" with another law professor, Adrian Vermeule:
Sunstein and Vermeule, 2008 - Rather than taking the continued existence of the hard core as a constraint, and addressing itself solely to the third-party mass audience, government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories, arguments and rhetoric that are produced by the hard core and reinforce it in turn. One promising tactic is cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. By this we do not mean 1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in future prosecutions. Rather, we mean that government efforts might succeed in weakening or even breaking up the ideological and epistemological complexes that constitute these networks and groups.
How might this tactic work? Recall that extremist networks and groups, including the groups that purvey conspiracy theories, typically suffer from a kind of crippled epistemology. Hearing only conspiratorial accounts of government behavior, their members become ever more prone to believe and generate such accounts.
Informational and reputational cascades, group polarization, and selection effects suggest that the generation of ever-more-extreme views within these groups can be dampened or reversed by the introduction of cognitive diversity. We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity. Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.
This is the equivalent of your local police force sending private detectives to meetings of local organizations and the town council to argue under cover for policies favored by the police chief. It was not uncommon, by the way, in the 1960s and was an ugly covert assault on democracy and decency.
Further, law professors shouldn't rail against conspiracy theories. After all, they were brought up on them - positive ones known as the great man theory of history, for example. If our system is supposedly dependent on a few great men doing great things than it presumably can be endangered by a few bad people doing bad things
Sam Smith, 2006 - A conspiracy does not have to be illegal; it can merely be wrongful or harmful.
- The term 'conspiracy theory' was invented by elite media and politicians to denigrate questions or critical presumptions about events about which important facts remain unrevealed.
- The intelligent response to such events is to remain agnostic, skeptical, and curious. Theories may be suggested - just as they are every day about less complex and more open matters on news broadcasts and op ed pages - but such theories should not stray too far from available evidence. Conversely, as long as serious anomalies remain, dismissing questions and doubts as a "conspiracy theory" is a highly unintelligent response. It is also ironic as those ridiculing the questions and doubts typically consider themselves intellectually superior to the doubters. But they aren't because they stopped thinking the moment someone in power told them a superficially plausible answer. Further, to ridicule those still with doubts about such matters is intellectually dishonest.
- There is the further irony that many who ridicule doubts about the official version of events were typically trained at elite colleges where, in political science and history, theories often take precedent over facts and in which substantive decisions affecting politics and history are presumed to be the work of a small number of wise men (sic). They are trained, in effect, to trust in (1) theories and (2) benign confederacies. Most major media political coverage is based on the great man theory of history. This pattern can be found in everything from Skull & Bones to the Washington Post editorial board to the Council on Foreign Relations. You might even call them positive conspiracy theorists.
- Other fields - such as social history or anthropology - posit that change for better or evil can come as cultural change or choices and not just as the decisions of "great men." This is why one of the biggest stories in modern American history was never well covered: the declining birth rate. No great men decided it should happen.
- Homicide detectives and investigative reporters, among others, are inductive thinkers who start with evidence rather than with theories and aren't happy when the evidence is weak, conflicting or lacking. They keep working the case until a solid answer appears. This is alien to the well-educated newspaper editor who has been trained to trust official answers and conventional theories.
- The unresolved major event is largely a modern phenomenon that coincides with the collapse of America's constitutional government and the decline of its culture. Beginning with the Kennedy assassination, the number of inadequately explained major events has been mounting steadily and with them a steady decline in the trust between the people and their government. The refusal of American elites to take these doubts seriously has been a major disservice to the republic.
- You don't need a conspiracy to lie, do something illegal or to be stupid.
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