The Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Donald Trump is preparing to engage in counterterrorism work, warned a political analyst.
According to Ken Klippenstein, FEMA, primarily known for disaster preparation and aid, “is shelling out grant money to state and local authorities to build up capacity to carry out pre-crime operations against ‘organized political violence,’” per a recent agency bulletin.
It’s part of Trump’s executive order to attempt to stop crimes before they take place, a concept popularized to a dystopian extreme in the 2002 science fiction film Minority Report.
The “pre-crime” operations, according to the bulletin, will include urging states to pay for “training to spot ‘social media-based indicators,’ analysts to monitor “’online behaviors and digital footprints,’ and teams for ‘managing persons of concern whose behavior indicates a potential trajectory toward domestic terrorism,’” Klippenstein’s report indicated.
In particular, said Klippenstein, the bulletin stresses “indicators” which “are something a person said or did that an officer has been trained to read as a sign of a crime that hasn’t happened and may never happen.” This is essentially “vibes-based law enforcement,” he argued, “with the imprimatur of national security respectability” — and a grave threat to civil liberties.
FEMA under the Trump administration has been plagued with troubles. A procurement rule enacted by former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem delayed disaster responses in several emergencies, including the tragic floods in Central Texas. Additionally, the third-in-command at the agency had to be let go after he started ranting that God hadteleported him to a Waffle House.
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