The Department of Homeland Security intends to list and track hundreds of thousands of news outlets, journalists, bloggers, and “influencers” in traditional and new media alike. Its plan is to analyze targets’ “sentiment,” monitor “any and all” coverage of select news stories, and possibly share data with “federal, state, local, tribal, and private partners.”

If you find yourself skeptical of this proposal of mass state monitoring of the press, consider yourself a bonafide member of the “tinfoil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorists,” DHS representative Tyler Houlton said Friday. It’s all very routine, he argued, casting the project as an innocent means of “monitoring current events.” Just shut up and let us do this, crackpots.

Yet I am bareheaded, untroubled by black whirlybirds, and utterly unconvinced.