Congress Wants Intel to Go After Online "Harassment," Blimps to Surveil Canadian Border

3 creepy items in the new Homeland Security budget

Tactical blimps for border authorities to monitor the Canadian border for the first time; intelligence assessment of mean online posts that might threaten government employees; technology that would allow Customs and Border Protection to conduct DNA point of origin analysis. These three items appear in Congress’s new $64.8 billion homeland security budget proposal, approved by the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, and an accompanying report.

The news media, fixated on this week’s legal sideshow regarding Hunter Biden, has not reported on any of these three items. Each represents a unique expansion of the Department of Homeland Security’s arsenal to turn America into a surveillance state. The bill comes at a time of acute voter concern with immigration, a topic presidential candidate Donald Trump has been hammering President Biden on. Bowing to the pressure, earlier this month Biden signed an executive order shutting down the southern border to almost all migrants seeking asylum in the U.S., a move that is patently intended to earn election year support. 

The upcoming election is a perfect time for the national (and homeland) security agencies to play their cards, so now’s the time to debate the goodies they’re angling for. I pored over the legislation to find some of the more bizarre items on the homeland security wishlist. Please become a paid subscriber so I can keep digging into documents like these that the media overlooks. (Unpaid subscriptions help too, as do gift subscriptions for friends/family.)  

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1) Cyber Harassment Threat Assessments

If passed, Homeland Security’s intelligence arm would be required  to develop a threat assessment on “cyber harassment” of not just federal government personnel, but even just government “entities,” whatever that means. No definition for what constitutes “cyber harassment” is provided.

The bill states:

“The Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) shall develop a threat assessment of acts of cyber harassment and online doxing perpetrated by foreign malign actors, including terrorists and other malicious groups, particularly those targeting government entities and personnel.”

I&A briefly made headlines in 2020 when, during protests over the police killing of George Floyd, the agency was caught generating intelligence reports on journalists covering the demonstrations. The scandal resulted in the removal of I&A’s chief. The intelligence arm was later investigated by the inspector general.

The George Floyd protests created an atmosphere of fear among federal law enforcement, particularly after an Air Force sergeant Steven Carrillo killed two Department of Homeland Security contractors amid George Floyd protests in Oakland. (Carrillo was not affiliated with the protests, but used them for cover during his ambush, according to the FBI.) 

The sense of anxiety over federal government vulnerabilities was supercharged after January 6, resulting in a seemingly endless stream of warnings from the government about the threat to officials big and small. To be clear, it makes sense to investigate credible threats of violence. But “cyber harassment” is something that’s happened to basically anyone who uses social media. It happened to me while I was writing this article. Somehow, life goes on.

The proposal would also require that the threat assessment be disseminated to the public, a nice little way to spread their hysteria.

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2) Tactical “Aerostats” (Blimps) on the Canadian Border

While the immigration debate focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border, officials have been pushing to crack down on the U.S.-Canada border as well, where homeland security says that terrorists are sneaking across. These efforts have culminated in Congress’s request for Customs and Border protection to explore deploying aerostats, or light-than-air aircraft that fly using buoyant gas like helium, on  the northern border. Aerostats are used to conduct surveillance, raising privacy concerns about their deployment.

Customs and Border Protection has deployed more agents of late to the northern border to respond to an uptick in illegal entries. But the agency has not previously deployed a tactical aerostat along the northern border. CBP operates multiple aerostats along the southern border, though it has reduced the number in recent years. 

The bill states:

“The Committee recognizes the value of the Tactical Aerostats Program on the southern border and encourages CBP to consider deploying aerostat assets on the northern border.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), who represents a southwest border district, has bitterly criticized aerostarts for both their cost and efficacy. “Those aerostats are military surplus,” Cuellar remarked in 2020, referencing the fact that many aerostats were manufactured by military contractors who can also charge exorbitant fees to operate them. “We have to be more effective, more efficient.” 

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3) DNA point of origin analysis

A committee report on the homeland security bill also encourages CBP to consider “DNA point of origin analysis,” a term that isn’t defined but could refer to rapid DNA testing designed to ascertain the geographic origins of migrants, and determine whether young people are indeed the offspring of parents.

That might sound like science fiction, but the capability has existed for years. In 2012, Israel’s Tel Aviv University announced that one of its professors had developed a method of DNA analysis that could identify the geographical location of a person’s ancestral origins. 

The press release states: “Using a probabilistic mathematical algorithm based on mutations in the genome, they were able to accurately determine their ancestral point or points of origin using only DNA data and the new mathematical model, unraveling genetic information to ascertain two separate points on the map for the mother and father.”

The FBI, in cooperation with CBP, last year amassed a total of 21.7 million DNA profiles, or equivalent to seven percent of the U.S. population. The explosive growth in DNA profiles is driven in large part by CBP’s collection of DNA samples from migrants. So it shouldn’t be shocking that the federal government is considering what it can do with all these profiles. 

But it should be debated.

— Edited by William M. Arkin