Homeland Security's Favorite Web Sites

Given that the Internet has become one of the world's most important sources of news and social discourse, it's probably appropriate, if not laudable, that the Department of Homeland Security should be closely monitoring the Web. In fact, according to official papers posted on Homeland Security's Web site, the department's National Operations Center has been making special efforts to enhance its "situational awareness" during major events, particularly the recent Haiti earthquake and the current Vancouver Olympics, by Web surfing. It has even published special "Privacy Impact Assessments" to advise the public of its intentions.

As USA Today reported on Feb. 1, Homeland Security personnel late last month were able to help emergency services locate and rescue a victim buried in a collapsed building by using information they found on Twitter. But earlier, Homeland Security had published a Privacy Impact Assessment listing some other Web resources that might help to "improve its situational awareness” and the “common operating picture related to [the] Haiti earthquake." Although many sites on the list are obvious choices—such as Drudge, Huffington Post, and Twitter—others are less scrutable: how, for example, would a Web site like the NEFA Foundation, which contains very specialized information on Islamic extremism and terrorist cases, be useful in monitoring events in Haiti, a country with no history of Islamic extremism? And what connection was there between events in Haiti and the content of the Los Angeles Times's undoubtedly excellent but very specialized blog on the threat of wildfires in Southern California?

The sites listed in the privacy notice Homeland Security published late last week related to the Vancouver Olympics also include many of both the obvious and odder choices listed in its Haiti-related privacy notice. Drudge, Huffington, Google Blog Search, and Twitter are all featured, as is The Blotter, the site of the ABC News investigative unit. (The Blotter posted an item about Homeland Security monitoring over the weekend, which in turn was linked by Drudge.)

Gone from the Vancouver-related list of Web sites was the L.A. Times's wildfire blog (though another of the paper's blogs, L.A. Now, is listed). Among the other entries on the Vancouver list—most of which were also on the Haiti list—are Cryptome.org, a site devoted to the publication of leaked secret government documents related to intelligence matters; WikiLeaks, which has a similar mission; Danger Room and Threat Level, two national-security blogs published by Wired magazine; Stratfor, a private-intelligence and risk-assessment service; and Passport, a blog published by Foreign Policy magazine (which, like NEWSWEEK, is owned by The Washington Post Company). More obscure listings include Borderfire Report, an anti-immigration blog that includes postings related to internal frictions inside the tea-party movement. Also listed (on both the Haiti and Vancouver lists) is Informed Comment, a blog by Juan Cole, an expert on the Middle East and Iran at the University of Michigan. (Missing from the list, however, are other potentially useful sites from various parts of the political and ideological spectrum, including neo-Nazi and pro-gun sites).

Cole told Declassified he believed that there was nothing strange in Homeland Security using his Web site as a resource, since "I cover Al Qaeda . . .  I know that a lot of people in the FBI and other agencies read my blog. They're generalists. If you want to know about this Muslim extremist stuff, it'll get you up to speed . . . If I came across an Islamic Web site which carried a threat related to the Olympics, I would blog it."

A Homeland Security official said that the department's expanded Web monitoring efforts related to Haiti and Vancouver "acknowledges that the first information from an incident comes via social media in today's world—we are only monitoring during incidents and special events." The official had no immediate explanation of the reasoning behind some of the department's more curious Web site choices. But the official added that Olympics-related sites not mentioned on the department's list, such as potentially relevant sites like those of Canadian media organizations and NBC, "are captured as part of standard media monitoring, and thus are not part of the special event-specific social-media monitoring."

UPDATE: After this item was first posted, Amy Kudwa, a spokesperson for Homeland Security, called us to advise that Web-site lists published by the department were "illustrative but not comprehensive," and that they represent a list of sites that, in the experience of the department's operational personnel, historically have contained information that has helped the department develop its situational awareness in the wake of a major incident.