Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere were on fire yesterday, with the news that Homeland Security Is Monitoring The Drudge Report, The New York Times, and other various websites.  The headline sparked burning blog posts all across the web, some bordering on hysterics. Type “Homeland Security” and “Drudge” into Google and perform a search within the last twenty four hours, and you’ll find 56,700 results at this writing.

The story was borne out of an upcoming privacy compliance review from the Department of Homeland Security regarding one of the agency’s initiatives that entails monitoring “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards.”  There’s just one important detail missing here:  the program was actually implemented in January of 2010.

The Volokh Conspiracy, a well-known group blog of law professors, puts the hype in check:

Matt Drudge and The Atlantic are hyperventilating, and Mark Hosenball of Reuters is bragging, about what The Atlantic calls an “exclusive” report that DHS “routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report.”

There are just two problems with this exclusive news report.

It isn’t news and it isn’t exclusive.

Readers of this blog could have learned exactly the same thing in one of my posts from, uh, February of 2010.

Here’s what I said two years ago:

With his usual nudge-and-wink, Matt Drudge invites us to be dismayed that “BIG SIS” — his moniker for Janet Napolitano — is “Monitoring Web Sites for Terror and Disaster Info.” Drudge links to a story saying that DHS will be monitoring social media like Twitter, as well as websites like Drudge, to keep abreast of events during the Winter Olympics. The source of the story is a twelve-page “Privacy Impact Assessment” issued by DHS.

This isn’t the first Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on DHS’s use of social media. A few weeks earlier, DHS wrote a similar assessment of using social media during Haitian rescue operations.

I am indeed dismayed, but not for Drudge’s reasons.  True, it’s disappointing that neither the Volokh Conspiracy nor www.skatingonstilts.com is deemed worthy of government monitoring.  But what’s really dismaying is that DHS and its Privacy Office felt obliged to labor over two separate and painfully obvious privacy assessments just to do things that you and I would do by simply firing up our browsers.

That’s it.  The story is that people at DHS are, gasp, browsing the Internet. As I said then, there’s no scandal, other than the electrons wasted by DHS agonizing over the privacy implications of browsing public Internet sources to find out what’s happening in the world.

The program is referred to as the Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative (pdf), and it was first implemented to monitor activity and news during events like those mentioned above.

Some seem especially concerned about the portion of the initiative that pertains to actually retaining personally identifiable information.

The DHS Privacy Office (PRIV) and OPS/NOC decided to further broaden the program’s capability to collect additional information, including limited instances of personally identifiable information (PII). As such, a Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) Update5 and new DHS/OPS-004 – Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative System of Records Notice (SORN)6 were issued on January 6, 2011 and February 1, 2011 respectively and are the basis for this Privacy Compliance Review (PCR).

But upon close inspection of “personally identifiable information,” the activity is really no different from what you or I might do to gather our own news interests.

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Hats off to Politico’s Roger Simon for pointing out that TSA Empress Napolitano has no clothes.

She has no real plan for catching terrorists; she’s just hoping to “discourage” them while spending vast sums of taxpayer dollars buying really expensive ElectroNudie scanners that embarrass regular travelers.  But, Simon observes that, ”as it turns out, the machines don’t detect explosives at all. They detect images on your body that shouldn’t belong on your body.”  Beautiful.

Dissecting Candy Crowley’s interview of TSA Secretary Janet Napolitano on CNN’s Sunday show,  Simon succinctly exposed Napolitano’s justification for the ElectroNudie-scanners’ shocking $300,000 million price tag:

One of the real successes of the machines and procedures, Napolitano said, is that they discourage terrorists from even trying to get on planes.  In other words, the machines keep us safe even if they don’t work at all.

Which means, I guess, that I should breathlessly await Napolitano to soon release the official 2010 “Number of Terrorists Discouraged” statistics, akin to the Administration’s infamous “Number of Jobs Saved” contrivances.  Of course, either set of numbers will be interchangeable with the University of East Anglia’s conjured global warming statistics.

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Just in time for Christmas, Muslim terrorists deployed a new weapon: the Burqa.

But few in the American Make-Believe Media seem impressed. In fact, coverage of the Burqa Bomber by Reuters and CBS News was dwarfed by that of traditional media giants Tehran Times and Malaysia Sun.

Yes, this little story apparently has no legs, journalistically speaking - female and child suicide terrorists are so yesterday. Where it was buried (such as NY Times and Bloomberg’s Business section), reporting centered on the gender of the attacker and the interruption in food distribution at the UN food center — with only passing mention of what she was wearing. How fashionably gauche!

No, this is not a terrorist fashion commentary. What’s missing in the paucity of reporting or news commentary is the inevitable twist on terrorism. A burqa is purposefully an identity tent, obscuring the wearer’s body, face and hair, revealing only the eyes. Originally meant to shield women from lecherous Muslim men, it now serves officially as a weapon of war.

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Oh, the spirit 0f giving is in the air—

With that thought we take a sneek peek under the tree of those who lead this great nation through perilous times—–gifts deserved, gifts needed.

JANET NAPALITANO- Binoculars. High powered. Aimed at the Arizona border. If you see something, say something.

JOHN BOEHNER- A pack of Marlboros and 2 hours in a tanning bed of your choice (you’ll have to pay the new health care taxes.)

THE TEA PARTY- You have everything you need, just keep it up.

ACTIVIST OLD MEDIA- You have everything you need, just keep it up. You will be irrelevant soon and you will be the last to know.

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The Mainstream Media (MSM) has gone “Missing in Action” as the TSA institutes it new comply or don’t fly rules.

The Progressive Opinion-makers such as Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and others have fallen silent against these new rules and were the nightly appearances by all those drive-by Constitutional Scholars and Experts from places like Harvard and Georgetown Law raging against this gross violation of our basic civil rights and liberties as they did against any renewal Patriot Act several years ago during the Bush Era.

Don’t expect much reporting in the MSM as many believe that they were responsible for getting this current administration elected to office and agree with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s statement that “Americans must comply with this new form of supposed enhanced security in order to fly.” This is why they are not reporting on public outrage at the TSA for its new requirement of groping Men, Women and Children in our public use airports all in the name of security. Yet Napolitano has stated recently she is willing to have her officers make exceptions for women of the Muslim faith.

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The patriotic immigration reform movement lost one of its most creative warriors last week.

Terry Anderson, the self-described “prisoner of South Central,” an African-American Los Angeles talk show host, succumbed to pancreatic cancer and died on July 7.

Anderson was the loud voice of the Sunday evening The Terry Anderson Show. The show, built around the single issue of immigration, was known for “articulating the popular rage.” It aired on KRLA radio and the internet.

And rage he did. Articulately. Against La Raza, John McCain, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Janet Napolitano, Cardinal Roger Mahony, Lindsey Graham, Antonio Villaraigosa, and the Obama Administration. In short, any sanctimonious phony who had allowed the country he loved – especially his corner of southern California – to be invaded by illegals.

For an auto mechanic, whose idea of a fashion statement was donning overalls, he was a natural communicator with a commanding presence. (more…)

In his June 8, 2010, 7,000-plus word Rolling Stone article entitled “The Spill, The Scandal, and the President,” Tim Dickinson fixed blame for the oil leak in the Gulf, but ignored how the effort to fix the mess it’s causing has been badly mismanaged. In that sense, he hit his intended targets, but missed the mark.

The subtitle of the piece identifies his targets.

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder.

The storyline is simple. A notoriously negligent oil company, British Petroleum (BP), plus a corrupt Minerals Management Services (MMS) inherited from Bush, equals The Spill. It’s a variation on the “It’s Bush’s Fault” motif.

Even a Republican Congressman piled on:

It’s tempting to believe that the Gulf spill, like so many disasters inherited by Obama, was the fault of the Texas oilman who preceded him in office. But, though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill. “Bush owns eight years of the mess,” says Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. “But after more than a year on the job, Salazar owns it too.”

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La Raza, MALDEF, MEChA, and all the rest of the shameless open-borders crowd should be quaking in their collectivist sandals. A fiery, well-spoken, and very wise Latina says that Arizona has the right to “protect our state from foreign invasion.”

That would be Gabriela Saucedo. In this YouTube video, Gabriela, who became a U.S. citizen in 1991, delivers a riveting defense of American sovereignty and SB 1070 (Paging Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano. She’s read the bill! She brings copies to the meeting!) to Mayor Bob Walkup and the Tucson City Council during the public comment portion of a meeting.

“The lack of support, from you, our elected officials, regarding this law is shameful!” scolds Gabby, as she takes a shot at her boycott-supporting congressman, Raul Grijalva, and her anti-rule-of-law city councilwoman, Regina Romero.

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A New Jersey court has ruled that bloggers are not journalists (now they’ve taken to the courts to establish this!). New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Judge Anthony J. Parrillo ruled last week that a blogger named Shellee Hale is not a journalist, and so does not enjoy the same protections that journalists do from being forced to reveal their sources.

Actually, this tool of a judge is right. For the most part, journalists today act as shills for the Democrat party. They cover up for the party’s crimes and excesses, obfuscate the effects of its disastrous policies, and propagandize for Obama’s agenda.

In that sense, bloggers are not journalists. The best bloggers aren’t shilling for Obama and Pelosi the way journalists are. Instead, bloggers are doing the heavy lifting. Who breaks the stories today? Bloggers. Take my own blog, AtlasShrugs.com, for example. I broke the explosive story of tens of thousands of dollars of Obama contributions from a Hamas-controlled “refugee” camp in Gaza. Did the “journalists” in the mainstream media pursue this story? Not a chance. Obama’s odd relationship with Kenyan pro-Sharia politician Raila Odinga? Atlas! Not to mention the numerous revelations I broke on the Rifqa Bary story (here and here and here and here), the story of the young Ohio girl who fled from her family in fear for her life after converting from Islam to Christianity.

If I am not a journalist, Anthony Parrillo is not a judge. (more…)

Ever wanted to be one of those highly paid caption writers on a large metropolitan daily or a major news magazine? Well, here’s your chance.

Even though the House chamber was chilly enough for an overcoat, a few folks got sleepy Wednesday night as they listened to the president’s State of the Union speech.  Harry Reid even nodded off.

But it looks like Janet Napolitano really caught up on her zzzzzs after exhausting herself stopping the BVD Bomber on Christmas.   Thanks for the nap, Barry!

The caption forum is now open, so have at it.

The flashy British tabloid the Daily Mirror and America’s so-called newspaper of record, the New York Times, would seem to represent opposite ends of the MSM.  Yet in the third week of January 2009, as two of their respective columnists rendered verdict on the outgoing president George W. Bush, the two papers seemed barely a bitch slap apart.

On one side of the Atlantic, writing for the fish-and-chips crowd, Tony Parsons declared Bush “the global village idiot,” “a 10th-rate President for a nation in decline,” “a natural simpleton, a rich man’s son who got to the Oval Office on his daddy’s shirttails.”  Meanwhile, in the learned pages of the Gray Lady, Maureen Dowd dropped the guillotine, deriding Bush as “the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance,” “Oedipally oddball,” “an asphyxiated and pampered son.”

Now that is all clever stuff, sure to win a round on the house at the MSM bar, where everybody knows that the Nobel Laureate out of Chicago will be remembered as a better president than the one-time drunk driver from Texas.

But the view from the future will likely be a different one.  The notions of Parsons and Dowd, like so much of the MSM storyboard, shall be of scant interest to presidential historians.  Instead the media’s decade of rage at George W. Bush will be written about by doctoral candidates in social psychology under the title “5 million minutes of hate.” (more…)

I woke up this morning to an email from Gillian Reagan, the reporter who had slammed me in a hit piece for Business Insider, defending her work and mitigating her sins, while not seeing how they all added up to an obvious hit job.  Thus began a war of words that’s continued all day.  Honest journalistic enterprise or partisan attack piece?  You be the judge:

PART 1: Gillian Reagan’s email

Hi Andrew,

We’d like to respond to your post on Big Journalism. May we repost the entry onto BusinessInsider.com so we can respond?

Let us know how you’d like to work it out.

Best,

Gillian

–

Gillian Reagan

The Business Insider

xxx@businessinsider.com

xxx Fifth Avenue, 7th Fl

New York, NY 10003

646-xxx-xxxx

~~~~

PART 2: Blodget Response to My Piece

From Buisness Insider:

Our Response To Andrew Breitbart’s Allegations About Us And Our Story

Yesterday, we published a story about Andrew Breitbart’s new site, Big Journalism. The story contained numerous quotes from Breitbart, including this one, in which the right-leaning Breitbart was describing sites operated by the left-leaning Arianna Huffington:

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For years, the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have played the same journalistic card trick:  Take the hot button issue of the week, cross it with the latest pop culture reference and – voila! – Times readers are treated to columns that give the appearance of having some kind of deep-seated cultural insight.

The problem, however, is that their “insights” won’t stand up to any kind of serious analysis, and quickly reveal themselves to be shallow, glib, sophomoric, and perhaps worst of all, predictable.

(Several weeks ago, for example, Rich struggled to make the claim that the George Clooney film Up in the Air is the Grapes of Wrath for our times – which sounds pretty good, until one thinks about it for a moment:  The film is about a guy who travels the country racking up frequent flier miles as he fires people; Steinbeck’s masterpiece is about the struggles of the Joads as they’ve lost their farm and their livelihoods, and set out for California, penniless.  But such is what passes for insight at the Times – where the upper westsider who’s been forced to fire a maid is seen as the tragic victim in need of sympathy, rather than the out-of-work maid.) (more…)