The Other Big Brother
The Pentagon has its own domestic spying program. Even its leaders say the outfit may have gone too far.
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

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Jan. 30, 2006 issue - The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater," Parkin says.

But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA)
), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection"tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALONshort for Threat and Local Observation Noticethat would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.

A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. It's not clear why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attentionalthough organizer Parkin had previously been arrested while demonstrating at ExxonMobil headquarters (the charges were dropped). But there are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations. A Pentagon memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows that the deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.

CIFA's activities are the latest in a series of disclosures about secret government programs that spy on Americans in the name of national security. In December, the ACLU obtained documents showing the FBI had investigated several activist groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Greenpeace, supposedly in an effort to discover possible ecoterror connections. At the same time, the White House has spent weeks in damage-control mode, defending the controversial program that allowed the National Security Agency to monitor the telephone conversations of U.S. persons suspected of terror links, without obtaining warrants.

Last Thursday, Cheney called the program "vital" to the country's defense against Al Qaeda. "Either we are serious about fighting this war on terror or not," he said in a speech to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. But as the new information about CIFA shows, the scope of the U.S. government's spying on Americans may be far more extensive than the public realizes.

It isn't clear how many groups and individuals were snagged by CIFA's dragnet. Details about the program, including its size and budget, are classified. In December, NBC News obtained a 400-page compilation of reports that detailed a portion of TALON's surveillance efforts. It showed the unit had collected information on nearly four dozen antiwar meetings or protests, including one at a Quaker meetinghouse in Lake Worth, Fla., and a Students Against War demonstration at a military recruiting fair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Pentagon spokesman declined to say why a private company like Halliburton would be deserving of CIFA's protection. But in the past, Defense Department officials have said that the "force protection" mission includes military contractors since soldiers and Defense employees work closely with them and therefore could be in danger.


CIFA researchers apparently cast a wide net and had a number of surveillance methodsboth secretive and mundaneat their disposal. An internal CIFA PowerPoint slide presentation recently obtained by William Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who writes widely about military affairs, gives some idea how the group operated. The presentation, which Arkin provided to NEWSWEEK, shows that CIFA analysts had access to law-enforcement reports and sensitive military and U.S. intelligence documents. (The group's motto appears at the bottom of each PowerPoint slide: "Counterintelligence 'to the Edge'.") But the organization also gleaned data from "open source Internet monitoring." In other words, they surfed the Web.

That may have been how the Pentagon came to be so interested in a small gathering outside Halliburton. On June 23, 2004, a few days before the Halliburton protest, an ad for the event appeared on houston.indymedia.org, a Web site for lefty Texas activists. "Stop the war profiteers," read the posting. "Bring out the kids, relatives, Dick Cheney, and your favorite corporate pigs at the trough as we will provide food for free."

Four months later, on Oct. 25, the TALON team reported another possible threat to national security. The source: a Miami antiwar Web page. "Website advertises protest planned at local military recruitment facility," the internal report warns. The database entry refers to plans by a south Florida group called the Broward Anti-War Coalition to protest outside a strip-mall recruiting office in Lauderhill, Fla. The TALON entry lists the upcoming protest as a "credible" threat. As it turned out, the entire event consisted of 15 to 20 activists waving a giant BUSH LIED sign. No one was arrested. "It's very interesting that the U.S. military sees a domestic peace group as a threat," says Paul Lefrak, a librarian who organized the protest.

Arkin says a close reading of internal CIFA documents suggests the agency may be expanding its Internet monitoring, and wants to be as surreptitious as possible. CIFA has contracted to buy "identity masking" software that would allow the agency to create phony Web identities and let them appear to be located in foreign countries, according to a copy of the contract with Computer Sciences Corp. (The firm declined to comment.)

Pentagon officials have broadly defended CIFA as a legitimate response to the domestic terror threat. But at the same time, they acknowledge that an internal Pentagon review has found that CIFA's database contained some information that may have violated regulations. The department is not allowed to retain information about U.S. citizens for more than 90 daysunless they are "reasonably believed" to have some link to terrorism, criminal wrongdoing or foreign intelligence. There was information that was "improperly stored," says a Pentagon spokesman who was authorized to talk about the program (but not to give his name). "It was an oversight." In a memo last week, obtained by NEWSWEEK, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ordered CIFA to purge such information from its filesand directed that all Defense Department intelligence personnel receive "refresher training" on department policies.

That's not likely to stop the questions. Last week Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee pushed for an inquiry into CIFA's activities and who it's watching. "This is a significant Pandora's box [Pentagon officials] don't want opened," says Arkin. "What we're looking at is hints of what they're doing." As far as the Pentagon is concerned, that means we've already seen too much.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2006 MSNBC.com

Welcome to U.S. Air Force AIM Points

UPDATED: January 20, 2006Full Version
Defense facilities pass along reports of suspicious activity
BY: Walter Pincus, Washington Post* 12/13/2005

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Day after day, reports of suspicious activity filed from military bases and other defense installations throughout the United States flow into the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, a three-year-old Pentagon agency whose size and budget remain classified.

The Talon reports, as they are called, are based on information from civilians and military personnel who stumble across people or information they think might be part of a terrorist plot or threat against defense facilities at home or abroad.

The documents can consist of "raw information reported by concerned citizens and military members regarding suspicious incidents," said a 2003 memo signed by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. The reports "may or may not be related to an actual threat, and its very nature may be fragmented and incomplete," the memo said.

The Talon system is part of the Defense Department's growing effort to gather intelligence within the United States, which officials argue is imperative as they work to detect and prevent potentially catastrophic terrorist assaults. The Talon reports -- how many are generated is classified, a Pentagon spokesman said -- are collected and analyzed by CIFA, an agency at the forefront of the Pentagon's counterterrorism program.

The Pentagon's emphasis on domestic intelligence has raised concerns among some civil liberties advocates and intelligence officials. For some of them, the Talon system carries echoes of the 1960s, when the Pentagon collected information about anti-Vietnam War groups and peace activists that led to congressional hearings in the 1970s and limits on the types of information the Defense Department could gather and retain about U.S. citizens.

"I am particularly apprehensive about the expansion of our military's role in domestic intelligence gathering," said Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the Sept. 11 commission at that panel's final news conference last week, noting that Congress has yet to pay attention to the Talon program. The Pentagon's collection of data, he said, was a "cause for concern," partly because little is known about it publicly.

"Programs such as CIFA, Eagle Eyes and Talon -- names unfamiliar to most Americans -- must receive robust scrutiny by Congress and the media," Ben-Veniste said.

CIFA, according to a Pentagon background paper provided to The Washington Post in response to inquiries, has established standards for Talon reports and handling that "meet intelligence oversight requirements." The statement said "U.S. person information" -- reports concerning people in the United States -- "is collected and retained only as authorized" by presidential executive order.

Spokesmen for the FBI, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte and the National Counterterrorism Center all said their principals would not comment on CIFA's Talon activities.

Talon, which stands for "threat and local observation notice," captures raw information about "anomalies, observations that are suspicious . . . and immediate indicators of potential threats to DoD [Defense Department] personnel and or resources," according to an attachment to Wolfowitz's memo.

Talon reports grew out of a program called Eagle Eyes, an anti-terrorist program established by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations that "enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror," according to the program's Web site. A Pentagon spokesman recently described Eagle Eyes as a "neighborhood watch" program for military bases. The Air Force inspector general newsletter in 2003 said program informants include "Air Force family members, contractors, off-base merchants, community organizations and neighborhoods."

In the period after Sept. 11, 2001, an intelligence and security panel working under sponsorship of the Joint Staff adopted Talon to be the Defense Department reporting system "to assemble, process and analyze suspicious activity reports to identify possible terrorist pre-attack activities," according to the background paper.

CIFA, which was created in February 2002, was given responsibility for analyzing the Talon reports. CIFA was originally asked to coordinate policy and oversee the counterintelligence activities of the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Defense agencies such as the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. CIFA's initial role also included the establishment of the common standards for training and collection of data.

Since that time, under its director, David A. Burtt II, CIFA has rapidly expanded its mandate inside the United States as the Pentagon's domestic intelligence activities have grown since Sept. 11.

It is unclear how many Talon reports are filed each year. But just one of the military services involved in the program, the Air Force, generated 1,200 during the 14 months that ended in September 2003, according to the inspector general's newsletter.

Among the types of information worth recording, according to a Talon report guide that accompanied the Wolfowitz memo, are threats or incidents that "may indicate a potential for a threat . . . whether the threat posed is deliberately targeted or collateral." Another trigger for reporting would be attempts by individuals to monitor U.S. facilities, including the taking of pictures, annotating maps or drawings of facilities, use of binoculars "or other vision-enhancing devices" or attempts to obtain "security-related or military specific information."

Other categories for reports were attempts to acquire badges, passes or theft of materials that could be used to manufacture false identification cards or thefts of military uniforms.

A former senior CIA official with wide counterintelligence experience, who is familiar with CIFA's growth, said the agency's mandate is "ambiguous, but the Defense Department is using its assets in its broadest terms." He added that efforts such as Talon "could be a well-intentioned effort and it could develop important information." But, he said that in his view, "the Pentagon has chosen to err on the side of over-collection" of information.

His concern, he said, was who does the intelligence "go to, and what do they do with it."

Republicans kill amendment to investigate Halliburton contract abuse; pledge hearings in December
HalliburtonWatch, 10 Nov. 2005

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WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 (HalliburtonWatch.org) -- -- Although Senate Republicans killed an amendment that would have established a special investigation into war profiteering by Halliburton and other companies by a vote of 53 to 44 today, they have pledged to investigate Halliburton before the end of the year.

The amendment, introduced by Senator Byron Dorgan, D-ND, during Senate consideration of the 2006 Defense Authorization bill, would have established a special committee modeled after Senator Harry Truman's World War II committee, which cost just thousands, but saved taxpayers $15 billion in 1940s' dollars. It was the third time in two years that the Senate rejected Dorgan's amendment.

After Dorgan introduced his amendment again yesterday, Sen. John Ensign, R-NV, made a surprise announcement that he would hold formal hearings into Halliburton's contract abuses in Iraq sometime in December. Ensign chairs a subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee - known as the Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support.

For two years, the Republican-controlled Senate has resisted public calls for a formal investigation into Halliburton, once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, even though it is being investigated for numerous violations, including criminal bid-rigging, overcharging of taxpayers, bribery and criminally profiting in a nation believed by President Bush to sponsor terrorism.

Although Republicans maintain that the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction is conducting an investigation, the Senate has failed to provide its own oversight.

The Army Corps of Engineers' top civilian contracting official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, was demoted in August after blowing the whistle on the Corps and Halliburton. "I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to [Halliburton] represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career," Greenhouse said.

There is no guarantee that Ensign's hearings will take place or be conducted in good faith, so we need to put the heat on:

Contact Sen. Ensign and congratulate him for his decision to hold formal hearings! Ask him to publicly release the dates on which the hearings will be held. Senator Ensign's telephone number is (202) 224-6244.

Contact your senators and ask them to support Sen. Ensign's decision to hold hearings, and call upon the Bush administration to ban Halliburton from any new contracts until all ongoing criminal investigations, as well as Ensign's pending investigation, are concluded.

US Capitol Switchboard - (202) 224-3121 or toll free: 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588

To contact your senators by email, click here.

To see how your senator voted on today's defeated Dorgan amendment, click here.

To see which members of Congress have received donations from Halliburton for the 2006 campaign cycle, click here.

Sen. Ensign's pledge: "I want to inform the Senator from North Dakota that, hopefully, when we come back for a couple days in December, as the chairman of the Readiness Subcommittee, I plan on holding hearings on exactly this. I plan on pulling that curtain back. I plan on getting into the investigation in the same way as Harry Truman. If it happens to be it is embarrassing to the administration, we are going to find out the truth on this--just like Harry Truman went after those cost-plus contracts in those days. It is not only the soul-source aspect, it is also the fact they are cost-plus contracts."

The following senators are members of Ensign's subcommittee:

Senator Ensign, Subcommittee Chairman
Senator McCain
Senator Inhofe
Senator Roberts
Senator Sessions
Senator Chambliss
Senator Cornyn
Senator Thune

Senator Akaka, Ranking Member
Senator Byrd
Senator Bill Nelson
Senator Ben Nelson
Senator Dayton
Senator Bayh
Senator Clinton

White House may expand power of a Pentagon agency. It would be able to investigate crimes
By Walter Pincus, Washington Post | November 28, 2005

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WASHINGTON -- The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel, and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.

The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform the agency from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage, or even economic espionage.

The Pentagon has pushed legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about US citizens with the Pentagon, CIA, and other intelligence agencies, as long as the data is deemed to be related to foreign intelligence. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.

The proposals, and other Pentagon steps aimed at improving its ability to analyze counterterrorism intelligence collected inside the United States, have drawn complaints from civil liberties advocates and a few members of Congress, who say the Defense Department's push into domestic collection is proceeding with little scrutiny by the Congress or the public.

'We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing," Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a recent interview.

Wyden has since persuaded lawmakers to change the legislation, attached to the fiscal 2006 Intelligence Authorization bill, to address some of his concerns, but he still believes hearings should be held. Among the changes was dropping a provision to let Defense Intelligence Agency officers hide the fact that they work for the government when they approach people who are possible sources of intelligence in the United States.

Modifications were made in the provision allowing the FBI to share information with the Pentagon and CIA, requiring the approval of the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, and requiring the Pentagon to make reports to Congress on the subject. Wyden said the legislation 'now strikes a much fairer balance by protecting critical rights for our country's citizens and advancing intelligence operations to meet our security needs."

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the data-sharing amendment would still give the Pentagon greater access to the FBI's massive collection of data, including information on citizens not connected to terrorism or espionage.

The measure 'removes one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies," she said. She added that the Pentagon's 'intelligence agencies are quietly expanding their domestic presence without any public debate."

Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Conway, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said the most senior Defense Department intelligence officials are aware of the sensitivities related to their expanded domestic activities. At the same time, he said, the Pentagon has to have the intelligence necessary to protect its facilities and personnel at home and abroad.

'In the age of terrorism, the US military and its facilities are targets and we have to be prepared within our authorities to defend them before something happens," Conway said.

Among steps taken by the Pentagon that enhanced its domestic capabilities was the establishment after 9/11 of Northern Command, in Colorado Springs, to help military forces in reacting to terrorist threats in the continental United States. Today, the Command's intelligence centers in Colorado and Texas fuse reports from the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the FBI, and other US agencies, and are staffed by 290 intelligence analysts. That is more than the roughly 200 analysts working for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and far more than those at the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition, each of the military services has begun its own post-9/11 collection of domestic intelligence, primarily aimed at gathering data on potential terrorist threats to bases and other military facilities at home and abroad.

Perhaps the prime illustration of the Pentagon's intelligence growth is the Counterintelligence Field Activity, which remains one of its least publicized intelligence agencies.

Neither the size of its staff, said to be more than 1,000, nor its budget is public, Conway said. The Pentagon agency's brochure said its mission is to 'transform" the way counterintelligence is done, 'fully utilizing 21st century tools and resources."

The Pentagon agency's abilities would increase considerably under the proposal being reviewed by the White House, which was made by a presidential commission on intelligence.

The commission's chairmen were Laurence Silberman, a retired judge, and former senator Chuck Robb, Democrat of Virginia. The commission urged that the Pentagon agency be given authority to carry out domestic criminal investigations and clandestine operations against potential threats inside the United States.

The Silberman-Robb panel found that because the separate military services concentrated on investigations within their areas, 'no entity views non-service-specific and department-wide investigations as its primary responsibility."

A 2003 Defense Department directive kept the Pentagon agency from engaging in law enforcement activities such as 'the investigation, apprehension, or detention of individuals suspected or convicted of criminal offenses against the laws of the United States."


Department of Defense Directive 5105.67

Counterintelligence Field Activity

CIFA - Sourcewatch

Guerrilla News Network: What is CounterIntelligence Field Activity?

Secrecy News: "Drastic" Domestic Military Changes; "Serious" Intelligence Reform

CIFA - Against the Madness