Reply #15: CIFA and CORNERSTONE [View All]

Code Name of the Week: Cornerstone

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Well, CIFA already has these authorities, has its own agents, and collects information on common American citizens under the guise of "sabotage" and "force protection" threats to the military. Since 9/11, functions that were previously intended to protect U.S. forces overseas from terrorism and protecti U.S. secrets from spies have been combined in one super-intelligence function that constitutes the greatest threat to U.S. civil liberties since the domestic spying days of the 1970's.


On May 2, 2003, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz signed a memorandum (large pdf) directing the military to collect and report "non-validated threat information" relating to U.S. military forces, installations or missions. His memorandum followed from the establishment of the Domestic Threat Working Group after 9/11, the intent of which was to create a mechanism to share low-level domestic "threat information" between the military and intelligence agencies.

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It is the military's equivalent of the FBI and intelligence community's post 9/11 shift, and Wolfowitz directed the sharing of reports on ambiguous activity.  This new reporting mechanism -- called TALON for Threat and Local Observation Notice -- applies to seven reporting categories:
• Non-specific threats
• Surveillance
• Elicitation
• Test of security
• Unusual repetitive activity
• Bomb threats
• Other suspicious activity

According to a classified Standing Joint Force Headquarters-North document on "intelligence sharing" dated July 20, 2005, and obtained exclusively by this washingtonpost.com blogger, collection of intelligence on U.S. persons is allowed by military intelligence units if there is a reason to believe the U.S. person is: 
• "Connected to international terrorist activities;
• Connected to international narcotics;
• Connected to foreign intelligence;
• A threat to DoD installations, property, or persons; or,
• The subject of authorized counterintelligence."

In other words, some military gumshoe or over-zealous commander just has to decide that someone is "a threat to" the military. 

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2005/11/domestic_milita.html