This doesn’t normal at all, and they need to do more explaining to pass it off as normal.
It’s normal for a large government body to monitor what is being said about them in the news for communications purposes (i.e. the NYT prints a story that you wasted $1B on a failed pilot of X, you need to be ready to speak to that).
- This purpose is served by monitoring what is being said, not who is saying it
- It is irrelevant whether the source is “hostile” or not if your goal is merely to share information or correct misinformation
I think this also shows the pernicious effect of Trump calling things “fake news”. If this is genuinely a non-story and the DHS is doing something totally non-sinister here, their ability to claim that by saying the reporting is inaccurate is completely undermined.
