widens its cyber reach what does it mean for your online freedoms well to talk more about this is ginger mccall director of affix open government program and the i p i o p program welcome to our program ginger so d.h. s. is now expanding their monitoring social media and this has civil liberty advocates concerned why is that well first department of homeland security does not have the legal authority to engage in the sort of monitoring that they are engaging in it's well outside of the bounds of their statutory mandate second to this sort of monitoring has the very real potential to chill on line speech especially legitimate criticism and dissent against the government and i understand that you you're an attorney and your organization is filed a freedom of information act to the department of homeland security to get documents pertaining to social media monitoring what was the response that you got from that we got no response actually for about nine months until we filed a lawsuit against the department of homeland security under the freedom of information act and at that point we received abo