Homeland Security Doesn't Want You to Know Who Its New University Intelligence Advisors Are

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas honors his department, with 280,000 employees and the largest police force in the nation (larger than the FBI). (Source: Department of Homeland Security)

In a little-noticed disclosure this past week, Homeland Security announced the creation of a new intelligence advisory board composed of up to 40 members whose discussions (and even identities) will be withheld due to the “sensitive nature” of their work.

Except that’s bullshit, a shining example of the national security community’s self-serving secrecy made possible by the lingering 9/11 culture and a news media that can hardly report on serious news that informs the public about what the government is doing in their name. 

Other intelligence advisory bodies, including the White House’s own President’s Intelligence Advisory Board provide routine public readouts of their meetings, and announcements of their members. The difference here, and why the news media should be asking questions, is because DHS is the closest America has to a domestic intelligence agency, and as such has to hide what it is actually doing as it encroaches more and more on civilian life of the nation, like trying to turn student protestors into terrorists or undermine free speech by arguing that everything is “disinformation” and some kind of shadowy foreign threat to American democracy.

What’s more, a similar advisory board convened by Homeland Security last September disclosed the identities of all of its members. Same agency, similar advisory board — what happened to the “sensitive nature” of information regarding their work?

Despite all of this, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas took the audacious step of exempting the advisory board from legally required transparency.

“In recognition of the sensitive nature of intelligence-related discussions, the Secretary exempted the Board from public notice, reporting and open meeting requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), 5 U.S.C. ch. 10,” the announcement says.

The need for transparency — at the very least, who these advisors even are — is not some abstract concern. Without knowing who the advisors are, there’s no way to be sure that they don’t have conflicts of interest. And that’s a very real problem when the advisors will include individuals from “private industry,” as the announcement says.

And think of it this way: If we don’t know what private sector individuals are advising the intelligence apparatus in secret meetings on policy, how is the news media to caveat their being expert commentators and analysts when they are quoted?

But don’t worry, Homeland Security assures us the board’s members will be selected “without regard for political affiliation” (something its previous advisory board was criticized for). 

How do we know? Because the Department says so!

Secrecy is of course reflexive to the national security state, which loves to darkly intone about the “sensitivity” of even its most mundane activities. It’s the media’s job to call bullshit on them, like the Associated Press did today when Israel tried to shut down its live feed of Gaza, prompting Israeli authorities to back off. But when the media’s equities aren’t at stake, they don’t seem much interested in standing up to their cushy friends in government agencies. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of national security, where the endemic secrecy makes news outlets uniquely dependent on access to officialdom.

So you end up with newsworthy expansions of the national security state that receive little or no reporting in the press. Like our first-ever Homeland Intelligence Advisory Board, which at a time of student protests across the country, will provide information and advice to Homeland Security’s Counterterrorism Coordinator, including by representatives of academia — very possibly some of the same universities rocked by protests. And at a time when the Biden administration is beefing up federal government control of “critical infrastructure” raises questions as to whether this isn’t just cover for more control of the utilities we rely upon for our everyday lives.

Seems newsworthy, right? Not according to the major media.

By my count, exactly one general interest news outlet covered it: the conservative Epoch Times, which fulminated against the possibility that the board might include former national security officials who signed a letter saying Hunter Biden’s laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian information operation.

But there’s more to the story than that, and the public is getting short changed when the only incentive for the media to cover these things is for partisan reasons.

And it’s not just about access. Compare the near-total silence of the news media on expansions of the national security bureaucracy with its breathless, minute-by-minute coverage of the Stormy Daniels trial.

That’s what I want to do with this newsletter: map out the alarming growth of the national security apparatus. Please help me do that by becoming a paid subscriber.

— Edited by William M. Arkin