Is The Pentagon Spying On Us?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in The War On Terrorism
Uh…yeah…
However, this type of spying makes me scratch my head…
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 “threatâ€Â? and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidentsâ€Â? across the country over a recent 10-month period.
In a word: why? It’s not like this is anything new. Our government has infiltrated groups like these and spied on them for years. But isn’t it about time they stop? Do we really think that these people are worth spending out time on? A nation spying on citizens who are merely publicly disagreeing with them, is a bit odd and frankly a waste of time, energy and resources.
And a former DOD official agrees:
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.[...]
“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.
Indeed.
In any event, what are your thoughts? Sure, there are some US citizens that should be monitored, but is it more prudent to watch people who could be considered terrorists instead of people who are simply considered activists?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 and is filed under The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:09 am
ANd how much does this *cost?*
There is the salary and expenses of the people who are infiltrating
There is the cost of data transcribing and storage
There is the cost of the analysts’ salaries
There is the cost of replying to, stonewalling, going to court to fight, redacting the reports from, and eventually complying with the inevitable FIOA requests.
On the ancillary base, there si the costs to the courts themselves, and the costs to individuals being spied upon when they have to hire lawyers for those FIOA requests.
Also, there will also be the eventual court costs involved when these individuals demand to know why they have been put on a do-no-fly list (and this scenario has already happened).
The “secret they” are collecting all thios data, and they will be running into the same problem that the Ottoman empire and the East German Stazi found — they have *so* much information collected that there is no way to properly catagorize and collate it into a reasonable form, and the individuals who *might* have been detected by a more “targeted” approach to information gathering go through the cracks and can proceed to be the actual bomber or assassin, because some idiot got bent over legitimate and legal citizen dissent.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:38 am
My question is, why would the DIA be watching a group of American citizens in America? If there was something that could have been construed as criminal going on, why wasn’t the FBI/DEA investigating?
Unless that group is plotting some type of armed action against the military or the government, the DIA shouldn’t have been involved.
If they were watching this group for legitimate reasons, then I wonder what in the hell those people are up to. Otherwise, having the DIA keeping an eye on the public is a scarry thought.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:53 am
I agree with ford4×4. What’s the DIA doing involved in this?
December 14th, 2005 at 4:19 pm
This development is also being discussed over on American Future, where it’s been pointed out that this may be a case of the government finally getting around to investigating allegations of ties between these anti-war activists and Islamic supremacist figures and organizations (which may or may not include actual terrorists), allegations which have been bandied about on the right side of the blogosphere for quite some time.
Some commentators there also pointed out that since the anti-war crowd is also taking aim at military recruiting, the government may also be attempting to determine whether, and if so how, these activists might try to harass students considering joining the armed forces, or to otherwise disrupt recruitment efforts.