US Military Monitored Planned Parenthood, White Nationalists

Planned Parenthood protest

New documents released from the US Department of Defense show the U.S. Joint Forces Command liaison monitored members from Planned Parenthood and the White Nationalist group National Alliance as part of security preparations for the 2002 Olympics in Utah.

American citizens who were members of these groups had information about their involvement in protests and passing out litereature collected by the JFC, which was then disseminated to the FBI’s Olympic Intelligence Center.

This and other intelligence-activity disclosures appear in more than 800 pages of heavily redacted documents that were released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which came in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act project the organization is conducting to obtain oversight information from intelligence agencies.

The documents cover the years 2001 – 2008 and show the actions conducted by various branches of the department, including the FBI, US Army and Joint Chiefs of Staff that are believed to be illegal.

National Alliance logo

One such infraction details the 2007 interception of a cellphone conversation made between two American citizens who were members of Planned Parenthood.

That cellphone interception is a violation of United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, an NSA rule that bars overseas surveillance of Americans without authorization and probable cause and provides instructions for destroying incidental interceptions that are collected unintentionally.

Another document obtained by EFF reveals that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations set up a “honey-pot” website in May 2006 “to identify & exploit foreign threats to DoD” and only realized in October 2007 that it potentially violated a sealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order.

“[D]uring the course of coordinating the operation with another agency,” the document states, “it was realized that the collection of some information targeting non-U.S. persons may be incongruent with a Spring ‘07 classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISC) opinion which may require a FISA warrant for legal interception in such cyber operations.”

Because the court order was sealed, the AFOSI staff didn’t know about it and only realized it might be applicable to their honey-pot project when they read about the order in the press. The Air Force halted the honey-pot operation and its “potential questionable activity” and asked the Justice Department for a copy of the sealed FISA Court order, but was denied access to it. At the time of the oversight report in 2008, the AFOSI still had not obtained clarification about the contents of the FISAC order.

A document from a 2008 oversight report indicates that Army Cyber Counterintelligence officers attended a Black Hat security conference without disclosing their Army affiliation. The conference, held annually in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., attracts hackers and security professionals from around the world. It’s also a hotbed gathering for undercover law enforcement and intelligence agents from around the world who come to learn about the latest computer security vulnerabilities and what specific hackers are up to. The documents don’t indicate if the officers collected any information on conference attendees.

EFF expects to receive additional documents from the Defense Department, as well as from the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

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