NEWSWEEK: Secret Pentagon Unit May Have Gathered and Kept Unauthorized Files on Thousands of Innocent Individuals and Organizations, Labelling Some Potential Security Threats
January 22, 2006 13:30:19 (ET)
NEW YORK, Jan 22, 2006 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- In late 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists protested outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Dick Cheney. 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," he says. But 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, reports Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff.
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 attention. But there are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations, reports Isikoff in the January 30 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, January 23).
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 TALON -- short for Threat and Local Observation Notice -- that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." The data collected would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.
But an internal Pentagon review has found that CIFA's database contained some information that may have violated regulations. A Pentagon memo obtained 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. There was information that was "improperly stored," says an authorized Pentagon spokesman. And the number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official. In another memo, last week, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ordered CIFA to purge such information from its files -- and directed that all Defense Department intelligence personnel receive "refresher training" on department policies.
Details about CIFA, including its size and budget, are classified. But 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 shows that CIFA analysts had access to law-enforcement reports and sensitive military and U.S. intelligence documents. But the organization also gleaned data from "open source Internet monitoring." In other words, they surfed the Web.
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 to appear to be located in foreign countries.
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