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Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups
By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella
12/13/05 "MSNBC" -- -- 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
I'm really concerned that all those people who were Hepatitis Activists may
now be on a government database, and I do confess that it is a long time since
any of them came in here to give me a hard time.
Alan
"Can't you see we're still here,
Can't you see we're still here,
Singing loud; Singing clear,
We shall not go under,
We're still here."
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