The Pentagon is spying on
Americans
MSNBC
By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella
December 14, 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."
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