Bad Guys
by digby
One senior government official, who was granted anonymity to speak publicly about the classified program, confirmed that the N.S.A. had access to records of most telephone calls in the United States. But the official said the call records were used for the limited purpose of tracing regular contacts of “known bad guys.”
“To perform such traces,” the official said, “you’d have to have all the calls or most of them. But you wouldn’t be interested in the vast majority of them.”
Well, that’s good. I feel so relieved. But it sure would be nice to know what the criteria for “known bad guys” are. There are, after all, people who work for some security agencies who have some funny ideas:
“You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act.”
And you just never know when somebody’s going to take it into their heads that it’s a threat to national security to dissent, do you? Why, it’s already happening:
The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation’s supposed “war profiteering.” The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. “It was tongue-in-street political theater,” Parkin says.
But that’s not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA’s role is “force protection”—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect “raw information” about “suspicious incidents.” The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon’s “terrorism threat warning process,” according to an internal Pentagon memo.
The fact this administration continues to say “trust us, we’re only going after Al Qaeda” even though we already know they are tracking political dissenters is galling in the extreme. There is every reason to believe that the government that has instituted surveillance on protesters, that revealed the identity of a CIA agent for political purposes and that continues to characterize each revelation of their unconstitutional acts as a threat to national security will use this illegal NSA program to invade the privacy of Americans for political reasons. It’s insulting to the nation’s collective intelligence to suggest otherwise.
To this administration it’s “L’etat c’est moi.” If you are against the administration, you are against the country. Which means that 71% of Americans are unamerican.
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