NEWSWEEK: Secret Pentagon Unit May Have Gathered and Kept Unauthorized Files

on Thousands of Innocent Individuals and Organizations, Labelling Some

Potential Security Threats

Gordon England Has Ordered Purge of Unit's Database and 'Refresher Training'

for Intel Personnel

NEW YORK, Jan. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- In late 2004, a motley group of
about 10 peace activists protested outside the Houston headquarters of
Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Dick Cheney.
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," he says. But 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, reports
Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060122/NYSU002 )

A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the
Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. It's not clear
why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention. But there
are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and
conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations,
reports Isikoff in the January 30 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands
Monday, January 23).

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 collected would be fed to CIFA to
help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to
an internal Pentagon memo.

But an internal Pentagon review has found that CIFA's database
contained some information that may have violated regulations. A
Pentagon memo obtained Newsweek shows that the deputy Defense
secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained
information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been
retained. There was information that was "improperly stored," says an
authorized Pentagon spokesman. And the number of reports with names of
U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon
official. In another memo, last week, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon
England ordered CIFA to purge such information from its files -- and
directed that all Defense Department intelligence personnel receive
"refresher training" on department policies.

Details about CIFA, including its size and budget, are classified. But
an internal CIFA PowerPoint slide presentation, recently obtained by
William Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who writes
widely about military affairs, gives some idea how the group operated.
The presentation shows that CIFA analysts had access to
law-enforcement reports and sensitive military and U.S. intelligence
documents. But the organization also gleaned data from "open source
Internet monitoring." In other words, they surfed the Web.

Arkin says a close reading of internal CIFA documents suggests the
agency may be expanding its Internet monitoring, and wants to be as
surreptitious as possible. CIFA has contracted to buy "identity
masking" software that would allow the agency to create phony Web
identities and let them to appear to be located in foreign countries.

(Read the entire article at www.Newsweek.com. Click "Pressroom" for news

releases.)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965509/site/newsweek/ SOURCE Newsweek