Politico: Spy spat divides Jane Harman, Janet Napolitano
Politico is reporting that Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano are divided over the National Applications Office. There was an uproar last year over the spy-satellite program, which would greatly expand the domestic use of military technology.
Last year, 33 groups sent a letter (pdf) to Congress urging members not to fund the National Applications Office. “Satellite imagery and the other vast capacities at issue are powerful weapons that have been used against our nation’s enemies and that are now poised to be used against our nation’s citizens. Congress must ensure that neither DHS nor any other agency is entrusted with such vast and unsupervised powers,” the groups said.
Members of Congress also questioned the privacy and civil liberty implications of this program. The Government Accountability Office reviewed the Office and reported in November, “DHS lacks assurance that NAO operations will comply with applicable laws and privacy and civil liberties standards.” The GAO noted that DHS had not addressed “significant issues, including the potential for improper use or retention of intelligence information by customers and the potential for overly broad annual memorandums about customers’ planned uses, which may facilitate the acceptance of requests that should be rejected.”
Politico reports:
Harman, the California Democrat who chairs a House subcommittee on domestic intelligence, wants Napolitano to kill the agency’s deceptively named National Applications Office, established by the Bush administration to funnel military intelligence to local, state and federal law enforcement. [...]
So far, the friendly pressure hasn’t worked. Napolitano included an unspecified amount of funding for the office in the “classified annex” of the fiscal 2010 department funding request — which prompted a mini-lobbying effort by Harman, the former ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee and a Clinton administration security adviser. [...]
In a June 9 letter to Pelosi, Napolitano said department officials were studying the program to see if it was useful — or posed a risk to civil liberties.
But she made no commitment to defunding it — and seemed to defend the NAO’s mission.
“Our nation is best protected when all assets at every level of government are used to analyze and share information,” Napolitano wrote. [...]
The debate over NAO has raged since former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff quietly inserted funding for the office in a 2008 appropriations bill.
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