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 [I]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.”

WASHINGTON - Thursday, Pentagon officials admitted that some of the information on anti-war protesters included in a secret Pentagon database "should never have been on the list in the first place."

A Defense Department spokesman also announced a "thorough review" of domestic intelligence operations and refresher classes on how to properly collect and store intelligence, especially involving U.S. citizens.

The database of "suspicious incidents" obtained by NBC News includes legitimate threats, such as someone taking pictures outside a recruiting station and a lookout for a suspected al-Qaida terrorist. But it also contains information on anti-war meetings or protests, including one group's peaceful discussion at a Quaker meeting house. 

Rep. Jane Harmon, D-Calif., is a top Democrat overseeing U.S. intelligence operations. She says the Pentagon appears to have gone beyond legitimate collection of intelligence to protect U.S. forces and facilities.

“The notion that appropriate protest activities consistent with the First Amendment would harm our troops is farcical,” Harmon says, “and not the kind of work the Pentagon should be doing.”

Privacy rights advocates, like Evan Hendricks, say the Pentagon must do more to correct its mistakes.

“The Pentagon needs to start notifying people that we collected information about you illegally, and here's the information we have on you and start the process of purging that out,” he says.

On Thursday night, Pentagon officials said as far as they know, no military personnel were sent to spy on or infiltrate anti-war groups.

Lisa Myers is NBC’s Senior Investigative Correspondent

NOTE: Bolding thus appears in the original article.  Bolding thus has been added below to identify intelligence programs TIA, it's successor BASKETBALL, TOPSAIL, GENOA, And GENOA II, for the convenience of citizens, journalists, historians, and legal researchers. -dcm

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.

A $19 million contract to build the prototype system was awarded in late 2002 to Hicks & Associates, a consulting firm in Arlington, Va., that is run by former Defense and military officials. Congress's decision to pull TIA's funding in late 2003 "caused a significant amount of uncertainty for all of us about the future of our work," Hicks executive Brian Sharkey wrote in an e-mail to subcontractors at the time. "Fortunately," Sharkey continued, "a new sponsor has come forward that will enable us to continue much of our previous work." Sources confirm that this new sponsor was ARDA. Along with the new sponsor came a new name. "We will be describing this new effort as 'Basketball,' " Sharkey wrote, apparently giving no explanation of the name's significance. Another e-mail from a Hicks employee, Marc Swedenburg, reminded the company's staff that "TIA has been terminated and should be referenced in that fashion."

Sharkey played a key role in TIA's birth, when he and a close friend, retired Navy Vice Adm. John Poindexter, President Reagan's national security adviser, brought the idea to Defense officials shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The men had teamed earlier on intelligence-technology programs for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which agreed to host TIA and hired Poindexter to run it in 2002. In August 2003, Poindexter was forced to resign as TIA chief amid howls that his central role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s made him unfit to run a sensitive intelligence program.

It's unclear whether work on Basketball continues. Sharkey didn't respond to an interview request, and Poindexter said he had no comment about former TIA programs. But a publicly available Defense Department document, detailing various "cooperative agreements and other transactions" conducted in fiscal 2004, shows that Basketball was fully funded at least until the end of that year (September 2004). The document shows that the system was being tested at a research center jointly run by ARDA and SAIC Corp., a major defense and intelligence contractor that is the sole owner of Hicks & Associates. The document describes Basketball as a "closed-loop, end-to-end prototype system for early warning and decision-making," exactly the same language used in contract documents for the TIA prototype system when it was awarded to Hicks in 2002. An SAIC spokesman declined to comment for this story.

Another key TIA project that moved to ARDA was Genoa II, which focused on building information technologies to help analysts and policy makers anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks. Genoa II was renamed Topsail when it moved to ARDA, intelligence sources confirmed. (The name continues the program's nautical nomenclature; "genoa" is a synonym for the headsail of a ship.)

As recently as October 2005, SAIC was awarded a $3.7 million contract under Topsail. According to a government-issued press release announcing the award, "The objective of Topsail is to develop decision-support aids for teams of intelligence analysts and policy personnel to assist in anticipating and pre-empting terrorist threats to U.S. interests." That language repeats almost verbatim the boilerplate descriptions of Genoa II contained in contract documents, Pentagon budget sheets, and speeches by the Genoa II program's former managers.

As early as February 2003, the Pentagon planned to use Genoa II technologies at the Army's Information Awareness Center at Fort Belvoir, Va., according to an unclassified Defense budget document. The awareness center was an early tester of various TIA tools, according to former employees. A 2003 Pentagon report to Congress shows that the Army center was part of an expansive network of intelligence agencies, including the NSA, that experimented with the tools. The center was also home to the Army's Able Danger program, which has come under scrutiny after some of its members said they used data-analysis tools to discover the name and photograph of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta more than a year before the attacks.

Devices developed under Genoa II's predecessor -- which Sharkey also managed when he worked for the Defense Department -- were used during the invasion of Afghanistan and as part of "the continuing war on terrorism," according to an unclassified Defense budget document. Today, however, the future of Topsail is in question. A spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., which administers the program's contracts, said it's "in the process of being canceled due to lack of funds."

It is unclear when funding for Topsail was terminated. But earlier this month, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, one of TIA's strongest critics questioned whether intelligence officials knew that some of its programs had been moved to other agencies. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and FBI Director Robert Mueller whether it was "correct that when [TIA] was closed, that several ... projects were moved to various intelligence agencies.... I and others on this panel led the effort to close [TIA]; we want to know if Mr. Poindexter's programs are going on somewhere else."

Negroponte and Mueller said they didn't know. But Negroponte's deputy, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who until recently was director of the NSA, said, "I'd like to answer in closed session." Asked for comment, Wyden's spokeswoman referred to his hearing statements.

The NSA is now at the center of a political firestorm over President Bush's program to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who the agency believes are connected to terrorists abroad. While the documents on the TIA programs don't show that their tools are used in the domestic eavesdropping, and knowledgeable sources wouldn't discuss the matter, the TIA programs were designed specifically to develop the kind of "early-warning system" that the president said the NSA is running.

Documents detailing TIA, Genoa II, Basketball, and Topsail use the phrase "early-warning system" repeatedly to describe the programs' ultimate aims. In speeches, Poindexter has described TIA as an early-warning and decision-making system. He conceived of TIA in part because of frustration over the lack of such tools when he was national security chief for Reagan.

Tom Armour, the Genoa II program manager, declined to comment for this story. But in a previous interview, he said that ARDA -- which absorbed the TIA programs -- has pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic. "That's, in fact, what the interest is," Armour said. When TIA was still funded, its program managers and researchers had "good coordination" with their counterparts at ARDA and discussed their projects on a regular basis, Armour said. The former No. 2 official in Poindexter's office, Robert Popp, averred that the NSA didn't use TIA tools in domestic eavesdropping as part of his research. But asked whether the agency could have used the tools apart from TIA, Popp replied, "I can't speak to that." Asked to comment on TIA projects that moved to ARDA, Don Weber, an NSA spokesman said, "As I'm sure you understand, we can neither confirm nor deny actual or alleged projects or operational capabilities; therefore, we have no information to provide."

ARDA now is undergoing some changes of its own. The outfit is being taken out of the NSA, placed under the control of Negroponte's office, and given a new name. It will be called the "Disruptive Technology Office," a reference to a term of art describing any new invention that suddenly, and often dramatically, replaces established procedures. Officials with the intelligence director's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.

Joint Terrorism Task Forces conducted surveillance of peace, civil rights and animal rights groups in Michigan and Colorado, according to documents released as part of a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) accusing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of misuse of anti-terrorism funds. The ACLU is seeking documents for 16 organizations and ten individuals nationwide relating to the case, in which the ACLU alleges the FBI used state task forces to spy on domestic advocacy groups that oppose Bush administration policies.

The ACLU obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) showing the FBI investigated the Rocky Mountain Peace, Justice Center and the Colorado American Indian Movement, and four groups in Michigan. The investigations were carried out by the state Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), which are meant to combine federal, state and local law enforcement resources to combat terrorism.

The Colorado groups were both investigated after announcing plans for anti-war demonstrations. In a statement issued by the Colorado ACLU, Legal Director Mark Silverstein said, "These documents underscore the ACLU's concern that the JTTF inappropriately regards public protest as potential 'domestic terrorism'... By casting its net so unjustifiably wide, the FBI wastes taxpayers' money and threatens to chill legitimate dissent." The ACLU has asked the city of Denver to withdraw from the Colorado JTTF.

In Michigan four advocacy groups were listed as targets of investigations described at a January 2002 "Domestic Terrorism Symposium" attended by representatives of the FBI, Michigan State Police Force, including its Criminal Intelligence Unit, the Secret Service, Michigan State University, and Michigan's National Guard and Department of Corrections. Documents obtained from the meeting state its purpose was to keep law enforcement "apprised of the activities of the various groups and individuals within the state of Michigan who are thought to be involved in terrorist activities." In addition to covering white militias and prison gangs, the meeting reported on the following:

• By Any Means Necessary, a national organization that defends affirmative action. The documents indicate that the FBI reported that all their activities have been peaceful.
• East Lansing Animal Rights Movement and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF). The report states a student group of 12-15 members had planned a meeting and potluck dinner on the Michigan State University campus.
• Direct Action, a peace group that organized a march to protest a 2002 FBI program to interview 37 Lansing-area immigrants from the Middle East as racial profiling.

In a statement announcing release of the documents, ACLU Staff Attorney Ben Wizner said, "This document confirms our fears..." Michigan ACLU Director Kary Moss said, "Labeling political advocacy as 'terrorist activity' is a threat to legitimate dissent which has never been considered a crime in this country. Spying on those who simply disagree with our government's policies is a tremendous waste of police resources."

(Washington, D.C.) Today, Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) will introduce a resolution of inquiry, officially requesting that President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provide detailed information to Congress regarding the scope and legal justification for the Department of Defense’s (DOD) collection of personal information under the “Talon” program about American citizens engaged in peaceful dissident activities. Under the rules of the House, a resolution of inquiry is privileged and requires committee consideration within 14 legislative days.

A recent NBC News report uncovered a 400 page DOD document outlining a secret Pentagon program “Talon,” which has spied on "peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups." One of the groups targeted and considered a “threat” by the Pentagon is the Truth Project Inc. -- a Lake Worth based group formed to counter military recruitment in area high schools. On December 13, NBC News reported that a Pentagon agency had monitored and infiltrated Truth Project Inc. when eight of its members met in November 2004 at a Quaker meeting house in Lake Worth, FL.

Wexler’s resolution of inquiry comes on the heels of recent findings by the New York Times that President Bush authorized without court approval domestic spying of U.S. citizens on over 30 separate occasions by the National Security Agency. In addition to filing the resolution of inquiry, Wexler has written Secretary Rumsfeld calling on the DOD to voluntarily submit the requested information to Congress immediately. Wexler has also joined Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, in introducing a resolution of inquiry, requesting information about the activities by the National Security Agency (NSA) in conducting domestic surveillance without obtaining a court-approved warrants. (Please find attached the letter to Secretary Rumsfeld)

“Spying and collecting information on American citizens without judicial review is indefensible. It is reprehensible that the Administration is brazenly skirting defined legal safeguards that were put in place after Watergate to deter wanton domestic spying on American citizens. Congress must immediately hold hearings and investigate the actions of the DOD, the NSA and the Bush Administration, and individuals must be held accountable if they broke the law. It is outrageous that Americans citizens like members of the Truth Project in my congressional district are considered to be a credible threat to this country; on its face this is not only a violation of our civil liberties but also a tremendous waste of resources that should be employed to fight the genuine threats America faces. If there is any legal justification for these unconscionable actions, we must hear it immediately," Wexler said.


Congressman Wexler is a senior member of the House International Relations Committee and is a member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Dear Secretary Rumsfeld:

In light of recent press reports and the startling admission by the Department of Defense that it may have conducted domestic surveillance and assembled a database of domestic dissident behavior, I am writing to request you immediately submit to Congress all information regarding the scope of the activities undertaken by the Department of Defense, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), or any related agency with regard to Threat and Local Observation Notice reports (TALONs). In addition, I am requesting any documents in your possession relating to any analysis of the legal authority upon which it is claimed that the Pentagon data collection or surveillance of domestic targets and the gathering of counterterrorism intelligence within the United States without obtaining court-ordered warrants is based.

Secretary Rumsfeld, given that the organization Truth Project Inc., which has been targeted by the Pentagon, is located in my Congressional district, I take the activities described in press reports very seriously and believe that Congress must be fully informed about the activities undertaken by the Department of Defense with regard to the TALON database. Today, I introduced a resolution of inquiry requesting this pertinent information from President Bush, the Administration as well yourself be transmitted to Congress. I sincerely hope that, as a sign of your commitment to work with Congress and to hold those accountable for their actions if found illegal, you will chose to provide the requested information in advance of a formal hearing on this subject.

I look forward to your expeditious response and stand willing to work with you to make the necessary accommodations in dealing with whatever classified and sensitive material may also be included in this request.

Sincerely,

ROBERT WEXLER