Department of Homeland Security

Hacktivist participation in Occupy protests draw federal attention

Ali Winston

Two demonstrators in Anonymous' favored Guy Fawkes masks speak with a passerby in Downtown San Francisco on August 15, 2011

It’s not just San Francisco and Oakland law enforcement that are interested in the nationwide spin-off protests of Occupy Wall Street. Since demonstrators fed up with financial mismanagement, perceived corporate greed and socioeconomic inequality set up camp in Lower Manhattan on September 17, similar encampments have been set up with varying degrees of success in over eleven hundred cities.

Reports unearthed by the open source website Public Intelligence reveal that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are carefully studying the role of the loose-knit hacktivist group Anonymous in the nationwide Occupation movement. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Anonymous, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Occupy Together, Occupy Wall Street

August 10, 2011 | 4:55 PM | By Ali Winston

DHS says Terror Watchlist is exempt from Privacy Act

Elec-Intro

Last Friday, the federal government’s new anti-terror database, the Terror Screening Watchlist Service, went live. The database is loaded with an unknown amount of personal information, including names, photographs and biometric data. In a new turn that has civil liberties advocates crying foul, the Department of Homeland Security is claiming all information contained in the watchlist is confidential.

Earlier today, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several other groups filed a formal complaint with DHS about the blanket exemptions to the Privacy Act. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Department of Homeland Security, Privacy Act, Surveillance

February 16, 2011 | 8:57 AM | By Rina Palta

Secure Communities: ICE documents show policy change, push back

Courtesy of ICE.

According to documents obtained by the Associated Press, the Obama administration changed its policy on communities’ participation in a controversial program targeting undocumented immigrants based on its popularity–as communities attempted to opt out of Secure Communities, the program switched from being voluntary to mandatory.

San Francisco and Santa Clara were among the handful of communities that actively tried to stay out of the program, which shares fingerprints from the county jail with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And that push-back was apparently anticipated by Department of Homeland Security officials:

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FILED UNDER: Police, Department of Homeland Security, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secure Communities

December 8, 2010 | 4:11 PM | By Rina Palta

Trend alert: Crowdsourcing homeland security

Earlier this week, the Department of Homeland Security released this video, which will now be played at select (meaning 588) Walmart check-out counters. The video depicts DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano encouraging shoppers to be on the alert for suspicious activity:

The idea behind this “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign is to get shoppers to look for, identify, and report indicators of terrorism and other crime in their communities. (And apparently is not an attempt to usher in a creepy SciFi world, where ubiquitous screens warn of infiltrators.) It’s also part of what many have identified as a growing reliance on outsourced and crowdsourced intelligence.

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