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Pentagon ditches controversial
security database
Andrew
Gray
Reuters
Tuesday Aug 21, 2007
The Pentagon said on Tuesday
it would close a controversial database tracking suspicious activity
around U.S. military bases that critics complained had been used
to spy on peaceful antiwar activists.
Officials decided the TALON program would end on September 17
not in response to public criticism but because the amount and
quality of information being gathered had declined, the Pentagon
said.
"The analytical value of it was pretty slim," said
Army Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters. "The
TALON database was a perfectly legal system, nobody ever said
it wasn't, but it just was not meeting our needs any more."
(Article continues below)
Although the Pentagon insisted the move was not a response to
criticism, a memo by the department's top intelligence official
obtained by Reuters in April said the program should not be continued
"particularly in light of its image in the Congress and the
media."
Military and defense personnel still will report suspicious activities
around military bases, the Pentagon said. But that information
will go to an FBI database until the Pentagon proposes a longer-term
solution.
The TALON program, which was set up in 2003, has been used to
store reports about potential threats to Pentagon and U.S. military
facilities and personnel.
PEACEFUL PROTESTORS INCLUDED
The Pentagon said in April last year that a review had found
the database included reports on peaceful protests and anti-war
demonstrations that should have been deleted.
At that time, the Pentagon said it had introduced safeguards
to prevent such information from ending up in the database but
it stood by the system, saying it was a valuable tool for detecting
potential terrorist threats.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which had sharply criticized
the Pentagon for maintaining the database, welcomed the decision
to abandon TALON but said questions remained about Pentagon surveillance
activity in the United States.
"The TALON program could be just the tip of the iceberg,"
said Caroline Fredericks, director of the group's Washington legislative
office.
"It remains critical that Congress investigate how the abuse
of the TALON database happened in the first place and conduct
proper oversight of other intrusive surveillance by the executive
branch," she said in a statement.
The Pentagon is legally restricted in the types of information
it can gather about activities and individuals inside the United
States.
In his memo from April this year, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense
for Intelligence James Clapper said he had assessed the results
of TALON during the past year and did not believe they justified
continuing the program in its current form.
The Pentagon said on Tuesday that records would be kept of data
previously collected in the TALON system.
TALON has been widely understood to stand for Threat and Local
Observation Notice and the Pentagon's own internal watchdog used
that name in a report on the program this year. But a Pentagon
spokesman said on Tuesday TALON was originally just a name, not
an acronym.
(Additional reporting by Kristin Roberts)
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