Looking Glass
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><h3 class="LC20lb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/04/29/family-separation-protests-surveillance/">Homeland Security Used a Private Intelligence Firm to ... - The Intercept</a></font></h3><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><div class="TbwUpd"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="iUh30">https://theintercept.com/2019/04/29/family-separation-protests-surveillance/</cite></font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span><span><div class="g"><div data-hveid="CAYQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwiEzdnwoP3hAhXUop4KHYVPAfIQFSgAMAB6BAgGEAA"><div class="rc"><div class="s"><div><span class="st"><span class="f">3 days ago - </span><em>LookingGlass</em> Cyber Solutions, a Virginia-based firm, gathered ... Homeland <em>Security</em> Used a <em>Private Intelligence</em> Firm to Monitor Family Separation Protests ... Day Protests' across the US on <em>June</em> 30,” the analyst's email read. ... the administration was instead <em>spying</em> on them for expressing themselves.” ...</span></div><div><span class="st">
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<span class="st"><span class="PostByline-date" data-reactid="180"><span data-reactid="181"><div class="Post-body" data-reactid="184"><div class="Post-content-block-outer" data-reactid="195"><div class="GridContainer Post-scroll-container" data-reactid="196"><div class="GridRow" data-reactid="197"><div class="Post-content-block" data-reactid="198"><div class="Post-content-block-inner" data-reactid="199"><div class="PostContent" data-reactid="202"><div data-reactid="203"><p><u>...The calls for</u>
action were mounting. It was mid-June, and the Trump administration’s
“zero tolerance” policy, which saw thousands of migrant children
separated from their parents, was producing waves of outrage. By the end
of the month, hundreds of protests were planned in towns and cities
across the country. As the plans moved forward, others took notice.
In the days leading up to the protests, a private intelligence
company that works with the Department of Homeland Security was
monitoring the activity on the ground. Documents shared with The
Intercept by the American Immigration Council, obtained through a
freedom of information request, show that<b> LookingGlass Cyber Solutions, a
Virginia-based firm, gathered information on <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5980360-LookingGlass.html">more than 600 demonstrations</a> across the country, information that was then shared with DHS and state-level law enforcement agencies.</b></p>
</div><a class="InstreamPromo InstreamPromo--promo" href="https://theintercept.com/collections/the-war-on-immigrants/"><span class="InstreamPromo-text"><span class="InstreamPromo-text-callout">Read Our Complete Coverage</span><span class="InstreamPromo-text-title">The War on Immigrants]</span></span></a><div data-reactid="205">
<p>Tracking Facebook accounts affiliated with the protests and
disseminating the intelligence to law enforcement fusion centers
nationwide, the operation drilled down on physical locations where
demonstrations were planned: a high school in Sebring, Florida; a church
in Carbondale, Illinois; the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City; a <b>Denny’s in
Carlsbad, California</b>; and “the old Kmart parking lot” in Stevens Point,
Wisconsin. All were logged by street address and the time of the planned
demonstrations.
<b>A “Threat Analyst” in Reston, Virginia, sent the finished
intelligence to a “LookingGlass Shared Services” address on June 28, two
days before the protests were set to begin.</b>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“LookingGlass has compiled a spreadsheet for<b> State Fusion Centers
detailing over 600 planned ‘Family Separation Day Protests’ across the
US on June 30,”</b> the analyst’s email read. “These originated from Cyber
Threat Center (CTC) and are broken out by City and State; they provide
physical location and the Facebook event ID.”</span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The following morning, the headquarters of DHS’s Office of
Intelligence and Analysis disseminated the information to its staff,
which was later circulated among Immigration and Customs Enforcement
personnel.</span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In a statement, LookingGlass Chief Marketing Officer Joy Nemitz told
The Intercept, “As a matter of company policy and confidentiality, we do
not comment on matters pertaining to clients or work performed and
refer all queries to the company in question.” A DHS official, speaking
on background, described the information LookingGlass collected as
“unsolicited.”</span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and
Analysis (I&A) works with federal partners, including the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, and state and local law enforcement through the
National Network of Fusion Centers to assess threats and analyze trends
in activity,” the official said in an email. “In this particular
instance, a private sector entity shared unsolicited information it
collected through publicly available channels with DHS I&A on
protests that were scheduled to take place near Federal facilities. <b>
Throughout the summer of 2018, the Department was at a heightened state
of security due to ongoing protests outside of Federal facilities and
physical threats to DHS employees which did result in a least one
arrest.</b>”</span>
<b>The official added:<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> “When DHS I&A receives this type of
information, we are required to share it consistent with DHS policy to
ensure stakeholders</span> have appropriate situational awareness regarding
personnel, facilities, suspicious activities, emerging threats,
incidents, operations, and operational capabilities affecting the
Department or the Homeland Security Enterprise.</b>”
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Jess Morales Rocketto, co-chair of Families Belong Together and a
lead organizer of last year’s protests, condemned the monitoring of the
demonstrations. “Those protests represented the best of democracy,” she
told The Intercept. “It’s especially concerning given that these
protests were basically thousands of moms and their kids, thousands of
families, and that the Trump administration’s response to that was to
put them on a watch list.”</span>
The emails confirming the protest surveillance were released in an
ongoing freedom of information battle that the American Immigration
Council, or AIC — in collaboration with the Florence Immigrant and
Refugee Rights Project, the National Immigrant Justice Center, Kids in
Need of Defense, Women’s Refugee Commission, and <b>Wilmer Cutler Pickering
Hale and Dorr LLP — is waging to pry documents surrounding family
separation from the government.</b>
“We’ve been getting them in drips,” Emily Creighton, deputy legal
director at the AIC, said of the documents beginning to surface as a
result of the litigation. “We have been told in litigation that ICE,
DHS, and CBP have hundreds of thousands of responsive records.”
For immigration attorneys working with families directly impacted by
the administration’s “zero tolerance” regime, news of protests being
monitored makes an ugly situation even worse.
“The public rightly expressed outrage when they learned of the Trump
administration’s shocking policy of ripping children away from their
parents,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties
Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead attorney in a lawsuit
challenging family separation, told The Intercept. “They’ll again be
outraged to learn that, rather than focusing resources on reuniting
these families, the administration was instead spying on them for
expressing themselves.”</p>
<h3>Intel for Profit</h3>
<p>As an operation, LookingGlass Cyber Solutions appears to fit squarely
in the larger universe of for-profit intelligence providers pitching
services to law enforcement in a post-9/11 world.
In 2015, the company acquired Cyveillance, “a leader in open-source threat intelligence” that, according to the firm’s <a href="https://www.lookingglasscyber.com/press-release/lookingglass-announces-cyveillance-acquisition-and-50-million-funding/">website</a>,
“delivers an open source intelligence-led approach to security through
continuous, comprehensive monitoring and analysis of millions of online
data sources to protect client information, infrastructure, and
employees from physical and online threats.” <a href="https://www.fbo.gov/index.php?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=32feb4e03809e730cd6b1ee4788d0eaf&tab=core&_cview=1">Records</a> indicate that Cyveillance previously provided contract work for the U.S. State Department.
In a jargon-heavy brochure, LookingGlass describes its “DHS
Cybersecurity Shared Services Program for State Fusion Centers” as a
combination of services and platforms designed to provide “insight and
technical indicators to support a range of activities from high-level
situational awareness to actionable recourse.” The company touts the
expertise of its analysts and their ability to provide “deep-dive
analysis, technical indicators, and situational awareness reporting,”
while highlighting the role of its Cyber Threat Center as “an aggregator
of global news, social media, and physical security events aligned to
an organization’s area of interest.”
“CTC can be configured to provide analysts with cyber news matching
topics of relevance and physical incident alerts in user-defined
proximity ranges around a given point on the map,” the company reports.
“Since global events can have impacts at local levels, analysts
utilizing CTC will benefit from the data collection breadth of global
sources from the surface web and Deep and Dark Web.”
Stood up in the wake of the September 11 attacks as another node in
the war on terror, the fusion centers that companies like LookingGlass
cater to have long been the target of criticism.
In a withering 2012 <a href="https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/10-3-2012%20PSI%20STAFF%20REPORT%20re%20FUSION%20CENTERS.2.pdf">report</a>,
congressional investigators found that “DHS-assigned detailees to the
fusion centers forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality — oftentimes
shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties
and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published
public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.” The
report was particularly hard on DHS’s Office of Intelligence and
Analysis — the office that saw fit to distribute LookingGlass’s
monitoring of family separation protests.
“This document shows that DHS accepts and distributes surveillance of
protest activity on social media, including to fusion centers, which
have a track record of monitoring innocent and constitutionally
protected conduct,” Hugh Handeyside, a senior staff attorney at the
ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Intercept, after reviewing
LookingGlass’s work product.
“It also demonstrates the reach of surveillance contractors and the
products they’re peddling,” Handeyside added. “We need to know a lot
more about these products and how the government is using them.”</p>
<h3>Targeting Critics of the President</h3>
<p>In the last two years, law enforcement agencies executing the Trump
administration’s immigration agenda have cracked down on critics of the
president’s policies.</p>
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<p>In Arizona, the U.S. Border Patrol and Trump
administration attorneys have aggressively targeted humanitarian
volunteers providing food, water, and medical aid to migrants trekking
through the desert with <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/01/17/no-more-deaths-border-documents-trial/">criminal prosecutions</a>.
And in the San Diego-Tijuana area, Customs and Border Protection, the
Border Patrol, and counterparts in Mexican law enforcement have run a
sweeping <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/02/08/us-mexico-border-journalists-harassment/">intelligence-gathering</a> operation targeting immigration attorneys, journalists, and activists working with, and around, migrant caravans.
The monitoring of last year’s family separation protest now adds a private intelligence firm to the mix.
<strong>“</strong>This is a chilling revelation, but follows an even
scarier trend of constant government surveillance and policing of
immigrant communities, and targeting of activists and journalists,”
Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant
Justice Center working on the FOIA litigation that led to the latest
revelations, said in an email to The Intercept. “The new records unveil
how the administration views voices of dissent as a threat to its
disinformation campaigns. Congress should be asking questions about why
DHS resources are going towards efforts to target opposition to hateful
anti-immigrant policies.”
Morales Rocketto, the organizer with Families Belong Together,
agrees. Within the immigrant rights community, Morales Rocketto said, it
is well-known “that the administration has been harassing some of the
most vocal activists, lawyers, and journalists.”
“The DHS inspector general should investigate this,” she said.
“Congress should demand answers about this, because the government
should not spy on Americans who are exercising their First Amendment
rights.”</p>
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</span></div></div></div></div></div><div class="g"><div data-hveid="CAAQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwiEzdnwoP3hAhXUop4KHYVPAfIQFSgAMAF6BAgAEAA"><div class="rc"><div class="r"><h3 class="LC20lb"><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/29/outrageous-company-spied-family-separation-protests-gave-info-dhs">'Outrageous': Company Spied on Family Separation Protests, Gave ...</a></h3>
<div class="TbwUpd"><cite class="iUh30">https://www.commondreams.org/.../outrageous-company-spied-family-separation-prot...</cite></div><span /></div></div></div></div><span><div class="g"><div data-hveid="CAAQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwiEzdnwoP3hAhXUop4KHYVPAfIQFSgAMAF6BAgAEAA"><div class="rc"><div class="s"><div><span class="st"><span class="f">3 days ago - </span>New reporting says <em>LookingGlass</em> Cyber Solutions spied on ... A protester in Washington, D.C., on <em>June</em> 30, 2018. (Photo: Susan Melkisethian, Flickr). A <em>private</em> company monitored protests around President Donald Trump's family ... was offered "unsolicited" to the Department of Homeland <em>Security</em> (DHS), ...</span></div></div></div></div></div><div class="g"><div data-hveid="CAIQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwiEzdnwoP3hAhXUop4KHYVPAfIQFSgAMAJ6BAgCEAA"><div class="rc"><div class="r"><h3 class="LC20lb"><a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/05/02/elizabeth-warren-calls-for-watchdog-investigation-into-surveillance-of-family-separation-protests/">Elizabeth Warren calls for watchdog investigation into surveillance of ...</a></h3>
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<div class="TbwUpd"><cite class="iUh30">https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1622732901</cite></div></div><div class="s"><div><div class="slp f"><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=inauthor:%22Alan+Burton%22&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiEzdnwoP3hAhXUop4KHYVPAfIQ9AgwA3oECAkQAg">Alan Burton</a> - 2018 - Performing Arts</div><span class="st">He believed that <em>intelligence</em> and <em>security</em> had moved on since the existential <em>spy</em> ... his job if he was allowed to do it” (quoted in the Radio Times, 27 <em>August</em> 2011). ... in 2007 and featured two crusading <em>personal</em> injury lawyers who set about exposing a ... In the first episode, Ben Graham (Richard Coyle) and The <em>Spy</em> Drama ...</span></div></div></div></div></div><div class="g"><div data-hveid="CAEQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwiEzdnwoP3hAhXUop4KHYVPAfIQFSgAMAR6BAgBEAA"><div class="rc"><div class="r"><h3 class="LC20lb"><a href="https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2013083000">Government Surveillance: CQR</a></h3>
<div class="TbwUpd"><cite class="iUh30">https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2013083000</cite></div></div><div class="s"><div><span class="st"><span class="f">Aug 30, 2013 - </span>Is government <em>spying</em> on Americans excessive? ... Agency (NSA), tells the House <em>Intelligence</em> Committee on <em>June</em> 18 that NSA <em>spying</em> prevents terror attacks on U.S. soil. ... National <em>security</em> letters, which allow the FBI to compel banks, .... the usefulness of <em>private</em> cameras at stores and other businesses in ...</span></div></div></div></div></div></span></span></span></span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=
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