Uncovering the Pentagon’s Secret Spy Files

News reports have revealed that the Pentagon collected information in a secret database on peace groups and law-abiding Americans who have attended anti-war protests. The ACLU is fighting to shed light on the secret databases and to clear the names unfairly collected in it.

On May 25, 2006, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that the Defense Department must expedite the ACLU-NC's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request for information about their secret database.

Last December, NBC News reported that the database contained information on several anti-war protests, including ones at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. The ACLU-NC and the San Francisco Bay Guardian originally filed a Freedom of Information Act request on behalf of UC Santa Cruz Students Against War and the UC Berkeley Stop the War Coalition on February 1, 2006. The Department of Defense denied the request for expedited processing on February 13.

On March 7, 2006, the ACLU-NC filed a federal Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking expedited processing and release of documents maintained by the Department of Defense’s Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) report system and database.

In granting summary judgment in the case in May 2006, the Court found that “there was a compelling need for the information” and that the information requested was “of significant importance to public policy and public protest.”  The Department of Defense must now expedite processing of the ACLU's FOIA request.

“The public has a right to know the extent to which the Defense Department is spying on political protest,” said ACLU cooperating attorney Amitai Schwartz. “The Court moved us one step closer to finding out the facts about what really happened.”

“The Department of Defense has already told Congress that information about protest activities was inappropriately included in the TALON database,” said Mark Schlosberg, Police Practices Policy Director of the ACLU-NC. “Therefore, the students who participated in these demonstrations deserve to be told why their activities were included in a terrorist database, what information was collected, and who it was shared with.”

The national ACLU filed similar FOIA requests on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee, Veterans for Peace, United for Peace and Justice, and Greenpeace. In Georgia, Rhode Island, Maine, and Pennsylvania, ACLU affiliates are also seeking Pentagon files on local groups.

“The Pentagon’s monitoring of anti-war protesters is yet another example of a government agency using its powers to spy on law-abiding Americans who criticize U.S. policies,” said Ben Wisner, a staff attorney with the national ACLU. “How can we believe that the National Security Agency is intercepting only al Qaeda phone calls when we have evidence that the Pentagon is keeping tabs on Quakers in Fort Lauderdale?”