Domestic Spying by the DoD

Sometimes I envy those of you too young to have lived through the last time. You can experience it all--the corruption, the mendacity, the body counts, the secrecy, the contempt for constitutional protections, for the rule of law--as fresh and new. You aren't plagued by the uneasy feeling that you're stuck in a recurring bad dream where you know the outcome but can do nothing to change it.

Kevin Drum directs us to an MSNBC story about a Department of Defense database tracking domestic incidents, including some 42 anti-war protests:

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.

In theory, there are very strict guidelines governing Department of Defense collection of information on U.S. citizens. This information-gathering was justified as protecting the security of Defense facilities--obviously a bogus justification, as it included protests 'far from any military installation'.

Enhanced domestic spying capability is, not surprisingly, another consequence of the Global War On Terra; the stated rationale is to prevent terrorism:

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.

And CIFA is no small effort:

CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community....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.

Just to be clear, I don't think we're where we were in 1970. Neither does the guy who leaked the COINTELPRO story, who is quoted in the article. The fact of DoD spying on some anti-war protests does not mean there is a widespread coordinated effort to use the military against domestic critics of the administration (as was the case under Nixon).

The point here is that we're (once again) headed in that direction, that we are led by people with a similar contempt for dissent who are at least as ruthless and every bit as willing to use the mechanisms of government for partisan ends. The point is that it could easily all happen again...only this time with a more compliant press and no congressional oversight.

[That's all, folks]