House Questions Homeland Security Program on Social Media

The manual, a 2011 reference guide for analysts working with the department’s Media Monitoring Capability program, raises questions about recent claims by Homeland Security officials who portrayed the program as limited to gathering information that would help gain operational awareness about attacks, disasters or other emerging problems.

Last month, a previous disclosure of documents related to the program showed that in 2009, when it was being designed, officials contemplated having reports produced about “public reaction to major governmental proposals with homeland security implications.”

But the department said it never put that category into practice when the program began in 2010. Officials repeated that portrayal in testimony last week before an oversight hearing by a a House Homeland Security subcommittee.

“I am not aware of any information we have gathered on government proposals,” testified Richard Chavez, the director of the office that oversees the National Operations Center, which runs the program.

Still, the 2011 manual, which was disclosed this week as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, lists a series of categories that constitute an “item of interest” warranting a report. One category is discussion on social media networks of “policy directives, debates and implementations related to DHS.”

It is not clear whether the department has produced such reports. Matthew Chandler, a department spokesman, said Wednesday that in practice the program had been limited to “social media monitoring for situational awareness only.”

He also said the department would review the reference guide and related materials to make sure they “clearly and accurately convey the parameters and intention of the program.”

Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group that filed the lawsuit and obtained the document, argued that the manual shows that the monitoring may have gone beyond its limited portrayal by department officials.

“The D.H.S. continues to monitor the Internet for criticism of the government,” she said. “This suspicionless, overbroad monitoring quells legitimate First Amendment activity and exceeds the agency’s legal authority."

A federal statute cited by officials last week as the legal basis for the program gives the National Operations Center the authority “to provide situational awareness” for officials “in the event of a natural disaster, act of terrorism or other man-made disaster” and to “ensure that critical terrorism and disaster-related information reaches government decision makers.”

Officials have stressed that the program does not collect personally identifying information, like the names or Twitter account handles of the people making comments, and that it does not monitor, review or collect First Amendment-protected speech.

Still, the program also monitors articles and broadcasts by traditional media outlets. The 2011 manual says that analysts, in addition to flagging information related to matters like terrorism and natural disasters, should also identify “media reports that reflect adversely on D.H.S. and response activities” and collect “both positive and negative reports” on department components as well organizations outside of the department.

The manual includes keywords that analysts should search for. A list of agencies in the keyword section includes not only those in the department dealing with matters like immigration and emergency management, but also the Central Intelligence Agency, several law enforcement agencies in the Justice Department, the Red Cross and the United Nations.

At the hearing last week, lawmakers of both parties said it made sense for the department to use the Internet to gather information about emerging events, but they voiced concerns that if it went further than that, the program might chill people’s freedom of speech and willingness to express dissent online.

“Other private individuals reading your Facebook status updates is different than the Department of Homeland Security reading them, analyzing them and possibly disseminating and collecting them for future purposes,” said the chairman of the subcommittee, Representative Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania.

Mary Ellen Callahan, the department’s chief privacy director, testified that the program was interested only in events within the department’s mission — like disasters, attacks or continuing operational problems. As an example, she cited a situation in which people post to Twitter about an unusually long line at a particular airport checkpoint.

She also played down the use of keyword searches the program uses for articles and postings on social networks, portraying them as simply related to disasters — “you know, flood, tornado and things like that.”

The 2011 manual contains a fuller list. Many keywords are closely related to various disasters. But a handful are potentially more sweeping, like China, cops, hacking, illegal immigrants, Iran, Iraq, marijuana, organized crime, police, pork and radicals.

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Washington Memo: Supreme Court Justices Remain Security Exceptions

In an era when many top American officials are blanketed in security, Justice Breyer and his colleagues are the exceptions, freer but also more exposed than their counterparts in the executive and legislative branches.

Nowadays, it often seems that anyone who is anyone in Washington has a driver and a gaggle of taciturn protectors. Congressional leaders sweep into restaurants trailed by members of the Capitol Police; top White House advisers have Secret Service agents.

And every president is more heavily encircled than the one before. When President Obama wants to snorkel on his Hawaii vacations, the Secret Service clears the airspace above him, the shoreline in front of him and the water around him. An aide said Mr. Obama had even been surrounded by agents in wetsuits as he floated.

However, the nine justices often slip around Washington like ordinary citizens, causing barely a pause at stop signs, parties, supermarkets and houses of worship. It is hard to name many officials with more influence than Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court’s perennial swing vote, who may determine the fate of Mr. Obama’s health care law this spring. But it is easy to name many officials with far more constant protection.

Court officials do not discuss security arrangements in detail, but according to longtime observers and Congressional budget requests, they vary depending on a justice’s location: traveling out of town for a speech, walking around Washington or working inside the heavily fortified court building.

In the capital, the justices are protected mainly by the court’s own small force, said a spokeswoman, Kathy Arberg. When the justices leave Washington, the United States Marshals Service takes over, and local police departments help, too.

Protection may be relatively light because justices have worked to preserve their freedom of movement, and the Supreme Court has a lucky history — its members have not met with serious violence. The most recent attack took place nearly three decades ago: an assailant who objected to Supreme Court decisions on pornography and school desegregation punched Justice Byron R. White in the face. (By contrast, federal and state judges have experienced far worse, including assassinations and the murders of family members.)

Like Justice Breyer, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and retired Justice David H. Souter have been victims of everyday crime, committed by people who probably did not recognize them. In 1985, a bullet pierced the living room window of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, but investigators concluded that it had probably been fired at random.

“Based on history, it’s tough to make the case that there should be mandatory protection,” said Robert Fein, a forensic psychologist who conducted a Secret Service study of assassins and near-attackers.

Over the years, the justices have cited security to support their longstanding objections to broadcasting the court’s oral arguments. (In keeping with tradition, only the few hundred observers who can crowd into the courtroom will be able to witness the proceedings over the national health care law next month. A C-Span video request is pending, though likely to be denied.)

The justices have many reasons for avoiding the cameras, including not wanting their courtroom statements turned into television sound bites, several longtime court observers said. But Justice Clarence Thomas has told lawmakers in Congress specifically that he fears that broadcasting oral arguments could put him and his colleagues in greater jeopardy, and security experts say he is probably correct.

“The fact that they maintain low profiles helps to maintain their overall security,” said Marisa Randazzo of Sigma Threat Management, who has consulted on protection for government officials. Television coverage “can really increase someone’s grievance or fixation, especially if we’re dealing with someone who may not be mentally stable,” she said.

Still, the justices are not the remote figures of the past. Today, they give frequent speeches at law schools and bar associations, and they have appeared widely on television, from C-Span to a cameo this month by Justice Sonia Sotomayor on “Sesame Street.”

Such appearances undercut the case against televised proceedings, in the view of Dennis J. Hutchinson, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a historian of the court. “They’re all over the place,” he said.

Some justices have delighted in their near anonymity. Retired Justice John Paul Stevens cherished one particular encounter, said Richard Davis, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University. One day, Justice Stevens was walking outside the court when tourists stopped him. They wanted to know if he would mind moving out of the way so they could take a good photograph of the Supreme Court.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 19, 2012

A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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Bird flu study publication gets go-ahead after security check

Bird flu experts meeting in Geneva ruled that controversial research on a mutant form of the virus potentially capable of being spread among humans should be made public.

Security assessments must however be carried out first before the two studies can be published and the research can continue, scientists agreed at a two-day meeting at the World Health Organization.

"The consensus was that in the interest of public health the full papers should be published," said Professor Ron Fouchier from the Institute of Virology in the Netherlands, the scientist behind one of the studies.

US bio-security chiefs urged in November that key details of the papers remain unpublished, citing fears of a pandemic should a mutated H5N1 virus escape the laboratory.

Scientists agreed on January 20 to a 60-day moratorium on further studies.

That deadline will now be extended for an unspecified time to allow for a wider group of scientists to examine the risks and allow for public discussion, Fouchier said at a conference following the meeting.

"This is very important research that needs to move forward," he said.

"The question is, how can it be done safely, what about bio-security, how do we prevent access to bad people?"

"Once there's agreement on all those issues then we can continue our work."

The 22 participants included the two teams of researchers and representatives of the scientific journals Science and Nature who were asked to withhold publication.

The editor of the US journal Science said later Friday he supports the decision of the bird flu experts in Geneva.

"The supreme court of decision-making on these things should not be me," said Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science, which along with the British journal Nature had been on track to publish partial versions of the research in March.

Alberts said the two journals were working closely with each other and with authorities, and would await further information before making plans to publish the manuscripts in full in the months ahead.

"Many people in the government worked very hard to try to see whether they could develop a mechanism that could be used to selectively get redacted information to the right people, and they came across all kinds of difficulties."

The engineered virus, created by two separate research teams in the Netherlands and Wisconsin, was able to spread through the air among mammals, indicating it could potentially be deadly to humans on a massive scale.

Alberts said he hoped that the decision taken after the two-day Geneva meeting would lead to the creation of an international body of scientists and biosecurity experts for making future decisions on such matters.

"The very best possible outcome for this is the establishment of an international version of the NSABB," he said, referring to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a US advisory panel that urged the government, which had funded the research, to withhold key details from publication.

However, NSABB leaders said last year that an international decision was needed and that they would obey any decision agreed by the global science community.

Avian influenza H5N1 is primarily transmitted between birds and very rarely to humans.

The Dutch team and another from the University of Wisconsin in the United States found ways late last year to engineer the virus so that it could be transmitted among mammals.

The breakthrough raised alarm that the method could fall into the wrong hands and unleash a massive flu pandemic that could cost millions of lives.

The WHO said 345 people have died from H5N1 from a total of 584 cases in 15 countries. The majority of victims have been in Indonesia.

"Given the high death rate associated with this virus all participants at the meeting emphasised the high level of concern with this flu virus in the scientific community and the need to understand it better with additional research," said Dr Keiji Fukuda, WHO assistant director general of health security.

The body underlined the need to increase public understanding of the research and to review bio-security issues.

The WHO will host further meetings "soon" with a wider range of scientists.

"This was a group of experts on influenza research," said Fouchier.

"We need to consult with the broader scientific community."

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