[Peace-discuss] quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I've suggested that AWARE is the best thing that's happened
in years to the C-U FBI office: they now have potential
"terrorists" to track, along with the state and local police
departments -- much more interesting than busting kids for
pot, say.  But here from MSM is an account of how the Pentagon
is horning in on the action.  Must make for for some tense
meetings over who's going to bug our meetings... --CGE]

  MSNBC.com
  Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
  Secret database obtained by NBC News 
  tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups
  By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella 
  and the NBC Investigative Unit
  Updated: 7:51 p.m. ET Dec. 13, 2005

WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake
Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest
of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't
know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the
U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC
News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of
more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over
a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is
incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group
called The Truth Project.

“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It's an
example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We're not
doing anything illegal.”

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at
how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection
inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the
monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military
recruitment groups.

“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in
fact, has reached too far,” says NBC News military analyst
Bill Arkin.

The Department of Defense declined repeated requests by NBC
News for an interview. A spokesman said that all domestic
intelligence information is “properly collected” and involves
“protection of Defense Department installations, interests and
personnel.” The military has always had a legitimate “force
protection” mission inside the U.S. to protect its personnel
and facilities from potential violence. But the Pentagon now
collects domestic intelligence that goes beyond legitimate
concerns about terrorism or protecting U.S. military
installations, say critics.

Four dozen anti-war meetings
The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four
dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have
taken place far from any military installation, post or
recruitment center. One “incident” included in the database is
a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles
last March that included effigies of President Bush and
anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned
protest against military recruiters last December in Boston
and a planned protest last April at McDonald’s National Salute
to America’s Heroes — a military air and sea show in Fort
Lauderdale, Fla.

The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible
threat and a column in the database concludes: “US group
exercising constitutional rights.” Two-hundred and forty-three
other incidents in the database were discounted because they
had no connection to the Department of Defense — yet they all
remained in the database.

The DOD has strict guidelines (.PDF link), adopted in December
1982, that limit the extent to which they can collect and
retain information on U.S. citizens.

Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to
U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC
News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing
its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document
stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased
communication and encouragement between protest groups using
the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between
incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or
“vehicle descriptions.”

The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.

“It means that they’re actually collecting information about
who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those
protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is
unprecedented,” he says. “I think it's the beginning of
enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.”

Some former senior DOD intelligence officials share his
concern. George Lotz, a 30-year career DOD official and former
U.S. Air Force colonel, held the post of Assistant to the
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight from 1998
until his retirement last May. Lotz, who recently began a
consulting business to help train and educate intelligence
agencies and improve oversight of their collection process,
believes some of the information the DOD has been collecting
is not justified.

Make sure they are not just going crazy
“Somebody needs to be monitoring to make sure they are just
not going crazy and reporting things on U.S. citizens without
any kind of reasoning or rationale,” says Lotz. “I
demonstrated with Martin Luther King in 1963 in Washington,”
he says, “and I certainly didn’t want anybody putting my name
on any kind of list. I wasn’t any threat to the government,”
he adds.

The military’s penchant for collecting domestic intelligence
is disturbing — but familiar — to Christopher Pyle, a former
Army intelligence officer.

“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War,
Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring
and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he
published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.

The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional
investigation followed that revealed that the military had
conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American
citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify
that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of
them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the
wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law
placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.

But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in
Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database
suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating
its past mistakes.

“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back
conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian
political activity. The military made promises that it would
not do this again,” he says.

Too much data?
Some Pentagon observers worry that in the effort to thwart the
next 9/11, the U.S. military is now collecting too much data,
both undermining its own analysis efforts by forcing analysts
to wade through a mountain of rubble in order to obtain
potentially key nuggets of intelligence and entangling U.S.
citizens in the U.S. military’s expanding and quiet collection
of domestic threat data.

Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known
agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to
establish and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database
that includes information related to potential terrorist
threats directed against the Department of Defense.”
Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also
established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or
Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide
“non-validated domestic threat information” from military
units throughout the United States that are collected and
retained in a CIFA database. The reports include details on
potential surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles,
bomb threats and planned anti-war protests. In the program’s
first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports.
The database obtained by NBC News is generated by
Counterintelligence Field Activity.

CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S.
national security community. Its “operational and analytical
records” include “reports of investigation, collection
reports, statements of individuals, affidavits,
correspondence, and other documentation pertaining to
investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S.
government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats.
Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in
contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys
Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop
Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and
unclassified government data, commercial information and
Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and
spies.

One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by
Northrop Grumman and dubbed “Person Search,” is designed “to
provide comprehensive information about people of interest.”
It will include the ability to search government as well as
commercial databases. Another project, “The Insider Threat
Initiative,” intends to “develop systems able to detect,
mitigate and investigate insider threats,” as well as the
ability to “identify and document normal and abnormal
activities and ‘behaviors,’” according to the Computer
Sciences Corp. contract. A separate CIFA contract with a small
Virginia-based defense contractor seeks to develop methods “to
track and monitor activities of suspect individuals.”

“The military has the right to protect its installations, and
to protect its recruiting services,” says Pyle. “It does not
have the right to maintain extensive files on lawful protests
of their recruiting activities, or of their base activities,”
he argues.

Lotz agrees.

“The harm in my view is that these people ought to be allowed
to demonstrate, to hold a banner, to peacefully assemble
whether they agree or disagree with the government’s
policies,” the former DOD intelligence official says.

'Slippery slope'
Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues
at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there
is very little that could justify the collection of domestic
intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going
down this slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a
place we never want to see again,” he says.

Some of the targets of the U.S. military’s recent collection
efforts say they have already gone too far.

“It's absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our
government,” says Hersh of The Truth Project.

“I mean, we're based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says
Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are
Quakers.”

The Defense Department refused to comment on how it obtained
information on the Lake Worth meeting or why it considers a
dozen or so anti-war activists a “threat.”

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/