Which Secret Government Database Has Your Name?

For every government spy database being closed, another database is being increased. Which Secret Government Database Has Your Name?By Cliff Montgomery – May 2nd, 2007The Defense Department’s new intelligence undersecretary has recommended the Pentagon shut down a questionable classified database which has been criticized for wrongly collecting information on anti-war protesters and other American citizens.James R. Clapper Jr., who only stepped into the job three weeks ago, “does not believe they merit continuing the program as currently constituted, particularly in light of its image in the Congress and the media,” according to Pentagon spokesman Maj. Patrick Ryder.Two weeks ago Clapper sent his recommendation to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, though no final decision has been made.Ryder added that the Pentagon needs a way to assess potential threats, “but we must lay to rest the distrust and concern about the Department’s commitment to civil rights that have been sustained by the problems found in the TALON reporting system.”TALON–or the Threat and Local Observation Notice–is the system created by the Air Force after 9/11 as a method of collecting information on possible terrorist threats.The database has been under withering scrutiny since it was publicly disclosed in December 2005.Anti-war groups and other organizations, including a Quaker group called the American Friends Service Committee, protested after it was revealed that the military had been monitoring anti-war activities, organizations and individuals who attended peace rallies.Pentagon officials last year claimed the program was productive and had detected ‘international terrorist interests in specific military bases’. But these are the same individuals who claimed we would find so many working WMDs in Iraq that “we wouldn’t know what to do with them all.”The TALON reports–collected by an array of Pentagon agencies including intelligence, counterintelligence, law enforcement,  and security–are compiled in a huge database and analyzed by an obscure Pentagon agency, the Counterintelligence Field Activity. CIFA is a three-year-old outfit with a secret size and budget, which means it has little to no accountability. Feel safer now?…Last year, a Defense review found that as many as 260 reports in the database were wrongly collected or kept there. At the time, the Pentagon admitted there were about 13,000 names in the database, and claimed that less than 2 percent either were wrongly added or were not removed later when they were determined not to involve actual threats.But it seems that for every government spy database being closed, another database is being increased. In fact one major terror database has quadrupled its names in just four years.Every day, thousands of bits of intelligence information from around the world–captured documents, field reports, news from foreign allies and sometimes idle gossip–are placed in a computer-filled office in McLean, Virginia, where analysts feed them into the nation’s central list of anyone the Bush Administration considers a threat. Some of them may even be terrorists .Called TIDE, for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, the database is the wellspring for watch lists distributed to airlines, law enforcement, border posts and U.S. consulates, created to close one of the key intelligence gaps revealed after Sept. 11, 2001: the failure of federal agencies to share what they knew about al-Qaeda operatives.This of course leaves out one little matter: there was already enough available information on the 9/11 terrorists to have captured them before the attacks on that fateful day. Field officers connected the dots well enough, even if their bosses did not. Therefore the bosses did not fail because of lack of info, but because of gross incompetence–which is only going to be made worse by doing away with the Fourth Amendment banning “unreasonable search and seizure.”And that’s apparently what’s beginning to happen with TIDE. Ballooning from fewer than 100,000 files in 2003 to about 435,000, the growing database threatens to overwhelm the people who manage it.”The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control,” Russ Travers, head of TIDE at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, recently told the Washington Post.Databases like TIDE create concerns about secrecy, errors and privacy. TIDE marks the first time American citizens and foreigners are combined in an intelligence database. Getting on the list is easy, and once someone is on it, it is virtually impossible to have your name taken off it. At every stage, such a process can lead to “horror stories” of mixed-up names and unconfirmed information, Travers admitted.Congressional committees have also criticized the process, some charging that it collects too much information about Americans, others pointing out that it is infamously ineffective against recording the names of actual terrorist suspects. Civil rights and privacy groups have demanded increased transparency.”How many are on the lists, how are they compiled, how is the information used, how do they verify it?” asks Lillie Coney, associate director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.It brings up the old question, “Someone may be watching us, but who’s watching the watchers?”