Meet CIFA, Rummy's secret police

The Pentagon has a new spy agency. Or, perhaps more accurately, a preexisting DOD bureaucracy is rapidly metastasizing into a full-service espionage operation unburdened by Congressional oversight.

Morgon discusses Monday's Washington Post article about Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA):

The Pentagon's newest counterterrorism agency, charged with protecting military facilities and personnel wherever they are, is carrying out intelligence collection, analysis and operations within the United States and abroad

CIFA is a three-year-old 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. [WaPo]

Echidne is as concerned as I am about CIFA's ever-widening authority.

Comments

[Frank Wilhoit]

This is the Huston Plan all over again. It has nothing to do with war or terrorism. Its targets and its motivations are exclusively domestic. Everything the Republican Party does is purely domestic. The Party has no foreign policy. It does not, it cannot, understand the existence of the rest of the world. This is the true moral obscenity of Iraq: it was never about Iraq. The Iraqi people are neither beneficiaries nor victims. They are not even spectators: they are scenery.

[Wendy Alia]

Hey, I thought I'd draw your attention to the article over at Crooked Timber which talks about an "upgrade" to the British domestic surveillance system, as reported in The Independent today. Here's the first paragraph:

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

[blogenfreude]

and CIFA reads The General ... better check your stats Lindsay ...

[Mr.Murder]

Could CIFA have been the NSA's end run? SImply chabge who does the wiretapping within the executive and caveat it by the President's directive...

?