Lt. Gen. Robert W. Noonan, Jr., the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, wrote in a memo dated November 5, 2001 that Military Intelligence has authority to gather intelligence "about U.S. persons reasonably believed to be engaged, or about to engage, in international terrorist activities. Within the United States, those activities must have a significant connection with a foreign power, organization, or person (e.g., a foreign-based terrorist group)."
"Contrary to popular belief," Gen Noonan writes, "there is no absolute ban on intelligence components collecting U.S. person information. That collection, rather, is regulated by EO 12333 and implementing policy in DoD 5240.1-R and AR 381-10."
The Order that Lt. Gen. Noonan cites, Executive Order 12333, dates from December 4, 1981 (by Ronald Reagan) and states, “timely and accurate information about the activities, capabilities, plans, and intentions of foreign powers, organizations, and persons, and their agents, is essential to the national security of the United States. All reasonable and lawful means must be used to ensure that the United States will receive the best intelligence possible.”
Noonan continues:
That said, my staff has received reports from the field of wellintentioned MI personnel declining to receive reports from local law enforcement authorities, solely because the reports contain U.S. person information. MI may receive information from anyone, anytime. If the information is U.S. person information, MI may retain that information if it meets the two-part test discussed in paragraph 2b, above. If the information received pertains solely to the functions of other DoD components, or agencies outside DoD, MI may transmit or deliver it to the appropriate recipients, per Procedure 4, AR 381-10. Remember, merely receiving information does not constitute “collection” under AR 381-10; collection entails receiving “for use.” Army intelligence may always receive information, if only to determine its intelligence value and whether it can be collected, retained, or disseminated in accordance with governing policy.
Secrecy News, which looked at the memo on a suggestion from John Pike of globalsecurity.com, quotes Pike as saying, " "'It seems to me that there is enough ambiguity in the language that with a bit of creativity in managing the US persons files there would have been not too much trouble' applying existing rules to the NSA Program." Steven Aftergood, who writes Secrecy News, states that the differentiation between "receiving" and "collecting" "appears to offer considerable leeway for domestic surveillance activities under the existing legal framework. This in turn makes it harder to understand why the NSA domestic surveillance program departed from previous practice."
Aftergood is a staff member of Federation of American Scientists and is the plaintiff, in an FOIA lawsuit against the National Reconnassance Office demanding the disclosure of unclassified budget documents.
From the Chapter 5, PROCEDURE 5 C5.1, PART 1 of DoD 5240.1-R on Electronic Surveillance in the U.S. for intelligence purposes (p.24):
A DoD intelligence component may conduct electronic surveillance within the United States for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes only pursuent to an order issued by a judge of the court appointed pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (reference (b)) or pursuent to a certification of the Attorney General issued under the authority of Section 102(a) of the Act.
C5.1.2.3.2 makes provisions for "Emergency Situations."
On Monday, Thw Washington Post (reg. req.) editorializes on what the paper calls "a parallel clandestine operation by the Pentagon to collect intelligence about domestic threats gathered and stored information on innocent citizens who never should have been watched." This is a program targeting and gathering intelligence on antiwar protestors who seem to have done nothing illegal:
A database managed by a secretive Pentagon intelligence agency called Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, was found last month to contain reports on at least four dozen antiwar meetings or protests, many of them on college campuses. Ten peace activists who handed out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches outside Halliburton's headquarters in Houston in June 2004 were reported as a national security threat. So were people who assembled at a Quaker meeting house in Lake Worth, Fla., or protested military recruiters at sites such as New York University, the State University of New York and campuses of the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Cruz.
The protesters were written up under a Pentagon program called Talon, which is supposed to collect raw data on threats to defense facilities in the United States. CIFA, an agency created just under four years ago that now includes nine directorates and more than 1,000 employees, is charged with working to prevent terrorist attacks. Instead, hidden from public and congressional scrutiny, it has repeated the same abuses once committed against war protesters and civil rights activists of the 1960s. In addition to compiling information on Americans who were peaceful political dissenters rather than terrorists, the agency retained reports in its database well beyond a 90-day limit -- a standard adopted in response to the Vietnam-era excesses.
In testimony of May 13, 2004, Carol A. Haave, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Counterintelligence and Security stated to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that at that time:
[T]he Domestic Threat Working Group, co-chaired by the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) and Joint Staff, meets to discuss issues associated with collection, analysis and dissemination of domestic anomaly and threat information. This group of DoD, CI, LE, Force Protection and Security representatives was critical in instituting the TALON report as the common reporting format for continental U.S. suspicious activity reporting. More than 5000 TALON reports have been received and shared throughout the government. DoD CI has also placed CI professionals at key locations throughout U.S. government agencies to facilitate a continued flow of CI and LE information.
We are getting closer to something like the truth, but there are many questions remaining to be asked and answered. We will not know what has been conducted in our name, on our citizens (if anything) until or unless we get hearings and a congressional investigation. If the president is confident that such action would vindicate or support his actions, he should welcome it. It is still a possiblity that the administration is on solid ground, and that the public will see the policies and operations of this administration in the context of the large conflict. However, not very many will be comfortable knowing that merely protesting government action can land you in a web of spying.
I'm trying to sort through and deconvolute the associations you have made.
For me, the fundamentals are this:
(1) "Information collection" is not the same as wiretapping
(2) Wiretapping without a judge-approved warrant is in violation of both the Constitution and the FISA law
(3) Collection by the military (or other government agency) of publicly available information, or information from local law enforcement authorites that was gathered legally and Constitutionally, while troubling to me, is NOT in violation of the Constitution, but I cannot speak to if it is against any law
(4) Given the data collection in (3) above is not unconstitutional, it is still something that can easily be abused, and should therefore be regulated in some fashion that will curb the potential for abuse
In other words, I'm not an unreasonable, screaming moonbat about the situation, I just want to see the checks and balances in place to minimize the abuse that is inevitable even WITH the checks and balances.
Posted by: Jack | February 01, 2006 at 09:24 PM