“Pentagon ditches controversial security database,” reads the headline of a Reuters article published August 21, 2007. The body of the article begins:
The Pentagon said on Tuesday it would close a controversial database tracking suspicious activity around U.S. military bases which 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.
“The TALON database was a perfectly legal system, nobody ever said it wasn’t, but it just was not meeting our needs any more,” he told reporters.
Many people who browse the news tend to just read the headlines or the first paragraph of a story before moving on. Such people might be forgiven for thinking that the TALON program would be “closed,” “ditched,” and “ended.”
They would be wrong.
Under the TALON program, the U.S. military spies on peaceful and legal civilian protests against Halliburton in public places on U.S. soil. Under the TALON program, the U.S. military spies on peaceful and legal student protests on college campuses. Under the TALON program, the U.S. military spies on legal and nonviolent meetings of peace activists in Quaker Meeting Houses. All this information is incorporated into databases for military analysis and pre-emptive government action.
Despite the description of the TALON program as being “ditched,” “closed” and “ended” in the initial paragraphs of that Reuters article, the closing paragraphs tell a different story altogether. The observation of American civilians will continue. The collection of data about them will continue. The warehousing of data about them will continue. None of the old TALON information will be tossed out.
What’s the change that they call a “closing,” a “ditching,” an “end?” Well, they won’t use the TALON name any more. Also, the results of military spy operations on American will be taken in by the FBI and integrated into its own databases, knocking down another brick in the wall separating the military from law enforcement.
I’m not stretching it. I’m working from the Department of Defense’s own press brief:
DoD to Implement Interim Threat Reporting Procedures
DoD’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) will close the TALON Reporting System effective Sept. 17, 2007, and maintain a record copy of the collected data in accordance with intelligence oversight requirements.
To ensure there is a mechanism in place to document and assess potential threats to DoD resources, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs will propose a system to streamline such threat reporting and better meet the Defense department’s needs.
In the interim, until this new reporting program is adopted, DoD components will send information concerning force protection threats to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Guardian reporting system.
“Interim, until this new reporting program is adopted.” The DOD isn’t shutting down TALON; it’s replacing it with something that will “better meet the Defense department’s needs.” And all the current military spying data goes to the Guardian database at the FBI, the information in which is sent on to field officers around the nation and to members of numerous Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which include local law enforcement. Completing the circle, JTTF members have themselves been caught spying on Americans engaged in peaceful, legal activist work. What will they do with this military information?
We’ve heard this “we shut it down” line before, when the government sent out press releases declaring that it would end its data-mining program called Total Information Awareness. It did. Then it started up even more expansive data-mining programs under different names, like “Operation Basketball” and “Topsail,” quietly and without fanfare or media attention.
Well, don’t let this one pass without a squawk. The TALON program of military spying on Americans isn’t being shut down. The program is not only continuing but being integrated with other federal databases. Roll over, Orwell.
And who, oh who, is in control of the FBI?
Alberto Gonzales, the same man who, along with Total Information Awareness architect John Michael McConnell, was given operationally unrestrained power to spy electronically on Americans by the Protect America Act.
Connect the dots, people!
This is not a TALON shutdown. It’s a consolidation of spy power within the Executive Branch.