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DoD closes controversial reporting program

The Pentagon is scrapping a controversial system touted as a way to collect and evaluate reports of potential threats to U.S. military installations and personnel after critics challenged its potential to improperly track benign anti-war and counter-military protests and demonstrations.

Reports of such incidents will not be deleted, however. The Defense Department will retain a “record copy” of the information collected, and the database itself will be transferred to the FBI’s Guardian reporting system, a separate repository of suspicious activities and terrorist threats.

The Tuesday announcement reflects the conclusion of a June 27 Defense Department Inspector General report on the Threat and Local Observation Notice system, better known as TALON. The report found no illegal activities, but said officials with the Defense Department Counterintelligence Field Activity had anticipated that the program would be terminated.

A Pentagon official denied that TALON was killed because of the program’s controversial nature — even though defense officials followed two congressional inquiries with an audit that resulted in the purging of thousands of reports, and James Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said in an April 18 memo to Defense Secretary Robert Gates that the program should end, “particularly in light of its image in the Congress and the media.”

“The analytical value of the TALON reporting system has declined significantly, both quantitatively and qualitatively,” said Army Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman.

Keck said he did not know why information that had not been purged had lost its analytical value. “That’s probably something that I probably couldn’t talk about even if I knew the answer,” he said.

As of April 2007, a total of 5,321 reports had been deleted from the database. As of January 2006, the database contained about 13,000 such reports, according to the Pentagon IG report.

A “record copy” of the remaining information will be retained by Counterintelligence Field Activity, a defense law enforcement and counterintelligence agency meant to serve as an intelligence bridge between international and domestic activities. The Pentagon plans to develop a new reporting system to “streamline such reporting and better meet the Defense Department’s needs,” according to a press release.

And the department will continue to collect reports of suspicious activity, routing them through law enforcement channels to the FBI, Keck said.

“We have not ceased telling people that if you see unusual activity [to] report it,” Keck said.

TALON was conceived by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a “neighborhood watch” system to track terrorist threats against Air Force facilities, according to the IG report. In 2003, the Pentagon expanded the program into an integrated force protection information-sharing system that would provide intelligence on possible terrorist threats against all U.S. military facilities.

TALON reports consist of raw data provided by citizens or service members about what they regarded as suspicious incidents. The Counterintelligence Field Activity collected the information in a database shared with the Defense Intelligence Agency and U.S. Northern Command.

A December 2005 broadcast report on NBC, “Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?” sparked a congressional inquiry by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.

NBC reported that TALON was tracking suspicious domestic groups and had noted 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the U.S. over a recent 10-month period. One such “threat” was the report of a small group of activists planning a protest of military recruiting at local high schools in Lake Worth, Fla.

Lofgren charged that the Defense Department was collecting the information in violation of its own regulations and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA, which became law in 1978, allows for domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens when there is evidence they are “agents of a foreign power” as defined in the statute.

The Pentagon IG “found no evidence” that any of the TALON reports reviewed were gathered as part of intelligence surveillance, and concluded that the Counterintelligence Field Activity had not violated the law regarding the collection of such information.

But the IG did find that the group had violated a Defense Department regulation requiring that the collected information be destroyed within 90 days “unless retention is required by law or specifically authorized under criteria established by the Secretary of Defense.”

The IG could not determine whether NorthCom had violated the regulation because the command deleted all such reports in November 2005, before the audit was conducted, and turned off the system the following year.