Know your BFEE: WikiLeaks Stratfor Dump Exposes Continued Secret Government Warmongering

[Octafish]

10. GOP Spies at Work on Us ... as in 'We the People' Us.

Gee. If the Roberts Court didn't have to decide it, I guess this would be illegal.

CIFA 2.0 Back in the Outsourcing Business

By: emptywheel Thursday April 21, 2011 9:30 am

Remember the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA)? Here’s how I described it back in 2007.

CIFA is, along with the National Security Letters Congress is now cracking down on, probably the biggest abuse of civil rights and privacy BushCo has hatched up. It was designed to gather intelligence on threats to defense installments in the United States–to try to collect information (in the TALON database) on threatening people scoping out domestic bases. But it ended up focusing on peace activists and the lefty blogosphere’s own Jesus’ General. 70 percent of CIFA’s employees are contractors, a figure that makes it a prime candidate for politicized contracting scandal.

Among the contractors spying on Americans was MZM, one of the companies that bribed Duke Cunningham. Prosecutors in that case started investigating MZM’s CIFA contracts in May 2006. Three months after that, the top two managers at CIFA, who had directed CIFA keep sending MZM contracts, resigned suddenly. When DOD’s Inspector General tried to investigate CIFA in 2007, it discovered (it claimed) that the entire CIFA database had been destroyed in June 2006, just as prosecutors were closing in on those contracts.

[font color="green"]Later, in 2008, just as CIFA was claiming it couldn’t publicly reveal its unclassified contracts, we learned that Stephen Cambone (who had led one of the inquiries into CIFA), had won a contract from it, sort of a payoff for not finding anything, I guess.[/font color]

Later that year, DOD “disestablished” CIFA.

Or rather, they renamed it, calling it the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center. Then, last year, we learned that database DOD claimed had been destroyed in 2006 really hadn’t been, and CIFA 2.0 was getting back in the business of keeping a database of information on big threats to the US like Quakers and bloggers.

CONTINUED w/LINKS...

http://www.emptywheel.net/tag/cifa/

Thanks, bananas! People who think this is old news are, well, missing a very big boat.

Like a clean environment, freedom was something We the People just took for granted -- apart from those who read the newspapers, of course.