Homeland Security Is Monitoring The Drudge Report, The New York Times

DHS also watching websites “that cover bird flu … news and activity along U.S. borders … drug trafficking and cybercrime”

Source: Liberty Confidential

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.

Reuters first broke the story yesterday.

I should add that the Reuters News story does, however, come on the heels of a similar story from RT. The RT story mentions more generally that the DHS has been monitoring journalists — apparently with consent from some media outlets.

What’s intriguing about the RT story is that it reports that media outlets receive a pay-off, as it were, from the DHS; because the DHS shares information gleaned from the monitoring with all participating news agencies. (Perhaps some media outlets are trying to play-along to get-along?)

Here’s a list of what the DHS is monitoring:

Social Networks

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Myspace

Blogs

• The Drudge Report
• The Huffington Post
• The New York Times‘s Lede blog
• Wired’s Threat Level
• Wired’s Danger Room
• ABC News’ investigative blog The Blotter
• “blogs that cover bird flu … news and activity along U.S. borders … drug trafficking and cybercrime”

Multimedia

• Hulu
• YouTube
• Flickr

As I recall from Matt Drudge’s old radio program, he hates his website being referred to as a “blog.” Partly because his Report was put together long before blogs came along; and partly because the term used to be tossed about rather dismissively by establishment media folks who looked down their nose at so-called “citizen journalists.”

But that’s entirely off the point. And being monitored, and having everything cataloged by the DHS for some unknown future purpose, is way worse than having a formal web page being called a “blog.”

Curious how they include “blogs that cover bird flu … news and activity along U.S. borders … drug trafficking and cybercrime” WTF?! Maybe the folks at the DHS are worried that if they actually websites and blogs like Alex Jones’s InfoWars and Prison Planet, it would be used as a kind-of promotional? Or they don’t want to give people like Jones more material?

RELATED: Alarm as Scientists Create Highly Contagious Killer Flu…

Also note that the DHS seem particularly interested in websites and blogs that tend to be critical of the Federal Government. ABC’s ‘Blotter,’ Drudge, HuffPo, and Wired all tend to be very critical of Government surveillance, and police state aggression — regardless of who’s sitting in the oval office.

RELATED: Fed Seeks Program to “Monitor” Critics
RELATED: Dept of Homeland Security monitors journalists

Is this cause for concern, or much ado about nothing?

Back in the late 1990s, Matt Drudge was sued by one of President Clinton’s aids,Sidney Blumenthal. And this was before Drudge even broke the Monica Lewinsky story. So it’s not unheard of for politicians or their staff to go after people in the media. (Abraham Lincoln had publishers and journalists arrested for being, in his view, “irresponsible.”) And people in power do keep lists of friends … and enemies.

The danger, in my opinion, is this: The DHS is building a body of evidence that will be tucked away in government databases, to be accessed at a later time. When members of the political class decide that someone in the media has become an inconvenience, they can use this arsenal of evidence, and have a government agency call the inconvenient person (or people) placed under suspicion of terrorism.

This news is all the more troubling when one considers the recent passage of National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. (Which was strangely passed and signed by politicians who originally opposed it.)

Full post at Dateline Zero

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