Are we being watched?

[skvorisdeadsorta]

This goes back quite aways though, guys. Hoover, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, the advent of Cointelpro, have all stepped on your rights. Bush is only following precedent here and it's not like he invented this flagrant violation of our freedoms or is the first. Only one in a long line of abuses of powers.

[luke]

Yeah, you're being watched. By private eyes.



They're watching YOU, bitch!

(can't believe it took so long to get to that)

[phil]

Now ... That is scary !!

[Galactus]

Is just me or does it look like Oates is strokin' it?

[Thorngrub]

shin said:

Who's worse, this President or the "conservatives" who voted for him twice?

Unfair question! My Mom is one of those "conservatives"!

[luke]

ded said:

Is just me or does it look like Oates is strokin' it?

I think he's watching you...take a shower.

[riley]

Oates is always strokin' it.

[skvorisdeadsorta]

No, I can't go for that! oh no oh no

[shin]

skvorisdeadsorta said:

This goes back quite aways though, guys. Hoover, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, the advent of Cointelpro, have all stepped on your rights. Bush is only following precedent here and it's not like he invented this flagrant violation of our freedoms or is the first. Only one in a long line of abuses of powers.

Holy shit you're a pathetic stooge. Check your mail in the coming week or so, now that finals are over I can finally get down to sending you that trophy. Merry Christmas, cocksucker.

[shin]

nymphofantasia said:

Yes you are being watched shin. And don't you remember when those little green guys landed in your back yard and kidnapped you and inserted a microchip up your ass?

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups
By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella and the NBC Investigative Unit[/b]
Updated: 6:18 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2005

WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It's an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We're not doing anything illegal.”

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.

“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far,” says NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin.

The Department of Defense declined repeated requests by NBC News for an interview. A spokesman said that all domestic intelligence information is “properly collected” and involves “protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel.” The military has always had a legitimate “force protection” mission inside the U.S. to protect its personnel and facilities from potential violence. But the Pentagon now collects domestic intelligence that goes beyond legitimate concerns about terrorism or protecting U.S. military installations, say critics.

Four dozen anti-war meetings
The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center. One “incident” included in the database is a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald’s National Salute to America’s Heroes — a military air and sea show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat and a column in the database concludes: “US group exercising constitutional rights.” Two-hundred and forty-three other incidents in the database were discounted because they had no connection to the Department of Defense — yet they all remained in the database.

The DOD has strict guidelines (.PDF link), adopted in December 1982, that limit the extent to which they can collect and retain information on U.S. citizens.

Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.”

The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.

“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it's the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.”

Some former senior DOD intelligence officials share his concern. George Lotz, a 30-year career DOD official and former U.S. Air Force colonel, held the post of Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight from 1998 until his retirement last May. Lotz, who recently began a consulting business to help train and educate intelligence agencies and improve oversight of their collection process, believes some of the information the DOD has been collecting is not justified.

Make sure they are not just going crazy
“Somebody needs to be monitoring to make sure they are just not going crazy and reporting things on U.S. citizens without any kind of reasoning or rationale,” says Lotz. “I demonstrated with Martin Luther King in 1963 in Washington,” he says, “and I certainly didn’t want anybody putting my name on any kind of list. I wasn’t any threat to the government,” he adds.

The military’s penchant for collecting domestic intelligence is disturbing — but familiar — to Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer.

“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.

The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.

But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.

“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.

Too much data?
Some Pentagon observers worry that in the effort to thwart the next 9/11, the U.S. military is now collecting too much data, both undermining its own analysis efforts by forcing analysts to wade through a mountain of rubble in order to obtain potentially key nuggets of intelligence and entangling U.S. citizens in the U.S. military’s expanding and quiet collection of domestic threat data.

Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.” Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide “non-validated domestic threat information” from military units throughout the United States that are collected and retained in a CIFA database. The reports include details on potential surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles, bomb threats and planned anti-war protests. In the program’s first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports. The database obtained by NBC News is generated by Counterintelligence Field Activity.

CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records” include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats. Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies.

One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop Grumman and dubbed “Person Search,” is designed “to provide comprehensive information about people of interest.” It will include the ability to search government as well as commercial databases. Another project, “The Insider Threat Initiative,” intends to “develop systems able to detect, mitigate and investigate insider threats,” as well as the ability to “identify and document normal and abnormal activities and ‘behaviors,’” according to the Computer Sciences Corp. contract. A separate CIFA contract with a small Virginia-based defense contractor seeks to develop methods “to track and monitor activities of suspect individuals.”

“The military has the right to protect its installations, and to protect its recruiting services,” says Pyle. “It does not have the right to maintain extensive files on lawful protests of their recruiting activities, or of their base activities,” he argues.

Lotz agrees.

“The harm in my view is that these people ought to be allowed to demonstrate, to hold a banner, to peacefully assemble whether they agree or disagree with the government’s policies,” the former DOD intelligence official says.

'Slippery slope'
Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.

Some of the targets of the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.

“It's absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,” says Hersh of The Truth Project.

“I mean, we're based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are Quakers.”

The Defense Department refused to comment on how it obtained information on the Lake Worth meeting or why it considers a dozen or so anti-war activists a “threat.”

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/

[shin]

Only eight pages from the four-hundred page document have been released so far. But on those eight pages, Sirius OutQ News discovered that the Defense Department has been keeping tabs NOT just on anti-war protests, but also on seemingly non-threatening protests against the military's ban on gay servicemembers. According to those first eight pages, Pentagon investigators kept tabs on April protests at UC-Santa Cruz, State University of New York at Albany, and William Patterson College in New Jersey. A February protest at NYU was also listed, along with the law school's gay advocacy group "OUTlaw," and was classified as "possibly violent."

...

The database indicates that the Pentagon has been collecting information about protesters and their vehicles, looking for what they call a "significant connection" between incidents. Of the four "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" protests listed, only one - U-C Santa Cruz, where students staged a "gay kissing" demonstration - is classified as a "credible" threat.

www.sldn.org/templates/press/record.html?section=5&record=2548

[skvorisdeadsorta]

shin said:

skvorisdeadsorta said:

This goes back quite aways though, guys. Hoover, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, the advent of Cointelpro, have all stepped on your rights. Bush is only following precedent here and it's not like he invented this flagrant violation of our freedoms or is the first. Only one in a long line of abuses of powers.

Holy shit you're a pathetic stooge. Check your mail in the coming week or so, now that finals are over I can finally get down to sending you that trophy. Merry Christmas, cocksucker.

I'm a stooge for pointing out a historical fact? You fucking moron cocksocking sorry piece of shit. If you're the new face of liberalism, I can't wait to forever be called a stooge around these boards. Did I say that I agreed with what Bush was doing or that he was right? Absolultely not, ye of no fucking reading comprehension. If you don't like what I post, I have some advice for you if can't be involved in the conversation and add to it any other way: fucking skip it you fucking moron.

I'm so sick of you whiney fucks that permeate these boards, however that doesn't mean that I'm going to go away. I'm sorry that pointing out something in a history book is hard for you to swallow, but there are several factual instances where all the Presidents in this country have conspired or spied against it's own citizens. JFK even went so far to get his own brother, Bobby Kennedy to wire tap and do surveillance on MLK Jr., for christ sakes. If I'm a stooge for pointing out the fact that this country has too much power in the executive branch for things that it does under the guise of National Security than so be it. Obviously it has a much better head on it's shouldars than self grandizing fucks such as yourself.

Now the true test is to see if you can actually POST around here without posting name calling rhetoric that really doesn't add anything to the boards.

It's too bad someone doesn't stab you repeatedly with some sort of nerf instruement. Stop taking yourself so seriously you fucking rabid goon.

As Vincent Gallo said: "goon, goon, goon, goon, goon, goon, that's your name, that's what you are, and that's all you're ever gonna be".

Goon.

[shin]

Wow, thanks for pointing out that historical fact of which instantly sought to excuse Bush by comparison. "Everyone else in school is doing it!" Can I now also point out a historical fact, that some spying on Americans is in fact legal, provided you follow certain protocol? You know, that's why they have the fucking FISA in the *first place*. And also that Bush blatantly broke a law he had no reason to break other than either a) laziness or b) utter contempt for restrictions on executive power?

I mean seriously, if Bush fucking rounded up Arabs and put them in prison camps, women and children included, would your first response on the fucking matter be to say "this isn't anything different than what FDR did"??

I don't think a single criticism has been made here of Bush by which you have not given "historical background" in an attempt to limit the impact of Bush's grotesque unconstitutional behavior. The only other person here who does anything like this is RocDoc, and even HIS first reaction was to point out how Soviet-like this shit really is. Talk about being on the wrong side of a debate when that happens. I mean, WOW OTHER PRESIDENTS HAVE DONE BAD THINGS BEFORE, LET'S NOT FOCUS TOO INTENTLY ON WHAT THIS ONE'S DOING NOW, RIGHT GUYS?

I don't know if I'm the "new face of liberalism" but I do know your the "old face of liberalism", or more importantly, the face of liberalism that loses elections, completely misses the plot, and sucks so much Republican cock that you drown in sperm.

How's that for name calling rhetoric, you commie hamster raper?

[skvorisdeadsorta]

WHAT?!!!? Where did you go to school because you FAILED MISERABLY AT READING COMPREHENSION 101, you cock-monkey. I didn't infer or anything other wise that what he is doing is anything other than WRONG AND FUCKED UP! You're so blinded by your self-riteous bullshit that you can't see that, YES I THINK IT'S A BIG DEAL!!!!!! Simply, you'd rather assume that I am trying to make excuses. All I was saying in my post IS THAT I'M NOT SURPRISED. Jesus, you're a thick dickweed.
I am not making excuses for Bush, I don't like Bush. I think he's an arrogant misinformed dickhead that I saw destroy my home state more than any other Govenor. How's that? Look, you dip shit cockamammy fagggot, I have pointed out several times the kinds of behaviour on both sides that I think are dangerous behaviour no matter what the party. It's not a matter of trying to lessen the blow of the Republicans, it's a matter of pointing out that, yes I have the Utopian ideal that maybe both sides should stop behaving in this manner.

So try again, you idiot.

[skvorisdeadsorta]

Sorry, GOON!