Two current Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials have confirmed that DHS and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) engaged in an undercover operation with the Drug Enforcement Agency during the racial justice protests in Portland, Oregon this summer ( DEA) have focused on “extracting information from the protester’s phones”.
Officials told The Nation that a DHS colleague with expertise in electronic surveillance had been sent to Portland as part of an “Interagency Task Force” that was conducting a classified cell phone clone attack to “intercept protesters’ telephone communications.”
“Cell phone cloning involves stealing a phone’s unique identifiers and copying them onto another device to intercept communications received from the original device,” explains The Nation. It is a tactic that is carried out to better understand your target, network, and planning. It is believed that the DEA had a “special key” to perform the surveillance.
While it is unclear who was specifically affected by the surveillance, “they were abusing people’s rights,” one official said. The DHS also did not respond to calls from Congress to explain the program.
Officials quoted in The Nation’s article say that colleagues from DHS have been asked to volunteer to participate in the program, which is what departments do to conduct operations outside of the department’s official and legal capabilities.
The overall aim, officials said, was to back up Attorney General William Barr’s thin allegations that antifa activists (anti-fascist activists) are receiving foreign sponsorship, which is a necessary criterion to officially designate the group as a terrorist organization, which Trump vowed to do just yesterday.
Given that the U.S. has a long history of surveillance, harassment, and possibly even killing of racial justice activists since the civil rights era, this latest program is hardly surprising, if still scary.
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