Crapaganda.com

“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government’s national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site’s revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.
We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies’ own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations.

Our maps show the headquarters buildings of the largest government agencies involved in top-secret work. A user can also see the cities and towns where the government conducts top-secret work in the United States, but not the specific locations, companies or agencies involved.

Within a responsible framework, our objective is to provide as much information as possible, so readers gain a real, granular understanding of the scale and breadth of the top-secret world we are describing.

On April 4, 1949, FBI agents in Utah sent a cable marked “urgent” to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It said an Army guard at the Ogden Supply Depot, a Logan policeman and a Utah Highway Patrol officer in Mantua each saw from miles apart a UFO — which they said exploded over Utah.

Under the title “Flying Discs,” the cable said they “saw a silver colored object high up approaching the mountains at Sardine Canyon” that “appeared to explode in a rash of fire. Several residents at Trenton … [reported] seeing what appeared to be two aerial explosions followed by falling object.”

That and other documents show the FBI was investigating whether UFOs were real, and it figured they could be. Such documents are now available in “The Vault,” vault.fbi.gov, a revamped FBI website for documents that have been released through the Freedom of Information Act and have been recently or often requested.

Besides talking about Utah UFOs, other Utah-related documents on the website look at such things as FBI snooping into whether the Salt Lake City NAACP had been infiltrated by communists; a death threat in Utah against Lady Bird Johnson; and Hoover lambasting W. Cleon Skousen — a Utahn who has become an icon of the tea party movement.

“The new website significantly increases the number of available FBI files, enhances the speed at which the files can be accessed, and contains a robust search capability,” David Hardy, chief of the FBI’s Record/Information Dissemination Section, said in a statement.

One document shows that the Logan UFO incident occurred two weeks after the FBI told bureaus that a “reliable and confidential source” reported that “flying discs are believed to be man-made missiles rather than natural phenomenon. It has also been determined that for approximately the past four years the USSR [Soviet Union] has been engaged in experimentation on an unknown type of flying disc.”

Documents show that an earlier UFO sighting had been investigated in Logan in September 1947. It said numerous witnesses told the FBI they saw “flying discs” in formation that were “circling the city at a high rate of speed.”

Most interestingly, on March 22, 1950, Guy Hottel, the agent in charge of the Washington Field Office, sent a memo reporting that an Air Force source said that flying saucers had crashed near Ros­well, N.M., and had been recovered.

“They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots,” it said.

Documents on the new website also show such things as a letter that Hoover wrote to a nun in 1962 criticizing Skousen, a former FBI agent who then was writing books and giving speeches on communism and conservative principles that later would make him vocally admired by many tea party leaders today, including TV and radio personality Glenn Beck.

“Former Special Agents of the FBI are not necessarily experts on communism. Some of them have sought to capitalize on their former employment with this Bureau for the purpose of establishing themselves as such authorities,” Hoover said in replying to questions from Sister Mary Shaun about Skousen.

“I am firmly convinced there are too many self-styled experts on communism, without valid credentials and without any access whatsoever to classified, factual data, who are engaging in rumor mongering and hurling false and wholly unsubstantiated allegations against people whose views differ from their own. This makes more difficult the task of the professional investigator,” Hoover wrote.

Other documents show the FBI in the 1950s was looking at whether the Salt Lake NAACP was infiltrated by communists, and was keeping track of its leaders and their backgrounds.

A memo said the Communist Party wanted the NAACP “to win leadership among negro organizations,” and “various attempts have been made by the CP [Communist Party] to infiltrate and dominate certain NAACP branches through the country.”

Another document shows that a threat against Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady, was sent to the FBI’s Salt Lake City office in 1988 in an anonymous letter saying she “must die.” Agents found it was likely sent by a New Mexico woman who was mentally ill, and no charges were filed against her.

Source: Salt Lake Tribune

Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old Arab-American student, is suing the FBI for placing a GPS tracking device on his car and then threatening him with charges when he tried to keep it.

The lawsuit, filed by by Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Wednesday, accused Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller of violating Afifi’s constitutional rights.

The suit, obtained by Talking Points Memo, explained that Afifi, an American-born student at Mission College in Sara Clara who also works as a salesman, was concerned that the device found on his car might be a pipe bomb.

After posting photos of the device on Reddit.com, agents came to his apartment in a “bizarre mission to retrieve the device” and questioned him, according to the lawsuit.

“Even after requesting counsel, the FBI agents continued to make demands of Mr. Afifi and interrogate him,” the suit claimed. “They asked him whether he was a national security threat, whether he was excited about an upcoming (but undisclosed) trip abroad, whether he was having financial difficulties, whether he had been to Yemen, why he traveled overseas, and many other questions.”

Afifi eventually relented and turned over the device after being threatened with federal charges.

One agent named Jennifer Kanaan “made clear that she knew intimate, private details of Mr. Afifi’s life” like that he had recently gotten a new job. She also complimented his taste in restaurants, the suit said.

The lawsuit noted that an FBI report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) detailed statements he had made to the media.

The report also identified people he contacted, hospitals he went to, organizations he belong to and religious services he attended.

Afifi had no connections to terrorism and was not politically active, CAIR attorney Zahra Billoo told The San Francisco Chronicle.

“He fit the profile – an Arab American male, young, lives by himself, travels frequently to the Middle East to visit his family,” she said.

A call to Billoo was not returned at the time of publication.

The FBI had not disclosed why it was monitoring Afifi.

Source: Raw Story

Using the available scientific evidence “it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion” about the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks which killed five people, according to a report issued Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings come two and a half years after the FBI said Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins was allegedly behind the anthrax mailings, and the spores could be genetically traced to a flask labeled RMR-1029 in his lab.

The scientific panel said the anthrax used in mailings to news organizations and members of Congress was the Ames strain Bacillus anthracis, and spores from those letters shared “a number of genetic similarities” with spores in Ivins’ flask. But the findings say the FBI did not fully explore other possible explanations for those similarities.

Ivins knew he was under suspicion by the FBI and committed suicide in July 2008 before any charges were filed against him. Ivins was involved in anthrax vaccine research at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.

Paul Kemp, a lawyer who represented Ivins, said that since August 2008, the Justice Department has maintained it had a “smoking gun” in the case against Ivins, citing the flask.

“Their smoking gun just turned into smoke and mirrors,” Kemp said of the report. “They said they had a smoking gun that would have convicted him (Ivins) in court and this report shows they didn’t.”

Kemp later added: “Over 200 people had access to the anthrax that came out of that flask.”

In response to the report, the FBI said, while the scientific investigation could not pinpoint the source of the anthrax, it helped its agents and the Justice Department to focus resources and conclude that Ivins was behind the attacks.

“Ultimately, the late Dr. Bruce Ivins was determined to be the perpetrator of the deadly mailings. The FBI and Department of Justice were preparing for prosecution at the time of Dr. Ivin’s death,” the FBI said.

Ivins maintained his innocence up until his death, Kemp said, adding that Tuesday’s report “just casts doubts” on the FBI’s conclusion that his former client was responsible.

The FBI praised the report for highlighting the value of what the FBI called “microbial forensics,” which it said “proved significant” in solving the case.

“Although there have been great strides in forensic science over the years, rarely does science alone solve an investigation. The scientific findings in this case provided investigators with valuable investigative leads that led to the identification of the late Dr. Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks,” the FBI said.

Throughout the anthrax probe, investigators grappled with questions about how much experience the perpetrator would have needed to make the anthrax and whether the material was “weaponized” with a silicon dispersant to allow it to float through the air, thus making it more likely the deadly spores would be inhaled.

The National Academy of Sciences panel said it found “no scientific basis on which to accurately estimate the amount of time or the specific skill set needed to prepare the spore material contained in the letters.” The panel said the time required to make the anthrax could range from two to three days to several months depending on the methods used to make the anthrax.

The group said it found no evidence the perpetrator intentionally added silicon-based dispersants to increase the flow of spores in the air. The panel said silicon was not detected on the outside of the spores which would be necessary as a dispersant. Silicon was found only inside the spores.

The FBI conducted a security review of the academy’s draft report in October 2010. The FBI subsequently asked to provide the panel some additional information. That material included an analysis of environmental samples taken from “an undisclosed overseas site at which a terrorist group’s anthrax program was allegedly located.” Investigators looked at the overseas site as part of the anthrax letters investigation. The Academy of Sciences report said samples from the site had inconsistent evidence of Ames strain B anthracis and further review was recommended.

The FBI also told the panel an analysis was done on human remains identified as belonging to 9/11 hijackers from United flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania. One test came up positive for anthrax but all other results were negative. Remains from the other 9/11 flights were not tested for anthrax.

The National Academy of Sciences report offers no opinion on Ivins’ guilt or innocence. It looks only at the scientific underpinnings of the FBI’s investigation. The scientists also did not have access to classified information.

The FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences to conduct an independent review of the science used in its investigation. That review began in 2009. The FBI’s investigation of the anthrax attacks was closed in February 2010 and some critics have said the bureau should have delayed that move until the release of the National Academy of Sciences report.

Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey who had criticized the FBI investigation, said he’s re-introducing legislation calling for a 9/11 style commission to look into the anthrax letter attacks.

“It would take a credulous person to believe the circumstantial evidence that the FBI used to draw its conclusions with such certainty,” Holt said in a press release. “The FBI has not proiven to me that this is an open and shut case.”

The anthrax letters were mailed from New Jersey, the state Holt represents.

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said the report “shows that the science is not necessarily a slam dunk.” Grassley called for an independent review of the FBI’s investigation.

At one time the FBI used Ivins as one of its scientific consultants in the anthrax investigation. After clues led investigators to focus on Ivins, the FBI performed surveillance on him, executed search warrants and studied lab records showing he had spent late hours alone in his lab prior to the time the anthrax letters were mailed. After his death, Justice Department and FBI officials released numerous documents from the investigation and said they believed Ivins bore sole responsibility for the attacks.

The anthrax-laced letters were mailed in fall 2001 — shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks — to then NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, the New York Post, Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Tom Daschle, who was the Senate Majority Leader at the time.

Five people died from inhalation anthrax which officials say was caused by contaminated mail. Two of those people were Washington area postal workers Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr. The other victims were Bob Stevens, a photo editor at American Media, Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida; Kathy Nguyen, a New York City hospital worker; and Ottilie Lundgren, an Oxford, Connecticut, widow. Seventeen other people became sick from either inhaling anthrax or skin exposure.

Source: CNN

That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am A Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was the only photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett Till, and he was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, King’s room, on the night he was assassinated.

But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil-rights era: He was a paid FBI informant.

On Sunday, The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two FBI agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil-rights movement. It was an astonishing revelation about a former police officer nicknamed the “Original Civil Rights Photographer,” famous in part for the trust he had engendered among high-ranking civil-rights leaders, including King.

“It is an amazing betrayal,” said Athan Theoharis, a historian at Marquette University who has written books about the FBI. “It really speaks to the degree that the FBI was able to engage individuals within the civil-rights movement. This man was so well trusted.”

From at least 1968 to 1970, Withers, who was black, provided photographs, biographical information and scheduling details to Howell Lowe and William H. Lawrence, two FBI agents in the bureau’s Memphis domestic surveillance program, according to numerous reports summarizing their meetings. The reports were obtained by the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its website.

A clerical error appears to have allowed for Withers’ identity to be divulged: In most cases in the reports, references to Withers and his informant number, ME 338-R, have been blacked out. But in several locations, the FBI appears to have forgotten to hide them. The FBI said Monday that it was not clear what had caused the lapse in privacy and was looking into the incident.

Civil-rights leaders have responded to the revelation with a mixture of dismay, sadness and disbelief. “If this is true, then Ernie abused our friendship,” said the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., a retired minister who organized civil-rights rallies throughout the South in the 1960s.

Others were more forgiving. “It’s not surprising,” said Andrew Young, a civil-rights organizer who later became mayor of Atlanta. “We knew that everything we did was bugged, although we didn’t suspect Withers individually.”

Many details of Withers’ relationship with the FBI remain unknown. The bureau keeps files on all informants but has declined repeated requests to release Withers’, which would presumably explain how much he was paid by the FBI, how he was recruited and how long he served as an informant.

At the time of his death, Withers had the largest catalog of any individual photographer covering the civil-rights movement in the South, said Tony Decaneas, the owner of the Panopticon Gallery in Boston, the exclusive agent for Withers. His photographs have been collected in four books, and his family was planning to open a museum and name it after him.

His work shows remarkable intimacy with and access to top civil-rights leaders. Friends used to say he had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. But while he was growing close to top civil-rights leaders, Withers was also meeting regularly with the FBI agents, disclosing details about plans for marches and political beliefs of the leaders, even personal information like the leaders’ car-tag numbers.

David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has written biographies of King, said many civil-rights workers gave confidential interviews to the FBI and CIA, and were automatically classified as “informants.” The difference, Garrow said, is the evidence that Withers was being paid.

Although Withers’ motivation is not known, Garrow said informants were rarely motivated by the financial compensation, which “wasn’t enough money to live on.” But Marc Perrusquia, who wrote the article for The Commercial Appeal, noted that Withers had eight children and might have struggled to support them.

One daughter of Withers, Rosalind Withers, told local news organizations that she did not find the report conclusive.

“This is the first time I’ve heard of this in my life,” Withers told The Commercial Appeal. “My father’s not here to defend himself. That is a very, very strong, strong accusation.”

Other children of Withers did not respond to requests for comment.

Source: Seattle Times

Consider the federal investigators who have “formally concluded” their investigation into the 2001 anthrax killings, pointing again to the late anthrax vaccine researcher Bruce Ivins as the case’s culprit.

Whatever history’s verdict on Ivins, one brouhaha at the center of the case has already outlived him — the story of “weaponized” anthrax.

“One of my biggest frustrations with this has been showing people the data, and it doesn’t matter,” says researcher Joseph Michael of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M. Michael has presented electron microscope results that show the 2001 attack anthrax wasn’t weaponized for two years, “but still the idea refuses to go away.”

The notion took hold in October of 2001, as the Hart senate office building faced closure due to anthrax contamination, when then-House minority leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., described some of the anthrax used in the attacks as “weapons-grade material.” The claim sparked a flurry of reports about the peculiar properties of the attack spores, their high quality and lightness, which hastened their spread through the building’s ventilation system.

Fears centered around silica, the chief ingredient in sand, which allows small bacterial spores to float more freely in the air, or aerosolize, if applied as a coating, a Cold War bioweapons technique studied at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.

In particular, a 2001 warning that silica had been purposely added to the attack anthrax came from virologist Peter Jahrling of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The warning was delivered to White House officials (reported in Robert Preston‘s 2002 book, The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story), after U.S. Armed Forces Institutes of Pathology X-ray results showed silica present in samples of the attack anthrax. The fear gained currency in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war‘s beginning, which centered around fears of bioweapons, as well as chemical and nuclear weapons.

“The spores in the Washington, D.C. letters were of exceptional purity,” says the Justice Department’s just-released investigation summary.

So, as part of the investigation, Michael and his colleagues looked at the attack spores using electron microscopes, which can see at fine enough resolution, on the nanometer scale, to spot exactly where the silica resided.In so doing they knocked down the notion the attack anthrax had been weaponized with a silicon coating. Instead, they found silicon that occurred naturally inside the spores.

“I believe I made an honest mistake,” Jahrling told The Los Angeles Times, in a 2008 response to this news, adding he was “overly impressed” by his initial views of the attack spores under the microscope.

Still the idea lives on, for example, in a January opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, that cited scientists who see the amount of silica in the attack spores as “blowing the FBI‘s case out of the water.” (The FBI argued the lab where Ivins worked didn’t have the facilities to weaponize the anthrax.)

Michael calls it “remarkable” that the opinion piece didn’t note his team’s well-publicized findings. “As a sheltered scientist, it kind of shocks me,” Michael says. “People will believe what they want to believe.”

So, how did the silica get inside the spores then? A January Journal of Bacteriology study led by Ryuichi Hirota of Japan’s Hiroshima University offers one answer. Looking at Bacillus cereus, a bacterium closely related to anthrax, researchers find silica naturally ingest the stuff if grown in sand-laced Petri dishes. Further, the silica produces acid resistance in the bugs, something they need to survive a trip to the stomach of grazing animals, one way they spread in the wild.

But it doesn’t make the spores float any more easily, Hirota and colleagues find. FBI scientist Vahid Majidi in 2008 suggested the crushing the anthrax letters underwent in postal sorting machines likely contributed to the fineness of the powders released in the Senate office building.

“I have to wonder if the controversial (Wall Street Journal opinion) piece didn’t put pressure on the Department of Justice and FBI to close the case. Maybe they realized that continuing the case just encouraged such misinformation,” says anthrax scientist Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, who managed the investigation’s repository of 1,070 anthrax samples. “Everyone can judge for themselves how the investigation was handled and the strength of the conclusions. Not everyone will be happy with the FBI conclusions, but this is America and we revel in conspiracy theories.”

Source: USA Today

An undercover law enforcement officer infiltrated a Christian militia group to gather evidence that led to FBI raids of the Michigan-based Hutaree group over the weekend.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald Waterstreet told U.S. Magistrate Judge Donald Scheer this afternoon that the leader of the group, David B. Stone, 45, of Clayton wanted the undercover agent to prepare bombs to fight law enforcement officers, who the group regarded as enemies of the country.

During the ongoing detention hearing, which began around 1:15 p.m., for eight alleged members of the group, Waterstreet played an audiotape of Stone saying, “Now is the time to strike and take our nation back. … This war will come whether we are ready or not. We will fight alongside anyone that calls the new world order their enemy.”

Stone’s speech was clandestinely recorded on Feb. 6 in a vehicle as members of the group were headed to Kentucky for a meeting with other militia groups, the prosecutor said, adding that Stone’s remarks were part of a speech he planned to deliver at a gathering in Kentucky.

According to prosecutors, on the way back from Kentucky, Stone pointed out a Hudson, Mich., police officer who had pulled someone over and said: “We’re going to pop him, guaranteed.”

Someone else in the van mentioned the Hudson police department was a small force, prompting a reply from Stone: “We’ll pop every one of them.”

The new information about the group came out during the detention hearing at the federal courthouse in Detroit in which Scheer is to decide whether the eight are to remain jailed pending trial. A ninth member of the group appeared Tuesday in federal court in Indiana and was to be transferred to Michigan.

Several members of the group are charged with seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, and knowingly transferring arms used in violent crimes.

Newly court-appointed defense lawyers repeatedly objected to Waterstreet’s allegations made during the hearing. The defense lawyers said the government should be forced to put an agent on the witness stand, and subject to cross-examination, so the magistrate could more thoroughly weigh the credibility of the claims.

Scheer repeatedly overruled such objections.

Stone’s lawyer, William Swor, of Detroit sought to mitigate the government’s claims, arguing, “All they’re saying is my client has opinions and knows how to use his mouth.”

Swor argued that Waterstreet had presented no evidence of a crime or justification for the magistrate to conclude that the defendants represented a danger to the community or a risk of flight if they were released.

It is not yet clear who the agent was who infiltrated the group or how he apparently gained the group’s confidence.

During the weekend raids at Stone’s home, agents seized more than 300 pieces of evidence, including explosives, bomb components and shrapnel, Waterstone said.

Waterstreet said one defendant Kristopher Sickles, 27, of Sandusky, Ohio told the group in January that he shot his pet cat to determine “If I could kill something I had a feeling for.”

A theme that developed throughout today’s hearing from defense lawyers was that Hutaree members were big talkers, who were short on action.

“That’s all you have, is a lot of talk – guys who like to dress up in fatigues,” said Michael Rataj, who represents Tina Stone, the wife of David Stone. “Absolutely nothing illegal about any of it.”

David Stone’s lawyer, Swor, said in court: “He talked, he trained. So what?” He added, “What we heard is that Mr. Stone talked a lot and that Mr. Stone is angry.”

The detention hearings will resume at 1 p.m. Thursday.

After the hearing today, David Stone Sr.’s ex-wife, Donna Stone, angrily left the courthouse with Shannon Witt, who recently married Joshua Stone, and Brittany Bryant, the fiancée to David Stone Jr.

“I don’t have a comment; neither does anyone else,” Donna Stone said between profanities. “Leave us alone.”

Source: Freep.com

The Feds are on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

U.S. law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that offers a tantalizing glimpse of issues related to privacy and crime-fighting.

Think you know who’s behind that “friend” request? Think again. Your new “friend” just might be the FBI.

The document, obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, makes clear that U.S. agents are already logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips.

Among other purposes: Investigators can check suspects’ alibis by comparing stories told to police with tweets sent at the same time about their whereabouts. Online photos from a suspicious spending spree — people posing with jewelry, guns or fancy cars — can link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, obtained the Justice Department document when it sued the agency and five others in federal court. The 33-page document underscores the importance of social networking sites to U.S. authorities. The foundation said it would publish the document on its Web site on Tuesday.

With agents going undercover, state and local police coordinate their online activities with the Secret Service, FBI and other federal agencies in a strategy known as “deconfliction” to keep out of each other’s way.

“You could really mess up someone’s investigation because you’re investigating the same person and maybe doing things that are counterproductive to what another agency is doing,” said Detective Frank Dannahey of the Rocky Hill, Conn., Police Department, a veteran of dozens of undercover cases.

A decade ago, agents kept watch over AOL and MSN chat rooms to nab sexual predators. But those text-only chat services are old-school compared with today’s social media, which contain mountains of personal data, photographs, videos and audio clips — a potential treasure trove of evidence for cases of violent crime, financial fraud and much more.

The Justice Department document, part of a presentation given in August by top cybercrime officials, describes the value of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other services to government investigators. It does not describe in detail the boundaries for using them.

“It doesn’t really discuss any mechanisms for accountability or ensuring that government agents use those tools responsibly,” said Marcia Hoffman, a senior attorney with the civil liberties foundation.

The group sued in Washington to force the government to disclose its policies for using social networking sites in investigations, data collection and surveillance.

Covert investigations on social-networking services are legal and governed by internal rules, according toJustice Department officials. But they would not say what those rules are.

The Justice Department document raises a legal question about a social-media bullying case in which U.S. prosecutors charged a Missouri woman with computer fraud for creating a fake MySpace account — effectively the same activity that undercover agents are doing, although for different purposes.

The woman, Lori Drew, helped create an account for a fictitious teen boy on MySpace and sent flirtatious messages to a 13-year-old neighborhood girl in his name. The girl hanged herself in October 2006, in a St. Louis suburb, after she received a message saying the world would be better without her.

A jury in California, where MySpace has its servers, convicted Drew of three misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization because she was accused of violating MySpace’s rules against creating fake accounts. But last year a judge overturned the verdicts, citing the vagueness of the law.

“If agents violate terms of service, is that ‘otherwise illegal activity’?” the document asks. It doesn’t provide an answer.

Facebook’s rules, for example, specify that users “will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.” Twitter’s rules prohibit its users from sending deceptive or false information. MySpace requires that information for accounts be “truthful and accurate.”

A former U.S. cybersecurity prosecutor, Marc Zwillinger, said investigators should be able to go undercover in the online world the same way they do in the real world, even if such conduct is barred by a company’s rules. But there have to be limits, he said.

In the face-to-face world, agents can’t impersonate a suspect’s spouse, child, parent or best friend. But online, behind the guise of a social-networking account, they can.

“This new situation presents a need for careful oversight so that law enforcement does not use social networking to intrude on some of our most personal relationships,” said Zwillinger, whose firm does legal work for Yahoo and MySpace.

Undercover operations aren’t necessary if the suspect is reckless. Federal authorities nabbed a man wanted on bank fraud charges after he started posting Facebook updates about the fun he was having in Mexico.

Maxi Sopo, a native of Cameroon living in the Seattle area, apparently slipped across the border into Mexico in a rented car last year after learning that federal agents were investigating the alleged scheme. The agents initially could find no trace of him on social media sites, and they were unable to pin down his exact location in Mexico. But they kept checking and eventually found Sopo on Facebook.

While Sopo’s online profile was private, his list of friends was not. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Scoville began going through the list and was able to learn where Sopo was living. Mexican authorities arrested Sopo in September. He is awaiting extradition to the U.S.

The Justice document describes how Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have interacted with federal investigators: Facebook is “often cooperative with emergency requests,” the government said. MySpace preserves information about its users indefinitely and even stores data from deleted accounts for one year. But Twitter’s lawyers tell prosecutors they need a warrant or subpoena before the company turns over customer information, the document says.

“Will not preserve data without legal process,” the document says under the heading, “Getting Info From Twitter … the bad news.”

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The chief security officer for MySpace, Hemanshu Nigam, said MySpace doesn’t want to be the company that stands in the way of an investigation.

“That said, we also want to make sure that our users’ privacy is protected and any data that’s disclosed is done under proper legal process,” Nigam said.

MySpace requires a search warrant for private messages less than six months old, according to the company.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said the company has put together a handbook to help law enforcement officials understand “the proper ways to request information from Facebook to aid investigations.”

The Justice document includes sections about its own lawyers. For government attorneys taking cases to trial, social networks are a “valuable source of info on defense witnesses,” they said. “Knowledge is power. … Research all witnesses on social networking sites.”

But the government warned prosecutors to advise their own witnesses not to discuss cases on social mediasites and to “think carefully about what they post.”

It also cautioned federal law enforcement officials to think prudently before adding judges or defense counsel as “friends” on these services.

“Social networking and the courtroom can be a dangerous combination,” the government said.

From 2002 until 2006 the FBI called on phone companies to provide customer records by faking terrorism emergencies.

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post indicate that officials inside FBI didn’t follow their own protocol to protect civil liberties.

A Justice Department inspector general’s report due out this month is expected to reveal that the FBI often broke the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed.

FBI broke law for years in phone record searches (Washington Post)

The FBI used faked terrorism emergencies to illegally obtain Americans’ phone records: Report (NY Daily News)