Military Expands Domestic Surveillance

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I just saw this and haven’t had a chance to digest it yet, but Eric Lichtblau and Mark Mazzetti write for the New York Times:

The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.

The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say. …

…The F.B.I., the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage, has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provoking criticism and court challenges from civil liberties advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans’ private lives.

But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.

13 thoughts on “Military Expands Domestic Surveillance”

  1. “The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans”…

    Little known? How about UNCONSTITUTIONAL and TREASONOUS!

  3. How many governmental agencies do we have poking into my business? Can I at least get a show of hands? It’s bad enough that the FBI can do it, and I get that the CIA no longer snoops only overseas, and the NSA is listening to my communications and now the Pentagon? Who next, the National Forest Service? The Department of Transportation?

  5. All this spying on Americans has little to do with ‘terrorism’ and everything to do with ‘politics’…….especially designed to hide the tracking of Bush critics and peace groups under the cover of fighting terrorism……….which makes me laugh because today these unconstitutional spies must be going nuts doing overtime, what with 70% of Americans critical of dear leader.

    This bit about the military spying domestically hits a nerve…..several years ago I had a message from my web mail server telling me that a ‘connection’ hadn’t made it….I clicked on the message and discovered that the ‘sender’ was a military address. Curiously [I knew no one in the military], when I then tried to e-mail that address, I got a prompt telling me that no such address existed. I believe that this was near the beginning of the Iraq War in the spring of 2003, soon after I first got on-line and not long after I did my first public placard-waving anti- pre-emptive war protest.

  7. Hey man, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.(Yea, right, like the time the state of California put a lien on a piece of property I no longer owned because of non payment of taxes on income which I didn’t earn in California that year. Talk about a double whammy!)Their little faux pas totally screwed up my credit rating for several years. We’ll all be more secure when it’s a total police state, no crime to worry about!
    The patriot act should be be called the “paranoid” act.

  9. Pingback: The Mahablog » The Pentagon Goes Fishin’

  10. When they say the Pentagon, I would imagine they mean Counterintelligence Field Activity. CIFA is the counterintel/force protection agency for the DoD and they were caught last year spying on protesters and maintaining a big database (Threat And Local Observation Something, called TALON) with lots of reports on anti-war protests, etc.

  11. Secession. Jihad. Insurge.
    Cut yourself from the federal leviathan.

    We now know the real reason the south seceded, Washington was and is full of tyrants.

  12. Wrong triad.

    Impeach. Remove. Incarcerate.

    Then it’s about Obamanation and a super majority in the Senate in ’08.

    Unless you live in Texas, please don’t secede.

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