By Christine Axsmith.
The Department of Homeland Security has been accused of following private citizen Tweets through government contractors. DHS strongly assures people that although one report like this has been done, that report violated their privacy policies and has been destroyed.
A report was written by a government contractor that did use private social media communications, including Twitter, in violation of DHS policy. DHS wants to assure everyone that they do not spy on U.S. citizens as a practice.
Enter the glory of the Information Age.
Wikileaks has published internal emails from Stratfor. Stratfor does work for DHS. DHS, it seems, had quite a fit about that report based on Americans’ Twitter accounts, as can be read in emails released to Wikileaks.
This all leads to DHS officials emailing each other about a YouTube channel called The Young Turks.
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, a YouTube news and politics show, describes how his YouTube interview of Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings was monitored by DHS here. Apparently, there was high level DHS talk about reaching out to Michael Hastings to get him to understand that this monitoring-of-U.S.-citizen-Twitter-and-Facebook-account thing was a mistake that was corrected.
Mr. Uygur is quite animated that private citizens’ Twitter accounts were being followed by Homeland Security. Although this seems to have happened once, was recognized as a mistake, and was immediately corrected, there is still cause for concern.
Remember when law enforcement targeted Occupy almost simultaneously across the United States? Later we learned that there was indeed communications between cities about cracking down on Occupy.
Remember when New York City police raided an apartment housing Occupy leaders just prior to a big protest? It’s not inconceivable that reading private Twitter and Facebook accounts contributed to those actions.
But even if it didn’t, with American teenagers being executed without a trial, or even without belief they committed a crime, there is cause to worry about this troubling report.
It demonstrates that the surveillance mechanisms are in place, just waiting for the key to turn.
