Feds To Close Unit That Monitored Americans' Social Media for Census Disinformation (theverge.com) 18
The US Commerce Department said Friday that it will eliminate an internal security division after an investigation found it had overstepped its authority when it launched criminal investigations into Commerce employees and US citizens. From a report: The Investigations and Threat Management Service division had no "adequate legal authority" to conduct criminal investigations, according to an internal investigation by the Commerce Department's Office of General Counsel.
The investigators recommended that the ITMS unit be eliminated within 90 days, and that its security duties be folded into other Commerce divisions. The Commerce Department said in a statement it would accept the report's recommendations. "Our most important priority is creating an environment at the Department of Commerce where employees feel safe and respected," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in the statement. "We are committed to maintaining our security, but also equally committed to protecting the privacy and civil liberties of our employees and the public."
[...] ITMS was the subject of a Congressional investigation earlier this year. In May, Sen. Roger Wicker, (R-Mississippi), the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, released a fact sheet detailing a Congressional investigation into the ITMS that began in February. Wicker's memo claimed that ITMS "surveilled social media activity on Twitter to monitor accounts that posted commentary critical of processes used to conduct the US Census." The Washington Post was first to report on ITMS' activities.
The investigators recommended that the ITMS unit be eliminated within 90 days, and that its security duties be folded into other Commerce divisions. The Commerce Department said in a statement it would accept the report's recommendations. "Our most important priority is creating an environment at the Department of Commerce where employees feel safe and respected," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in the statement. "We are committed to maintaining our security, but also equally committed to protecting the privacy and civil liberties of our employees and the public."
[...] ITMS was the subject of a Congressional investigation earlier this year. In May, Sen. Roger Wicker, (R-Mississippi), the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, released a fact sheet detailing a Congressional investigation into the ITMS that began in February. Wicker's memo claimed that ITMS "surveilled social media activity on Twitter to monitor accounts that posted commentary critical of processes used to conduct the US Census." The Washington Post was first to report on ITMS' activities.
Well the census is done (Score:2)
For another 9 and a bit years
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Those smaller surveys are not important enough to generate significant public misinformation propaganda campaigns, though, so they don't need monitoring. Also they're not Constitutionally mandated to use a certain timetable, so they can just redo a survey if they need to.
In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
overstepped its authority
In other words: They were guilty of criminal behaviour, and will not be punished.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
This word, "criminal," I don't think it means what you think it means.
Why would they be punished, when they haven't even been accused, much less convicted?
On other types of legal stories, do you claim that people are innocent until proven guilty?
Are you going to keep making that claim, whenever it suits you, but then declare people (not even accused!) guilty whenever it suits you?
Perhaps they made a mistake. Perhaps their department's lawyers gave poor legal advice. Perhaps you have no idea at all what happ
Re:In other words (Score:4, Interesting)
No single person is responsible. This is how you avoid criminal conspiracy charges. It is tyranny by committee.
Just break down the overt crime into subcomponents that are not crimes in and of themselves. Nobody is significantly responsible, no charges. And the public goes "meh, whatever".
It is by design.
Naah... It's government waste due to incompetence. (Score:2)
No single person is responsible. This is how you avoid criminal conspiracy charges. It is tyranny by committee.
Just break down the overt crime into subcomponents that are not crimes in and of themselves. Nobody is significantly responsible, no charges. And the public goes "meh, whatever".
It is by design.
It is once again a situation adequately explained by stupidity and incompetence. [wikipedia.org]
Dumpeacho (AKA The Number Two) infested the US Government with incompetent sycophants (and plain old sickos) all across the board.
Thus, when Dumpy tried to meddle with the census [nytimes.com] - his incompetent sycos tried to "prove" that criticism of The Number Two was the work of Chinese commies within the Department of Commerce and general public on Twitter. [theverge.com]
They failed.
The internal review found that ITMS was managed poorly, but said in the report it had "not found any firsthand or documentary evidence that racial, ethnic, or national origin bias motivated any specific cases," as had been alleged.
The investigation was able to confirm that "ITMS engaged in broad searches of Department of Commerce servers for particular phrases and words in Mandarin as part of talent recruitment investigations."
...
According to the Wicker memo, ITMS conducted the social media probes in an effort to demonstrate its "intelligence-gathering capabilities by linking those accountholders - members of the general public - to disinformation campaigns orchestrated by foreign governments."
There was no evidence that an effort to discredit the Census existed, however.
...
The social media posts collected by ITMS were added to a spreadsheet called the Social Media Tracker, which was used to conduct searches on secure intelligence databases of social media account holders, the Post reported.
One example: the ITMS opened a case after a 68-year-old retiree in Florida with around 100 Twitter followers tweeted that the Census would "be corrupted and falsified to benefit the Trump Party."
Not to say that there was ever a lack of malice in anything related to
The census, of all things... (Score:3, Insightful)
If the government is willing to break the law with regard to investigating those critical of the census (of all things), what other trust might it be willing to violate?
At a time when our population as a whole would benefit from complete (or nearly so) vaccination, we cannot achieve that goal because our government has once again shown us that it is untrustworthy, and that delaying the vaccination is a rational response to the knowledge of our government's past actions.
At some point you have to realize that most people aren't experts in everything, and that for matters outside of their understanding, the average person has to trust experts. But when those experts have shown themselves untrustworthy, whom do you trust? Can we really blame people for going with their gut feeling when government has shown time and again that it can't be trusted?
Re: (Score:2)
Clearly we can.
Re: (Score:2)
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Overstepping your authority in conducting an investigation doesn't always mean they "broke the law," the implication here is that they wasted their time.
"Broke the law" means that they were forbidden from doing something, and they did it anyway. Here, the law tells them to
"conduct investigations and analyses to identify and/or assess critical threats to the Department’s mission, operations, or activities; prevent or mitigate such threats from adversely affecting Department personnel, facilities, property, or assets through strategic and tactical approaches; and collaborate with other national security and law enforcement entities as appropriate"
Furthermore, they were instructed by the law that their duties include
"initiates and completes complex and sensitive criminal and administrative investigative functions, as well as due diligence and exploratory inquiries across varied program areas including conducting counterintelligence investigations involving personnel (e.g., foreign national visitors), classified/sensitive information and critical programs, as well as protective intelligence investigations related to the Secretary or his designees."
They simply conflated parts of these instructions; the first set were administrative investigations, and the criminal investigations were limited to counter-intellig
Re:The census, of all things... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, yes, they exceeded their statutory authority, but the article describes violations of the 4th amendment. Worse, it's being done for the ostensible purpose of suppressing constitutionally protected speech. That's a clear violation of USC 18.
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Title 18 of the U. S. Code is pretty long and broad. Did you have some particular section you thought they clearly violated?
Presumably it's not section 342, "Operation of a common carrier under the influence of alcohol or drugs". Or section 951, "Agents of foreign governments". Or section 1762, "Transportation or importation [of prison-made goods]". Or section 2721, "Prohibition on release and use of certain personal information from State motor vehicle records". But there are a lot more crimes to look
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gillbates fumed:
So, yes, they exceeded their statutory authority, but the article describes violations of the 4th amendment. Worse, it's being done for the ostensible purpose of suppressing constitutionally protected speech. That's a clear violation of USC 18.
The "exceeding its authority" happened under, and at the direction of, Trump-appointed Director of the Census Bureau Steven Dillingham [wikipedia.org], who left office on January 20, 2021, more than 11 months early, as a result of widespread criticism for his other efforts to push the 2020 census in unprecedentedly-partisan directions, at the behest of the President who appointed him.
This was in keeping with the multi-front effort by Trump-loyalist appointees to suppress criticism of his policies, and to ab
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So, yes, they exceeded their statutory authority, but the article describes violations of the 4th amendment.
That's odd, because the source document from the Office of the General Counsel of the Commerce Department doesn't say anything about broken laws or the Constitution. It talks about conflating the two passages above that I quoted from the report.
https://www.commerce.gov/sites... [commerce.gov]
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What's really gonna cook your noodle later on is realization that both sides of your "argument" are MAGA-MORONS.
Both your "rationally responding" anti-vaxxer morons [voanews.com] AND the "untrustworthy gubermint" in fabula.
The social media posts collected by ITMS were added to a spreadsheet called the Social Media Tracker, which was used to conduct searches on secure intelligence databases of social media account holders, the Post reported.
One example: the ITMS opened a case after a 68-year-old retiree in Florida with around 100 Twitter followers tweeted that the Census would "be corrupted and falsified to benefit the Trump Party."