Pentagon hired contractor to advise on collecting information on churches, mosques, other U.S. sites

By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Posted on Fri, Mar. 17, 2006

WASHINGTON - A Pentagon intelligence agency that kept files on American anti-war activists hired one of the contractors who bribed former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., to help it collect data on houses of worship, schools, power plants and other locations in the United States.

MZM Inc., headed by Mitchell Wade, also received three contracts totaling more than $250,000 to provide unspecified "intelligence services" to the White House, according to documents obtained by Knight Ridder. The White House didn't respond to an inquiry about what those intelligence services entailed.

MZM's Pentagon and White House deals were part of tens of millions of dollars in federal government business that Wade's company attracted beginning in 2002.
MZM and Wade, who pleaded guilty last month to bribing Cunningham and unnamed Defense Department officials to steer work to his firm, are the focus of ongoing probes by Pentagon and Department of Justice investigators.

In February 2003, MZM won a two-month contract worth $503,144.70 to provide technical support to the Pentagon's Joint Counter-Intelligence Field Activity, or CIFA. The top-secret agency was created five months earlier primarily to protect U.S. defense personnel and facilities from foreign terrorists.

The job involved advising CIFA on selecting software and technology designed to ferret out commercial and government data that could be used in what's called a Geospatial Information System. A GIS system inserts information about geographic locations, such as buildings, into digital maps produced from satellite photographs.

According to a "statement of work," the data that CIFA was interested in obtaining included "maps, street addresses, lines of communication, critical infrastructure elements, demographic and other pertinent sources that would support geocoding and multi-level analysis."

Geocoding involves assigning latitudes and longitudes to locations, such as street addresses, so they can be displayed as points on maps. Such tools increasingly are being used by U.S. corporations and law enforcement agencies.

MZM was to "assist the government in identifying and procuring data" on maps, as well as "airports, ports, dams, churches/mosques/synagogues, schools (and) power plants," said the statement of work.

"In many cases, the government already owns such data, and for reasons of economy, government-owned data is preferred," said the statement. It isn't clear why U.S. intelligence agencies couldn't do the work themselves.

Navy Cmdr. Gregory Hicks, a Pentagon spokesman, said MZM began working on the project in October 2002, when the agency was created.

Its job was to help the agency integrate technology into its "information architecture to help CIFA use available (satellite) imagery, which is produced legally by other commercial and government agencies," Hicks said.

"GIS software ... is designed to allow integration of geographic and imagery data with threat information to provide complex analytic products," he said. "Not knowing the location of key infrastructure and points of interest, such as bridges, chemical plants, schools, parks, and even religious facilities, as they relate to threat information, could significantly affect the accuracy of such analysis and plans and lead to disastrous results."

He was unable to discuss further details of CIFA's dealings with MZM, citing the ongoing investigations into Wade's dealings with the Pentagon.

CIFA recently has come under fire following disclosures that it maintained information on individuals and groups involved in peaceful anti-war protests at defense facilities and recruiting offices.

The information was stored in a database that was supposed to be reserved for reports related to potential foreign terrorist activity.

In a March 8 letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., a senior Pentagon official said that a review of the Cornerstone database had identified 186 "protest-related reports" containing the names of 43 people that were mistakenly retained in the database.

"These reports have since been removed from the Cornerstone database and refresher training on intelligence oversight and database management is being given to all CI (counter-intelligence) and intelligence personnel," said the letter from Robert W. Rogalski, an acting deputy undersecretary of defense.

The disclosure that CIFA was storing information on anti-war activities added to concerns that the Bush administration may have used its war on terrorism to give government agencies expanded power to monitor Americans' finances, associations, travel and other activities.

The administration's domestic eavesdropping program and FBI monitoring of environmental, animal rights and anti-war groups have also fueled such fears. The administration contends that its programs are legal and insists that they're designed to ensure civil liberties while protecting national security.

A Washington Post story last year contained a brief reference to the White House contracts in a report on the company's dealings with the Pentagon.

Wade, who faces up to 20 years in prison, was one of four men charged in the Cunningham case. Cunningham, who resigned from Congress in November after serving for 15 years, was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison earlier this month.

Warrantless Physical Searches

According to Countdown, US News and World Report will tell us tomorrow that Bush administration lawyers (Torture Yoo and Abu Gonzales presumably) after 9/11 made the case that Bush had the power to engage in warrantless physical searches of terrorism suspects on domestic soil.

Cue wingers screeching Clinton/Aldrich Ames. I actually don't agree with what Clinton did with Aldrich Ames, but it nonetheless isn't the same thing as at the time the FISA law had no provision for dealing with physical searches. After the FISA law as amended the Clinton administration didn't argue they could violate the law.


-Atrios 8:25 PM

Can we have investigations NOW?

by mcjoan
Fri Mar 17, 2006 at 09:53:05 PM PDT

On tonight's Countdown, Keith Olbermann had a short segment with GW Law School Professor, Jonathon Turley in which they discussed an upcoming report in U.S. News & World Report that says the White House has used the same justification for warrantless wiretaps to justify physical searches of terror suspects homes and businesses.  Here's an unofficial transcript from kossack Chamonix, part of which was posted in vmckimmey's diary:

Olbermann: (reading from a U.S. News & World Report press release) "Soon after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, lawyers in the White House and the Justice Department argued that the same legal authority that the same legal authority that allowed warrentless electronic surveillance inside the US, could also be used to justify physical searches of terror suspects homes & businesses without court approval."

Olbermann: Doesn't that send chills down your spine?

Turley: Well it does. It's horrific, because what that would constitute is to effectively remove the 4th Amendment from the U.S. Constitution and the fact that it was so quick as a suggestion shows the inclinations, unfortunately, of this administration. It treats the Constitution as some legal technicality instead of the thing were trying to fight to protect. Notably, the U.S. News & World Report story says the FBI officals, or some of them apparently, objected... [W]e're seeing a lot of people in the administration with the courage to say "Hold it, this is not what we're supposed to be about. If we're fighting a war, it's a war of self definition and if we start to take whole amendments out of the Constitution in the name of the war on terror-we have to wonder what's left at the end, except victory."

Olbermann: (reading from the press release) "According to 2 two current and former government officals . . . the Bush administration lawyers presented the arguments to senior FBI officals who expressed strong reservations about their proposal. . . . It could not be determined whether any warrentless physical searches had been carried out under the legal authority cited by the administration, but at least one defense attorney representing a terrorism suspect has alleged that his law office and home may have been searched without a court warrant."

Olbermann: The attorneys office and home not the suspect's office and home. Is there away to overstate this? When you start to talk about the 4th amendment and protections of constitution verses the needs to try to track down terrorist, you can move very quickly into tin-foil hat zone. When you sound totally Paranoid-like they're spying on us through our walls, but is this...is this not the first thing you would see if you did some sort of... prequel to the book 1984, wouldn't this be somewhere in the 1st chapter?

Turley: I'm afraid it would. This is something to be very concerned about. These are not trival matters. We've seen a sort of broad-based assault on basic Constitutional rights in our country since 9/11. We have a President who ordered electronic surveillance by the NSA without warrants in something that constitutes a federal crime. Congress isn't even holding serious hearings on that. So we have a system that has checks & balances but none of them seem to be working. At the same time, as we noted earlier, we have an attack on the Judiciary itself, all of this should present a picture of concern for any American.

You can see the video of this segment at CanOFun. The online version of the magazine story won't be up until tomorrow night, so until then a lot of our questions will remain unanswered. One would be what justification exactly are they using for these programs? AUMF? That one's pretty much already been debunked. Were the FBI official who objected actually objecting the to justification effort, or to the actual program? And have actual, warrantless physical searches been conducted in this program?

These are all questions that you would thing a Senate investigative committee or two, say, oh, maybe the Intelligence Committee, and maybe the Judiciary Committee, would be interested in asking.

NSA program broader than previously described

By Shane Harris, National Journal
March 17, 2006

The Bush administration has assiduously avoided any talk about the actual workings of its program to intercept the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are suspected of having links to terrorists abroad. Officials' unwavering script goes like this: Present the legal justifications for the president to authorize domestic electronic surveillance without warrants, but say nothing about how the National Security Agency actually does it -- or about what else the agency might be doing.

But when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 6 to answer questions about the program, what he didn't say pulled back the curtain on how the NSA decides which calls and e-mails to monitor. The agency bases those decisions on a broad and less focused surveillance than officials have publicly described, a surveillance that may, or may not, be legal.

In a hearing that lasted more than eight hours, Gonzales, who didn't testify under oath, dutifully batted away senators' inquiries about "operational details" and stayed silent, under determined questioning by some Democrats, about other warrantless programs that the president might have secretly authorized. When the hearing finally ended, so did Gonzales's comments on the program.

Until 22 days later. On February 28, Gonzales sent committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., a six-page letter, partly to respond to questions he was unprepared to answer at the hearing, but also "to clarify certain of my responses" in the earlier testimony. In the letter, Gonzales took pains to correct any "misimpressions" that he might have created about whether the Justice Department had assessed the legality of intercepting purely domestic communications, for example, as opposed to those covered by the NSA program, in which one party is outside the United States. The attorney general didn't say that Justice had contemplated the legality of purely domestic eavesdropping without a warrant, but he also didn't say it hadn't.

Gonzales's letter was intriguing for what else it didn't say, especially on one point: With exacting language, he narrowed the scope of his comments to address only "questions relating to the specific NSA activities that have been publicly confirmed by the president." Then, as if to avoid any confusion, Gonzales added, "Those activities involve the interception by the NSA of the contents of communications" involving suspected terrorists and people in the United States.

Slightly, and with a single word, Gonzales was tipping his hand. The content of electronic communications is usually considered to be the spoken words of a phone call or the written words in an electronic message. The term does not include the wealth of so-called transactional data that accompany every communication: a phone number, and what calls were placed to and from that number; the time a call was placed; whether the call was answered and how long it lasted, down to the second; the time and date that an e-mail message was sent, as well as its unique address and routing path, which reveals the location of the computer that sent it and, presumably, the author.

Considering that terrorists often talk and write in code, the transactional data of a communication, properly exploited, could yield more valuable intelligence than the content itself.

"You will get a very full picture of a person's associations and their patterns of activity," said Jim Dempsey, the policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an electronic-privacy advocacy group. "You'll know who they're talking to, when they're talking, how long, how frequently.... It's a lot [of information]. I mean, a lot."

According to sources who are familiar with the details of what the White House calls the "terrorist surveillance program," and who asked to remain anonymous because the program is still classified, analyzing transactional data is one of the first and most important steps the agency takes in deciding which phone calls to listen to and which electronic messages to read.

Far from the limited or targeted surveillance that Gonzales, President Bush, and intelligence officials have described, this traffic analysis examines thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of individuals, because nearly every phone number and nearly every e-mail address is connected to a person.

Patterns in the Sea

Analysis of telephone traffic patterns helps analysts and investigators spot relationships among people that aren't always obvious. For instance, imagine that a man in Portland, Ore., receives a call from someone at a pay phone in Brooklyn, N.Y., every Tuesday at 9 a.m. Also every Tuesday, but minutes earlier, the pay phone caller rings up a man in Miami.

An investigator might look at that pattern and suspect that the men in Portland and Miami are communicating through the Brooklyn caller, who's acting as a kind of courier, to mask their relationship. Patterns like this have led criminal investigators into the inner workings of drug cartels and have proved vital in breaking these cartels up.

Terrorists employ similar masking techniques. They use go-betweens to circuitously route calls, and they change cell phones often to avoid detection. Transactional data, however, capture those behaviors. If NSA analysts -- or their computers -- can find these patterns or signatures, then they might find the terrorists, or at least know which ones they should monitor.

Just after 9/11, according to knowledgeable sources, the NSA began intercepting the communications of specific foreign persons and groups named on a list. The sources didn't specify whether persons inside the United States were monitored as part of that list. But a former government official who is knowledgeable about NSA activities and the warrantless surveillance program said that this original list of people and groups, or others like it, could have formed the base of the NSA's surveillance of transactional data, the parts of a communication that aren't considered content.

If the agency started with a list of phone numbers, it could find all the numbers dialed from those phones. The NSA could then learn what numbers were called from that second list of numbers, and what calls that list received, and so on, "pushing out" the lists until the agency had identified a vast network of callers and their transactional data, the former official said.

The agency might eavesdrop on only a few conversations or e-mails. But starting with even an initial target list of, say, 10 phone numbers quickly yields a web of hundreds of thousands of communications, because the volume increases exponentially with every new layer of callers.

To find meaningful patterns in transactional data, analysts need a lot of it. They must set baselines about what constitutes "normal" behavior versus "suspicious" activity. Administration officials have said that the NSA doesn't intercept the contents of a communication unless officials have a "reasonable" basis to conclude that at least one party is linked to a terrorist organization.

To make any reasonable determination like that, the agency needs hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of call records, preferably as soon as they are created, said a senior person in the defense industry who is familiar with the NSA program and is an expert in the analytical tools used to find patterns and connections. Asked if this means that the NSA program is much broader and less targeted than administration officials have described, the expert replied, "I think that's correct."

In theory, finding reasonable connections in data is a straightforward and largely automated process. Analysts use computer programs based on algorithms -- mathematical procedures for solving a particular problem -- much the same way that meteorologists use data models to forecast the weather. Counter-terrorism algorithms look for the transactional indicators that match what analysts recognize as signs of a plot.

Of course, those algorithms must be sophisticated enough to spot many not-so-obvious patterns in a mass of data that are mostly uninteresting, and they work best when the data come from many sources. Algorithms have proven useful for detecting frequent criminal activity, such as credit card fraud.

"Historical data clearly indicate that if a credit card turns up in two cities on two continents on the same day, that's a useful pattern," says Jeff Jonas, a computer scientist who invented a technology to connect known scam artists who are on casinos' watch lists with new potential grifters, and is now the chief scientist of IBM Entity Analytics.

"The challenge of predicting terrorism is that unlike fraud, we don't have the same volume of historical data to learn from," Jonas said. "Compounding this is the fact that terrorists are constantly changing their methods and do their best to avoid leaving any digital footprints in the first place."

The obvious solution would be to write an algorithm that is flexible and fast enough to weigh millions of pieces of evidence, including exculpatory ones, against each other. But according to technology experts, and even the NSA's own stated research accomplishments, that technology has not been perfected.

The Bleeding Edge

The NSA began soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to collect transactional data from telecommunications companies. Several telecom executives said in press accounts that their companies gave the NSA access to their switches, the terminals that handle most of the country's electronic traffic. One executive told National Journal that NSA officials urged him to hand over his company's call logs. When he resisted, the officials implied that most of his competitors had acceded to the agency's request.

Not long after the surveillance program started, in October 2001, the NSA began looking for new tools to mine the telecom data. The agency, the industry expert said, considered some that the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program was developing. TIA was an ambitious and controversial experiment to find patterns of terrorist activity in a much broader range of transactions than just telephone data.

But NSA officials rejected the TIA tools because they were "too brittle," the expert said, meaning that they failed to manage the torrent of data that the NSA wanted to analyze. He noted the irony of rejecting the TIA technologies -- which privacy advocates had characterized as huge, all-seeing, digital dragnets -- because they couldn't handle the size of the NSA's load.

In the fall of 2002, a federal research-and-development agency that builds technologies primarily for the NSA launched another search for pattern-detection solutions. The Advanced Research and Development Activity, ARDA, issued $64 million in contracts for the Novel Intelligence for Massive Data, or NIMD, program. Its goal was "to help analysts deal with information overload, detect early indicators of strategic surprise, and avoid analytic errors," according to ARDA's public call for proposals released last year.

In essence, NIMD is an early-warning system, which is how the administration has described the terrorist surveillance program. In 2003, ARDA also took over research of the tools being developed under TIA.

While the NSA was searching for the next generation of data-sifters, it continued to rely on less sophisticated tools. For an example, the former government official who spoke to NJ cited applications that organize data into broad categories, allowing analysts to see some relationships but obscuring some of the nuance in the underlying information. The results of this kind of category analysis can be displayed on a graph.

But the graph might reveal only how many times a particular word appears in a conversation, not necessarily the significance of the word or how it relates to other words. Technologists sarcastically call these diagrams BAGs -- big-ass graphs.

Such was the state of affairs when the NSA started looking for terrorist patterns in a telephonic ocean. So, instead of looking for a tool that could cull through the data, the agency decided to "reverse" the process, starting with the data set and working backward, looking for algorithms that could work with it.

The NSA has made some breakthroughs, the industry expert said, but its solution relies in part on a technological "trick," which he wouldn't disclose. Another data-mining expert, who also asked not to be identified because the NSA's work is classified, said that computer engineers probably started with the telecom companies' call data, looked for patterns, and then wrote algorithms to detect them as they went along, tweaking the algorithms as needed.

Such an ad hoc approach is brittle in its own right. For starters, if analysts are working with algorithms designed to detect only certain patterns, they could be missing others, the technology expert said. At the same time, the more dependent the algorithms are on identifying very specific patterns of behavior, the more vulnerable the NSA's monitoring is to being foiled if terrorists discover what the agency is watching for, or if they change their behavior. A more complex algorithm that considers thousands, or even millions, of patterns is harder to defeat.

The industry expert added that NSA officials have worried that "if you knew what the technical trick was they were doing [to make the surveillance program function], you wouldn't have to know what specific algorithms" the agency was using. This reliance on a "trick" makes the program very vulnerable to defeat and helps explain why the Bush administration is so keen on cloaking its inner workings.

"It's pretty bleeding-edge," the expert said, referring to a technology that's unperfected and therefore prone to instability. "We're talking about dumping hundreds of thousands or millions of records" into a system. In an unsophisticated system, connections among people can emerge that look suspicious but are actually meaningless. A book agent who represents a journalist who once interviewed Osama bin Laden, for example, doesn't herself necessarily know bin Laden. But she might turn up in an NSA search of transactional data. "False positives will happen," the expert said.

Gonzales and former NSA Director Michael V. Hayden have said that career agency employees decide to eavesdrop only if they have a "reasonable" basis to believe one party to a communication is a terrorist or connected to a terrorist organization.

But what determines reasonableness? In a January speech at the National Press Club, Hayden drew a distinction between the Fourth Amendment's requirement that "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause," and its protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures."

When a journalist in the crowd questioned his logic, Hayden heatedly replied, "If there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment.... I am convinced that we are lawful, because what it is we're doing [intercepting content] is reasonable."

He said that the terrorist attacks fundamentally altered the NSA's thinking. "The standard of what [information] was relevant and valuable, and therefore, what was reasonable, would understandably change, I think, as smoke billowed from two American cities and a Pennsylvania farm field. And we acted accordingly."

Aside from the question of whether NSA employees, rather than federal judges, are qualified to determine what constitutes a reasonable search, that determination provides much of the basis for deciding whose communications will be intercepted without a warrant. If the technology the NSA is using to determine what constitutes a reasonable search is unsophisticated, the industry expert said, "you're talking about tapping a phone based on a statistical correlation."

A New Legal Battle?

Gonzales's narrowly tailored letter to Sen. Specter raised more questions than it answered. Democrats were outraged by what they saw as the attorney general's attempt to alter his testimony and to obstruct senators' attempts to fully assess the program's legal basis.

"Much of your letter is devoted to not providing answers to the questions of a number of us regarding legal justifications for activities beyond those narrowly conceded by you to have already been confirmed by the president," Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee's ranking Democrat, wrote to the attorney general in a follow-up letter.

Leahy also raised the question of what else Gonzales hadn't told lawmakers. The attorney general's letter contained "disturbing suggestions ... that there are other secret programs," Leahy wrote.

In Gonzales's letter to Specter, the attorney general had referred to "other intelligence activities" and to his inability to discuss them; he left open the possibility that the president may not have authorized these activities. Gonzales wrote, "When I testified in response to questions from Sen. Leahy, 'Sir, I have tried to outline ... what the president has authorized, and that is all that he has authorized,' I was confining my remarks to the Terrorist Surveillance Program as described by the president."

Gonzales's testimony was meant to defend the program's legality. But as more about the NSA's operations become known, new legal questions arise, including one that goes to the heart of how officials reasonably identify suspected terrorists.

Under normal criminal law, content is defined as "any information concerning the substance, purport, or meaning of [a] communication," but the definition of content under the law that governs electronic eavesdropping on U.S. persons for intelligence purposes is different and is potentially in conflict with normal jurisprudence. That law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, states that content "includes any information concerning the identity of the parties ... or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of [their] communication."

A phone number can be used to identify a person, said Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology, who for nine years was assistant counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. Does that mean that a phone number is "content" under the law?

FISA, enacted in 1978, didn't envision today's technology, when anyone with an Internet connection can use a phone number to find someone's name, address, and even an aerial photograph of his house, Dempsey said.

"I just cannot read [FISA] and figure out what it means in the context of analysis of [transactional] data," he added. "Presumably somebody in the administration thinks they understand it.... Whether that's providing any clear guidance" to the people working on the NSA program, "that's not clear."

The Letter of the Law
The White House says spying on terror suspects without court approval is ok. What about physical searches?

By Chitra Ragavan
3/27/06

In the dark days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a small group of lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department began meeting to debate a number of novel legal strategies to help prevent another attack. Soon after, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to begin conducting electronic eavesdropping on terrorism suspects in the United States, including American citizens, without court approval. Meeting in the FBI's state-of-the-art command center in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the lawyers talked with senior FBI officials about using the same legal authority to conduct physical searches of homes and businesses of terrorism suspects--also without court approval, one current and one former government official tell U.S. News. "There was a fair amount of discussion at Justice on the warrantless physical search issue," says a former senior FBI official. "Discussions about--if [the searches] happened--where would the information go, and would it taint cases."

FBI Director Robert Mueller was alarmed by the proposal, the two officials said, and pushed back hard against it. "Mueller was personally very concerned," one official says, "not only because of the blowback issue but also because of the legal and constitutional questions raised by warrantless physical searches." FBI spokesman John Miller said none of the FBI's senior staff are aware of any such discussions and added that the bureau has not conducted "physical searches of any location without consent or a judicial order."

In December, the New York Times disclosed the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance program, resulting in an angry reaction from President Bush. It has not previously been disclosed, however, that administration lawyers had cited the same legal authority to justify warrantless physical searches. But in a little-noticed white paper submitted by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to Congress on January 19 justifying the legality of the NSA eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers made a tacit case that President Bush also has the inherent authority to order such physical searches. In order to fulfill his duties as commander in chief, the 42-page white paper says, "a consistent understanding has developed that the president has inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless searches and surveillance within the United States for foreign intelligence purposes." The memo cites congressional testimony of Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, in 1994 stating that the Justice Department "believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes."

"Black-bag jobs." Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says the white paper cited the Gorelick testimony simply to bolster its legal defense of the NSA's electronic surveillance program. Roehrkasse points out that Justice Department lawyers have told Congress that the NSA program "described by the president does not involve physical searches." But John Martin, a former Justice Department attorney who prosecuted the two most important cases involving warrantless searches and surveillance, says the department is sending an unambiguous message to Congress. "They couldn't make it clearer," says Martin, "that they are also making the case for inherent presidential power to conduct warrantless physical searches."

It could not be learned whether the Bush administration has cited the legal authority to carry out such searches. A former marine, Mueller has waged a quiet, behind-the-scenes battle since 9/11 to protect his special agents from legal jeopardy as a result of aggressive new investigative tactics backed by the White House and the Justice Department, government officials say. During Senate testimony about the NSA surveillance program, however, Gonzales was at pains to avoid answering questions about any warrantless physical surveillance activity that may have been authorized by the Justice Department. On February 6, Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked Gonzales whether the NSA spying program includes authority to tap E-mail or postal mail without warrants. "Can you do black-bag jobs?" Leahy asked. Gonzales replied that he was trying to outline for the committee "what the president has authorized, and that is all that he has authorized"--electronic surveillance. Three weeks later, Gonzales amended his answer to Leahy's question, stating that he was addressing only the legal underpinnings for the NSA surveillance program but adding: "I did not and could not address operational aspects of the program, or any other classified intelligence activities." In the past, when Congress has taken up explosive issues that affect the bureau, Mueller has made it a point, officials have said, to leave Washington--and sometimes the country--so as not to get pulled into the political crossfire. When Gonzales testified February 6, Mueller was on his way to Morocco.

Government officials told the magazine that Mueller and then Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who also questioned the NSA spying program, both believed that while it was a close call legally, the president did have authority to conduct electronic surveillance of terrorism suspects in the United States without court approval; both men, however, raised grave concerns about the possible use of any information obtained from any warrantless surveillance in a court of law.

At least one defense attorney representing a subject of a terrorism investigation believes he was the target of warrantless clandestine searches. On Sept. 23, 2005--nearly three months before the Times broke the NSA story--Thomas Nelson wrote to U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut in Oregon that in the previous nine months, "I and others have seen strong indications that my office and my home have been the target of clandestine searches." In an interview, Nelson said he believes that the searches resulted from the fact that FBI agents accidentally gave his client classified documents and were trying to retrieve them. Nelson's client is Soliman al-Buthe, codirector of a now defunct charity named al-Haramain, who was indicted in 2004 for illegally taking charitable donations out of the country. The feds also froze the charity's assets, alleging ties to Osama bin Laden. The documents that were given to him, Nelson says, may prove that al-Buthe was the target of the NSA surveillance program.

The searches, if they occurred, were anything but deft. Late at night on two occasions, Nelson's colleague Jonathan Norling noticed a heavyset, middle-aged, non-Hispanic white man claiming to be a member of an otherwise all-Hispanic cleaning crew, wearing an apron and a badge and toting a vacuum. But, says Norling, "it was clear the vacuum was not moving." Three months later, the same man, waving a brillo pad, spent some time trying to open Nelson's locked office door, Norling says. Nelson's wife and son, meanwhile, repeatedly called their home security company asking why their alarm system seemed to keep malfunctioning. The company could find no fault with the system.

In October, Immergut wrote to Nelson reassuring him that the FBI would not target terrorism suspects' lawyers without warrants and, even then, only "under the most exceptional circumstances," because the government takes attorney-client relationships "extremely seriously." Nelson nevertheless filed requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, with the NSA. The agency's director of policy, Louis Giles, wrote back, saying, "The fact of the existence or nonexistence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter."

"Maximum speed." For the FBI, the very mention of the term "black-bag jobs" prompts a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. In 1975 and 1976, an investigative committee led by then Sen. Frank Church documented how the FBI engaged in broad surveillance of private citizens and members of antiwar and civil rights groups, as well as Martin Luther King Jr. The committee's hearings and the executive-branch abuses that were documented in the Watergate investigation led to numerous reforms, including passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. The law created a special secret court tasked with approving electronic wiretaps in espionage and other national security investigations. After the Aldrich Ames spy case, Congress amended FISA to include approval of physical searches. After 9/11, the law was further amended to allow investigators to place wiretaps or conduct physical searches without notifying the court for 72 hours and to obtain "roving" wiretaps to allow investigators to tap multiple cellphones.

In justifying the NSA's warrantless surveillance program, Gonzales has argued that the review process required for a FISA warrant is too cumbersome for a program that is of "a military nature" and that requires "maximum speed and agility to achieve early warning."

White House lawyers, in particular, Vice President Cheney's counsel David Addington (who is now Cheney's chief of staff), pressed Mueller to use information from the NSA program in court cases, without disclosing the origin of the information, and told Mueller to be prepared to drop prosecutions if judges demanded to know the sourcing, according to several government officials. Mueller, backed by Comey, resisted the administration's efforts. "The White House was putting pressure on Mueller to broadly make cases with the intelligence," says one official. "But he did not want to use it as a basis for any affidavit in any court." Comey declined numerous requests for comment. Sources say Mueller and his general counsel, Valerie Caproni, continue to remain troubled by the domestic spying program. Martin, who has handled more intelligence-oriented criminal cases than anyone else at the Justice Department, puts the issue in stark terms: "The failure to allow it [information obtained from warrantless surveillance] to be used in court is a concession that it is an illegal surveillance."

Mueller has been criticized by some agents for being too close to the White House. His predecessor, Louis Freeh, made his break publicly from President Clinton, even returning his White House security access badge. Until recently, Mueller reported to the White House daily to brief Bush and Cheney. But Mueller has not shied away from making tough decisions. He refused to allow FBI agents to participate in CIA and Defense Department interviews of high-value prisoners because of the administration's use of aggressive interrogation techniques. In Iraq and at the Pentagon-run camp for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it has been FBI agents who have called attention to what they viewed as abuse of detainees.

It is unclear how much resistance from the FBI the White House and the Justice Department will be willing to brook. What is clear, however, is the extraordinary extent to which officials in both places inject themselves in the bureau's operations. In late 2004, President Bush asked then FBI Deputy Director Bruce Gebhardt, filling in for Mueller during the daily White House briefings, minute details about a suspected terrorism threat in Kansas. "Don't worry, Mr. President," responded Gebhardt, straight-faced. "We have Kansas surrounded."

The politics of pacifism meets FBI monitoring

By James Carroll  |  March 20, 2006

Over the last four years, the FBI has repeatedly spied on the Thomas Merton Center, a Catholic peace organization in Pittsburgh. The American Civil Liberties Union made the case public last week, with documentation. One 2002 FBI memo defined the center as ''a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism." Oh my. I confess that I felt a little light-headed on reading this news; déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.

The Thomas Merton Center, named for the great Trappist monk, was an antiwar beacon of hope beginning in the early 1970s, and it was a target of FBI harassment even then. Unlike most Vietnam-era peace organizations, the center is still going strong. Hanging on my wall is a citation I received from the center in 1972, and last week's news makes me prouder of it than ever.

The founding director of the Merton Center is Larry Kessler, who, after moving to Boston, became founding director of the AIDS Action Committee 23 years ago. Having led AIDS Action to its position of national prominence as an exemplary AIDS advocacy and service organization, Kessler is retiring next month, to, as he put it, ''get back to my roots and work on the social justice issues that continue to drive this epidemic: poverty, violence, racism, and homophobia."

It is as if, in carrying out fresh surveillance of the antiwar organization Kessler started more than 30 years ago, the FBI is paying tribute to the staying power of this compassionate prophet of justice and peace.

That's one part of the story. Another part is implied in the FBI memo, which breathlessly singles out pacifism as a ''political cause" of concern. What drew the bureau's attention to the Merton Center in 2002 was its members' handing out leaflets that opposed the impending war in Iraq.

Of course, one needn't have been a pacifist to have seen the folly, and immorality, of the impending ''shock and awe" campaign. Still, what made the Merton Center leafleting an un-American activity requiring FBI monitoring, despite its certain legality, was the blatant rejection of the government's hair-trigger presumption in favor of war as the way to resolve international conflict.

Never mind that the instincts on display at the Merton Center just then proved far more reasonable -- and realistic -- than those that drove the United States into the abyss of the present situation in Iraq.

As if to join the FBI in its alarm about pacifism, the Bush administration last week reiterated its supreme reliance on force as defining America's main mode of being in the world. In 2002, the so-called National Security Strategy first articulated the Bush doctrine of preventive war, and now an update has been issued. The new statement repeats the assertion of a unilateral right of ''anticipatory action to defend ourselves."

The preventive war doctrine was a true innovation in American foreign policy, yet now it is referred to as if an established tradition. What were abstract questions about the doctrine's wisdom and even legality in 2002 have become, through blood in the streets of cities across the Mideast, hard lessons that Washington has yet to learn.

Today, Iran occupies the center of preoccupation, with a threat of a coming ''confrontation," but the new document's ominous tone extends to Syria, China, and Russia. Lip service is paid to diplomacy, but the threat of war is the main note being struck here. In Iraq especially, the world sees where such bluster leads.

But in this time of shameless political pliancy, perhaps the FBI is right to treat as subversive those who question the Bush premise. And in getting caught in shadows of the Merton Center again, perhaps the FBI is accidentally serving a useful purpose.

To a government enthralled with the power of violent force, any dissent can seem like pacifism, but when the word is slung to discredit reasoned objections as wild-eyed idealism that would leave terrorists unchecked, it does not stick.

In the distant past, groups had to be associated with communism to become targets of the national security apparatus, but in the Vietnam era it became enough merely to ask questions about an obviously immoral war. Déjà vu indeed.

The FBI is once more serving an invaluable function with its inept display of the shallow paranoia that sees enemies everywhere, a clear manifestation of the mental unbalance driving the entire enterprise of the United States government.

Police state files
Government cracks down on dissent in name of 'anti-terrorism'

Geov Parrish
WorkingForChange.com
03.20.06

Two releases of local law enforcement files in recent days have shed new light on just how far the Bush administration, federal, and local law enforcement are going to suppress political dissent in the aftermath of 9-11.
The first case was in Pittsburgh, where a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union yielded the revelation that from 2002, when opposition to an invasion of Iraq began in earnest, right through at least until the final, heavily redacted document from 2005, law enforcement officials investigated, monitored, harassed, and infiltrated activists from Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Center. Merton was a renowned Catholic theologian and pacifist who fiercely opposed the Vietnam War and all wars, and his namesake descendants apply the same beliefs to Iraq.

As the released documents make clear, that, and only that, was why they became targets: because they opposed the war in Iraq. An FBI document from 2002 notes that the center is "a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism." Pacifism! Egads! Aside from the fact that pacifism is a set of personal moral beliefs -- not a "political cause" -- is pacifism, in our militarized 21st Century America, the new Red Scare? Seems so. Just ask the Quakers.

Or maybe, instead, pacifism is simply terrorism. Because the outfit investigating the Thomas Merton Center wasn't the Pentagon TALON program, which was the tool used to go after the Lake Worth (Florida) Quakers and hundreds (at least) of other domestic peace groups. It wasn't even an NSA monitoring program. The Merton Center caught the attention of the Pittsburgh version of a Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force, a program set up in dozens of cities across the U.S. to combine the efforts of the FBI and other federal, state, county, and local law enforcement agencies to combat the alleged threat of "domestic terrorism." With only so many domestic terrorists to go around, there's got to be something handy to keep all those task forces busy and their budget dollars flowing. Now, we have a better idea of what that "something" might be: investigating ordinary, law-abiding citizens who oppose Bush administration policies. That's now considered terrorism. Of course, it's the far right that has engaged in "domestic terrorism" in our recent history (remember Oklahoma City), but for some reason that's not who these task forces are concerned about.

Apparently, in nearly three years of probing, the terrorism most frequently engaged in by the Mertonites was the handing out of leaflets. A February 2003 FBI report titled "International Terrorism Matters" detailed a schedule that the center posted on its web site of anti-war rallies in Pittsburgh, New York, and elsewhere. From Bush on down, the word "terrorism" is being slung around awfully loosely these days.

Still, the FBI defends the investigations, calling them, in a statement, "appropriate." And that raises the question of whether such investigations are still going on (probably), and whether they're being carried out by a local Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force near you (probably), and whether the main target is your local anti-war group or coalition (probably).

The second set of documents came from yet another source: the court-ordered release, as part of an ongoing lawsuit, of five internal NYPD memos detailing and analyzing -- mostly with gleeful satisfaction -- steps taken to disrupt and minimize New York City demonstrations in 2002, particularly the World Economic Forum protest that was the first, and virtually the last, major anti-summit demonstration after 9-11.

What the memos for the first time detail are police tactics that have been used widely across the U.S. against such demonstrations ever since law enforcement was embarrassed by the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Anyone who has been to these demonstrations knows the playbook: massive presence of police in riot gear, heavily armed mostly with chemical weapons and batons; tanks, visible police vans and buses, and a widespread use of undercover cops; corralling protesters into tightly controlled spaces with no access available for the public to enter or leave; a constant shifting of police lines, including provocative forays into the crowd; and the preemptive arrests of any protestors the police don't happen to like or find inconvenient, with the understanding that they'll be held until the summit or convention or whatever leaves town and then released, with charges (if any) later dropped or dismissed. One of the NYPD memos notes, for example, the arrest of about 30 masked demonstrators (doubtless black bloc anarchists) for the "crime" of being "obvious potential rioters."

The last I checked, the Constitution doesn't allow for arresting people for what they might potentially do. But that, along with the rest of these tactics, with minor variations, is pretty much what's happened at every major post-Seattle U.S. protest of the war or the international corporate regime, in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami, and so on. The black bloc property destruction in Seattle, and the media overhype it provoked, allowed law enforcement to sell such tactics as necessary; in every one of these cities, a major protest has been preceded by a local media hysteria over the potential for "another Seattle," local city councils passed restrictive new anti-protest measures, and law enforcement got lots of pricey new crowd control toys.

Now, such protesters are not only "obvious potential rioters," but "terrorists." The recent reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, passed with widespread bipartisan support, included a new "anti-terrorist" provision allowing police to establish anti-protester "exclusion zones" at any event of "national significance." (In Seattle, where this idea was first used and then legitimized by the courts, it was more honestly called a "no-protest zone," an egregious violation of the First Amendment.)

The idea of all these harsh tactics is both to scare potentially sympathetic members of the public, who don't necessarily want to be caught in a riot (police or otherwise), away from attending; and at the same time to legitimize whatever forms of police and jail abuse are inflicted on the protesters who do attend, in hopes they'll think better of it next time. It's worked, and in six years, as the crackdown grows ever-harsher, activists have yet to devise effective counter-measures.

What does any of this have to do with protecting the country from terrorist attack? Not a damn thing, of course. But it's exactly the sort of rationale dictatorships and totalitarian states throughout history have used to scare the public, rationalize domestic state violence, and suppress, marginalize, and eventually silence political dissent. According to your high school civics class, America doesn't go for that sort of thing.

But then, that book seems to have been thrown out.

Keeping Tabs on the Peaceniks
What are political and activist groups like Indymedia and Food Not Bombs doing on the FBI's Terrorist Watch List?

By Nick Schwellenbach, AlterNet
Posted March 27, 2006

More evidence that the U.S. government is justifying surveillance of political dissidence under the guise of monitoring "terrorism" has recently come to light. Early this March an FBI agent's presentation at the University of Texas law school listed Indymedia, Food Not Bombs, the Communist Party of Texas and "Anarchists" as groups on the FBI's "Terrorist Watch List" for central Texas.

On March 8, 2006, FBI Supervisory Senior Resident Agent G. Charles Rasner, delivered a guest lecture before Professor Ronald Sievert's U.S. Law and National Security class of approximately 100 students. Accompanying his lecture was an "unclassified" Power Point presentation titled "Counter-Terrorism Efforts in Texas."

According to UT law student Elizabeth Wagoner's account of Rasner's lecture on Austin Indymedia:

"On a list of approximately ten groups, Food Not Bombs was listed seventh. Indymedia was listed tenth, with a reference specifically to IndyConference 2005. The Communist Party of Texas also made the list. Rasner explained that these groups could have links to terrorist activity. He noted that peaceful-sounding group names could cover more violent extremist tactics."

Wagoner has made a Freedom of Information Act request for Rasner's Power Point presentation.

Food Not Bombs (disclosure: the author used to participate in an Austin FNB group) is a moniker for volunteer-run groups that distribute unused vegetarian food from grocery stores and restaurants for free to the general population. Its name stems from a belief that excessive military spending could be redirected to provide food for the hungry. Indymedia is a decentralized grassroots online media outlet, which provides an alternative to the mainstream media coverage.

A self-described libertarian law student who also attended the class wrote on his blog that this list "got many in class riled up."

Rene Salinas, a spokesperson for the FBI San Antonio field office, said that the FBI "doesn't put people on the Terror Watch List for grins." He said that a group has to act or participate in a group connected with terrorism. He declined to say whether any of the groups Rasner mentioned have connections to terrorism or how terrorism is defined. He did say that the Terror Watch List helps keep different law enforcement agencies informed about suspect characters. Salinas described a scenario where the list could help a police officer who pulled an individual on the list over for traffic violation identify a person that "we might just want to question."

Since 9/11, government surveillance of domestic organizations has increased, raising questions that legitimate political activity and civil liberties are being violated under a sweeping and unjustifiably broad definition of terrorism. Legislative and administrative changes, notably the Patriot Act, have given law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, broadened power to investigate and monitor individuals and organizations. In response to concerns from a bi-partisan group of legislators, minor changes were made to the Patriot Act when Congress reauthorized it last month.

At the UT-Austin campus alone, there has been other evidence of government surveillance of political organizations. A 2003 FOIA request by UT Watch uncovered that the University of Texas-Austin participates in the Austin Joint Terrorism Task Force, made up of an FBI liason, and members of the University of Texas Police Department and Austin Police Department. In 2004, FBI agents questioned a UT student after he made a state open records request to UT for information about tunnels underneath the UT campus. The agents asked the student questions such as "Have you ever thought of joining any student activist organizations, like UT Watch?" (disclosure: the author has been involved with UT Watch)

Such surveillance has occurred at other campuses as well. For example, the ACLU obtained a FBI report entitled "Domestic Terrorism Symposium" [PDF] which mentions Direct Action, an anti-war group at Michigan State University, and BAMN (By Any Means Necessary), a national group with a chapter at Michigan State that defends affirmative action.

Also this month, the ACLU released documents showing that Pennsylvania law enforcement were surveilling an anti-war group based on their political activities. Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request the ACLU of Pennsylvania obtained documents revealing that the FBI was monitoring gatherings at the Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Justice in Pittsburgh. According to the FBI's own description [PDF] , the Thomas Merton Center "is a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacificism." However, the center is more of a gathering place and resource center "for over thirty different projects," according to the Center's website.

Post-9/11 government spying operations are reminiscent of those uncovered by 1970s Congressional investigations such as the FBI's COINTELPRO program and the NSA's Shamrock and Minaret programs. Congress found that civil liberties and legitimate political activity were suppressed by the government and sought to place these programs under a modicum of oversight to reign in excesses.

Document: FBI Monitored Cars Near War Protest Rally
ACLU Questions Practice

POSTED: 10:30 am MST March 28, 2006
UPDATED: 11:38 am MST March 28, 2006

DENVER -- The FBI recorded the license plate numbers of a dozen vehicles spotted "in the vicinity of" a Denver bookstore where anti-war demonstrators gathered before a rally, according to an agency document released by the American Civil Liberties Union Tuesday.

"This report raises more questions about the degree to which the FBI is unjustifiably regarding demonstrations and public dissent as potential terrorism," said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU in Colorado. "Why is the FBI conducting surveillance of a bookstore, monitoring the persons who gather there, and keeping files with lists of license plate numbers?"

The ACLU obtained the FBI report under the Freedom of Information Act.

The ACLU said the surveillance was part of a domestic terrorism investigation by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. A copy of the document posted on an ACLU Web site does not mention the task force or domestic terrorism.

FBI spokesman Bill Carter in Washington said he was not familiar with the bookstore surveillance, but he said the agency would not monitor a group simply because it is protesting.

"Our interest is not in the First Amendment activities the group is involved in," he said. "It's only when those individuals that may be in that meeting who may be involved in planning, or are actively involved in, violent criminal activity."

The document says a two-hour surveillance of the bookstore showed that at least 40 people "appeared to be involved" in the Revolutionary Anti-War Response demonstration planned later that day in Colorado Springs.

It does not say what led to that conclusion, but it says some of the group "wore all black clothing, including sweat shirts or jackets with hoods." It says FBI agents saw several pink and black flags and banners but doesn't list what the banners said.

The document gives general descriptions of the 12 vehicles but their license numbers are blocked out.

The names of four FBI agents who conducted the investigation are also blocked out.

The report released Tuesday is available on the ACLU of Colorado’s web site.

Bill Would Speed Challenge to Surveillance

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 30, 2006

WASHINGTON, March 29 — Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, introduced a bill Wednesday that would put lawsuits challenging the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program on a fast track to the Supreme Court.

With Congress and the Bush administration at odds over the legality of eavesdropping on Americans without court warrants, the legislation could produce a timely ruling by the court on the program's constitutionality, Mr. Schumer said.

"We have a system of checks and balances," he said, "and, in this case, when the stakes are so high, the Supreme Court should be the ultimate check."

The bill would permit lawsuits by scholars, journalists and others who assert that they have refrained from calls or e-mail messages to Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries because of "a reasonable fear" of N.S.A. eavesdropping.

Such suits would be heard by a panel of three federal judges, whose decision could be appealed immediately to the Supreme Court.