[IP] Domestic Defense
Begin forwarded message:
From: Reuben Halper <reuben@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 8, 2005 4:22:03 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Domestic Defense
Domestic Defense
Could proposed new intelligence-gathering powers for the Pentagon
lead to spying on U.S. citizens? The question is being asked as the
White House considers new roles for the military inside America's
borders.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 7:02 p.m. ET Oct. 5, 2005
Oct. 5, 2005 - The Pentagon would be granted new powers to conduct
undercover intelligence gathering inside the United States—and then
withhold any information about it from the public—under a series of
little noticed provisions now winding their way through Congress.
Citing in part the need for “greater latitude” in the war on terror,
the Senate Intelligence Committee recently approved broad-ranging
legislation that gives the Defense Department a long sought and
potentially crucial waiver: it would permit its intelligence agents,
such as those working for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), to
covertly approach and cultivate “U.S. persons” and even recruit them
as informants—without disclosing they are doing so on behalf of the
U.S. government. The Senate committee’s action comes as President
George W. Bush has talked of expanding military involvement in civil
affairs, such as efforts to control pandemic disease outbreaks.
The provision was included in last year’s version of the same bill,
but was knocked out after its details were reported by NEWSWEEK and
critics charged it could lead to “spying” on U.S. citizens. But late
last month, with no public hearings or debate, a similar amendment
was put back into the same authorization bill—an annual measure
governing U.S. intelligence agencies—at the request of the Pentagon.
A copy of the 104-page committee bill, which has yet to be voted on
by the full Senate, did not become public until last week.
At the same time, the Senate intelligence panel also included in the
bill two other potentially controversial amendments—one that would
allow the Pentagon and other U.S. intelligence agencies greater
access to federal government databases on U.S. citizens, and another
granting the DIA new exemptions from disclosing any “operational
files” under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). “What they are
doing is expanding the Defense Department’s domestic intelligence
activities in secret—with no public discussion,” said Kate Martin,
director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil-
liberties group that is often critical of government actions in the
fight against terrorism.
But Don Black, a DIA spokesman, said Wednesday that the new
provisions were limited in scope and would only give the DIA the same
investigative powers as the FBI and CIA—powers that are crucial to
the agency’s expanded mission in tracking the terrorist threat.
“We’re not trying to do investigations of people inside the United
States,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is follow leads about
terrorist activities.”
The proposed new powers governing the Pentagon’s intelligence
operations comes at a time when there is already internal debate
within Washington over proposals to expand domestic Defense
Department activities—in part because of the outcry over the botched
response by other U.S. government agencies to the Hurricane Katrina
disaster. President Bush ratcheted the debate up Tuesday during his
press conference when he suggested for the first time that the U.S.
military might be used to quarantine members of the public in the
event of an outbreak of the avian flu. “And who best to be able to
effect a quarantine?” Bush asked during his press conference. “One
option is the use of a military that’s able to plan and move. And so
that’s why I put it on the table.”
But the move to expand Pentagon intelligence activities inside the
United States carries special resonance—in part because of
embarrassing disclosures about the U.S. military engaging in domestic
spying during the 1960s and 1970s. Revelations that the U.S. military
had penetrated and spied on antiwar protestors led to tight new
restrictions imposed by Congress. One of the chief restrictions is a
legal requirement that the DIA or any other Defense Department
intelligence agency conform to the provisions of the Privacy Act, a
Watergate-era law that requires government officials seeking
information from a U.S. resident to disclose who they are and what
they want the information for.
Ever since the September 11 terror attacks, which gave the Pentagon
expanded new counterterrorism authority, DIA officials have
maintained that this restriction (which does not apply to the FBI or
the CIA) has severely hampered its ability to approach U.S. residents
and recruit them as informants. Many of the agency’s potential
targets are members of ethnic communities inside the United States—
such as Pakistanis or Arabs with close relatives in the Middle East.
Such persons may often travel overseas, either for business, family
or educational reasons and may have contacts with friends or
relatives who have been tied to terrorist groups or hostile foreign
government officials—making them tempting targets for recruitment as
DIA informants, the agency argues.
DIA officials also say the provision approved by the Senate
Intelligence Committee has important protections against abuses: any
approaches to U.S. residents must be specifically approved by the
director of DIA, coordinated with the FBI and could not be used to
gather information about the “domestic activities of any United
States person.” One senior DIA official, who asked not to be
identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the agency
only contemplates using the provision in a limited number of cases
where the potential foreign intelligence information is “significant.”
“This isn’t for run-of-the-mill stuff,” said the senior DIA official.
“We’ve tried to write in these protections so this will be used only
in limited circumstances where we can’t do it any other way.”
But Martin, the civil-liberties advocate, said the DIA recruitment
provision must be looked at in the context of two other measures
tucked into the Senate intelligence authorization bill. One of them
specifically grants the DIA a blanket exemption from having to search
any of its “operational files” when it receives a FOIA request. There
is already such a FOIA exemption for CIA operational files. But
Martin contended that some of the DIA’s activities that are currently
not covert would be covered by the new exemption, thereby extending a
greater cone of secrecy around the agency. (The senior DIA official
said the agency was “wasting time, energy and manpower” conducting
FOIA requests for agency files that, at the end of the day, don’t get
released anyway because they involve classified information.)
Another little-noticed provision of the bill would create a four-year
pilot program that would allow U.S. intelligence agencies to have
access to data collected about U.S. residents by other government
agencies and covered by the Privacy Act. The FBI can already obtain
many such records—such as pilot licenses or Transportation Department
licenses for driving hazardous-waste materials or other government
permits and applications—for law-enforcement purposes. The new Senate
intelligence provision would allow U.S. intelligence agencies, such
as the CIA and the DIA, or "parent" agencies such as the Pentagon
itself, to collect such information deemed by the agency director to
be useful in intelligence gathering related to international
terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. No court order would be
required for the information to be shared.
Hurricane, Flu Outbreak Defense
The notion that the military should play a greater role in other
civil matters—by quarantining part of the country affected by an
infectious-disease outbreak, for example—was raised by President Bush
himself in a White House news conference Tuesday. A questioner
pointed out to the president that Health and Human Services Secretary
Mike Leavitt had said that emergency services and local governments
were not prepared to handle such an outbreak. The questioner asked
whether, in light of the government’s recent problems responding to
hurricanes, this was why Bush was considering using “defense assets”
to respond to a deadly flu epidemic.
Bush said an avian flu outbreak would present him with “difficult”
decisions, including whether or not to quarantine affected parts of
the country. Bush said he put "on the table" the option of using the
military so Congress could examine such a proposal. "Congress needs
to take a look at circumstances that may need to vest the capacity of
the president [to respond to that kind of catastrophe].”
Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster
Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public
Health, says that the military has almost certainly had contingency
plans for years for dealing with pandemics but that to his
recollection such plans had not been publicly discussed by presidents
or other top government officials. Redlener says that the clumsy
response of government agencies at all levels to recent hurricanes
has bolstered his belief that in the case of major catastrophes it
might be appropriate to get the military involved in a substantial
way at an early stage because of its capabilities to move men and
materiel to a disaster scene in a rapid and orderly fashion.
However, Redlener gives several reasons why it would be “unworkable”
to use the military to try to limit the spread of a pandemic such as
avian flu. For a start, he says, such a pathogen spreads rapidly and
it would be difficult if not impossible to contain it to a particular
geographical area. Moreover, the use of the military to enforce such
a quarantine would, in Redlener’s view, smack of martial law and set
up potentially violent confrontations between armed troops trying to
enforce a quarantine and U.S. citizens used to moving freely around
the country. Such deployment of the military would “cause
extraordinary disruption from the societal point of view” with
“highly unpredictable” consequences, he said.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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