Defense Dept. tracking anti-war protesters

Anti-war protests and protesters across the country are being tracked as part of a little known Department of Defense (DoD) program used to identify terrorist threats, according to internal DoD documents recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The released documents, which refer to several separate anti-war protests in 2005, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU after evidence surfaced late last years that the Pentagon was secretly conducting surveillance of domestic protest activities. The documents were part of a three-year-old DoD information sharing and database project called TALON, which replaced a similar Homeland Security program called Operation TIPS after it fell into disfavor. "When information about non-violent protest activity is included in a military anti-terrorism database, all Americans should be concerned about the unchecked authority this administration has seized in the name of fighting terrorism," said ACLU attorney Ben Wizner. In one document issued by the DoD, an Akron, OH, anti-war event commemorating the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq was labeled as "Suspicious Activities/Incidents." The event, hosted by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker group and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, featured a rally, march and reading of the names of US and Iraqi war dead. Though the report was issued by the DoD through the TALON program, the source of the information was an agent with the Department of Homeland Security. According to the report, information about the protest was shared by the DoD who briefed the Federal Protective Services, the Joint Terrorism Taskforce in Dayton, OH, and the 308th Military Intelligence Battalion at Fort Knox, KY, about the protests. But the report did not specify what if any credible terrorist threat the protest posed. Responding to the revelations, Akron-based AFSC community organizer Greg Coleridge stated: "We need to be clear, the Pentagon is snooping on individuals and groups that have no history of organizing or even calling for violence against the government. If people and groups like this can be monitored, then we need to ask 'where does it end?'" Another released document about an Atlanta anti-war protest by the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, states that a participating group, Students for Peace and Justice Network, poses a threat to DoD personnel. To support that claim the report cites previous acts of civil disobedience in California and Texas that included sit-ins and street theater. The report gives no indication of the Georgia groups' direct involvement in the cited protests or why a sit-in or street theater poses a threat to DoD personnel. The ACLU release also included DoD spying on anti-war groups in Massachusetts and Florida. William Arkin, a news analyst for NBC, first revealed that the TALON program was being used to monitor domestic protest activities in December of last year after receiving leaked documents containing information on peaceful anti-war groups across the US. Speaking about the TALON program last December on Democracy Now!, Arkin, a former intelligence analyst, stated "I think that this is just one tiny picture of the actual amount of information which is collected by the FBI and the intelligence community." Responding to the misuse of the intelligence program in a report by the Washington Post on Dec. 15, 2005, Pentagon officials stated they will review the program. A Mar. 30 DoD memo by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England concerning the review states that 260, or nearly two percent, of the 13,000 entries in the database had been inappropriately added to the database or wrongly retained. Guidelines for the TALON database require items found not to be a threat to military assets or personnel to be removed from the database within 90 days. Despite the scrutiny the Arkins report raised, and the subsequent review of the program, the newly revealed documents received by the ACLU have now been retained in the TALON database for over a year and a half. Furthermore all of the TALON reports released by the ACLU refer by reference number to previous TALON reports on the groups in question. "The Pentagon has gone too far in collecting information on Americans who pose no real threat to national security," said Wizner. "It is an abuse of power and an abuse of trust for the military to play any role in monitoring critics of administration policies." The size and budget of the agency within the DoD overseeing the database–the Counter intelligence Field Activity–remains classified as does the vast majority of the database itself. The ACLU is still waiting for DoD response to requests for information on monitoring of anti-war groups in several other states.