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Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2006 17:27:29 -0400
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Subject: [Clips] Pentagon Steps Up Intelligence Efforts Inside U.S. Borders
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http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB114610040426937149.html
The Wall Street Journal
PAGE ONE
Neighborhood Watch
Pentagon Steps Up
Intelligence Efforts
Inside U.S. Borders
Post-9/11 Campaign Includes
Tracking Antiwar Protests,
Mining Large Databases
'Collecting' vs. 'Receiving'
By ROBERT BLOCK and JAY SOLOMON
April 27, 2006; Page A1
AKRON, Ohio -- On March 19, 2005, about 200 mainly middle-aged peace
marchers made their way through the streets of this city, stopping outside
a Marine Corps recruiting center and a Federal Bureau of Investigation
office to listen to speeches against the Iraq war. Close behind, police in
unmarked cars followed them -- acting on a tip from the Pentagon.
For weeks prior to the demonstration, analysts at the Army's 902nd Military
Intelligence Group in Fort Meade, Md., were downloading information from
activist Web sites, intercepting emails and cross-referencing this with
information in police databases.
The Army's conclusion, contained in an alert to Akron police: "Even though
these demonstrations are advertised as 'peaceful,' they are assessed to
present a potential force protection threat."
The Akron protest and seven others monitored by the Army that month turned
out to be nonviolent. Pentagon officials later issued an apology, admitting
that some of the information in military databases shouldn't have been
there. But they called that a minor slip in a critical program to protect
Americans.
Iraq war protesters carry a fake casket down East Market Street in Akron,
Ohio, on March 19, 2005.
The government's monitoring of the protests is one example of how the 9/11
terror attacks have sparked a broad effort by the Pentagon to gather
intelligence within U.S. borders. Its goals are both to protect military
facilities and keep an eye out for any threat on American soil.
After 9/11, the Bush administration declared the continental U.S. a theater
of military operations for the first time since the Civil War, creating a
demand to better research potential threats to American forces at home. Now
several parts of the vast Pentagon bureaucracy are building large databases
of information from sources including local police, military personnel and
the Internet. In doing so, the military is edging toward a sensitive area
that has been off-limits to it since the 1970s: domestic surveillance and
law enforcement.
One widely reported part of the new information battle is the National
Security Agency's wiretapping of calls without a warrant between people in
the U.S. and suspected terrorists overseas. The agency is part of the
Defense Department. That practice is just one piece of a larger,
less-discussed effort.
The military justifies the gathering of domestic intelligence in part by
relying on a key distinction between "receiving" information and
"collecting" it. Military regulations over the past few decades have
generally barred using soldiers to gather information on American citizens.
Officials have interpreted the rules to mean that receiving information
from the police or federal agencies is acceptable.
"We are receiving information lawfully gathered by other agencies and then
following up on it to make an assessment," says Cmdr. Greg Hicks, a
Pentagon spokesman.
Further, the military says it doesn't order civilian law-enforcement
officials such as the police or the FBI to do anything. Military officials
say they may point out items of concern such as the Akron march but it's up
to police whether to listen.
The broad Pentagon effort comes amid a surge of popular support after the
9/11 attacks for more vigilant efforts to prevent terrorism. Polls continue
to show backing for aggressive moves. In a March Wall Street Journal/NBC
News poll1, 52% of those surveyed said they supported the NSA wiretaps
without a warrant, while 46% said they were opposed.
The military moves nonetheless face both political and practical
objections. Civil libertarians fear a return to the Vietnam era, when
military personnel collected information on more than 100,000 Americans,
infiltrated church youth groups and posed as reporters to interview
activists, according to a 1975 Senate investigation. Critics say the
receiving-versus-collecting distinction makes little sense if the Pentagon
is taking in huge amounts of data, organizing it, analyzing it and using it
to influence law enforcement.
"Today military spies can compile more information about antiwar protesters
by 'receiving' it off the Web than its gumshoes used to collect by watching
demonstrations," says Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer
who disclosed the military's surveillance of civilian politics in the 1960s
to Congress and worked to end it. Mr. Pyle is now a professor of politics
at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
Because of the secrecy surrounding the programs, the results of the
Pentagon's efforts -- including any possible successes in preventing
terrorism -- are unknown. President Bush and other officials have said that
Americans often don't see such successes because revealing them would help
terrorists. Mr. Bush's critics, aside from their civil-liberties concerns,
say monitoring antiwar activities may turn out to be a waste of resources
by diverting attention from known terrorists.
According to documents seen by The Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon has
monitored more than 20 antiwar groups' activities around the country over
the past three years. It has reviewed photographs and records of vehicles
and protesters at marches to see if different activities were being
organized by the same instigators. Cmdr. Hicks says the point of this
monitoring is to keep military personnel away from places where they might
provoke demonstrators, not to interfere with anyone's right to protest.
The peace activists don't like being watched. About 300 activists gathered
at Akron's public library this February to complain to elected
representatives at a public hearing. They had watched an NBC News report in
December that said the Pentagon included peace group activities in a
database of potential terrorist threats. Documents viewed by The Wall
Street Journal show that, as the activists suspected, their
Quaker-organized rally in March 2005 was on the Pentagon's watch list.
Those documents show a broader effort to gather information for databases
and analyze it.
'Eerie Feeling'
Pat Carano, a veteran of Ohio peace marches since the Vietnam War, told the
meeting of the "eerie feeling" of being watched when he saw the unmarked
police cars. "It's ridiculous," said Donna Schapps, a grandmother of four
from Stow, Ohio. "Quakers are not terrorists. We believe in peace."
Strict limits on soldiers doing the work of police date back to the Posse
Comitatus Act of 1878, enacted in response to a public backlash against
troops maintaining civil order in the South during Reconstruction. The act
generally prohibits the military from domestic law-enforcement activities.
The military's secret monitoring of dissidents during the Vietnam War led
to a slew of laws, regulations and executive orders that pushed the
military out of domestic spying and created walls between domestic and
foreign intelligence.
After Sept. 11, 2001, those walls came in for criticism from a broad range
of experts. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission concluded that U.S. intelligence
agencies needed to do a better job of coordinating and connecting leads.
The Pentagon itself believed it might have prevented the attacks if its
ability to operate within the U.S. were less circumscribed, and decided to
take a fresh look at the post-Vietnam rules.
On Nov. 5, 2001, Lt. Gen. Robert W. Noonan Jr., then the Army's deputy
chief of staff for intelligence, sent a memo to Army commanders titled,
"Collecting Information on U.S. Persons3."
"Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on intelligence
components collecting U.S. person information," it said. Gen. Noonan noted
that while the military was normally barred from using its own assets to
collect information about people living in the U.S., military intelligence
"may receive information from anyone, anytime...if only to determine its
intelligence value.
"Remember," the memo stressed, "merely receiving information does not
constitute 'collection' " under Army regulations.
Michael Varhola, an official in the Army inspector general's office,
repeated the message in a January 2002 article in the quarterly Military
Intelligence Professional Bulletin. Even though many types of information
gathering were perfectly legal, Mr. Varhola wrote, "unfortunately some
individuals find it easier or safer to avoid the issue altogether by simply
not collecting the data on citizens they may need to do their complete
jobs."
As such views spread, several parts of the Pentagon empire soon swung into
action to formalize information-gathering efforts, though they weren't all
necessarily acting in concert. In February 2002, Paul Wolfowitz, then the
deputy defense secretary, formed a unit at Pentagon headquarters to manage
all military counterintelligence programs. Its name was Counter
Intelligence Field Activity. CIFA, whose exact size and budget remain
secret, has grown to include nine directorates. Its main focus is on
protecting defense facilities and personnel from terrorist attacks.
Some of the raw data feeding into CIFA headquarters comes from a reporting
process called Talon (short for "Threat and Local Observation Notice").
Talon started out as an Air Force reporting form that airmen could fill out
and hand in if they noticed anything unusual around the base. In May 2003,
the Pentagon made Talon the standard method for service members in all the
armed forces to report "nonvalidated" information about possible terrorist
activity. Talon reports can now be filled out online.
Connecting the Dots
Pentagon officials compare the process to a neighborhood-watch program.
Cmdr. Hicks says Talon is the place where the Department of Defense
"initially stores the 'dots' of information, which, if validated, might
later be connected before an attack occurs."
To connect the dots, the Pentagon has turned to data mining, the science of
extracting patterns from large volumes of raw information. In theory,
reports of unusual incidents such as those collected by Talon could be
added to electronic records of business transactions, Internet usage and
police activity to deduce where terrorists are gearing up for an attack.
A December 2002 report issued by Sen. Richard Shelby, then vice chairman of
the Senate Intelligence Committee, said CIFA was working with the Justice
Department to develop "deep access data-mining techniques" to discover
potential threats to the U.S. from terrorists.
As Mr. Wolfowitz was starting up CIFA, researchers at a separate Pentagon
unit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, began work on a
massive data-capturing program known as Total Information Awareness. This
program, too, envisioned mining government databases and personal records
of individuals for patterns that would predict a terrorist attack. A huge
public outcry over the project led Congress to cancel it in October 2003 --
but Congress created a specific exemption for tools that might aid
"counterterrorism foreign intelligence."
Many computer programs and techniques developed during the Total
Information Awareness project quietly survived. Some were taken up by the
Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group. The 902nd, established during
World War II and known as the "Deuce," is part of the Army command
structure and separate from CIFA at Pentagon headquarters. Nonetheless, the
902nd plays an important military-wide role because it is the military's
largest counterintelligence unit and has hundreds of soldiers stationed
around the country.
Charles Harlan, who heads the 902nd's analysis center, published an article
in the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin in January 2005
describing how his unit processed information to help the Pentagon predict
attacks against the military in the U.S. He described three data-mining and
artificial-intelligence programs as key to the effort -- all three of which
were components of the defunct Total Information Awareness project.
The 902nd has access to Talon, but it also makes extensive use of another
information system created after 9/11. This system, called the Joint
Regional Information Exchange System, gathers information collected by
civilian law enforcement agencies around the country. The Pentagon and
local authorities including the New York Police Department and California's
justice department set it up in December 2002. The idea was to give
military personnel access to terror-related information on U.S. residents
without violating any prohibitions on the military collecting domestic
intelligence.
The Pentagon's regional information-exchange system got a boost when the
Department of Homeland Security took it over and expanded it to include
information from all 50 states and major urban areas.
The system doesn't just serve military personnel. A police department in
one place can put a query out to other cities or states seeking information
on, say, license plates or phone numbers of terrorist suspects. Many police
departments purchase commercially available information about individuals,
such as credit data and online viewing habits, as part of investigations.
They can post this information on the exchange system.
Military members can also issue a query seeking information on any topic
they like, but they can't command any civilian participant to do anything.
In theory they could ask for personal data on individuals via the exchange
system, but it isn't clear whether they do so and if so under what
circumstances.
All of these strands came together to prompt the police's shadowing of
peace protesters in the spring of 2005. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
told the Senate last month that the Department of Homeland Security was the
source of information in Pentagon databases about at least three antiwar
protests at military recruiting centers -- two in Vermont and one in
Washington, D.C.
A number of leads also came from the Talon reports. The two-page alert from
the 902nd Military Intelligence Group that prompted the Akron police to
follow the Quaker-organized rally attaches a nine-digit Army Talon number
to that protest. It also gives separate numbers for each of seven other
protests organized for the second anniversary of the Iraq war. The memo
says officials at the 902nd had used some of their data-analysis techniques
to look for signs of hidden coordination between the protests.
Analysts at the 902nd's headquarters in Ft. Meade also scrutinized antiwar
Web sites looking for threats, including the possibility that protesters
might attack military personnel.
The alert memo, signed by Army official Claude G. Benner Jr., portrayed the
imminent demonstrations as "threats." It gave a detailed description of
activists' Web sites, noting that some featured a "help desk" where
would-be protesters could get tips on organizing a demonstration. The memo
also raised the possibility that military supporters might assault the
protesters. Mr. Benner warned that "the potential for a spontaneous,
unprovoked attack against either the demonstrators or pro-US Military
persons is assessed as HIGH."
In the end the Akron march was peaceful. A report compiled by the Army and
presented last May to the U.S. Northern Command, which is in charge of
joint military operations in the continental United States, threw cold
water on the idea that hidden provocateurs might be organizing multiple
protests around the country. "We have not noted a significant connection
between incidents (i.e. reoccurring instigators at protests, vehicle
descriptions)," said the report.
Cmdr. Hicks at the Pentagon says the assessment that the Akron protest
posed a threat "was based on the best information available at the time,
which was lawfully received from another federal agency." He declines to
name the agency. Cmdr. Hicks adds: "The fact that the marches proceeded
peacefully is irrelevant to leveling criticisms against the Army in this
instance. Hindsight is always 20/20."
--
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R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'