The United States of America, has extensive military departments, including a National Guard, and within each locality, there is also law enforcement, of which, the expressed purpose of all these agencies, together, is for the defense of America and for the protection of its citizens. Yet, when the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002, this signified a new chapter in citizen safety, for its very creation, implied that the citizens of the United States, needed to be secure.
The most basic problem with Homeland Security, really begins with its name. That name, seems to denote that this country, has an important obligation to see that this nation is both secured as well as protected; which begs the question, as to why it took this nation over 200 years to determine, that this specific department was needed for the security and protection of its people. So too, this presupposes that in order for the people to be fully secured, that they must do their patriotic duty and therefore sacrifice some of their freedoms and precious liberty in order for that security to be truly effective.
Life in America, currently consists of the fact that the population is being constantly monitored through all sorts of agencies and devices, of which some of this is of an individual's own making as in social media, internet activity, and by virtue of the use of one's cell phone; and some of this is the constant accumulation of all of the actionable information so being provided to various governmental agencies as a requirement to receive social benefits, or of employment, or of housing, or of healthcare, and the like. A lot of this monitoring of the population, is something that is not only often covert, but it is invasive, along with it also being opaque, and of which, these government agencies appear to be a law of their own, with nobody actually representing the people being in a position to thereby independently monitor those that are ostensibly protecting the citizens from some real and present danger.
It is not an especially difficult task to sell the story that homeland security is necessary in order to protect the population, especially when the narrative so being propagated, is confirmed by pliant mega-media companies, who benefit by toeing the governmental line, while receiving their own benefits, in return. Additionally, many citizens are only too willing to do their part to help keep this country safe, and therefore they are obedient to the state, in their apparent credulous belief that this is always the right thing to do. The problem, though, is that when one's own government, knows absolutely everything about its own citizenry, it is the shortest of steps for that government to become unnecessarily oppressive in its own right, especially when that governmental security agency has all of the tools to assert itself, in a targeted way against those citizens who appear to be difficult and unyielding.
Homeland security's true function is to convince the vast majority of the population that they should trade their freedom for the protection of the state, of which most of those people do not seem to realize that once traded, freedom is a very hard thing to ever get back; for make no mistake about it, the government has all of the force and a significant amount of the law on its side, which means that they are no longer the people's servant, but are and mean to be a repressive master.