Unit meant to protect US Commerce Dept staff was secretly monitoring them, report claims

A security unit for the US commerce department has been accused of spying on Asian-American employees and critics of the census as part of an undercover bid to root out “foreign influence”.

The Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS), whose job it is to protect employees, allegedly over-stepped legal limits by instead behaving like a counterintelligence agency and collecting information on hundreds of staff and private citizens, including searching their desks and reading their emails and social media, according to The Washington Post, who spoke to five ex-investigators.

The 17-person team under the Trump administration reportedly had a $5.38 million annual budget and opened an estimated 1,000 cases, though very few led to any criminal cases, it has been claimed.