Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare reacts to a leaked report that DHS (Department of Homeland Security) has assigned intelligence analysts to him – both the clownish and sober parts:
Bizarrely, the reports describe me as a “source,” as though I am publishing my Twitter feed to provide information to DHS I&A. But no, @benjaminwittes was not meeting with anyone from DHS in a garage. Nor was my Twitter feed specifically providing information to DHS I&A; rather, I was taking information from it and making that information public. Both reports describe me as “a social media user” and “a new source whose information has not been validated.” My name is not redacted or withheld in the report although at one point, that of the then-head of DHS I&A is masked; instead of including his name, Bryan Murphy, it quotes my tweet as saying “And to (Identified Acting Undersecretary): I have read, and I acknowledge receipt.”
The reports are cleared for dissemination to “All Field Ops” and say they are “releasable to the governments of Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and New Zealand.” So the document is at least cleared for release to state and local law enforcement and to foreign governments; to what extent it has been actively disseminated I do not know. There are certainly more efficient ways to read my tweets in New Zealand.
The rest of the document is quite literally just the tweet, which is both described and included in a screenshot, along with an image of the document it reported and an image of my Twitter header. …
And if all that sounds really dumb, well, that’s because it is.
Given the amateur hour character of the Trump Administration, this is unsurprising. It appears someone was told to be authoritarian and played the buffoon card, instead. Maybe their playing cards did not include the authoritarian card. But Wittes doesn’t just laugh at it:
And yet again, it’s worth asking: if this is okay, what else is fair game for dissemination to intelligence partners?
I personally love that government officials are sending around my tweets. They should all do it more. But for this intelligence report to get filed, dumb as it is, a lot of things have to go wrong. People have to either believe that my tweets on DHS’s internal documents are meaningfully connected to some homeland security mission. They have to believe that they are doing something other than monitoring purely First Amendment protected activity—or, worse, they have to not care that they’re doing exactly that. And they have to believe that their partner agencies and governments have a legitimate interest, one reasonably connected to some lawful mission, in seeing such material—which they plainly do not.
If all this could go wrong with my two tweets, where else are similar abuses taking place less stupidly and more menacingly—and how much more harmful have the abuses been in those other situations?
The fact that Wittes was notified via a leak indicates there’s self-knowledge in DHS that this is, in fact, an abuse. That’s good.
But it also indicates parts of the government have become infected with personnel – Americans – that think rules apply to others, not to them. This, ironically, is the conservative nightmare when liberals are in power; are they willing to vociferously object when it happens when Trump is in power?
