The Pentagon’s main spy outfit, the Defense Intelligence Agency, is building a new database which will consolidate in one system “human intelligence” information on groups and individuals—potentially including Americans—collected by DIA operatives in United States and abroad.
A notice published earlier this week in the government’s regulatory bulletin, the Federal Register, says the manager of the system will be a little-known DIA unit called the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC).
Records held in the database, the notice says, could include information on “individuals involved in, or of interest to, DoD intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and counternarcotic operations or analytical projects as well as individuals involved in foreign intelligence and/or training activities.” Among the data to be stored: “information such as name, Social Security Number (SSN), address, citizenship documentation, biometric data, passport number, vehicle identification number and vehicle/vessel license data.” Actual intelligence reports from the field and analytical material which would help “identify or counter foreign intelligence and terrorist threats to the DoD and the United States” will also be included.
“That’s potentially a lot of information,” Donald Black, chief spokesman for DIA, acknowledged in an interview with Declassified. But he said that material entered into the new database would be carefully reviewed—as regularly as every 90 days—to ensure that out-of-date, discredited, or irrelevant data on individuals would be destroyed if there was no longer a good reason to keep it.
[...]
Two U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that while CIFA had been disbanded on paper, many of its personnel and some of its functions were transferred to DCHC. One of the officials said that DCHC is now in the same office space that CIFA once occupied, in a complex near suburban Washington’s Reagan National Airport.
A defense official, who also did not want to be named, insisted that the new unit, unlike CIFA, had no law-enforcement powers. He maintained that the new system would not repeat abuses similar to those which occurred with TALON.
[...]
The official said that unlike TALON, the new DCHC database would not include field reports generated by military counterintelligence agencies with domestic field offices, such as the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, or the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. However, if those agencies were to ask DIA or DCHC to become involved in one of their cases, then information about the case could well be entered in the new DCHC database. The official had no estimate of how many records on individual subjects—including Americans—would be stored.
Some civil-liberties experts are already expressing dismay about the new DIA database. Mike German, a former FBI investigator who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Washington Post’s Spy Talk blog that while the functions of the new database were still murky, "We do know that DIA took over 'offensive counterintelligence' for the DoD once CIFA was abandoned… It therefore makes sense that this new DIA data base would be collecting the same types of information that CIFA collected improperly, so Americans should be just as concerned."
---------------------------------------
Mike Pick (Chief of the CI HUMINT Enterprise Management Office) names two former CIFA employees that were acting senior leaders in the DCHC when it was formed in 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment