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 Post subject: Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 1:16 pm 
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Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups

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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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 1:43 pm 
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like of myyyy god!!! our feedom!!!!!!!!! heeeeeeelllp!


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 1:43 pm 
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Isn't that what the Pentagon was made to do?

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 2:01 pm 
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STRIKE LIGHTNING, STRIKE Wrote:
Isn't that what the Pentagon was made to do?


my thoughts exactly. i dont grow weed anymore and manage to pay my taxes on time so do what you gotta do, boys.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 2:08 pm 
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Northern Soul, why are you worried about us?

Oh yeah, not much goin' on in canada.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 2:12 pm 
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I don't have a problem with our government having information that they don't act upon. Sorry to drop the "T" word, but if they're going to stop further acts of terrorism, they are in fact going to have to closely scrutinize Saudis who really just want to learn to fly a Cesna.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 2:13 pm 
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HaqDiesel Wrote:
I don't have a problem with our government having information that they don't act upon. Sorry to drop the "T" word, but if they're going to stop further acts of terrorism, they are in fact going to have to closely scrutinize Saudis who really just want to learn to fly a Cesna.

Then again, maybe they should do just that, instead of monitoring Quakers and Dope Growers.

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harry Wrote:
I understand that you, of all people, know this crisis and, in your own way, are working to address it. You, the madras-pantsed julip-sipping Southern cracker and me, the oldman hippie California fruit cake are brothers in the struggle to save our country.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 2:16 pm 
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Well you gotta make sure the Quakers aren't wearing towels under those funny hats.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 2:18 pm 
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HaqDiesel Wrote:
Well you gotta make sure the Quakers aren't wearing towels under those funny hats.


That's true...and Bloor, just wait until the GBI learns of your extensive collection of Surfers rekkids and books about Nixon...yer fooked.

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Throughout his life, from childhood until death, he was beset by severe swings of mood. His depressions frequently encouraged, and were exacerbated by, his various vices. His character mixed a superficial Enlightenment sensibility for reason and taste with a genuine and somewhat Romantic love of the sublime and a propensity for occasionally puerile whimsy.
harry Wrote:
I understand that you, of all people, know this crisis and, in your own way, are working to address it. You, the madras-pantsed julip-sipping Southern cracker and me, the oldman hippie California fruit cake are brothers in the struggle to save our country.

FT Wrote:
LooGAR (the straw that stirs the drink)


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 3:13 pm 
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Dalen Wrote:
Northern Soul, why are you worried about us?

Oh yeah, not much goin' on in canada.


why would i worry about you? i posted a story i thought would get some interesting opinions, just like every other story i post here. its got nothing to do with concern. of course, i could post about the current election going on in canada, but i know no one is interested in that, and i wouldnt get any opinions, making the whole excercise worthless.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 3:45 pm 
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this surprises who? and why?

i'm willing to bet that they've sent agents posing as protestors out to infiltrate as well.

I am against this, surprise, but can at least see the merit in it. But aren't GOP fundraisers filled with just as many suspect citizens of this country?

Gladio!


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 4:31 pm 
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cotton Wrote:
this surprises who? and why?


Exactly.

cotton Wrote:
i'm willing to bet that they've sent agents posing as protestors out to infiltrate as well.


And um... incase yah'll were thinking Canada was so sweet and benign; they totally did this kind of stuff at the G8 protests in Quebec city a couple of years ago, as well as at other protests in Ottawa.

Indie media centers in Quebec city were ransacked, and someone I know personally had police show up at his house because they tracked emails he had exchanged with protestors who going to be staying at his house.

Awwee yeah.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 5:05 pm 
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i'm gonna say for the 8 millionth time: COINTELPRO! JUMANJI!

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:11 pm 
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While that report isn't surprising, the general acceptance of this shit is.


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:21 pm 
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Dalen Wrote:
Northern Soul, why are you worried about us?

Oh yeah, not much goin' on in canada.


I'd prefer the quiet of the prairie wind over the alternative.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:24 pm 
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Show me a law that prevents the government from recording publicly-available information, and I'll show you a speech restriction that is potentially as dangerous as the government's practice.

Slippery slope arguments go both ways.


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:30 pm 
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HaqDiesel Wrote:
Show me a law that prevents the government from recording publicly-available information, and I'll show you a speech restriction that is potentially as dangerous as the government's practice.

Slippery slope arguments go both ways.


Did you edit your Location for that post?

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[quote="Bloor"]He's either done too much and should stay out of the economy, done too little because unemployment isn't 0%, is a dumb ingrate who wasn't ready for the job or a brilliant mastermind who has taken over all aspects of our lives and is transforming us into a Stalinist style penal economy where Christian Whites are fed into meat grinders. Very confusing[/quote]


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:31 pm 
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haha, no, park slope. but i'm likely on a number of slippery ones as well.


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:32 pm 
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HaqDiesel Wrote:
haha, no, park slope. but i'm likely on a number of slippery ones as well.


first a cardigan, then a hemingway turtleneck, and then one day nothing but argentinian cashmere will do...

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[quote="Bloor"]He's either done too much and should stay out of the economy, done too little because unemployment isn't 0%, is a dumb ingrate who wasn't ready for the job or a brilliant mastermind who has taken over all aspects of our lives and is transforming us into a Stalinist style penal economy where Christian Whites are fed into meat grinders. Very confusing[/quote]


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:33 pm 
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Bah, Radcliffe! Wrote:
While that report isn't surprising, the general acceptance of this shit is.


I agree completely. If Kerry had had the balls to make stuff like this a campaign issue, I would have held my nose and voted for him.


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:34 pm 
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Cap'n Squirrgle Wrote:
HaqDiesel Wrote:
haha, no, park slope. but i'm likely on a number of slippery ones as well.


first a cardigan, then a hemingway turtleneck, and then one day nothing but argentinian cashmere will do...
Alpaca?


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:36 pm 
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Joseph P. Crack Wrote:
Cap'n Squirrgle Wrote:
HaqDiesel Wrote:
haha, no, park slope. but i'm likely on a number of slippery ones as well.


first a cardigan, then a hemingway turtleneck, and then one day nothing but argentinian cashmere will do...
Alpaca?


The very same.

Or are you asking for synonyms again?

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[quote="Bloor"]He's either done too much and should stay out of the economy, done too little because unemployment isn't 0%, is a dumb ingrate who wasn't ready for the job or a brilliant mastermind who has taken over all aspects of our lives and is transforming us into a Stalinist style penal economy where Christian Whites are fed into meat grinders. Very confusing[/quote]


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:36 pm 
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dr winston o'boogie Wrote:
Bah, Radcliffe! Wrote:
While that report isn't surprising, the general acceptance of this shit is.


I agree completely. If Kerry had had the balls to make stuff like this a campaign issue, I would have held my nose and voted for him.


I'm really interested to know where you guys would draw the line here.


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:55 pm 
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HaqDiesel Wrote:
dr winston o'boogie Wrote:
Bah, Radcliffe! Wrote:
While that report isn't surprising, the general acceptance of this shit is.


I agree completely. If Kerry had had the balls to make stuff like this a campaign issue, I would have held my nose and voted for him.


I'm really interested to know where you guys would draw the line here.


Peaceful. That's the line. What investigating QUAKERS has to do with protecting anything, I don't know.

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PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:58 pm 
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almost Wrote:
HaqDiesel Wrote:
dr winston o'boogie Wrote:
Bah, Radcliffe! Wrote:
While that report isn't surprising, the general acceptance of this shit is.


I agree completely. If Kerry had had the balls to make stuff like this a campaign issue, I would have held my nose and voted for him.


I'm really interested to know where you guys would draw the line here.


Peaceful. That's the line. What investigating QUAKERS has to do with protecting anything, I don't know.


So the government can't collect any information on "peaceful" gatherings. How about Saudi nationals in flight school? Sounds pretty peaceful. Off limits? Can the Library of Congress archive newspapers referring to peaceful protests in which the names of protesters appear? Or do you have a good line to draw around which government purposes are benign?


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