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Military
Admits
To New
Spying On Gay Groups
by
365Gay.com from the Web, June 27, 2006
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Washington, June 26 -- The
Department of Defense has admitted it conducted surveillance on groups opposed
to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" on a more extensive level than previously reported.
The new revelations are part of an ongoing call for information under the
Freedom of Information Act by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an
organization that represents gays in the military.
Some of the surveillance outlined in the new documents suggests, SLDN says, that
the spying may have been part of an undercover Pentagon operation.
The new material shows government surveillance of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and
anti-war protests at the State University of New York at Albany, William
Paterson University in New Jersey, Southern Connecticut State University and the
University of California at Berkeley.
The documents released today indicate that emails sent by various student groups
were intercepted and monitored by the government and that the government
collected reports from seemingly undercover agents who attended at least one
student protest at Southern Connecticut State University.
None of the reports in the documentation, however, indicated any terrorist
activity by the students who were monitored.
“Federal government agencies have no business peeping through the keyholes of
Americans who choose to exercise their first amendment rights,” said SLDN
executive director C. Dixon Osburn.
“Americans are guaranteed a fundamental right to free speech and free
expression, and our country’s leaders should never be allowed to undermine those
freedoms. Surveillance of private citizens must stop. It is the suppression of
our constitutional rights, and not the practice of them, that undermines our
national security. It is patently absurd that this administration has linked
sexual orientation with terrorism.”
Last December media reports said that the Pentagon has been spying on
“suspicious” meetings by civilian groups, including student groups opposed to
the military’s "don't ask, don't tell".
The reports said that the Pentagon had spied on New York University law school’s
LGBT advocacy group OUTlaw and gay groups at the State University of New York at
Albany and William Patterson College in New Jersey.
In February, the DoD acknowledged in a letter to the Senate Armed Services
Committee that it had ‘inappropriately’ collected information on protestors but
did not name any of the organizations.
The DoD initially refused a Freedom of Information request from SLDN. But,
when the organization sought a court order to force compliance with FOI it began
releasing some of its information.
Other agencies have either denied participating in domestic surveillance of the
LGBT community, or have refused to release information about their activity.
In a June letter to SLDN, the National Security Agency said it will “neither
confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence” of information that may have
been obtained in its surveillance of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
communities.
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