Less than 24 hours after NBC News reported that the Pentagon has been spying on law-abiding, anti-war protestors, the Defense Department announced an internal review of their policies.
Pentagon officials said yesterday they had ordered a review of a program aimed at countering terrorist attacks that had compiled information about U.S. citizens, after reports that the database included information on peace protesters and others whose activities posed no threat and should not have been kept on file.
The move followed an NBC News report Tuesday disclosing that a sample of about 1,500 “suspicious incidents” listed in the database included four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, some aimed at military recruiting.
Although officials defended the Pentagon’s interest in gathering information about possible threats to military bases and troops, one senior official acknowledged that a preliminary review of the database indicated that it had not been correctly maintained.
“On the surface, it looks like things in the database that were determined not to be viable threats were never deleted but should have been,” the official said. “You can also make the argument that these things should never have been put in the database in the first place until they were confirmed as threats.”
To their credit, Pentagon officials didn’t bother trying to defend the inclusion of nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests in their “Talon” database. In fact, in a statement, the Defense Department said, “The Department of Defense . . . views with the greatest concern any potential violation of the strict DoD policy governing authorized counter-intelligence efforts,” which seemed to suggest an acknowledgement that a violation had occurred.
The review of the program, the WaPo said, will focus on whether officials broke the rules that strictly limit domestic military spying on American protestors.
Just as an aside, I wanted to add that I was a little surprised this didn’t get bigger play in the media. The WaPo put it on its front page, but the NYT ran wire copy, and the LAT ran an op-ed on the subject without an accompanying news item. USAT and the WSJ, at least online, seem to have ignored it altogether.
Where’s the outrage?