Note: Since the time of the original publication, it has been revealed that the story about the government investigating a student for ordering a copy of Mao's Little Red Book via inter-library loan was a hoax.

Over the past week, a considerable amount of information has come out about the federal government’s domestic spying. The spying, conducted under the guise of preventing terrorism, appears to be far more extensive than originally believed with the Defense Department monitoring antiwar protests and the National Security Agency (NSA) conducting unauthorized surveillance within the United States. Recent news reports have confirmed earlier reports that the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) is carrying out secretive intelligence collection, analysis, and operations within the United States and has a substantial budget to monitor possible threats and track them in the government’s TALON database. Moreover, new reports last week revealed the existence of a government “watch list” for books in an incident where a student at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth was investigated for requesting a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book via inter-library loan. Government agents who interviewed the student told him that the book is on a watch list and that the investigation was triggered by the fact that the student requested a copy in the original Chinese and had spent significant time abroad.

Of the recent domestic surveillance stories, the Bush administration’s use of the NSA to conduct electronic surveillance on between 500 and 1,000 (according to the government), has drawn the most attention in the corporate press. The NSA uses a variety of electronic surveillance techniques to monitor entire streams of communications (for example, all calls between Britain and the United States going during a certain number of days) and then uses sophisticated technology to sort through them in a method of surveillance that is far more invasive than the individual incident wiretaps generally used by the FBI. In order to conduct such surveillance, the NSA is required to get approval from a secret court (frequently referred to as the FISA Court) that was formed as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That law, passed in 1978, was designed to prevent the rampant government surveillance that characterized the government’s COINTELPRO operations against domestic citizens. In response to an article that was published in the New York Times (albeit held for over a year at the request of the government), Bush defended the unauthorized use of NSA surveillance by arguing that it took to long to get approval from the FISA Court, that the methods were necessary to protect the United States, and that the President has the authority to pursue such surveillance. However, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give presidents the power to conduct such electronic surveillance, nor is there any substantive need to be concerned about the speed of FISA Court rulings. Since 1978, the FISA Court has only denied 8 out of 15,000 requests and typically just “rubber stamps” requests in short hearings. According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Bush committed a felony and his admissions that he personally ordered the NSA to do this could, however unlikely it is, make him vulnerable to possible impeachment.

Despite the media’s focus on the NSA surveillance, domestic spying goes far beyond the NSA and involves multiple agencies conducting widespread surveillance of anything conceived as a possible “threat” to the government. 2,300 pages of documents obtained this week by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show that the FBI is continuing to spy on political groups including PETA, Greenpeace, and Catholic Worker, including a terrorism investigation of PETA that used informants to monitor the group’s meetings, allegedly prompted by information that PETA was funding the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. Similar documents obtained over the past few years have showed FBI investigations into antiwar protests and groups planning protests outside of the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 2004. Documents released last week also reveal that it is not just the FBI engaged in this type of political spying, but that the Department of Defense has also investigated antiwar protests.