Pentagon to scrap controversial anti-terror database

The Defense Department will close its controversial anti-terrorism database known as TALON and preserve the data collected in accordance with intelligence oversight requirements, officials said Tuesday.

The five-year-old system, whose acronym stands for Threat and Local Observation Notices, was established by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to gather and assess possible threats to the U.S. military and civilian workers at military bases domestically and overseas.

TALON will be closed effective Sept. 17 because reporting to the system had declined significantly and it was determined to no longer be of analytical value, Army Col. Gary Keck told the American Forces Press Service.

To ensure a mechanism to document and examine potential threats, Assistant Defense Secretary Paul McHale plans to propose a new, streamlined reporting system that can better meet the Pentagon's needs, an agency press release said. In the interim, Defense Department officials will send information pertaining to protection concerns to the FBI's Web-based threat tracking system.

The American Civil Liberties Union lauded TALON's closure, saying that the department strayed from its intended mission and expanded the database to include reports by local law enforcement agencies and military security personnel about nonviolent demonstrations and anti-war protests.

"It was high time for this program to be shut down," ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said. "There should have been no place in a free democratic society for the military to be accumulating secret data on peaceful demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights."

In December 2005, media reports claimed that TALON was storing information on peace groups, many of which were protesting the Iraq war and holding anti-recruitment events. Several months later, the ACLU filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests seeking records relating to Pentagon surveillance under the TALON program.

When the Pentagon failed to respond, the watchdog group filed a lawsuit in a Pennsylvania federal court, which resulted in the release of hundreds of pages of documents revealing details about the military's surveillance of lawful, non-violent activities.

A June 2007 report by the Defense Department's inspector general found that counterintelligence officials "maintained TALON reports without determining whether information on organizations and individuals should be retained for law enforcement and force-protection purposes."

Of the 1,131 TALON reports reviewed, 117 originated outside the United States and did not contain information on U.S. people, and 263 were related to protests and demonstrations. More than 70 of the protest-related reports involved criminal actions that resulted in arrests, court appearances, violence, destruction and police intervention.

"There is still too much that remains unanswered about the Pentagon's surveillance activities in this country," ACLU top lobbyist Caroline Fredrickson said in a statement. TALON could be "the tip of the iceberg" and a further congressional investigation is critical, she said.

Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, said TALON's closure leaves several questions, including what Defense's counterintelligence field activity will be doing now.