A 400-hundred page Department of Defense document obtained by NBC News has revealed that the Department of Defense has engaged in extensive monitoring of anti-war and counter-military groups. According to NBC’s report, the document describes the Department of Defense investigations into more than 1,500 “suspicious interests” and “threats” across the country over the past 10 months, many which had no direct relationship to the military or Department of Defense property. While declining to comment on the specifics of the database, the Department of Defense stated that all “domestic intelligence” is legally collected and involves the “protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel." The document details incidents in which the Defense Department monitored individual activists, took down descriptions of vehicles, monitored conversations on internet email lists and discussion boards, and investigated protests that constituted “threats” yet dismissed the majority as “exercising constitutional rights” and retained information about them in the database.

The revelation, while surprising in that the Department of Defense has not been previously known to engage in such surveillance, will not be too surprising to many involved in the antiwar movement, both locally and nationally. Activists in Grand Rapids are well aware of the Grand Rapids Police Department’s surveillance of the local antiwar movement and other activist groups in Michigan were listed as having connections to “domestic terrorist groups” by the FBI. Documents obtained by the ACLU over the past year have also revealed that the FBI has been monitoring antiwar protests, especially with regard to protests planned at the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions which were preceded by the surveillance and questioning of activists associated with the protests.

On today’s edition of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed NBC news analyst William Arkin who obtained the Department of Defense database from a government source. During the show, Arkin explained how in the current climate of government concern over terrorism and with the USA PATRIOT Act, many in the government and military establishment have come to view measures like the Department of Defense database as being perfectly acceptable although there is clearly no link between antiwar protestors and transnational terrorists. It was also discussed how this database is not the only means of tracking data on domestic civilians, but there are a host of them—the TALON database, the Coast Guard ICC database, the CIA TD database, the NSA database, and more—all of which are currently being integrated into a single database as part of the National Counterterrorism Center. Data provided by private corporations such as Choicepoint is also being used by the military, with Choicepoint giving the military access to an “undisclosed and vague” exclusive data searching system. Such data is also being collected by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and new documents released last week by the Colorado ACLU reveal that the JTTF was being used to conduct “domestic terrorism” investigations of peaceful protestors held by the Campaign for Middle East Peace in February of 2003 and at the June 2002 North American Wholesale Lumber Association meeting.

While the Department of Defense announced that it will review the database with particular attention being paid as to why data that did not contain “viable threats” and why certain people were targeted. Despite the government's intent to "review" the program, there are clear similarities to the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) undertaken by the government in the 1960s to monitor disrupt the burgeoning civil rights and New Left movements. From COINTELPRO’s start in the late 1950s to its termination in 1971, the FBI conducted investigations on more than 100,000 US citizens and repeatedly and systematically broke the law while conducting surveillance operations. COINTELPRO’s founding mission was to “track, expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities” of civil rights and New Left groups and many disputes within organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement either originated in or were exacerbated by COINTELRPO activity. In response to public outrage over COINTELPRO, the government adopted a series of laws restricting government intelligence gathering, but there have been persistent reports of COINTELPRO-style activities into the present day and concern has grown that with the new policies such as the USA PATRIOT Act and other domestic intelligence programs allowed since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, that a COINTELPRO-style program may reemerge.