“An obscure security unit tasked with protecting the Commerce Department’s officials and facilities has evolved into something more akin to a counterintelligence operation that collected information on hundreds of people inside and outside the department, a Washington Post examination found. The Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) covertly searched employees’ offices at night, ran broad keyword searches of their emails trying to surface signs of foreign influence and scoured Americans’ social media for critical comments about the census, according to documents and interviews with five former investigators. In one instance, the unit opened a case on a 68-year-old retiree in Florida who tweeted that the census, which is run by the Commerce Department, would be manipulated ‘to benefit the Trump Party!’ records show.”

“In another example, the unit searched Commerce servers for particular Chinese words, documents show. The search resulted in the monitoring of many Asian American employees over benign correspondence, according to two former investigators. The office ‘has been allowed to operate far outside the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation at the Department,’ John Costello, a former deputy assistant secretary of intelligence and security at Commerce in the Trump administration, said in a statement for this story. ITMS ‘rests on questionable legal authority and has suffered from poor management and lack of sufficient legal and managerial oversight for much of its existence,’ Costello said.
Concerns have long simmered internally about the Commerce unit, which was led for more than a decade by career supervisor George D. Lee. The unit’s tactics appear as if ‘someone watched too many ‘Mission Impossible’ movies,’ said Bruce Ridlen, a former supervisor'” – Washington Post.