Homeland Security Investigations agents hit the outdoor retailer with a controversial subpoena as part of a dragnet search for the identities of protesters who entered a Minnesota church in March.

After Watergate, Congress exposed how the F.B.I. had surveilled, blackmailed and intimidated activists, celebrities and politicians. To prevent such abuse, President Gerald Ford’s administration prohibited the agency from opening investigations without reasonable suspicion of a crime. In 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his Justice Department worked around that reform by creating a new category of F.B.I. investigations called “assessments.” Under the new policy, agents could use physical surveillance and interview acquaintances, as well as informants, to gather information, even in the absence of a demonstrably high level of suspicion.

Moving scanning from the server to the client pushes it across the boundary between what is shared (the cloud) and what is private (the user device). By creating the capability to scan files that would never otherwise leave a user device, CSS thus erases any boundary between a user’s private sphere and their shared (semi-)public sphere [6]. It makes what was formerly private on a user’s device potentially available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, even in the absence of a warrant. Because this privacy violation is performed at the scale of entire populations, it is a bulk surveillance technology.

DHS’s mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS. According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

the real enemy would be government, the bastion of traditional power. Old power. Dark suits. Heavy badges.

To change incentives so that personal data is treated with appropriate care, we need criminal penalties for the Facebook executives who left vulnerable half a billion people’s personal data, unleashing a lifetime of phishing attacks, and who now point to an FTC deal indemnifying them from liability because our phone numbers and unchangeable dates of birth are “old” data.

Senior government officials in multiple U.S.-allied countries were targeted earlier this year with hacking software that used Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) WhatsApp to take over users’ phones, according to people familiar with the messaging company’s investigation.