This is going to be a explosive topic when the Congress returns. These fascist neocons started with peeping through Clinton's bedroom window. Now they have ended up peeping through everybody's window. And Americans, no matter what political views they come from, will not tolerate an invasion of their privacy, much less from one with concentrated powers such as the President of the US all alone.
Spying pattern a legacy of 9/11
State senator wants to close legal loophole so Guard cannot be used for domestic snooping
By Sean Holstege, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area
President Bush's authorization of warrantless wiretaps within the United States grabbed headlines last week, but a pattern of domestic snooping stretches back to California and the weeks after 9/11.
Almost daily it seems, new revelations emerge about domestic surveillance programs. U.S. News and World Report said Friday that the government has been secretly monitoring radiation levels at mosques and other private Muslim buildings in six U.S. cities outside California. The New York Times reported Thursday that undercover city police had infiltrated political protest groups in New York City.
A week earlier, NBC News reported the Pentagon had assembled a 400-page database listing "threats" from domestic protesters, including the Quakers.
The document listed 1,500 "suspicious incidents" over 10 months in 2004 and 2005. An eight-page excerpt posted on the MSNBC Web site includes six entries in California, including protests at military recruiting offices at the University of California's Berkeley and Santa Cruz campuses.
That revelation prompted state Sen. Joseph Dunn, a Santa Ana Democrat investigating similar efforts by the California National Guard, to call for a state law banning the state military from domestic spying.
Nationally, the military is barred by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, written in response to federal troops being stationed at Southern voting booths after the Civil War. Dunn suspects the military may be using state National Guards to get around those restrictions.
"We need to close that loophole so that no future adjutant general (the Guard's top general) or governor will be tempted to use the National Guard for domestic spying," Dunn said. "I plan to introduce in the next session a state version of the Posse Comitatus Act."
Dunn's suspicions arose from the creation in the spring of the Information Synchronization Center under then-Adjutant General Gen. Thomas Eres. Eres was trying to create an entire domestic intelligence division within the Guard, when news broke that it kept tabs on a Mother's Day anti-war protest by Raging Grannies, Code Pink and Gold Star Families for Peace.
Eres was ousted weeks later, and his replacement, Maj. Gen. William Wade II, disbanded the unit and dismissed its commanding officer. It was widely believed that Eres drew up plans for a 40-person Guard surveillance network on his own. Dunn is not so sure.
Last summer, his investigators uncovered hundreds of pages of documents, with numerous references to and correspondence with the Pentagon and its new post-9/11 domestic intelligence operation at NORTHCOM. At the time, no direct evidence linked Eres' plans to the Pentagon, and Defense Department investigators later found fault with his methods.
"The Information Synchronization unit was far beyond the capabilities of General Eres. I can't help believe something else was in play. It was not just General Eres creating a bigger kingdom," Dunn said. "There are identical units in other states. Coincidence? I don't think so."
He did not offer specifics, but in May Massachusetts created an "intelligence fusion center," using the Massachusetts National Guard to help collect information.
The California National Guard played a similar role soon after 9/11. Attorney General Bill Lockyer and then-Gov. Gray Davis established the first state center in the country, weeks after the attacks, and called it the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, or CATIC. The National Guard has staffed the state center from the onset.
In spring of 2003, CATIC warned local police in a bulletin to expect violence at a Port of Oakland war protest. A CATIC spokesman at the time defended the bulletin in an Oakland Tribune investigation by likening a protest against the war on terrorism to terrorism itself.
The investigation found that CATIC had from its beginning issued similar alerts about several protest groups and had conducted an extensive clipping service compiling reports about such groups.
CATIC, Lockyer's office, the National Guard and Gary Winuk, executive director of the Governor's Office of Homeland Security, all said the efforts of CATIC — since re-formed — and Eres' unit were unrelated.
But last week, the American Civil Liberties Union demanded new records from the state terrorism center, seeking information about its relationship with the Guard, the Pentagon, the FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Force. The ACLU wants documents about the monitoring of about a dozen activist groups.
Those include Greenpeace, Code Pink, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The ACLU has documented FBI surveillance on PETA and an AAADC conference at Stanford University in 2002.
"I don't think there is any role for the military in gathering information about peaceful protests that pose no threat to the military," said Ben Wizner, an attorney in the ACLU's national headquarters. "If there is a legitimate criminal investigation to be done, it should be done by the FBI or local police."
But Winuk said he thinks the role of the military has been exaggerated and said he has never heard of the Defense Department's Counterintelligence Field Activity unit, which NBC reported as engaged in building "a domestic law enforcement database."
"I've never showed a piece of information with the national military," Winuk said. "If they get something, they don't share it with the state. I get stuff from the FBI or U.S. Department of Homeland Security."
Winuk said he wants "nothing to do with" military surveillance.
"I think we do ourselves a massive disservice keeping tabs on protest groups," Winuk said.
But military intelligence officers are legally cleared to share information about bona fide threats, particularly to military bases. The standard for all domestic surveillance is a reasonable expectation, based on evidence, that a crime will likely be committed. Files involving anything else are supposed to be purged. That does not always happen.
"There are new dangers in maintaining electronic information because of the proliferation of databases," Wizner said. "I would not want to have my name in a Pentagon or FBI database if there is another catastrophic terrorist attack."
Wizner added: "We don't have a Congress doing any oversight whatsoever. Congress needs to step up and have hearings about domestic surveillance."
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