If this was April 1 I’d think that the following story was a joke.  I even Snopesed it to be sure it wasn’t a known hoax.  Apparently the Department of Homeland Security has asked firefighters to snoop around in houses they’ve been called to help (source Fox News).  From BoingBoing’s post about it:

The DHS likes the idea because firefighters aren’t bound by pesky
warrants and probable cause and can therefore report on suspicious
material like blueprints, anti-American literature, and potential
bomb-making materials (e.g., the bedrooms of every friend I had, circa
1985). Firefighters are just the latest legion of potential snoops the
DHS is leaning on — they’ve also asked meter-readers to peer into our
windows and sheds to find evidence of bad-guy-ery. This stuff doesn’t
work and won’t work: amateur pecksniffs snitching on their neighbors
just flood cops with bad intel, and turn the country into East Germany,
a land where everyone is on alert lest they say the wrong thing and get
turned in to the secret police.

And then from a comment on their post:

As a volunteer firefighter, I will say that turning firefighters into spies is a bad idea.

If criminals have to worry that by calling the fire department they are
also calling the DHS, they may be less likely to call in the first
place, putting lives and property at further risk. If they do call,
they may treat firefighters as hostile parties, placing firefighters’
lives at risk beyond the normal hazards of the job.

If firefighters have to worry that each call may be a hostile
one, that will distract them from the job at hand–saving lives in
immediate peril–and could delay response time in a business where a
few seconds or minutes often does make the difference between life and
death.

The list of "suspicious" things that firefighters are supposed
to be on the lookout for includes cameras, photographs, maps, and
chemicals. In my professional life I am a photographer, so my house is
full of cameras, photographs, maps, and chemicals (not to mention
rubber gloves, an organic vapor mask, etc.)–all perfectly legal–that
might fit the DHS’s definition of "suspicious."

What I find most disturbing about our leaders is that they seem to see our civil liberties as something that needs to be subverted in the name of security rather than protected in the name of civility.  Fat chance that will change anytime soon.