What if J. Edgar Hoover Had Been a Moron?

It was on the ninth day of the Trump presidency, writing in response to the new president’s new travel ban executive order, that I coined the phrase “malevolence tempered by incompetence.”

I never imagined in doing so that the phrase might aptly describe the Trump administration’s behavior towards me personally.

Yet contemplating the Washington Post’s revelation that the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis (DHS I&A) issued two intelligence reports about tweets I had written, I can’t help but think that this is what J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses of power might have looked like had Twitter existed in Hoover’s time—and had Hoover been a total idiot.

On the one hand, DHS I&A was preparing intelligence reports on American journalists—on me and on Mike Baker of the New York Times—based on activity indisputably protected by the First Amendment: reporting unclassified information about the conduct of government. That’s toxic stuff. And DHS knows it. No sooner had the redoubtable Shane Harris published the story in the Post than DHS declared that Acting Secretary Chad Wolf was stopping the activity in question and initiating an investigation:

Upon learning about the practice, Acting Secretary Wolf directed the DHS Intelligence & Analysis Directorate to immediately discontinue collecting information involving members of the press. In no way does the Acting Secretary condone this practice and he has immediately ordered an inquiry into the matter. The Acting Secretary is committed to ensuring that all DHS personnel uphold the principles of professionalism, impartiality and respect for civil rights and civil liberties, particularly as it relates to the exercise of First Amendment rights.

On the other hand, the collection and reporting on me is so trivial—and so dumb—that it can be hard to stop giggling and see the menace. Consider, DHS issued two intelligence reports, noting the shocking fact that I had tweeted things, a fact evident to all of my Twitter followers. The reports added no analysis of any kind. They didn’t mention what this had to do with anything a law enforcement or intelligence officer might find important. If this is Big Brother, he’s not all that impressive.

Support Lawfare

So let’s look at both the incompetence, which is simple and easy to understand and genuinely amusing, and then the malevolence beneath it—which is more complicated and is not amusing at all.

Here, to start, are the simple facts of my adventure as a DHS intelligence subject.

On July 20, Steve Vladeck and I published a Lawfare article entitled “DHS Authorizes Domestic Surveillance to Protect Statues and Monuments,” based on a DHS I&A document leaked to me.  For reasons related to source protection, we did not publish the document itself but described it in some detail:

A document provided to Lawfare on July 19 from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) describes personnel as “collecting and reporting on various activities in the context of elevated threats targeting monuments, memorials, and statues”—and it gives legal guidance concerning the “expanded intelligence activities necessary to mitigate the significant threat to homeland security” posed by such activities.

The document, titled “Job Aid: DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) Activities in Furtherance of Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, Statues, and Combatting Recent Criminal Violence,” is not classified. Its three pages each bear the heading “UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY.” But it clearly indicates that at least parts of the intelligence community are being tasked with monitoring and collecting information on some protest activities.

Shane Harris wrote about the same document, a copy of which I gave him, in the Washington Post later that day.

In the days that followed, I received more documents from DHS I&A. Rather than analyzing them on Lawfare, I simply tweeted screenshots of them to make them available to other reporters and the general public as quickly as possible; I figured I would come back and analyze them later if the need arose. These included this tweet, which revealed an email complaining about the leaks to me and Harris:

More significantly, they also included this tweet, which disclosed a memo changing the nomenclature status of the perpetrators of violence in Portland, OR from “Violent Opportunists” to “VIOLENT ANTIFA ANARCHISTS INSPIRED (VAAI).” I described this memo in a subsequent tweet as “responsive to POTUS pressure to ‘designate’ Antifa as a terrorist organization”:

Unbeknownst to me until the matter leaked to Harris last week, both of these tweets turned out to have been the subject of what DHS I&A termed an “OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE REPORT.” Here’s the report on the first tweet. Here’s the report on the second tweet. Reporting by Mike Baker of the New York Times was also the subject of a third, similar intelligence report. I tweeted images of all three reports when I got my hands on them after Harris’s story became public:

The reports in question are odd. Each amounts to little more than a write-up of the tweet it covers dressed up in intelligencese. “This information is provided for intelligence and lead purposes only,” each says. “The product contains U.S. person information that has been deemed necessary for the intended recipient to understand, assess, or act on the information provided.” The summary reads, in one case, “Social media user”—which is to say me—”posts a leaked Department of Homeland Security internal memo that discusses changing terminology used in reports.” In the other report, the summary says, “Social media user posts a leaked Department of Homeland Security internal memo on intelligence activity in Portland, Oregon.”

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. Perhaps coincidentally—given that the Mike Baker report also displays Baker’s Twitter header—my Twitter header bears the following image:

Advertise on IT Security News.