Pentagon spying on law abiding American citizens

[Diomedes]

msnbc link

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.

....

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."

....

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."

[Zanshin]

Let them spy on me.  I'll bore them to death.

[Diomedes]

So, you'd think, would Quakers.

[phillymic2000]

And if they would have broken up the Terrorist cell that struck on 9/11 before hand, there would have been lawsuits out the ying yang. If the government doesn't do enough in some peoples eyes, people bitch, if they do too much in some peoples eyes people bitch. 

[Butchers Bill]

And if they would have broken up the Terrorist cell that struck on 9/11 before hand, there would have been lawsuits out the ying yang.

Yup...would have been "profiling".  And profiling is wrong.   

[4and26]

And if they would have broken up the Terrorist cell that struck on 9/11 before hand, there would have been lawsuits out the ying yang. If the government doesn't do enough in some peoples eyes, people bitch, if they do too much in some peoples eyes people bitch. 

Tis the cost of "freedom"

[Cerevant]

Yup...would have been "profiling".  And profiling is wrong.   

Easy to say when you don't fit the profile.

[Butchers Bill]

Easy to say when you don't fit the profile.

And thats why we waste time strip searching 80 year old grandma's at airports.

[General_Failure]

That, and it's fun.