A heavily redacted 800 page document released by the Department of Defense (DoD) in February 2010 shows that military intelligence officials spied on Planned Parenthood and other domestic groups between 2001 through 2008. Released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in July 2009, the document characterizes some of the intelligence collection as “unlawful.”
As part of the release schedule ordered by a federal judge last December, EFF is expecting to receive additional oversight reports from the CIA, National Security Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense in March 2010.
According to EFF, the document contains “rarely disclosed” intelligence oversight reports from several DoD departments. Included in the document are reports stating the FBI “improperly collected and disseminated intelligence on Planned Parenthood and a white supremacist group called the National Alliance, as part of preparations for the 2002 Olympics.” The family-planning clinic was targeted because of its “involvement in protests and literature distribution,” according to a May 1, 2002 memorandum from a Pentagon deputy inspector general. The oversight report does not explain how the information was gathered, but indicates that the collection was “clearly outside the purview of military intelligence” and should have been the jurisdiction of law enforcement.
The document reveals other examples of “possibly illegal intelligence activities” involving peace activists and protestors expressing their First Amendment rights. According to The Progressive, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) conducted intelligence gathering operations on an anti-war group, Alaskans for Peace & Justice, “which was planning a peaceful demonstration” and disseminated the information in a “command briefing”.
Another possible violation involved a 2007 Pentagon document that noted a staff officer at the U.S. Army Reserve Command at Fort McPherson, Georgia, “routinely collected and retained information from open sources concerning domestic U.S.-person protest groups exercising their freedom of speech/assembly.” The oversight report about that paper concluded that “there was no indication that the information contained a foreign nexus or otherwise represented a legitimate force protection threat to the U.S. Army.”