Bush's Imperial Presidency

"Back in the late sixties I was a military "special agent" of the type to which Mr. Hightower refers. I did this work, in plainclothes. Our target was the anti-Vietnam protest movement--For one thing, I learned how these people think and how they operate -- and the spying technology now is 40 years beyond anything we could have dreamed up.
It is more insidious even than the NSA eavesdropping. It's the operational side of counterintelligence. (The very term "counterintelligence" now has a sinister meaning; when I got into it, it was about detecting and catching Soviet spies, a perfectly honorable undertaking. Now it has come to mean dirty tricks aimed at political enemies. Watergate was a counterintelligence operation.)"

"Three years ago, the Pentagon set up a new, ultrasecret agency called CIFA, for Counterintelligence Field Activity. Its initial task was to detect terrorist plots against military installations in the United States, but two years ago, a directive from the Pentagon's top ranks ordered CIFA to broaden its scope by creating and maintaining "a domestic law enforcement database." The agency's motto became "Counterintelligence to the Edge."...read on"