FOCUS | Pentagon Illegally Spying on Activists

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FOCUS | Pentagon Illegally Spying on Activists

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 12:02:58 -0800

 

 

 

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/122205Y.shtml

 

 

The Pentagon Breaks the Law

By William M. Arkin

The Washington Post

 

Thursday 22 December 2005

 

The National Security Agency story has pushed military spying on

anti-war groups off the front pages, and the Pentagon appears to have

seized upon administrative error to explain away its slide into

domestic spying.

 

The Department of Defense now says that analysts may not have

followed the law and its own guidelines that require the purging of

information collected on US persons after 90 days. The law states that

if no connection is made between named persons and foreign governments

or transnational terrorist organizations or illegal activity, US

persons have a right to their privacy and information about them must

be deleted.

 

Thanks to RL, I now know that the database of " suspicious

incidents " in the United States first revealed by NBC Nightly News

last Tuesday and subject of my blog last week is the Joint Protection

Enterprise Network (JPEN) database, an intelligence and law

enforcement sharing system managed by the Defense Department's

Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA).

 

What is clear about JPEN is that the military is not inadvertently

keeping information on US persons. It is violating the law. And what

is more, it even wants to do it more.

 

Follow-up reporting on the Pentagon spying story - both by this

newspaper and by the New York Times - mistakenly refers to the

suspicious incidents database that I obtained for the time period July

2004-May 2005 as the TALON database, for the Threat and Local

Observation Notice reporting system.

 

TALON, according to the Pentagon, is merely a non-threatening

compilation of " unfiltered information. "

 

The data on incidents is used " to estimate possible threats, " DOD

says. " It is in effect, the place where DOD initially stores " dots, "

which if validated, might later be connected before an attack occurs, "

the department says in a written statement prepared for reporters.

 

" Under existing procedures, a " dot " of information that is not

validated as threatening must be removed from the TALON system. "

 

But JPEN is more than just a compilation of TALON's. It is a near

real-time sharing system of raw non-validated force protection

information among Department of Defense organizations and

installations. Feeding into JPEN are intelligence, law enforcement,

counterintelligence, and security reports, TALONs as well as other

reports.

 

JPEN shares this information at all levels, from military police

guarding entry gates at military bases to terrorism warning watch

standers at the Defense Intelligence Agency. JPEN began as a pilot

project in the Washington, D.C. area and was initially fielded in June

2003.

 

Under the provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. 552a),

the military can maintain information on specific individuals (name of

individual or other personal identifiers such as Social Security

number or driver's license number) in the JPEN database system for 90

days. JPEN then is supposed to purge all Privacy Act information after

90 days, unless it is part of an ongoing investigation.

 

From the beginning of JPEN, system designers have attempted to

balance their task of collecting and retaining information of

intelligence and warning value with the longstanding " intelligence

oversight " and Privacy Act restrictions. According to a JPEN

classified briefing obtained by this blogger, the 90-day " data content

limit ... creates issues for long-term correlation and analysis. "

 

In other words, how can the military connect the dots if it is

restricted to a 90-day deadline? According to the briefing the

NORTHCOM says it will " continue to purge required information IAW [in

accordance with] the law " but it is also working " privacy act

restrictions with legal office to retain information previously

subject to purging. "

 

Evidently though, the JPEN maintainers didn't abide by the law,

and the collectors feeding TALON and other reports into the system

overreached in monitoring and retaining information on anti-war and

anti-military organizations of no conceivable threat.

 

The managers of JPEN are hardly being inadvertent about either the

90-day restriction or the intentional collection of information on US

persons. So far, it appears that they have broken the law. And what is

more, they are agitating internally to find ways of circumventing the

legal restrictions.

 

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