Obama’s ISIS War Already Hits Home: DHS Tells Retailers to Spy on You

Right about the time President Barack Obama
made to the nation his
declaration of war in Iraq and Syria against the terrorist
organization ISIS, Homeland Security Department (DHS) Secretary Jeh
Johnson quietly announced that he’s expanding the “See Something,
Say Something” campaign by enlisting retailers to make sure you’re
with us, not against us, in this fight.

Johnson delivered some remarks at the Council of Foreign
Relations in New York on September 10. He recalled that the
September 11, 2001 attacks gave birth to his department, and

boasted how much its grown since—”240,000 employees, 22
components and a total budget authority of about $60 billion”—but
apparently that’s not enough.

He listed the DHS’s five-point plan to slog through the
ever-hazier war on terror and the last one is “to address the
home-grown terrorist who may be lurking in our midst” by “sending a
private sector advisory identifying for retail businesses a long
list of materials that could be used as explosive precursors, and
the types of suspicious behavior that a retailer should look for
from someone who buys a lot of these materials.” He
refused to say exactly what’s on his list.

This new policy is alarming and problematic, first
of all, because the FBI, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and
Johnson himself (repeatedly)
have all
acknowledged that ISIS
poses no credible threat to the U.S. homeland.

Johnson assures he’s just looking for “explosive precursors” in
people’s shopping lists, but as TechDirt‘s Tim Cushing

points out, “that could be nearly anything.” Cushing predicts
that this could be used to justify an even greater invasion of
privacy: “Because retail outlets don’t share customer purchase data
with each other, this may result in the DHS attempting to justify
the requisition of data from multiple retailers using credit/debit
card numbers as a starting point.”

This
worst-first thinking, that someone buying a pressure
cooker or bags fertilizer must be a domestic terrorist, promotes a
climate of constant fear that degrades our own society, not
ISIS.