My blog, Jesus’ General, and at least one other liberal-oriented blog, Call of Cthulhu, are being monitored by the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), a domestic intelligence organization formed following the Sept. 11 attacks. This monitoring appears to be ongoing, because Cthulhu alerted me to it last spring when his logs recorded a visitor from CIFA who had been referred from a link at Jesus’ General. Today, I noticed another entry for CIFA.MIL in my log (see the screen cap at right)–I use a free logging service which only captures the last 100 viewers, so I’ve had a hard time documenting it until now.

Here’s how Dow Jones describes CIFA:

Another little-known Pentagon group, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, was set up two years ago. With 400 service members and civilians stationed around the globe, the CIFA was originally charged with protecting the military and critical infrastructure from spying by terrorists and foreign intelligence services. But in August, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, issued a directive ordering the unit to maintain a “domestic law-enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.”

The CIFA also works closely with the FBI and is conducting some duties for civilian agencies. For example, according to Department of Agriculture documents, the CIFA is in charge of doing background checks on foreign workers and scientists employed by the department’s agricultural-research service. The group also provides information to the Information and Security Command, or Inscom, the Army’s main intelligence organization, based at Fort Belvoir, Md.

Military.com adds a little more to the description:

Quietly created post-September 11, CIFA has a broad charter to provide counterintelligence and security support to the Defense Department around the world and within the United States.

“Worldwide, more than 400 civilian and military employees work for CIFA with the ultimate goal of detecting and neutralizing the many different forms of espionage regularly conducted against the United States by terrorists, foreign intelligence services and other covert and clandestine groups,” according to the Defense Security Service.

“The threats posed by these adversaries include actions to kill or harm U.S. citizens; to steal critical information or assets (military or civilian); or destroy critical infrastructures.”

Are Cthulhu and I suspected of being “terrorists” or members of “foreign intelligence services and other covert and clandestine groups?” If not, why are we being monitored by CIFA? Is it because we are opposed to the Bush regime?

The funny thing about this is that CIFA could hide their IP address if they chose to do so, but they don’t. Are they just too stupid to do it, or are they brazenly attempting to intimidate us? If it’s the latter, they’ve failed in my case. In any event, it’s beginning to look like COINTELPRO may be making a comeback.

Are you being monitored as well? You may want to check your own logs.

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Of course, The General is grateful that he’s being monitored.

Update: Cthulhu points out that a whois query for CIFA.MIL leads us to a nameserver belonging to nipr.mil. What is nipr.mil:

Nipr.mil is not a single domain a but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities. It was established by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in response to a memorandum (CM-5 1099, INFOCOM) issued in March 1999 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for “actions to be taken to increase the readiness posture for Information Warfare.” “Uncontrolled Internet connections,” the document says, “pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all Department of Defense information systems and operations.”

It doesn’t look like they’re hiding their identities very well to me.