The U.S. military monitored Planned Parenthood and a white supremacist group as part of the government's security preparations for the 2002 Olympics in Utah, according to new documents released by the Department of Defense.

The U.S. Joint Forces Command liaison collected and disseminated information on U.S. citizens who were members of Planned Parenthood and the white supremacist group National Alliance regarding their involvement in protests and distributing literature, according to an intelligence-oversight report released by the Pentagon. The documents indicate that the JFC liaison was working with the FBI's Olympic Intelligence Center at the time.

This and other intelligence-activity disclosures appear in heavily redacted documents that were released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They came in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act project the organization is conducting to obtain oversight information from intelligence agencies.

EFF received more than 800 pages from intelligence oversight reports created by the Defense Department inspector general that examine actions, conducted by various branches of the department, that are believed to be illegal.

The reports cover the years 2001 to 2008 and were submitted to the Intelligence Oversight Board and cover the U.S. Army, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military entities. The board is composed of private citizens with security clearances who are supposed to submit to the office of the president any reports describing activities that are believed to be illegal.

The reports provide little context for the information that's disclosed, leaving the public to wonder about the nature and extent of the information and surveillance revealed in them.

Pertaining to the Planned Parenthood members, for example, the oversight report provides no explanation about how the information was collected. Nor does it indicate why the information was collected and notes only that military intelligence is not allowed to collect and disseminate information on U.S. persons unless the information constitutes "foreign intelligence." The report indicates that the collection was therefore "clearly outside the purview of military intelligence" and should have been handled by law enforcement.

Another oversight document discusses an incident involving the interception of civilian cellphone conversations of U.S. persons in April 2007. During a field exercise at Fort Polk, Louisiana, a Signals Intelligence noncommissioned officer operating a SIGINT collection system intercepted the cell phone calls, though the document doesn't indicate if they were intercepted on U.S. soil or outside U.S. borders.

Initial reports indicated that the noncommissioned officer listened to the conversations for entertainment purposes, and the incident was reported to the National Security Agency. But the inspector-general document indicates that the officer never admitted to this and indicates only that he may have listened to some conversations "longer than necessary to do his job."

Five months after the incident, the SIGINT staff at Fort Polk was given a refresher on United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, an NSA rule that bars overseas surveillance of Americans without authorization and probable cause and provides instructions for destroying incidental interceptions that are collected unintentionally.

Another document obtained by EFF reveals that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations set up a “honey-pot” website in May 2006 "to identify & exploit foreign threats to DoD" and only realized in October 2007 that it potentially violated a sealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order.

"[D]uring the course of coordinating the operation with another agency," the document states, "it was realized that the collection of some information targeting non-U.S. persons may be incongruent with a Spring '07 classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISC) opinion which may require a FISA warrant for legal interception in such cyber operations."

Because the court order was sealed, the AFOSI staff didn't know about it and only realized it might be applicable to their honey-pot project when they read about the order in the press. The Air Force halted the honey-pot operation and its "potential questionable activity" and asked the Justice Department for a copy of the sealed FISA Court order, but was denied access to it. At the time of the oversight report in 2008, the AFOSI still had not obtained clarification about the contents of the FISAC order.

A document from a 2008 oversight report indicates that Army Cyber Counterintelligence officers attended a Black Hat security conference without disclosing their Army affiliation. The conference, held annually in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., attracts hackers and security professionals from around the world. It's also a hotbed gathering for undercover law enforcement and intelligence agents from around the world who come to learn about the latest computer security vulnerabilities and what specific hackers are up to. The documents don't indicate if the officers collected any information on conference attendees.

EFF expects to receive additional documents from the Defense Department, as well as from the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Photo: PDX Pixels/Flickr

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