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More Government Spying on Nonprofits Revealed
(OMB Watch, 10 January 2006)
New documents released to the press in December 2005 show federal agencies have been infiltrating and conducting surveillance on a wide range of nonprofits, in what appears to be a policy of treating lawful dissent as an act of terrorism. . . . On Dec. 14, 2005 NBC published a story based on a 400-page Dept. of Defense (DOD) document that lists more than 1,500 "suspicious incidents" from the previous year. These included a number of peaceful nonprofit activities, such as a Fort Worth, FL Quaker group planning a protest of military recruitment in area high schools. The DOD document referenced over four dozen anti-war meetings and protests. DOD deemed 24 of these incidents as no threat to national security, but did not delete them from its Talon database. . . . The DOD surveillance, however, does not appear to have been inadvertent. A DOD briefing document, cited in the NBC story, indicated a policy of surveillance of protest groups, stating, "We have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the Internet..." . . . The FBI's use of Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) resources to spy on domestic groups engaging in peaceful protest has come to light through litigation filed by the ACLU. OMB Watch reported on several instances of surveillance of peace, civil rights and environmental groups last year, based on documents obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act. . . . Similar incidents were revealed in Dec. 2005. First, the ACLU of Colorado announced release of documents showing the FBI had tracked the names and license plate numbers of people that attended a protest at the North American Wholesale Lumber Association's convention in Colorado Springs in June 2002. The documents released to the ACLU showed that JTTF recommended a domestic terrorism investigation of people planning to participate in a training on nonviolent protest. . . . The Colorado documents also revealed a FBI investigation of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace, because the group's website promoted a Feb. 2003 anti-war demonstration in Colorado Springs. According to the ACLU report, the FBI conducted surveillance of a car pool meeting place for people attending the event. Of the incidents, ACLU of Colorado Legal Director Mark Silverstein explained, "The FBI is unjustifiably treating nonviolent public protest as though it were domestic terrorism. The FBI's misplaced priorities threaten to deter legitimate criticism of government policy while wasting taxpayer resources that should be directed to investigating real terrorists." . . . Still more ACLU documents were released later that month. The New York Times reported that over 2,300 pages of FBI material revealed surveillance of a wide variety of groups, including the Indianapolis Vegan Project, the antipoverty group Catholic Workers, Greenpeace, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The documents showed that, in addition to surveillance, the FBI has used informants within targeted groups to collect information.

posted by LoZo 1:13 PM