Domestic Surveillance: November 2007 Archives

From Joe Conason's It Can Happen Here:

The Pentagon had established a secret domestic counterintelligence program, known as TALON, to gather 'non-validated threat information and security anomalies indicative of possible terrorist pre-attack activity.' What that bit of jargon meant in practice, according to documents obtained by NBC and Newsweek, was monitoring peace groups and other political groups deemed hostile to the administration. In TALON's database files were thousands of pages of dossiers devoted to antiwar meetings and protests.

The pretext for compiling this database of dissenters was that they might pose a threat to the Defense Department's installations and personnel, although there was no evidence that the protest groups had contemplated any violent or illegal action. As part of the 'terrorism threat warning process,' the TALON investigators filed reports on peaceful protests, including an antiwar rally at Hollywood and Vine streets in Los Angeles, a gathering at a Quaker meeting in Lake Worth, Florida, and an anticorruption demonstration at the headquarters of the Haliburton Corporation in Houston, Texas.

Events such as these were labeled "suspicious incidents" and possible national security threats.

TALON was instituted in May 2003 at the behest of Paul Wolfowitz after the Iraq invasion was "completed," with operations housed in the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Office (CIFA). The program was closed September 17, 2007 due to controversy. Reports are now funneled through an FBI database known as Guardian.

It Can Happen Here, pgs 192 - 193.
Pentagon Shutting Down Domestic Spying Database - Wired
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When it comes to my government’s intelligence agencies, I am, and likely always will remain, “low hanging fruit.”

Until last week I had scarcely heard the expression. Then two lawyers in two different offices separately described me thusly just hours apart on the same day. The phrase has been pinging around my brain’s background circuitry like a pinball ever since.

What does it conjure? A well-endowed gay friend made me laugh when he claimed to share the designation… Sometimes I imagine an easy-to-reach banana with my head on it…

Finding out that my Hushmail messages aren't as private as I thought they were makes me nostalgic (and pissed, of course).

When I studied abroad in Thailand as an undergrad I began to realize what made me U.S. American. Though I was full of youthful certainty about everything that was wrong with the U.S., and expected that my time in Prothet Thai would only reveal the ways our foreign policy and globalization generally had damaged the country, I unexpectedly came face to face with my own Americanness.

"Surprise radical, young know-it-all," nearly all of my experiences seemed to say. "Most of what you value dearly is ingrained in your culture! American Culture! Ha!" The ensuing identity crisis was long and ugly.

While researching FBI surveillance of environmental groups today, I came across this passage in a December 2005 New York Times Article:

'One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a ''Vegan Community Project.'' Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's ''semi-communistic ideology.'' A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.'

While llama fur has never put me in Big Brother's sights, the notion of attracting attention due to "semi-communistic ideology" gave me pause. I noted yesterday how this type of surveillance can start with a germ of misperception and spiral out of control, and, well, naive about the draconian period of U.S. history we were entering, I may have inadvertently branded myself a Communist. A Red. A Bathroom Bolshevik Breeder.