“When you are recording information about people’s political activities, you know that that is the first step towards acting on that speech,” Steinbaugh said. “And what the government then does with that information can have a real chilling effect.”
On July 24, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and three legal observers filed a First Amendment lawsuit against DHS, alleging the agency has “adopt[ed] a secret Protester Surveillance Policy enabling its agents to first collect records on Americans engaging in First Amendment exercise and then maintain them in DHS systems, where they can be used to retaliate against those Americans.”…
