WASHINGTON \u2014 Officials in a little-known security unit within the Commerce Department conducted unauthorized surveillance and investigations into the agency\u2019s employees that targeted people of Chinese and Middle Eastern descent, Senate investigators said in a new report.<\/p>\n
The report, informed by more than two dozen whistle-blowers and released this week by Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Commerce Committee, concluded that the Investigations and Threat Management Service functioned for more than a decade as \u201ca rogue, unaccountable police force,\u201d opening thousands of unauthorized investigations into department employees, often for specious reasons.<\/p>\n
It found that the work of the office \u2014 consumed by concerns about rampant Chinese espionage in the United States \u2014 sometimes veered into racial profiling, and that its leaders used extreme tactics, such as sending masked agents to break into offices to search for incriminating evidence. <\/p>\n
\u201cCombating national security threats posed by China should be a priority for any agency, but that does not give the federal government a license to disregard the law,\u201d Mr. Wicker said in a statement. \u201cAbuse of authority and race-based targeting is unacceptable, especially in law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The unit, an internal security office inside the Commerce Department, became fixated on rooting out foreign espionage, according to the report, resorting to searching employees\u2019 email accounts for certain phrases in Chinese and flagging \u201cethnic surnames\u201d for background checks through secure intelligence databases. In some cases, its agents would covertly search employees\u2019 offices wearing face masks and gloves, sometimes picking locks to gain entry.<\/p>\n
Unit leaders often refused to close investigations into employees even after agents were unable to find incriminating evidence, at times leaving researchers or other employees in administrative limbo. Almost 2,000 cases remained open at the end of last year, Senate investigators said.<\/p>\n
In recent years, American law enforcement officials have become increasingly concerned that China is expanding its spying efforts in the United States and using visiting Chinese scholars for intelligence-gathering purposes. The Senate report laid out how those fears fueled an aggressive, unauthorized counterespionage effort inside a department that houses scientific agencies staffed by researchers from around the world. The result, it said, was a discriminatory effort to target and spy on people of Asian and Middle Eastern descent \u2014 many of them Chinese Americans, but some from Iran and Iraq \u2014 even in the absence of reasonable suspicion.<\/p>\n
Under the Biden administration, department officials suspended the unit\u2019s investigations and began an internal review of the program in April, a spokeswoman said, <\/span>adding that officials were examining Mr. Wicker\u2019s report and took the allegations against the office \u201cvery seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n The spokeswoman said officials expected their internal review to conclude \u201cin the coming weeks, at which point the department will share its plans for addressing the issues that have been raised.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Wicker\u2019s report was the culmination of a six-month Senate inquiry in which investigators interviewed more than two dozen whistle-blowers and combed through a trove of internal documents. The Washington Post reported on some of the investigation\u2019s initial findings in May, while the inquiry was still active.<\/p>\n Senate investigators painted a picture of a unit that routinely engaged in unethical or unsafe activities that were beyond the scope of its mandate and that its employees were not trained to do. The report indicated that the bulk of those efforts were driven over the course of multiple administrations by one official: George Lee, the unit\u2019s longtime director, who has since been placed on leave.<\/p>\n Mr. Lee could not be reached for comment on Friday.<\/p>\n Investigators with the unit surveilled social media activity for commentary criticizing the census, and then would run the commenters\u2019 names through classified databases, \u201cdespite having unclear authority from the intelligence community to use these databases for this purpose,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n One whistle-blower who aided the investigation and was subsequently interviewed by The New York Times said that the focus on investigating dissenting social media comments was particularly frustrating because the unit did not follow up on threats made against census employees \u2014 including if commenters wrote on Facebook that they would shoot an enumerator if they came to their house, for example.<\/p>\n Much of the unit\u2019s focus was looking within the Commerce Department for perceived threats, often targeting \u201cemployees renowned in their professional fields,\u201d the report said, with many of those investigations targeting subjects with Chinese or Middle Eastern ancestry.<\/p>\n Investigators said that the practice dated back \u201cas early as 2014,\u201d during the Obama administration, and that the unit specifically \u201ctargeted departmental divisions with comparably high proportions of Asian American employees.\u201d<\/p>\n An internal document reviewed by The Times shows that unit employees were encouraged to search employees\u2019 email accounts for terms written in Chinese characters as broad as \u201cfund,\u201d \u201cgovernment support\u201d and \u201cproject lead,\u201d ostensibly to root out employees who were participating in a Chinese talent recruitment program. Any matching language found in an employee\u2019s inbox would prompt an investigation, two former employees said in independent interviews.<\/p>\n A torrent of hate and violence\u00a0against people of Asian descent around the United States began last spring, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\nA Rise in Anti-Asian Attacks<\/h4>\n
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