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The FBI plays Big Brother
(The Toledo Blade, November 28, 2005)
The FBI is behaving like Big Brother again, conducting surveillance on U.S. citizens without regard to the guidelines it is supposed to follow to keep its operations above board. . . . [For historical background see: COINTELPRO: "FBI Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt."] . . . What's worse is that once these breaches were pointed out, the agency brushed them off as if they were no big deal. Newly released classified documents reveal that the FBI has secretly shadowed citizens for as long as 18 months, and that it did so without the proper legal permission or oversight. It also kept tabs on another target for five years, but didn't bother to tell the Justice Department the person had moved from New York to Detroit. That is a clear violation of rules, and also ominously evokes the bad old days when J. Edgar Hoover presided over an agency that too often ran amok. . . . There's a reason law enforcement agencies are required to get warrants. Warrants give them the authority to obtain information for investigations. But the muscleheads at the FBI didn't bother to update an expired warrant before they seized e-mails. Plus, they obtained bank records without proper authority and conducted an improper "unconsented physical search." . . . The documents show the need for greater oversight of secret surveillance within the country. The FBI's so-what, no-big-deal attitude is due in part to the Bush Administration throwing its weight around in this post 9/11 era. Besides, the documents confirm citizens' fear that their liberties are under attack. . . . Congress shouldn't let the FBI get by with brushing this off. If it does, the agency will think it can get away with greater breaches. It's time for the House and Senate to quit fighting over whether to establish new restrictions on the controversial USA Patriot Act. The FBI has proven once again just how much every agency needs civilian oversight, and a set of watchdogs, media and otherwise.

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 6:57 AM

 

U.S. Secret Police Expanding Domestic Surveillance Activity
(Walter Pincus, Washington Post, November 27, 2005)
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, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. . . . 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 U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies . . . 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," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) . . . The measure, she said, "removes one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies." She said the Pentagon's "intelligence agencies are quietly expanding their domestic presence without any public debate." . . . In addition, each of the military services has begun its own post-9/11 collection of domestic intelligence . . . The Marine Corps has expanded its domestic intelligence operations and developed internal policies in 2004 . . . The order recognizes that in the post-9/11 era, the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity will be "increasingly required to perform domestic missions," . . . Perhaps the prime illustration of the Pentagon's intelligence growth is CIFA, 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

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 11:06 AM

 

FBI & Pentagon Pay Private Firm to Spy on U.S. Citizens(11/11/05)
(Shane Harris, National Journal, November 11, 2005)
The FBI and the Defense Department for the past three years have been paying a Georgia-based company for access to its vast databases that contain billions of personal records about nearly every person -- citizens and noncitizens alike -- in the United States. . . . Among the services that ChoicePoint provides to the government is access to a previously undisclosed, and vaguely described, "exclusive" data-searching system. This system in effect gives law enforcement and intelligence agents the ability to use the private data broker to do something that they legally can't -- keep tabs on nearly every American citizen and foreigner in the United States. . . . A set of contract documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and which the government sought to withhold for almost two years, reveals details not previously reported about ChoicePoint's work for the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, called FTTTF or "F tre F." This task force was set up soon after the 9/11 attacks to assist law enforcement and intelligence agencies in locating foreign terrorists and their supporters in the United States. Because the task force can't maintain records on U.S. persons without opening an official investigation, it relies on ChoicePoint to augment the intelligence that the government collects. . . . In early 2003, the agencies ordered a set of Internet-based services from ChoicePoint. These services, the documents show, effectively put the power of the company's databases at government agents' fingertips on their desktop computers. . . . And the agencies purchased ChoicePoint's "national comprehensive reports with associates," a service that lists the names, Social Security numbers, addresses, properties, and even pilot licenses to which someone is connected, directly or through known associates and relatives. . . . ChoicePoint's work involves continuously tracking a "subject of interest" and notifying the government when new information has surfaced on that person. . . . "When this new information is added and identified as relevant new data for a subject of interest, the FTTTF will receive electronic notification.... Additional information beyond the identity and address data can be provided to the FTTTF . . . According to an outside expert on ChoicePoint who reviewed the documents for National Journal, the exclusive service looks like something ChoicePoint built specifically for federal agencies, and the arrangement raises questions about whether the company is effectively becoming an arm of the federal government. . . . Even though existing laws strictly limit the government's ability to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens, those limitations don't apply to corporations. And so, the more ChoicePoint takes on exclusive work for the government that the government is prohibited from doing on its own, "the more it looks like a government actor," Hoofnagle says. . . . Standard ChoicePoint fare includes concealed-weapons permits; marriage and death certificates; registrations for boats, aircraft, and automobiles; eviction notices; credit card information; hazardous-materials-handling permits; and employment histories. . . . U.S. citizens have few avenues to monitor how the government is using their personal data when it resides outside government hands. . . . "Using contractors to perform sensitive intelligence or counterintelligence work, whether it's prisoner interrogation in Iraq or data mining in D.C., is always problematic, because their activities are much harder to oversee," Aftergood says. "Unlike government agencies, contractors are not answerable to Congress. And the secrecy of most intelligence work makes them all but impervious to independent oversight. If they broke or bent the law, we might never find out."

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 12:24 PM

 

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
(Dana Priest, Washington Post, November 2, 2005)
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement. . . . The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents. . . . The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions. . . . The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country. . . . But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military -- which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress -- have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody. . . . It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas . . . CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning. . . . The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreign government and intelligence officials. . . . Most of the facilities were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees' chairmen and vice chairmen on the program's generalities. . . . The black-site program was approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers and officials, according to several former and current U.S. government and intelligence officials. . . . The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA's substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death. . . . The Salt Pit was protected by surveillance cameras and tough Afghan guards, but the road leading to it was not safe to travel and the jail was eventually moved inside Bagram Air Base. It has since been relocated off the base. . . . By mid-2002, the CIA had worked out secret black-site deals with two countries, including Thailand and one Eastern European nation, current and former officials said. An estimated $100 million was tucked inside the classified annex of the first supplemental Afghanistan appropriation. . . . Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 6:47 AM