I will have more to say about this story after considering my legal options. For now, a few points...
washingtonpost.com/national-secur…
washingtonpost.com/national-secur…
(1) It does not trouble me that DHS officials shared my tweets internally. That is certainly appropriate given that the tweets contained disclosures of information from DHS I&A. The contents of these intelligence reports are innocuous enough.
(2) What is troubling about this story is that I&A shared my tweets *as intelligence reporting,* that is, an intelligence arm of the government filed a report on a citizen for activity at the heart of journalism: revealing newsworthy information about government to the public.
(3) DHS is permitted to collect and analyze intelligence pursuant to homeland security missions. I am not sure how my reporting of unclassified material constitutes any kind of homeland security threat that justifies the dissemination of intelligence reporting on a US person, ...
particularly not one exercising core First Amendment rights and nothing more. I intend to find out.
(4) I am also not sure I understand the parameters of DHS’s authority to collect and report on people like me. If this activity is okay, is it okay to build a full dossier of public record information on a journalist?
Is it okay to buy a lot of information from a data broker and report it to senior policy makers? I intend to find out the answer to these questions too.
Stay tuned.
Stay tuned.
