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1 Spencer Reynolds & Faiza Patel, A New Vision for Domestic Intelligence: Fixing Overbroad Mandates and Flimsy Safeguards 1 (2023)

handle is hein.brennan/dhsaanag0001 and id is 1 raw text is: DHS AT 20: AN AGENDA FOR REFORM A New Vision for Domestic Intelligence Fixing Overbroad Mandates and Flimsy Safeguards By Spencer Reynolds and Faiza Patel PULUSHED MARCH 30.2023 Built from 22 agencies with disparate missions, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) routinely gathers intelligence to guide its strategic and operational activities.1 But in the two decades since its inception, scores of incidents have undermined the legitimacy of its intelligence programs. Congress and the department's own general counsel and inspector general, among others, have shown that DHS intelligence officers abused their counterterrorism author- ities to suppress racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer.2 In support of the Trump administration's goals to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement and spin an election-season story of anarchy, DHS sent intelligence officers to Portland, Oregon, to surveil protestors, create dossiers on dissidents, and enable U.S. Border Patrol special forces to whisk demonstrators away in unmarked vehicles. DHS's Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) also surveilled prominent national security journalists and issued intelligence reports on their tweets. This political targeting was enabled by expansive intelligence authorities and a lack of meaningful checks on discretion. While investigations into the department's response to the Portland protests provide a rare, detailed look at its operations, the concerns they raise are hardly limited to a single administration. Throughout its history, I&A has generated poorly sourced analysis heavily reliant on social media and on conjecture and caricature to draw sweeping conclusions. Its intelligence products are widely circulated to tens of thousands of police and other government offi- cials nationwide, influencing their threat evaluations and responses to protests and social movements. Other parts of DHS also raise concerns.3 U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has used high-tech surveil- lance tools to target its critics. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has monitored protestors. These programs, along with those run by other DHS components, operate with an opaque patchwork of rules that has proved both inadequate to counter abuses and resistant to transparency. The time has come to rethink DHS intelligence oper- ations and build safeguards that permit the department to provide its leadership with the information it needs while protecting civil rights and civil liberties. This report charts a course for doing so. It focuses initially on I&A, explaining how the office has veered from its counter- terrorism mission into tracking social and political movements, often distributing shoddy information and Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law 1

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