1/16/07: The New York Times on Sunday reported on yet another police state measure the Bush regime has enacted in secret since 9/11.
What has been known for some time is that the FBI has been issuing “national security letters” to get financial records from American financial companies. As the Times reported:
The bureau has frequently relied on the letters in recent years to
gather telephone and Internet logs, financial information and other
records in terrorism investigations, serving more than 9,000 letters in
2005, according to a Justice Department tally. As an investigative
tool, the letters present relatively few hurdles; they can be
authorized by supervisors rather than a court. Passage of the Patriot
Act in October 2001 lowered the standard for issuing the letters,
requiring only that the documents sought be “relevant” to an
investigation and allowing records requests for more peripheral
figures, not just targets of an inquiry.
This alone is Orwellian enough to send shivers down the spine. But what was revealed Sunday in the New York Times is that the Pentagon and the CIA have been doing the same thing and keeping databases of the information collected:
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.The military and the C.I.A. have long been
restricted in their domestic intelligence operations, and both are
barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work. The
C.I.A.’s role within the United States has been largely limited to
recruiting people to spy on foreign countries.Carl Kropf, a
spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said intelligence
agencies like the C.I.A. used the letters on only a “limited basis.”Pentagon
officials defended the letters as valuable tools and said they were
part of a broader strategy since the Sept. 11 attacks to use more
aggressive intelligence-gathering tactics – a priority of former
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The letters “provide tremendous leads to follow and often with which to
corroborate other evidence in the context of counterespionage and
counterterrorism,” said Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman.Government
lawyers say the legal authority for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. to use
national security letters in gathering domestic records dates back
nearly three decades and, by their reading, was strengthened by the
antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.Pentagon
officials said they used the letters to follow up on a variety of
intelligence tips or leads. While they would not provide details about
specific cases, military intelligence officials with knowledge of them
said the military had issued the letters to collect financial records
regarding a government contractor with unexplained wealth, for example,
and a chaplain at Guantánamo Bay erroneously suspected of aiding
prisoners at the facility…Military intelligence officers have sent letters in up to 500
investigations over the last five years, two officials estimated. The
number of letters is likely to be well into the thousands, the
officials said, because a single case often generates letters to
multiple financial institutions. For its part, the C.I.A. issues a
handful of national security letters each year, agency officials said.
Congressional officials said members of the House and Senate
Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the use of the letters by
the military and the C.I.A….Unlike the F.B.I., the military and the C.I.A. do not have
wide-ranging authority to seek records on Americans in intelligence
investigations. But the expanded use of national security letters has
allowed the Pentagon and the intelligence agency to collect records on
their own. Sometimes, military or C.I.A. officials work with the F.B.I.
to seek records, as occurred with an American translator who had worked
for the military in Iraq and was suspected of having ties to insurgents.After
the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld directed military lawyers and
intelligence officials to examine their legal authorities to collect
intelligence both inside the United States and abroad. They concluded
that the Pentagon had “way more” legal tools than it had been using, a
senior Defense Department official said.Military officials say
the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978, which establishes
procedures for government access to sensitive banking data, first
authorized them to issue national security letters. The military had
used the letters sporadically for years, officials say, but the pace
accelerated in late 2001, when lawyers and intelligence officials
concluded that the Patriot Act strengthened their ability to use the
letters to seek financial records on a voluntary basis and to issue
mandatory letters to obtain credit ratings, the officials said.
The
Defense Department is now planning to incorporate the financial records
they have obtained into database at the Counterintelligence Field
Activity office. This is the same Defense Department that kept records
on over 250 incidents of legal antiwar protest activities in its
antiterrorist database.
So there you have it. Not only the FBI,
but the Pentagon and CIA (which are not supposed to conduct domestic
intelligence) could be sending “national security letters” to your bank
or credit card company, obtaining private financial information, and
keeping it in a database for suspected terrorist activity. This
represents a serious ratcheting up of police state powers in the United
States, all in the name of the “war on terrorism”. Do you feel safer?
(All quotes and information from “Military Expands Intelligence Role in U.S.”, New York Times, 1/14/07)