This is the latest in a series of such revelations made public over the past year.

Under the Patriot Act the FBI has the power to use a secret subpoena, known as a “national security letter,” to demand companies and institutions provide financial and other personal records on individuals. In 2005, the FBI issued 30,000 such letters, gaining records on more than 3,500 U.S. residents.

Recipients of these secret subpoenas are subject to criminal prosecution if they make them public. In 2005, the Library Connection, a Connecticut-based library network, refused to comply with an FBI national security letter. The group successfully fought to have this gag order lifted so that it could wage a public campaign against such government snooping.

While the Pentagon and CIA were not granted the same power, they began issuing a “noncompulsory” version of the national security letter. Records obtained through this process by the Pentagon were then added to a growing network of databases used to follow the activities of many people.

Four military spy agencies—the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center, the Criminal Investigation Service of the Army and of the Navy, and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations—are authorized to issue these letters. All four are part of the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), a Pentagon spying program established in 2002.

CIFA has become massive, with nine separate directorates under its purview. In the first four years of its existence, the military spent more than $1 billion on the program.

Officially, the military is not supposed to be in the business of spying inside U.S. borders. However, since the establishment of the Northern Command in 2002—which opened the continental United States to military operations for the first time since the U.S. Civil War—the Pentagon has asserted its "right" to do so in the name of "fighting terrorism."

“The Department of Defense has legitimate authority in this area,” U.S. vice president Richard Cheney asserted when asked about the program during a January 14 interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “It’s a perfectly legitimate activity… . It doesn’t violate people’s civil rights.” The military can do domestic spying, Cheney said, because “we’ve got hundreds of bases inside the United States that are potential terrorist targets.”

The latest revelations add to a string of recent similar reports.

Last November, documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act that revealed spies under the jurisdiction of CIFA were snooping on the activities of individuals opposed to the U.S. war in Iraq. Those documents were part of CIFA’s Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) database.

Some 250 reports on “lawful political protests by people opposed to the war in Iraq,” were purged from the database following the disclosure, reported the New York Times.

In December 2005, the press revealed that the White House had directed the Pentagon's National Security Agency to intercept e-mails without a warrant and to wiretap phone calls made by individuals inside the United States. The New York Times, which first broke the story after sitting on it for a year at the request of the White House, said the agency monitored the communications of up to 500 people at any given time.  
 
 
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