Pentagon to Suspend Anti-Terror Database
Posted by wdporter on August 21, 2007
Aug 21 12:06 PM US/Eastern
By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer
Keck said that after the TALON database is shut down in September, a copy of the data it contains will be maintained at the Pentagon for record-keeping purposes but not for further analytical use.
The decision to end the program, which had been recommended in April by the Pentagon’s new intelligence chief, James R. Clapper, Jr., was approved by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, Keck said.
The program, known as TALON, was created after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and was designed to maintain a base of information on reported potential threats to military facilities and personnel.
In December 2005 it was disclosed that the system included data on anti-military protests and other peaceful demonstrations.
Anti-war groups and other organizations, including a Quaker group—the American Friends Service Committee—protested after it was revealed that the military had monitored anti-war activities, organizations and individuals who attended peace rallies.
Pentagon officials have said the program was productive and had detected international terrorist interests in specific military bases. But they also acknowledged that some officials may not have been using the system properly.
The TALON reports—collected by an array of Defense Department agencies including law enforcement, intelligence, counterintelligence and security—are kept in a large database and analyzed by an obscure Pentagon agency, the Counterintelligence Field Activity. CIFA is a three-year-old outfit whose size and budget are secret.
Last year, a Pentagon review found that as many as 260 reports in the database were improperly collected or kept there. At the time, the Pentagon said there were about 13,000 entries in the database, and that less than 2 percent either were wrongly added or were not purged later when they were determined not to involve real threats.
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