Surveillance Daily News -- Houston edition

For those who have attended a Halliburton protest in downtown Houston, be advised:

The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater," Parkin says.

But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection" — tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON — short for Threat and Local Observation Notice — that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.

A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. It's not clear why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention — although organizer Parkin had previously been arrested while demonstrating at ExxonMobil headquarters (the charges were dropped). But there are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations. A Pentagon memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows that the deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.

CIFA's activities are the latest in a series of disclosures about secret government programs that spy on Americans in the name of national security. In December, the ACLU obtained documents showing the FBI had investigated several activist groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Greenpeace, supposedly in an effort to discover possible ecoterror connections. At the same time, the White House has spent weeks in damage-control mode, defending the controversial program that allowed the National Security Agency to monitor the telephone conversations of U.S. persons suspected of terror links, without obtaining warrants.

Read the rest.

There's a variety of First Amendment exercises on the local calendar for the rest of January: L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer is shilling his book -- err, speaking to the Houston World Affairs Council in the Westin Oaks Hotel on Thursday, January 26 and drawing a protest outside; The World Can't Wait is organizing "Drown Out the Lies" demonstrations on January 31st, the night President* Bush speaks to the Nation about its State (including a march on KHOU, the CBS affiliate here); and a small group of people will be at Senator Kay Bailey Perjury Technicality's office later this week to find out how she intends to vote on Borkalito.

I suppose my file is going to be getting thicker. Of course since we're no longer talking J. Edgar Hoover and it's on disk, I should probably hope to reach a megabyte or two shortly, not including the photos.

I have added the following signature to my e-mail ( and you are free to do the same):

LEGAL NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Order, the National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may have done so without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President.

And if you want to see exactly how the FBI has implemented this computer monitoring program, then click here.

On January 22, 1973,

... in the decision known as Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court legalized abortion using a trimester approach.

Happy Anniversary.

Samuel Alito, misogynist, must be filibustered.

Democratic Candidate Events: Murff, Henley, Radnofsky, Van Os, Bell

Tomorrow at the meeting of the West Houston Democratic Club you can see a debate between CD-07 candidates David Murff and Jim Henley. Charles Kuffner prepared questions for both and their answers can be found at Texas Tuesdays, which is your bookmark for all things candidate-related between now and November. Many of the Texas lefty bloggers you read regularly will be posting and cross-posting there.

US Senate challenger Barbara Radnofsky will hold two press conferences next week to announce her anti-corruption initiatives. She will be in Houston on Wednesday, January 25 and in Austin on Thursday, January 26. CD-31 candidate Mary Beth Harrell will attend the Austin press conference.

“A major moral cost of corruption is our children growing up in a world where lying, cheating, and stealing appear to be acceptable. It’s a world where leaders embrace perjury, take money under false pretenses, and lack any code of honor so they refuse to try to correct the wrongs in which they’re involved,” says Radnofsky. Her initiative will include the following “to do” items for Sen. Hutchison:

1. Renounce perjury
2. Return the money she accepted from El Paso's Tigua Indian tribe, who were defrauded by indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff
3. Make good on the promise she made to the people of South Texas recently when she echoed Radnofsky’s call for a VA hospital south of San Antonio.

The steering committee of the David Van Os for Texas Attorney General campaign will be held in Austin tomorrow (yours truly will be moderating this event), and that coincides with the platform meeting of the Texas Progressive Populist Caucus (at a different location also in Austin).

Chris Bell was at the Alamo today, will be in speaking in San Antonio at noon tomorrow, and will address the state convention of Texas Machinists in Austin also tomorrow afternoon.

If I left someone out, give us an update on your candidate's events with a comment.

Corruption Chronicles: The Week That Was

Here's a boatload of good blogging going on in some of my favorite places:

Fred at Truth Serum points out the hypocrisy inherent in the local Republican blogosphere as they desperately fail to explain away Tom DeLay's slumping polls.

Anna at annatopia met Smoky Joe Barton's Gravy Train at the station today. It made the Traditional Media. A platoon of Texas progressive blogs piled on: BOR, Peoples' Republic of Seabrook, Kuff, Common Sense, Eye on Williamson County, In the Pink Texas, The Agonist, By the Bayou and Wyld Card all had something to say about it, as did Barton's Democratic opponent, David Harris, at his Dkos diary.

Texas Democratic Party Chair Charles Soechting called out Rick Perry for his blatant cronyism regarding the state contracts awarded two of Jack Abramoff's best buddies, which I posted about here and also at HouDems. You can contact Governor Adios MoFo at that last link and tell him yourself what you think.

Remember my post earlier about the Houston Democrats being disinvited from Monday's MLK Day Parade through downtown Houston? Well, here's the backstory.

OK, my mouse finger needs a break. There's a lot of candidate happenings this weekend, and I'll drop them in above this.

One less candidate on the ballot: Alvarado's check bounces

This is kind of sad:

A Fort Worth man, the only Hispanic person to declare for governor, was bounced from the ballot late Thursday after his check to the Texas Democratic Party for the $3,750 filing fee bounced.

The name of Felix Alvarado, a middle school administrator, will not appear on the March 7 party primary ballot, said Charles Soechting, the party's state chairman.

"The position I would have to take is, the filing fee wasn't paid," Soechting said. "It's sad. I hate to see that happen to anybody."

Thursday evening, Alvarado, 63, confirmed submitting his check for the filing fee without sufficient funds available.

"I take full responsibility for that. That's my mea culpa. I overplayed my hand," he said. "I'm disappointed."

In his campaign's contribution and expenditure report covering July through December, Alvarado reported no money in his treasury as of Dec. 31. The report shows that he's taken two campaign loans: $1,000 from a brother and $300 on a credit card.

The ramifications are that the eventual Democratic nominee for governor should be able to escape the primary on March 7 without a runoff, which will make it easier on Kinky Friedman and Carole Strayhorn to secure the 45,000-ish unduplicated signatures from non-primary voters needed to appear on November's ballot.

A four-handed free-for-all for eight months, spring to fall, will make for one hell of an interesting political season this year.

Over 3.200 Katrina victims are still missing

Three thousand two hundred people still unaccounted for, after five months.

More than the number of Americans killed on 9/11; a thousand more than have been killed so far in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Somehow I get the feeling that your government doesn't care quite so much about them as they do those others.