“I don't want to live in a world where everything I say, (click here) everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity and love or friendship is recorded.”
August 1, 2020
By Shane Harris
A senior Department of Homeland Security official (click here) whose office compiled “intelligence reports” about journalists and protesters in Portland, Ore., has been removed from his job, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Brian Murphy, the acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, was reassigned to a new position elsewhere in the department, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter.
Acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf made the decision on Friday, one person said.
Murphy’s removal follows revelations in The Washington Post that the Intelligence & Analysis Office (I & A) at DHS compiled Open Source Intelligence Reports about the work of two journalists who had published leaked department documents. In a separate intelligence report, the office also analyzed the communications of protesters in Portland....
I have no doubt this is all on Trump's insistence although he would never take responsibility for it.
It seems as though we are still spinning our wheels about how many intelligence officers we have in how many private agencies and the full accounting as to what work they are conducting and on what authority.
There was a report by the Washington Post some time ago that outlined the ridiculousness occurring in regard to private contractors. It seems to me this new abuse of power by the Trump administration is simply more of the same abuse the USA people have witnessed over and over again.
February 14, 2014
By Brian Fung
...In the wake of last year's NSA revelations, (click here) many agencies have been reviewing their contracting policies. But few people have a good grasp on just how many contractors the government employs. What's worse, the country's eight civilian intelligence agencies often can't sufficiently explain what they use those contractors for, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
Every year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is supposed to count how many contractors serve the intelligence community (IC). Due to differences in the way intelligence agencies define and assess their workers, however, the data are inconsistent and in some places incomplete. Out of hundreds of agency records, for example, GAO found that almost a fifth lacked enough paperwork to prove how much a contractor was paid. Another fifth of the records were found to have either over-reported or under-reported the actual cost of the contract work.
But the GAO reserves its harshest judgment for the agencies that couldn't fully explain why they resorted to contractors in the first place.
"In preparing their inventory submissions, IC elements can select one of eight options for why they needed to use contract personnel, including the need to provide surge support for a particular IC mission area, insufficient staffing resources, or to provide unique technical, professional, managerial, or intellectual expertise to the IC element that is not otherwise available," the report says.
Out of 102 records that were filed under "unique expertise," 81 failed to convince investigators that an ordinary civil servant couldn't have handled the job.
"Overall," the report went on, "the civilian IC elements could not provide documentation for 40 percent of the 287 records we reviewed."...
