Power tools

This isn't really news. The difference is in the power of the tool behind it:

"Neither you nor anybody in that (Quaker) church had anything to do with terrorism," said Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla. "The fact is, the Truth Project may have a philosophy that is adverse to the political philosophy and goals of the president of the United States. And as a result of that different philosophy, the president and the secretary of defense ordered that your group be spied upon.

"There should not be a single American who today remains confident that it couldn't happen to them."

UPDATE (via O de Potomac):

More tools... (but should this go in the Halliburton post?)

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.

Another Update:

A commenter suggests taking a look at this website, Friends of Scott Parkin, and Parkin's hassles Down Under.

...A few days later, walking out of a café in Melbourne, I was snatched off the street by four Australian Federal Police and two Immigration Compliance Officers. They informed me I was being placed into "questioning detention" so that the Department of Immigration could assess if they were going to cancel my tourist visa or not. In truth, "a competent Australian authority" had already assessed me to be a "direct or indirect risk to Australian national security", cancelled my visa and began the process of removing me from the country (which would end up costing me $11,000 Australian dollars). By that evening, I was in solitary confinement at the Melbourne Custody Center, a maximum security lock-up awaiting that not-so free ride home. In addition, that evening, a media firestorm erupted in Australia and I became the centre of debate over free speech and the criminalisation of dissent in Australia....