{news} Fw: [GPUS-PAX] article about Pentagon spying quotes local greens

[Justine McCabe]

 Marie Zwicker and Rich Hersh are Maine Greens

> 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/page/3/
>
----------------------------------
Pentagon may be spying on anti-war activists - NBC

1 hour, 34 minutes ago

The Pentagon has a secret database that indicates the U.S. military may be 
collecting information on Americans who oppose the Iraq war and may be also 
monitoring peace demonstrations, NBC reported on Tuesday.

The database, obtained by the network, lists 1,500 "suspicious incidents" 
across the United States over a 10-month period and includes four dozen 
anti-war meetings or protests, some aimed at military recruiting, NBC's 
Nightly News said.

The network said the document was the first inside look at how the Pentagon 
has stepped up intelligence collection in the United States since the 
September 11, 2001, attacks.

The report quoted what it said was a secret briefing document as concluding: 
"We have noted increased communication between protest groups using the 
Internet," but not a "significant connection" between incidents.

Americans have been wary of any monitoring of anti-war activities since the 
Vietnam era when it was learned that the Pentagon spied on anti-war and 
civil rights groups and individuals. Congress held hearings in the 1970s and 
recommended strict limits on military spying inside the United States.

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the NBC report about the 
database. However, he said: "The Department of Defense uses 
counterintelligence and law enforcement information properly collected by 
law enforcement agencies.

"The use of this information is subject to strict limitations, particularly 
the information must be related to missions relating to protection of DoD 
installations, interests and personnel," he added.

The Pentagon has already acknowledged the existence of a counterintelligence 
program known as the "Threat and Local Observation Notice" (TALON) reporting 
system.

This system, the Pentagon said, is designed to gather "non-validated threat 
information and security anomalies indicative of possible terrorist 
pre-attack activity."

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