[Clips] Pentagon Steps Up Intelligence Efforts Inside U.S. Borders

[R.A. Hettinga]

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  Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2006 17:27:29 -0400
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  From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
  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 <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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'