COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: War Protests: General
Terror Database Tracks UC Protests: U.S. Agent Reported on
'05 Rallies Against Military Recruitment
Demian Bulwa, San Francisco Chronicle
July 19, 2006
A federal Department of Homeland Security agent passed along
information about student protests against military recruiters at UC
Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, landing the demonstrations on a database
tracking foreign terrorism, according to government documents released
Tuesday.
The documents were released by the American Civil Liberties Union,
which filed a Freedom of Information Act request on behalf of student
groups that protested against recruiters who visited their campuses in
April 2005.
The students were angry when they turned up in the database of a
Pentagon program called Threat and Local Observation Notice, or TALON,
which the government started in 2003 as a way to collect data that
could help stop terrorist attacks. Officials have acknowledged that the
reports on protests should not have been included.
In the Santa Cruz and Berkeley reports, the source of information
was listed as an agent for Homeland Security's Federal Protective Service.
The reports were filed by the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, the
Army's largest counterespionage unit.
"This raises questions about whether the Department of Homeland
Security tasked somebody to gather information about anti-war
activities," said Mark Schlosberg, police practices policy director for
the ACLU's Northern California office.
Dennis O'Connor, a spokesman for the Federal Protective Service,
said his agency protects 9,000 federal sites. Agents disseminate publicly
available information about protests, he said, but do not investigate
them or their organizers, spy on them or try to hinder them. He said he
did not know how the information ended up in the terror database.
"If we're not aware of what's going on around us, we can't do our
job effectively," he said. "Even if a protest is going to be peaceful, we
have to be aware of it."
The reports say the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in San
Francisco had been briefed on the protests. FBI spokeswoman LaRae Quy said the
agency had taken no action related to the protests.
The report on the Berkeley protest said the Homeland Security agent
received an e-mail on April 18, 2005, announcing a
"counter-recruitment" and civil disobedience action three days later, when recruiters would
be at a career fair. In a section titled "Agent Notes," the report states,
"There is a strong potential for a confrontation at this protest given
the strong support for anti-war protests and movements in the past."
NBC News revealed the database in December. The Pentagon
acknowledged that the protest reports should not have been included in the database,
which now has more than 13,000 entries.
The reports "have been removed," Pentagon spokesman Greg Hicks said
Tuesday.
Schlosberg said the ACLU is seeking further information. In the
documents released Tuesday, the government blacked out the source of
the e-mails to the Homeland Security agent.
E-mail Demian Bulwa at dbulwa@sfchronicle.com.t.
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