A nonprofit group focused on privacy and civil liberties said Tuesday it has sued the Department of Homeland Security in the hope of delaying its move to monitor media coverage, until DHS explains the impact that step will have on reporters privacy.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center on May 30 filed a complaint against DHS that claims the department broke federal law because it did not publish a Privacy Impact Assessment about its plan to create a “media influencer database,” which was announced in early April.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, stated that since the tracker “will necessarily include personally identifiable information from individuals identified in the media coverage tracked by the DHS,” the E-Government Act of 2002 maintains DHS must issue a formal document explaining how it will affect the press.
The complaint said DHS did not honor Freedom of Information Act requests that EPIC filed April 13 asking DHS for this privacy assessment and “agency records including but not limited to police guidelines, memoranda, email communications, and Privacy Threshold Analysis related to ‘Media Monitoring Services.'”
EPIC has previously sued other government entities for the same Privacy Impact Assessments and won.
DHS press secretary Tyler Houlton has maintained the database is not a federal attempt to infringe on reporters privacy, but track how it is being covered.
Despite what some reporters may suggest, this is nothing more than the standard practice of monitoring current events in the media. Any suggestion otherwise is fit for tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorists. https://t.co/XGgFFH3Ppl
— Tyler Q. Houlton (@SpoxDHS) April 6, 2018
The database would include information from approximately 300,000 global news sources and social media accounts. It would “identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event.”
