Salem, Ore. — U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials under then-President Donald Trump have compiled intelligence files on people who were arrested in Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon according to an internal audit.
Surveillance of Portland protesters in 2020 “included lists of friends, family and social media associates of people who did not pose a threat to national security,” US Sen. Ron Wyden’s office, which received the report, told reporters.
The dossiers, known to agents as baseball cards, previously were typically compiled on non-US citizens or only Americans with “identified ties to terrorism,” the agency said. The report has 76 pages.
Ben Wiesner, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union on free speech, privacy and technology, said the report shows that Homeland Security officials wanted to increase the risk posed by the Portland protesters. The city became the epicenter of sometimes violent demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by a Minneapolis police officer. But many of the protesters, including women who belong to the Wall of Moms task force and war veterans, were peaceful.
“We have a dark history of intelligence gathering dossiers on protesters,” Wiesner said by phone from New York, referring to domestic espionage in the 1960s and ’70s against civil rights activists, war veterans, Vietnam and others.
“We need to be especially careful when intelligence agencies are going to step in to look at protest activity and where Americans are exercising their First Amendment rights,” Wiesner said.
Protesters who break the law are not immune from investigation, Wiesner said, but intelligence agencies must be careful not to create a “chilling environment” for Americans to legitimately exercise their right to dissent.
The report reveals actions taken by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis in June and July 2020, when militarized federal agents were deployed to Portland.
When the dossiers, officially known as “Operations,” were being compiled, some DHS analysts raised concerns about the legality of gathering intelligence “on protesters arrested for minor criminal offenses with little or no connection to domestic terrorism,” the report said. Some employees even refused to participate.
Wyden, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, criticized DHS leaders in the Trump administration for the actions revealed in the report.
“DHS political officials spied on Oregonians exercising their First Amendment right to protest and justified it with baseless conspiracy theories,” Wyden said.
Brian Murphy, who was acting undersecretary for intelligence at DHS at the time, insisted on calling the violent protesters “inspired by violent antifa anarchists,” even though there was “no overwhelming information about the motivations or affiliation of the violent protesters,” according to the report . .
Top DHS leaders even wanted the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis to create a dossier on everyone involved in the Portland protests, but Murphy said the unit could only look at people who had been arrested.
Surveillance was also widely used in other cities during the 2020 protests, when federal agencies sent drones and military aircraft to assist local law enforcement. But it’s unclear exactly how that surveillance was used: Late last year, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit against several government agencies seeking the information, but the case is still pending in the Southern District of New York.
However, some agencies acknowledged that tracking was problematic. An investigation by the Department of the Air Force Inspector General, completed in August 2020, found that Air National Guard aircraft were used to monitor protests in Minnesota, Arizona, California and Washington, D.C., without express authorization from military leaders.
The sighting in Phoenix, Arizona, was of “particular concern,” the inspector general’s investigation found, because documentation related to the flight suggests it was used to allow law enforcement agencies to quickly deploy to areas where they hoped to contain protests or looting.
“There are no scenarios in which it would be acceptable or permissible to use DoD (DoD) assets to contain demonstrations and protests, provided they remain lawful,” the report said.
The Portland DHS internal review was previously published last year, but has had more redactions.
A less redacted version Wyden’s office provided to reporters Thursday also shows the baseball cards — which were typically one-page summaries — included any past criminal history, travel history, “derogatory information from DHS or Intelligence Community holdings” and publicly available social media. The drafts also included friends and family of the protesters.
Wyden credited current Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Kenneth Weinstein with reviewing the Trump administration’s “unnecessary redactions” and releasing the unredacted report.
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