Dept. of Homeland Security to Use Molecular Scanners That Will Instantly Know Everything About You

Within the next year or so, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans on deploying a laser based molecular scanner that can penetrate clothing, many other organic materials and will instantly know everything about those targeted from as far away as 164 feet. From traces of drugs or gun powder on clothing to even what an individual had for breakfast to the adrenaline levels in their body.

All without the individuals who are being targeted even knowing it.

In November 2011, the inventors of the technology were subcontracted by In-Q-Tel to work with the US Department of Homeland Security. In-Q-Tel is a company founded “in February 1999 by a group of private citizens at the request of the CIA, with the support of the U.S. Congress.” According to In-Q-Tel, they are the bridge between the Agency and new technology companies.

The plan is for these new scanners to be utilized in airports and at border crossings all across the United States.

The machine is ten million times faster and one million times more sensitive than any system currently available system and can be used systematically on everyone passing through airport security, not just suspect or randomly sampled people.

In-Q-Tel states that “an important benefit of Genia Photonics’ implementation as compared to existing solutions is that the entire synchronized laser system is comprised in a single, robust and alignment-free unit that may be easily transported for use in many environments… This compact and robust laser has the ability to rapidly sweep wavelengths in any pattern and sequence.”

So not only can they scan everyone, but they would be able to do it everywhere at anytime: the subway, a sports events or even at a traffic light.

According to the undersecretary for science and technology of the Department of Homeland Security, this scanning technology will be ready within one to two years, which means we will probably start seeing them in airports as soon as 2013.

These portable, incredibly precise molecular-level scanning devices will soon be cascading lasers across our bodies as we move throughout airports instantly reporting and storing a detailed breakdown of our persons, in search of certain “molecular tags”.

Going well beyond eavesdropping, it looks like the U.S. government plans on recording molecular data on travelers without their consent, or even knowledge.

Civil Liberties Advocates Concerned About Dept. of Homeland Security Monitoring Social Networking Sites

Civil liberties advocates are sounding alarms over the practice of the Department of Homeland Security monitoring social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. They say the DHS may begin tracking public reaction to news events and reports that “reflect adversely” on the U.S. government.Documents obtained from the DHS through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit contained a February 2010 analyst handbook that touted a good example of “capturing public reaction” by monitoring Facebook and other sites for public sentiment about the possible transfer of Guantanamo detainees to a Michigan prison.

According to a senior DHS official the department does not monitor dissent or gather reports tracking citizens’ views. He said such reporting would not be useful in the types of emergencies to which officials need to respond. Officials also said that the analyst handbook is no longer in use and that the current version does not include the Guantanamo detainee reaction or similar examples.

With the rise of digital media, the DHS and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies have begun monitoring blogs and social media to anticipate trends and threats that affect homeland security, such as flu pandemics or terrorist plots.

Monitoring for “positive and negative reports” on U.S. agencies is not part of the department’s mission to “secure the nation,” said the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which obtained a copy of a contract and related material describing DHS’s social media monitoring through its FOIA suit.

According to the documents, the department’s Office of Operations Coordination and Planning awarded a contract in 2010 to Fairfax-based General Dynamics’ Advanced Information Systems. The company’s task is to provide media and social media monitoring support to Homeland Security’s National Operations Center (NOC) on a “24/7/365 basis” to enhance DHS’s “situational awareness, fusion and analysis and decision support” to senior leaders.

“The language in the documents makes it quite clear that they are looking for media reports that are critical of the agency and the U.S. government more broadly,” said Ginger McCall, director of EPIC’s open government program. “This is entirely outside of the bounds of the agency’s statutory duties, and it could have a substantial chilling effect on legitimate dissent and freedom of speech.”

John Cohen, a senior counterterrorism adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said that in his three years on the job, during which he has received every social media summary the NOC has produced, he has never seen a report summarizing negative views of DHS or any other governmental agency. Such reports, he said, “would not be the type of reporting I would consider helpful” in forming an operational response to some event or emergency.

“What I generally get are reports regarding hazmat spills, natural disasters, suspicious packages and street closures, active shooter situations, bomb threats,” Cohen said. “That is the type of information being pulled off social media.”

There is one sense in which reports of “adverse” publicity might be useful, he said: for example, alerting senior officials to the arrest of an off-duty officer for discharging his weapon.

The $11.3 million General Dynamics contract began in 2010 with a four-year renewal option. It states that the firm should provide daily social network summaries, weekly data reports and a monthly status report.The work is being done for DHS’s Office of Operations Coordination and Planning.

A year ago, the department released a report describing privacy guidelines on its social media monitoring program. For instance, information that can identify an individual may be collected if it “lends credibility” to the report. Officials said that would generally be provided to operational officials responding to an emergency.

 

U.S. Citizens Being Arrested For Illegal Immigration

An Alarming number of U.S citizens have been detained for illegal immigration under Obama administration programs designed to detect illegal immigrants who are arrested by local police.

Acting on flawed information from Dept. of Homeland Security databases, local police have been instructed by federal immigration officers to hold citizens for investigation and possible deportation. Immigration agents do not have the authority to detain citizens, but those arrested by local police say they were held for days with no communication with federal agents to rectify the situation.

“I told every officer I was in front of that I’m an American citizen, and they didn’t believe me,” said Antonio Montejano, who was arrested on a shoplifting charge last month and held on an immigration order for two nights in a police station in Santa Monica, Calif., and two more nights in a Los Angeles county jail cell, on suspicion that he was an illegal immigrant. Mr. Montejano was born in Los Angeles.

Under the Obama Administration more than 1.1 million people have been deported, the highest numbers in six decades. Under the immigration agencies Secure Communities program, fingerprints of every person booked at local jails are checked against a Homeland Security immigration database. If the check results in a match, federal immigration agents can issue detainers, asking local law enforcement authorities to hold a suspect for up to 48 hours.

John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency gave “immediate and close attention” to anyone who claimed to be a citizen.

“We don’t have the power to detain citizens,” Mr. Morton said in an interview on Tuesday. “We obviously take any allegation that someone is a citizen very seriously.”

The exact numbers of Americans held by immigration authorities are hard to determine because they are not typically recorded. In one study, 82 people who were held for deportation from 2006 to 2008 at two immigration detention centers in Arizona, for periods as long as a year, were freed after immigration judges determined that they were American citizens.

“Because of the scale of enforcement, the numbers of people who are interacting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement are just enormous right now,” said Jacqueline Stevens, the study’s author and political science professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Ms. Stevens has concluded that “a low but persistent” percentage of the nearly 400,000 people held for deportation each year are citizens.

An American college student, Romy Campos, was held in a California jail last month for four days on an immigration detainer. After her Nov. 12 arrest in Torrance on a minor misdemeanor charge, Ms. Campos, 19, was denied bail and transferred to a Los Angeles County jail. A public defender assigned to her in state court said he was unable to lift the federal detainer.

“Can’t they see in my file or something that I’m a citizen?” Ms. Campos said she asked him. “He said: ‘I’m sorry, but this is state court. I can’t do anything about it.’ ”

After four days, Ms. Campos was released after Jennie Pasquarella, an A.C.L.U. lawyer, provided her Florida birth certificate to the immigration agency.

“I felt misused completely, I felt nonimportant, I just felt violated by my own country,” Ms. Campos said. A citizen of both the United States and Spain, she later learned that she had a Department of Homeland Security record because she had once entered the United States on her Spanish passport.

United States citizens can be tagged in a Secure Communities fingerprint check because of flukes in the department’s databases. Unlike the federal criminal databases administered by the F.B.I., Homeland Security records include all immigration transactions, not just violations. An immigrant who has always maintained legal status, including those naturalized to become American citizens, can still trigger a fingerprint match.

According to Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer in Alaska, under the nation’s complex citizenship laws, many foreign-born people become Americans automatically, through American parents or adoption. Often their citizenship is not recorded in Homeland Security databases, Ms. Stock said.

Other cases of possibly illegal detentions of citizens have been recently reported in Allentown, Pa., Indianapolis and Chicago.

I.C.E. agents generally cancel detainers immediately when they determine that the suspect is a citizen. In no recent cases was an American placed in deportation.

Dept of Homeland Security launches “pre-crime” detection program…

Tom Cruise would be jealous. He only pretended to be head of a future police unit that arrested and charged people with crimes they had not yet committed, or even expressed intent to commit. The Department of Homeland Security gets to do it in real life.

FAST, Future Attribute Screening Technology, is a system that uses ethnicity, gender, body movements, voice-pitch and rhythm changes, eye movement, body heat, breathing patterns, blink rate and pupil variation to determine whether someone has  mal-intent. The DHS is already testing the program on select members of the public in at least one field test conducted in an undisclosed location in the Northeast. A limited trial was also conducted with DHS employees.

“The department’s Science and Technology Directorate has conducted preliminary research in operational settings to determine the feasibility of using non-invasive physiological and behavioral sensor technology and observational techniques to detect signs of stress, which are often associated with intent to do harm,” according to a statement DHS gave CNET. “The FAST program is only in the preliminary stages of research and there are no plans for acquiring or deploying this type of technology at this time.”

The phrase “big brother is watching” never had more relevance.