Domestic spying by our government is all the rage

nsa, cifa, the fbi... with all the spying going on, i'm sure there has to be a dossier on you and me out there somewhere...

CIFA is a three-year-old [Defense Department] agency whose size and budget remain secret. It has grown from an agency that coordinated policy and oversaw the counterintelligence activities of units within the military services and Pentagon agencies to an analytic and operational organization with nine directorates and ever-widening authority.

Its Directorate of Field Activities (DX) "assists in preserving the most critical defense assets, disrupting adversaries and helping control the intelligence domain," the fact sheet said. Those roles can range from running roving patrols around military bases and facilities to surveillance of potentially threatening people or organizations inside the United States.

[...]

CIFA manages the Pentagon database that includes Talon reports, consisting of raw, unverified information picked up by the military services on suspicious activities that could involve terrorist threats. The Pentagon acknowledged last week that the Talon database contained reports on peaceful civilian protests and demonstrations that should have been purged long ago under Defense Department regulations.

i get even more nervous than i already am when i read phrases like "ever-widening authority..."

CIFA's authority is still growing. In a new move to centralize all counterterrorism intelligence collection inside the United States, the Defense Department this month gave CIFA authority to task domestic investigations and operations by the counterintelligence units of the military services.

we all know how bureaucracies work... the more investigators there are, the greater the likelihood that they will work extra hard to find things to investigate if for nothing else than to justify their existence...

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