On Friday, Reuters and AP reported that our Department of Homeland Security is soliciting contractors to compile a database on journalists and media outlets, foreign and domestic: www.independent.co.uk/…
Please write your Senators and Congresspeople about this inchoate assault on democracy. Seriously, snail mail before email (they are required by Federal Statute to record and respond to serious inquiries from constituents). Then go ahead and call and email, but those will be messages tallied by staffers (as the letters sometimes are, but you’ll find a detailed, thoughtful letter will often get you an appropriately specific response).
Then demand to see your elected Federal representatives. Make appointments. Go to receptions and town halls. Ask them personally, why in the name of a more perfect Union, are our tax dollars being used to pay for this Orwellian surveillance? Our FBI and CIA already do a fairly thorough job of tracking media trends and overseas chatter through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (aka FISA); too thorough some would say. Presumably they’ve been coordinating what they discover on terrorist propaganda and possible threats to the USA with DHS since the agency was created after 9/11. Why is Trump’s DHS doing this now?
Yes, we’ve heard Trump toady Houlton’s characterization of this question as “fit for tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorists”, but it’s a critically serious matter. It is NOT in the purview of DHS to monitor the media, only security threats to the homeland. Neither individual journalists nor the democratic media have ever been a threat to our security, just the opposite. Is this another example of different Federal agencies not communicating, like the FBI and CIA before 9/11? Should DHS simply link with the FBI and CIA for info on this issue, instead of re-inventing the wheel? Or is this a rather sinister trial balloon right under our noses by Trump’s administration to monitor and rein in the Free Press he so vehemently hates and fears?
This is not a conspiracy theory, but it might be part and parcel of an incipient conspiracy against our democratic norms. And we have every Constitutional right to question it. The President isn’t allowed to spend a nickel on some cockamamie project not approved by We, The People and our elected representatives. And they owe us a complete accounting of why this database is being initiated now, by this Administration, and for what reason in the world? There need to be hearings by the Intelligence Committees, both houses, stat. Or we could find ourselves living in some dystopian world order where ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery, war is peace.