Domestic Spying by the DoD: Update

A month or so ago, I wrote about an MSNBC story saying CIFA, a secret Defense Department agency theoretically dedicated to protecting troops and bases, had spied on peaceful protestors. This week there's another story about it in Newsweek. I don't see a lot of new information in it (it seems to be mainly confirming the earlier revelation), but there are two bits worth highlighting. First:

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.

In other words, they admit they were going beyond what was permissible.

There's also this:

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....

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.

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 earlier article was all about spying on protestors; it didn't have anything about spying on the internet. Both efforts have the potential to suppress speech, but the latter could be much more far-reaching in its effects. The part about concealing their identities is particularly creepy, and bound to incite paranoia in the blogosphere.

Which means we'll be back to the perennial question: are we too paranoid, or not paranoid enough?

[That's all, folks]