[Peace-discuss] "Neighborhood Watch": CIFA, TALON, etc.

[C. G. Estabrook]

[An article in this morning's WSJ illustrates why AWARE is the
best thing that ever happened to the careers of those
relegated to the Champaign office of the FBI & their friends.
--CGE]

   Pentagon Steps Up
   Intelligence Efforts
   Inside U.S. Borders
   Post-9/11 Campaign Includes
   Tracking Antiwar Protests,
   Mining Large Databases
   'Collecting' vs. 'Receiving'
   By ROBERT BLOCK and JAY SOLOMON
   April 27, 2006; Page A1

AKRON, Ohio -- On March 19, 2005, about 200 mainly middle-aged
peace marchers made their way through the streets of this
city, stopping outside a Marine Corps recruiting center and a
Federal Bureau of Investigation office to listen to speeches
against the Iraq war. Close behind, police in unmarked cars
followed them -- acting on a tip from the Pentagon.

For weeks prior to the demonstration, analysts at the Army's
902nd Military Intelligence Group in Fort Meade, Md., were
downloading information from activist Web sites, intercepting
emails and cross-referencing this with information in police
databases.

The Army's conclusion, contained in an alert to Akron police:
"Even though these demonstrations are advertised as
'peaceful,' they are assessed to present a potential force
protection threat."

The Akron protest and seven others monitored by the Army that
month turned out to be nonviolent. Pentagon officials later
issued an apology, admitting that some of the information in
military databases shouldn't have been there. But they called
that a minor slip in a critical program to protect Americans.

The government's monitoring of the protests is one example of
how the 9/11 terror attacks have sparked a broad effort by the
Pentagon to gather intelligence within U.S. borders. Its goals
are both to protect military facilities and keep an eye out
for any threat on American soil.

After 9/11, the Bush administration declared the continental
U.S. a theater of military operations for the first time since
the Civil War, creating a demand to better research potential
threats to American forces at home. Now several parts of the
vast Pentagon bureaucracy are building large databases of
information from sources including local police, military
personnel and the Internet. In doing so, the military is
edging toward a sensitive area that has been off-limits to it
since the 1970s: domestic surveillance and law enforcement.

One widely reported part of the new information battle is the
National Security Agency's wiretapping of calls without a
warrant between people in the U.S. and suspected terrorists
overseas. The agency is part of the Defense Department. That
practice is just one piece of a larger, less-discussed effort.

The military justifies the gathering of domestic intelligence
in part by relying on a key distinction between "receiving"
information and "collecting" it. Military regulations over the
past few decades have generally barred using soldiers to
gather information on American citizens. Officials have
interpreted the rules to mean that receiving information from
the police or federal agencies is acceptable.

"We are receiving information lawfully gathered by other
agencies and then following up on it to make an assessment,"
says Cmdr. Greg Hicks, a Pentagon spokesman.

Further, the military says it doesn't order civilian
law-enforcement officials such as the police or the FBI to do
anything. Military officials say they may point out items of
concern such as the Akron march but it's up to police whether
to listen.

The broad Pentagon effort comes amid a surge of popular
support after the 9/11 attacks for more vigilant efforts to
prevent terrorism. Polls continue to show backing for
aggressive moves. In a March Wall Street Journal/NBC News
poll1, 52% of those surveyed said they supported the NSA
wiretaps without a warrant, while 46% said they were opposed.

The military moves nonetheless face both political and
practical objections. Civil libertarians fear a return to the
Vietnam era, when military personnel collected information on
more than 100,000 Americans, infiltrated church youth groups
and posed as reporters to interview activists, according to a
1975 Senate investigation. Critics say the
receiving-versus-collecting distinction makes little sense if
the Pentagon is taking in huge amounts of data, organizing it,
analyzing it and using it to influence law enforcement.

"Today military spies can compile more information about
antiwar protesters by 'receiving' it off the Web than its
gumshoes used to collect by watching demonstrations," says
Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer who
disclosed the military's surveillance of civilian politics in
the 1960s to Congress and worked to end it. Mr. Pyle is now a
professor of politics at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

Because of the secrecy surrounding the programs, the results
of the Pentagon's efforts -- including any possible successes
in preventing terrorism -- are unknown. President Bush and
other officials have said that Americans often don't see such
successes because revealing them would help terrorists. Mr.
Bush's critics, aside from their civil-liberties concerns, say
monitoring antiwar activities may turn out to be a waste of
resources by diverting attention from known terrorists.

According to documents seen by The Wall Street Journal, the
Pentagon has monitored more than 20 antiwar groups' activities
around the country over the past three years. It has reviewed
photographs and records of vehicles and protesters at marches
to see if different activities were being organized by the
same instigators. Cmdr. Hicks says the point of this
monitoring is to keep military personnel away from places
where they might provoke demonstrators, not to interfere with
anyone's right to protest.

The peace activists don't like being watched. About 300
activists gathered at Akron's public library this February to
complain to elected representatives at a public hearing. They
had watched an NBC News report in December that said the
Pentagon included peace group activities in a database of
potential terrorist threats. Documents viewed by The Wall
Street Journal show that, as the activists suspected, their
Quaker-organized rally in March 2005 was on the Pentagon's
watch list. Those documents show a broader effort to gather
information for databases and analyze it.

'Eerie Feeling'

Pat Carano, a veteran of Ohio peace marches since the Vietnam
War, told the meeting of the "eerie feeling" of being watched
when he saw the unmarked police cars. "It's ridiculous," said
Donna Schapps, a grandmother of four from Stow, Ohio. "Quakers
are not terrorists. We believe in peace."

Strict limits on soldiers doing the work of police date back
to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, enacted in response to a
public backlash against troops maintaining civil order in the
South during Reconstruction. The act generally prohibits the
military from domestic law-enforcement activities.

The military's secret monitoring of dissidents during the
Vietnam War led to a slew of laws, regulations and executive
orders that pushed the military out of domestic spying and
created walls between domestic and foreign intelligence.

After Sept. 11, 2001, those walls came in for criticism from a
broad range of experts. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission
concluded that U.S. intelligence agencies needed to do a
better job of coordinating and connecting leads. The Pentagon
itself believed it might have prevented the attacks if its
ability to operate within the U.S. were less circumscribed,
and decided to take a fresh look at the post-Vietnam rules.

On Nov. 5, 2001, Lt. Gen. Robert W. Noonan Jr., then the
Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, sent a memo to
Army commanders titled, "Collecting Information on U.S. Persons3."

"Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on
intelligence components collecting U.S. person information,"
it said. Gen. Noonan noted that while the military was
normally barred from using its own assets to collect
information about people living in the U.S., military
intelligence "may receive information from anyone,
anytime...if only to determine its intelligence value.

"Remember," the memo stressed, "merely receiving information
does not constitute 'collection' " under Army regulations.

Michael Varhola, an official in the Army inspector general's
office, repeated the message in a January 2002 article in the
quarterly Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin. Even
though many types of information gathering were perfectly
legal, Mr. Varhola wrote, "unfortunately some individuals find
it easier or safer to avoid the issue altogether by simply not
collecting the data on citizens they may need to do their
complete jobs."

As such views spread, several parts of the Pentagon empire
soon swung into action to formalize information-gathering
efforts, though they weren't all necessarily acting in
concert. In February 2002, Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy
defense secretary, formed a unit at Pentagon headquarters to
manage all military counterintelligence programs. Its name was
Counter Intelligence Field Activity. CIFA, whose exact size
and budget remain secret, has grown to include nine
directorates. Its main focus is on protecting defense
facilities and personnel from terrorist attacks.

Some of the raw data feeding into CIFA headquarters comes from
a reporting process called Talon (short for "Threat and Local
Observation Notice"). Talon started out as an Air Force
reporting form that airmen could fill out and hand in if they
noticed anything unusual around the base. In May 2003, the
Pentagon made Talon the standard method for service members in
all the armed forces to report "nonvalidated" information
about possible terrorist activity. Talon reports can now be
filled out online.

Connecting the Dots

Pentagon officials compare the process to a neighborhood-watch
program. Cmdr. Hicks says Talon is the place where the
Department of Defense "initially stores the 'dots' of
information, which, if validated, might later be connected
before an attack occurs."

To connect the dots, the Pentagon has turned to data mining,
the science of extracting patterns from large volumes of raw
information. In theory, reports of unusual incidents such as
those collected by Talon could be added to electronic records
of business transactions, Internet usage and police activity
to deduce where terrorists are gearing up for an attack.

A December 2002 report issued by Sen. Richard Shelby, then
vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said CIFA
was working with the Justice Department to develop "deep
access data-mining techniques" to discover potential threats
to the U.S. from terrorists.

As Mr. Wolfowitz was starting up CIFA, researchers at a
separate Pentagon unit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, began work on a massive data-capturing program known
as Total Information Awareness. This program, too, envisioned
mining government databases and personal records of
individuals for patterns that would predict a terrorist
attack. A huge public outcry over the project led Congress to
cancel it in October 2003 -- but Congress created a specific
exemption for tools that might aid "counterterrorism foreign
intelligence."

Many computer programs and techniques developed during the
Total Information Awareness project quietly survived. Some
were taken up by the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group.
The 902nd, established during World War II and known as the
"Deuce," is part of the Army command structure and separate
from CIFA at Pentagon headquarters. Nonetheless, the 902nd
plays an important military-wide role because it is the
military's largest counterintelligence unit and has hundreds
of soldiers stationed around the country.

Charles Harlan, who heads the 902nd's analysis center,
published an article in the Military Intelligence Professional
Bulletin in January 2005 describing how his unit processed
information to help the Pentagon predict attacks against the
military in the U.S. He described three data-mining and
artificial-intelligence programs as key to the effort -- all
three of which were components of the defunct Total
Information Awareness project.

The 902nd has access to Talon, but it also makes extensive use
of another information system created after 9/11. This system,
called the Joint Regional Information Exchange System, gathers
information collected by civilian law enforcement agencies
around the country. The Pentagon and local authorities
including the New York Police Department and California's
justice department set it up in December 2002. The idea was to
give military personnel access to terror-related information
on U.S. residents without violating any prohibitions on the
military collecting domestic intelligence.

The Pentagon's regional information-exchange system got a
boost when the Department of Homeland Security took it over
and expanded it to include information from all 50 states and
major urban areas.

The system doesn't just serve military personnel. A police
department in one place can put a query out to other cities or
states seeking information on, say, license plates or phone
numbers of terrorist suspects. Many police departments
purchase commercially available information about individuals,
such as credit data and online viewing habits, as part of
investigations. They can post this information on the exchange
system.

Military members can also issue a query seeking information on
any topic they like, but they can't command any civilian
participant to do anything. In theory they could ask for
personal data on individuals via the exchange system, but it
isn't clear whether they do so and if so under what circumstances.

All of these strands came together to prompt the police's
shadowing of peace protesters in the spring of 2005. Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate last month that the
Department of Homeland Security was the source of information
in Pentagon databases about at least three antiwar protests at
military recruiting centers -- two in Vermont and one in
Washington, D.C.

A number of leads also came from the Talon reports. The
two-page alert from the 902nd Military Intelligence Group that
prompted the Akron police to follow the Quaker-organized rally
attaches a nine-digit Army Talon number to that protest. It
also gives separate numbers for each of seven other protests
organized for the second anniversary of the Iraq war. The memo
says officials at the 902nd had used some of their
data-analysis techniques to look for signs of hidden
coordination between the protests.

Analysts at the 902nd's headquarters in Ft. Meade also
scrutinized antiwar Web sites looking for threats, including
the possibility that protesters might attack military personnel.

The alert memo, signed by Army official Claude G. Benner Jr.,
portrayed the imminent demonstrations as "threats." It gave a
detailed description of activists' Web sites, noting that some
featured a "help desk" where would-be protesters could get
tips on organizing a demonstration. The memo also raised the
possibility that military supporters might assault the
protesters. Mr. Benner warned that "the potential for a
spontaneous, unprovoked attack against either the
demonstrators or pro-US Military persons is assessed as HIGH."

In the end the Akron march was peaceful. A report compiled by
the Army and presented last May to the U.S. Northern Command,
which is in charge of joint military operations in the
continental United States, threw cold water on the idea that
hidden provocateurs might be organizing multiple protests
around the country. "We have not noted a significant
connection between incidents (i.e. reoccurring instigators at
protests, vehicle descriptions)," said the report.

Cmdr. Hicks at the Pentagon says the assessment that the Akron
protest posed a threat "was based on the best information
available at the time, which was lawfully received from
another federal agency." He declines to name the agency. Cmdr.
Hicks adds: "The fact that the marches proceeded peacefully is
irrelevant to leveling criticisms against the Army in this
instance. Hindsight is always 20/20."

Write to Robert Block at bobby.block at wsj.com4 and Jay Solomon
at jay.solomon at wsj.com5
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(2)
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(3)
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/quaker20060426.pdf
(4) mailto:bobby.block at wsj.com
(5) mailto:jay.solomon at wsj.com
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