It's not like CIFA is really going away. More like its just being folded under another layer of secrecy in the stucture of the National Security State...

Controversial military counterspy office closed
Aug 4, 2008 6:24 PM (1 day ago) By PAMELA HESS, AP
WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The Pentagon on Monday officially dissolved an intelligence office that once created a controversial database about potential threats to military bases, shifting it to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The Pentagon's six-year old Counterintelligence Field Activity's personnel, budget, and most of its mission has been folded into the newly created Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center.

Human intelligence is military parlance for using people, rather than gadgets, to spy. Counterintelligence refers to actions taken to protect an organization against espionage.

The counterintelligence field office budget was secret, but it was created to protect DoD personnel, resources, and information against foreign influence and manipulation, as well as to detect and neutralize espionage against the department. As such it had law enforcement powers within the Defense Department. Those powers will not transfer to the new center.

Elliot D. Cohen: Senate Judiciary Poised to Pass Total Information Awareness Bill Mon, 2007-11-12 A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION by Elliot D. Cohen
Amid public outcry, in 2003, Congress defunded the Bush Administration's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, a massive Orwellian technology-driven surveillance and data mining initiative. Now, it is attempting to pass through the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S. 2248), a bill that would affectively give legal standing and retroactive legal immunity to a major component of this project...

Ain't this a BUNCH of TOTAL BS?

U.S. official: Privacy must be redefined - Residents need to adjust to loss of anonymity, government leader says updated 7:41 p.m. ET, Sun., Nov. 11, 2007
WASHINGTON - As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act...

emptywheel lays out the latest evidence of military spying on US citizens, and the cover-up by the Pentagon IG...

More Funny Business with Record-Keeping? by emptywheel July 02, 2007
Holy Shit. Remember TALON and CIFA? Here's a description I wrote in April:

It was designed to gather intelligence on threats to defense installments in the United States - to try to collect information (in the TALON database) on threatening people scoping out domestic bases. But it ended up focusing on peace activists and the lefty blogosphere's own Jesus' General....

It Can Happen Here By Marie Cocco
Posted on Jun 12, 2007
WASHINGTON—There was a time when the dark, political drama was my preferred weekend movie. That was before kids and suburbs and serial viewings of “Shrek.”

The films were almost always about some exotic country gripped in a vise of poverty and dictatorship, where human life is cheap and strongmen unaccountable for crimes that shock the conscience. The genre was popularized in the 1982 film “Missing,” by the master director Costa-Gavras. It was a fictionalized account of the kidnapping and murder of a young American journalist in Chile, and the political awakening that his conservative father and the journalist ‘s wife undergo when they come to understand that the American government refuses to aide their search and somehow appears complicit in the horrors they see unfolding around them.

No matter where these dramas were set—in Latin America or in Africa or the Soviet Union or Northern Ireland—you would leave the theater stunned and silent, for a time. But safe, it seemed, in the knowledge that it could not happen here. Now it has...