Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post reports that Collins said Senate leadership and the highest ranking intelligence committee members were informed of the program, which The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed last week. But, she said,  "The rest of us did not. At the time, I was the ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, so I'd think that I would've had more information about that since I had, along with Joe Lieberman, a monthly threat briefing. But I did not have access to this highly compartmentalized information."

Collins added: "If they're talking about there being widespread knowledge [of PRISM in Congress], there was not."

HuffPo also reports that the Obama Administration held 22 briefings for Congress on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is the law that intelligence officials have used as authorization for the NSA's surveillance program.

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"I do not endorse actions that move Boston and our nation into a police state mentality, with surveillance cameras attached to every light pole in the city," Commissioner Edward Davis said in prepared remarks for the House Homeland Security Committee. "We do not and cannot live in a protective enclosure because of the actions of extremists who seek to disrupt our way of life."

Investigators used surveillance video from a restaurant near one of the explosions to help identify Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a police shootout, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, who survived, as the bombing suspects.

"Images from cameras do not lie. They do not forget," Davis said. "They can be viewed by a jury as evidence of what occurred. These efforts are not intended to chill or stifle free speech, but rather to protect the integrity and freedom of that speech and to protect the rights of victims and suspects alike."

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"It's a wide investigation that is multi-state. We are looking at whole industry spectrum of repair shops that are using substandard products," said Gerard O'Neill, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of Miami Field Office for Homeland Security.

O'Neill says it's a public safety issue and that is how Homeland Security is involved.

He says consumers have be hurt by overheating phones that were repaired using counterfeit parts.

"There are trademark and licensing violations as well," he added.

According to Abel Abella, the proprietor of one of the raided repair shops, "20 ICE agents and two people from Apple came to his store."

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Duncan, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee and chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency, harangued Napolitano for the alleged deportation, which he asserted as fact. "Now we have someone being deported for national security concerns and I'm assuming he's got some sort of link to terror or he wouldn't be being deported," Duncan said. "And yet we're going to deport him? We're going to remove him from the scene?"

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I heard the news as most did - through the digital grapevine. My initial reaction was the same as that of many people with loved ones in Boston - entirely personal and worried about possible friends and family who might have been maimed or, god forbid, killed. But while I fretted and texted and called, I also realized that something had changed in me -- and in all of us -- since I fled the U.S. Capitol back on Sept. 11, 2001. What had changed was that while I was nervous, worried, disgusted and anxious -- and while I was shaking my head muttering rhetorical questions about the senselessness of the world -- I was no longer shocked.

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1) "I have made the position of the United States of America clear: Iran must not get a nuclear weapon. This is not a danger that can be contained. As President, I have said to the world that all options are on the table for achieving our objectives. America will do what we must to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran."

2) "One thing is certain. The United States should never allow Iran to threaten the world with a nuclear bomb."

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But while the common justification for such conduct is the protection of Americans, there is much evidence that excessive secrecy actually harms national security.

First, it impedes information-sharing among government officials, and hampers effective coordination with our allies. It also cheapens the currency of secrecy, leading officials to exercise less care in their handling of classified information. And it results in unwise choices by executive officials who make key decisions about national security policy – for example, whether to go to war against Iraq – without the benefit of broad feedback and robust debate.

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Gillian Christensen, an ICE spokeswoman, said ICE has reviewed "several hundred cases" of immigrants being held in jails around the country and released them in the last week. They have been "placed on an appropriate, more cost-effective form of supervised release," she said.

Christensen said the agency's "priority for detention remains on serious criminal offenders and other individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety." She did not say how released immigrants were selected or what jails they were released from.

Tuesday's announcement of jail releases is the first tangible impact of the looming budget cuts for DHS.

The Obama administration has been issuing dire warnings about the impact of the sequestration and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters at the White House Monday that across-the-board cuts would impact the department's core operations, including border security and airport screening operations.

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But the CIA’s prisons left some unfinished business.  In 2009, ProPublica’s Dafna Linzerlisted more than thirty people who had been held in CIA prisons and were still missing.

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Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which comes amid a concerted focus on immigration reform from the White House to Capitol Hill, was to feature testimony from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and — in an unusual move for Congress — an illegal immigrant, Jose Antonio Vargas, a former journalist who founded the group Define American, which campaigns for immigration reform.

The former head of America Online, Steve Case, also was on the witness list, along with Chris Crane, president of the immigration and customs' workers union, which has opposed Obama's immigration policies.

The hearing comes a day after Obama, in his State of the Union address, renewed his call for sweeping immigration legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship for the nation's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of eight senators has been meeting to develop a bill by next month that accomplishes eventual citizenship for illegal immigrants while also containing enough border security and enforcement measures to gain conservative support.

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The first time he experiences this newly hardened U.S.-Canada border, it takes him by surprise. It’s a freezing late December day and Matthews, a lawyer (who asked me to change his name), is on the passenger side of a car as he and three friends cross the Blue Water Bridge from Sarnia, Ontario, to the old industrial town of Port Huron, Michigan. They are returning from the Reviving the Islamic Spirit conference in Toronto, chatting and happy to be almost home when the car pulls up to the booth, where a blue-uniformed U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent stands. The 60,000-strong CBP is the border enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security and includes both customs and U.S. Border Patrol agents. What is about to happen is the furthest thing from Matthews’s mind. He’s from Port Huron and has crossed this border “a million times before.”

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Texas Republican Rep. Mike McCaul edged out Michigan Rep. Candice Miller -- who was the GOP’s best hope of getting a female major committee head -- and Mike Rodgers in a close private vote this week. King’s tenure as chairman drew controversy for the series of hearings he held on the radicalization of Muslims in America. Critics didn’t discount the threat of homegrown terror but said King should have expanded the hearings to include all kinds of violent radicalism, including right-wing extremism.

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Romney himself understood this very problem when he chaired a little-noticed advisory council on homeland security in 2004.

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Today’s presidential debates are a long way from Mr. Garrity’s club. It seems that the first rule of the debate club now is: no disagreeing on what matters most. In fact, the two candidates rarely interact with each other at all, typically ditching whatever the question might be for some rehashed set of campaign talking points, all with the complicity of the celebrity media moderators preening about democracy in action. Waiting for another quip about Big Bird is about all the content we can expect.

But the joke is on us. Sadly, the two candidates are stand-ins for Washington in general, a “war” capital whose denizens work and argue, sometimes fiercely, from within a remarkably limited range of options.  It was D.C. on autopilot last week for domestic issues; the next two presidential debates are to be in part or fully on foreign policy challenges (of which there are so many). When it comes to foreign -- that is, military -- policy, the gap between Barack and Mitt is slim to the point of nonexistent on many issues, however much they may badger each other on the subject.  That old saw about those who fail to understand history repeating its mistakes applies a little too easily here: the last 11 years have added up to one disaster after another abroad, and without a smidgen of new thinking (guaranteed not to put in an appearance at any of the debates to come), we doom ourselves to more of the same.

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NYC's population is a little over 8 million. That means that there are 4.18 police officers per 1,000 people. By comparison, Los Angeles, the second largest city in the U.S. with 3.8 million people, has only 9,895 officers--a ratio of 2.6 police per 1,000 people.

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Fast-forward to 2012, and the danger posed by right-wing extremists still exists, as demonstrated by the recent Sikh Temple massacre, in Wisconsin. Yet DHS continues to turn a blind eye, says Johnson.

“Right around the time I went public last year, they hired a brand-new person with no experience and no law enforcement connections,” Johnson told Salon. But shortly thereafter the new hire was transferred to a different unit, again leaving just one analyst on the beat. A year later, Johnson says, “absolutely nothing has changed.”

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The Transportation Security Administration, a universally loathed government agency, is facing a shortfall, despite its more than $8 billion budget. Instead of having a debate over what effective airport security might actually look like and how much should reasonably be spent on the honestly rare threat of commercial-air-travel-based terrorism, there was a debate over how best to come up with the money needed for all the radioactive naked picture machines and bomb-sniffing dogs. The Democrats suggested passing on the cost of ineffective, cumbersome and intrusive security theater to citizens, via higher fees on airfares. The Republicans, even more predictably, suggested cutting spending that directly helps poor people to ensure there is enough to spend on stopping imaginary future 9/11s.

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Yet warning signs abound that 2012 will be another year in which, in the name of national security, those rights and liberties are only further Guantanamo-ized and abridged. Most notably, for example, despite the fact that genuinely dangerous enemies continue to exist abroad, there is now a new enemy in our sights: namely, American oppositional types and whistleblowers who are charged as little short of traitors for revealing the workings of our government to journalists and others.

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The story in the earlier article was that our sprawling intelligence and national security apparatus was caught off-guard by social media-fueled uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, and that they were going to take steps to be better prepared in the future.

DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the department was still trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook information for law enforcement purposes. And they seem to be starting completely from scratch:

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As he shopped for a children's watch inside the sprawling Mall of America, two security guards approached and began questioning him. Although he was not accused of wrongdoing, the guards filed a confidential report about Kleinerman that was forwarded to local police.

The reason: Guards thought he might pose a threat because he had been looking at them in a suspicious way.

Najam Qureshi, owner of a kiosk that sold items from his native Pakistan, also had his own experience with authorities after his father left a cellphone on a table in the food court.

The consequence: An FBI agent showed up at the family's home, asking if they knew anyone who might want to hurt the United States.

Mall of America officials say their security unit stops and questions on average up to 1,200 people each year. With 4.2 million square feet under one roof, the two-decade-old mall is a monument to suburban shopping and entertainment. Nearly 100,000 people from around the world pass through on a given day.

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