DHS Awards $20 Million To Program That Flags Americans As Potential “Extremists” For Their Online Speech

by Cindy Harper | Reclaim the NetSeptember 15th 2023, 4:12 am

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The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded 34 grants to as many organizations, worth a total of $20 million, whose role will be to undergo training in order to flag potential online “extremist” speech of Americans.

The money will be spent from the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) grant program for fiscal year 2023, while the recipients include police, mental health providers, universities, churches and school districts.

According to DHS, this program (administered by its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, CP3, and for some reason, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA) is the only federal one of its kind whose goal is “helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities in combating targeted violence and terrorism.”

Those given the money from the grants fund are expected to develop prevention programming at the community level that would stop “targeted violence and terrorism,” as well as come up with innovative prevention ideas, and “identify prevention best practices that can be replicated in communities nationwide.”

In announcing and explaining the need for such spending, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas cited the Jacksonville shooting. As he remarked while justifying the awarding of grants, the event was racially motivated, and – “[it] made painfully clear, targeted violence and terrorism can impact any community, anywhere.”

DHS claims that the “current” environment is one of heightened – and lethal – threat, based on ideology or personal grievances of “lone offenders and small groups.”

The DHS announcement came on the anniversary of 9/11, but it showed that the focus is now on Americans rather than some foreign terrorist threat (or even foreign terrorist gangs in the habit of “invading” US soil).

And the way the terrorist threat is defined here looks more like a drive to suppress dissent to dominant narratives pushed by the government and large traditional and social media who work in concert with the federal authorities.

Specifically, what opponents of such policy single out as possible reasons to be branded a violent extremists or (domestic) terrorist could be disagreeing, and expressing that opinion online on anything from Covid, vaccines, gun rights, gender and LGBTQ policies, the war in Ukraine, or immigration.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.

Source:  https://reclaimthenet.org/dhs-funds-program-extremists-online-speech 

Blogger's note:  This mellon head Mayorkas is a dual citizen, and he has NEVER signed an oath of office.  So clearly his patriotism is NOT to the US.  He cares NOT what the Constitution nor the Rule of Law sets down.  He is working to destroy this nation, and he is succeeding. 

U.S. Government Targets “Homegrown Violent Extremists” In Broad Surveillance

TOPICS:Aaron KeselCivil LibertiesConstitutionSurveillance

October 26, 2017

By Aaron Kesel

The U.S. government has increased its physical and digital surveillance to now include a broad definition of “homegrown violent extremists” in the Department of Defense’s manual which isn’t clearly defined, Reuters reported.

The change actually happened last year, announced under the Obama administration but carries on to the Trump administration. This will allow some forms of monitoring of U.S. persons without a court-issued warrant, a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The Fourth Amendment is defined as:

“The Fourth Amendment originally enforced the notion that “each man’s home is his castle”, secure from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government.  It protects against arbitrary arrests, and is the basis of the law regarding search warrants, stop-and-frisk, safety inspections, wiretaps, and other forms of surveillance, as well as being central to many other criminal law topics and to privacy law,” according to Cornell Law School.

The new manual permits the collection of information about Americans for counterintelligence purposes “when no specific connection to foreign terrorist(s) has been established,” according to training slides created last year by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).

This raises particular legal concerns that the feds will use this mandate to skirt laws that protect citizens.

“The government’s authority to monitor people doesn’t depend on their beliefs, or what the government thinks they believe, but on specific evidence that gives sufficient reason to think a criminal offense is occurring or that the person is an agent of a foreign power,” Sarah St.Vincent said. “A secret determination that someone’s rights should be curtailed based on undisclosed criteria is incompatible with the rule of law. The government should explain what it’s doing as well as its legal basis for doing it.”

All this was made possible by executive order 12333, signed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and later modified by former President George W. Bush, which establishes how U.S. intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA are allowed to pursue foreign intelligence investigations. The order also allows surveillance of U.S. citizens in certain cases which are defined as a counter-intelligence operations.

Which again in itself is a very broad definition first published and defined in 1982, the U.S. government was required to demonstrate a target was working on behalf of the goals of a foreign power or terrorist group. With the Obama era’s DHS definition of a terrorist group this is even more unclear.

Obama’s DHS didn’t hesitate to call those who believe in conspiracy theories potential right-wing terrorists, stating the following points might make someone a terrorist in a study by the University of Maryland, which was funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security.

• Americans who “are fiercely nationalistic, as opposed to universal and international in orientation”
• Americans considering themselves “anti-global”
• Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority”
• Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty (especially their right to own guns and be free of taxes)”
• Americans exhibiting a belief in “conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty and a belief that one’s personal and/or national way of life is under attack”

Specifically listing Americans who love liberty as terrorists, noting that two subgroups of “right-wing extremism” were identified as “gun rights” and “tax protest,” according to PJ Media.

The slides were acquired by Human Rights Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about the use of federal surveillance laws for countering drug or immigration purposes.

“What happens under 12333 takes place under a cloak of darkness,” Sarah St. Vincent, a surveillance researcher with Human Rights Watch told Reuters. “We have enormous programs potentially affecting people in the United States and abroad, and we would never know about these changes without the documents.”

The slides also list recent shooting attacks including San Bernardino, California, in December 2015 and Orlando, Florida, in June 2016 as examples that would classify individuals as a “homegrown violent extremist.”

Documents revealed by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden beginning in 2013 indicated that the government used/uses EO 12333 as the basis for collecting bulk communications surveillance programs overseas.

Meanwhile, as we reported last week, the acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke has called on Silicon Valley to remove extremist content that may cause “homegrown violent extremists.”

This comes amid calls for renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which the EFF is fighting against to declare Section 702 of the surveillance unconstitutional, while Congress is proposing another new bipartisan law called the USA Rights Act seeking to close a legal loophole to conduct warrantless surveillance on American citizens, Tech Crunch reported.

The USA Rights Act will permanently end the “about” collection. It also puts an end to the “backdoor searches” on Americans, and it will increase oversight for surveillance programs.

“The American people deserve better from their own government than to have their internet activity swept up in warrantless, unlimited searches that ignore the Fourth Amendment,” Sen. Rand Paul said. “Our bill institutes major reforms that prove we can still protect our country while respecting our Constitution and upholding fundamental civil liberties.”

Additionally, this news comes as a letter was just written to Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking if the USA PATRIOT Act and Pipeline Safety Act contain enough provisions to criminalize actions against “energy infrastructure at the federal level” by environmentalist groups labeling them “terrorists” which could be seen as “homegrown violent extremists.”

So will this new mandate allow the U.S. government and the Trump administration to surveil activists using their First Amendment right to assemble and protest? This again leads us to ask the question, “how will Trump’s administration compare to his predecessor?” Only time will tell.

For further information, you can view all the newly released documents on the Human Rights Watch website.

Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post and is Director of Content for Coinivore. Follow Aaron at Twitter and Steemit.

This article is Creative Commons and can be republished in full with attribution. Like Activist Post on Facebook, subscribe on YouTube, follow on Twitter and at Steemit.

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SOLDIERS OF ODIN

LAUNCH OFFENSIVE TO HUNT EXTREMISTS AT U.S. MOSQUES

Submitted by IWB, on June 13th, 2016

James King for Vocativ reports The Soldiers of Odin held a “patrol” at a Denver-area mosque, escalating their intimidation tactics against Muslims. An anti-Muslim vigilante group with roots in Europe is now targeting mosques in the United States with “patrols” meant to curb Islamic extremism and radicalism.

Read more:
http://www.vocativ.com/327191/soldier…

Western Gov'ts Create 'Perfect Climate' for Terror by Funding Extremists

© AFP 2015/ Fadi al-Halabi

Politics

18:35 23.11.2015(updated 18:42 23.11.2015) Get short URL

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By funding radical organizations – from the Afghan Mujahideen to the Islamic State – Western governments "have created the perfect climate" for terror attacks in their homeland and used the terror threat as a pretext for implementing Orwellian-style policies, Scottish geopolitical analyst Steven MacMillan writes.

According to Scottish geopolitical analyst Steven MacMillan, it is beyond even a shadow of doubt that Western foreign policy has directly resulted in the rise of terrorism in the Middle East.

"These groups would not have the resources and global reach to launch any attacks in the West if they had not been armed, trained and let loose on the Syrian government by NATO members in collusion with regional allies. For those who have been following the proxy war in Syria and the nefarious and insidious policies of the West, this latest attack comes as no surprise," MacMillan notes in his recent piece for New Eastern Outlook.

© rusplt.ru

To Defeat ISIL, Europe Should Remember Its 'Original' Terrorists

In order to illustrate his statement, the geopolitical analyst pointed to a number of facts shedding light on the controversial role of the Western establishment in the emergence of radical groups in the Middle East.
Citing the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, MacMillan noted that back in 2012 the US authorities were well informed that the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria included "the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq)." Al-Qaeda in Iraq is one of the names used for the notorious Islamic State.
According to the report, US intelligence officials envisaged the establishment of a "declared or undeclared" Salafist principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor) in order "to isolate the Syrian regime."

"The former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael T. Flynn, revealed in a recent interview that the Obama administration took the 'willful decision' to support the rise of the Syrian rebels in 2012, even though Washington knew the opposition was composed of extreme terror groups," MacMillan continues.

© AFP 2015/ YOUSSEF KARWASHAN

Mysterious Middleman: Who is Buying ISIL's Crude and Dropping Oil Prices?

Remarkably, the UK has poured millions into the Syrian insurgency. Together with Washington and some EU member states, London was involved in providing the Syrian rebels with almost 3,000 tons of weapons in 2013.
In its turn, the French government has delivered vast sums of money and weapons to the so-called "Syrian opposition," MacMillan emphasized.
In a further complication of the situation, former French minister of Foreign Affairs Roland Dumas revealed that the war in Syria was "prepared, preconceived and planned" by some Western top officials at least "two years before the violence" erupted in 2011.
But were London, Paris, Brussels and Washington indeed unable to foresee the possibility of terror attacks in Europe after they armed Syrian religious extremists and then flooded Europe with refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa?
Predictably, terrorists jumped at the opportunity to enter the European Union alongside innocent asylum seekers, the analyst remarked.
"This leads to the question: Do Western leaders welcome more attacks?" he asks.

"It is clear that Western countries have been using the hoax of the 'war on terror' as a justification to impose totalitarian control domestically, in addition to using it to mobilize public opinion for imperial wars abroad. The US, UK and France, can't justify a dystopian surveillance state without terror attacks, and these attacks allow the government to impose policies that the population would have never have accepted prior to the crisis," MacMillan explained, adding that the recent Paris attack may prompt the Western governments to demand even more Orwellian-style surveillance powers.

At the same time, the Scottish researcher noted that there have been a few signs showing that European powers could shift their stance toward Syria and the government of Bashar al-Assad.
"In Syria, we're looking for the political solution to the problem, which is not Bashar Assad. Our enemy in Syria is ISIL," Hollande said as quoted by MacMillan.
And still it is difficult to believe that the West will change its foreign policy course anytime soon, the analyst believes, expressing the hope that Russia "will encourage the West to move in the direction of sanity."

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/politics/20151123/1030598158/western-governments-terrorism-syria-isil-alqaeda.html#ixzz3sPfG94Co