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.

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.

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.