No sooner had the House's reauthorization of the Patriot Act then we encountered this nifty bit of federal synergy, news of which comes courtesy of NBC News' investigative team: The Pentagon has been conducting wide-ranging, data-mining surveillance on U.S. antiwar activists and anyone else it might whimsically designate a "person of interest." The domestic spying intitiative comes under the jurisdiction of a little-known Pentagon agency called Counterintelligence Field Activity. Here are a few of its lovelier contracts, as characterized by NBC investigative reporters Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak and Rich Gardella:

One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop Grumman and dubbed