Illuminati News: Pentagon Sued for Surveillance Info

ASHINGTON -- The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court Wednesday demanding more information about a Defense Department database that collected information on antiwar groups and U.S. citizens.

The lawsuit asks that the Defense Department turn over records it collected in its TALON database, developed by the Air Force in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a way to collect information about possible terrorist threats.

Archive's Lawsuit Challenges the CIA

The CIA has adopted internal rules allowing it to define what constitutes news and what doesn't, a Washington-based research group contended in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The lawsuit by the National Security Archive, which operates the largest nongovernmental library of declassified documents, says the spy agency has begun charging search and duplication fees that are illegal under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

The act requires government agencies to waive fees if the information request is considered to be a matter of public interest. Waivers are generally granted to news organizations.

The CIA told the archive that it wouldn't waive search and duplication fees because many of the requests wouldn't interest the general public. "This means they get to decide what's news," Thomas Blanton, the archive's director, said.

A CIA spokesman said the agency would have no comment.

Associated Press

Antiwar groups and others, including a Quaker group -- the American Friends Service Committee -- protested after it became public that the military had monitored antiwar activities, organizations and individuals who attended peace rallies.

"The U.S. military should not be in the business of maintaining secret databases about lawful First Amendment activities," said ACLU attorney Ben Wizner. "It is an abuse of power and an abuse of trust."

Defense Department spokesman Cmdr. Greg Hicks said the Pentagon would not comment.

ACLU affiliates in Florida, Georgia, Rhode Island, Maine, Pennsylvania and Washington, and more than two dozen activist groups joined the lawsuit, which charges that the Pentagon is violating federal freedom-of-information laws by refusing to provide information on the database. The lawsuit was filed in Philadelphia.

Pentagon officials did an internal review of TALON -- the Threat and Local Observation Notice -- and concluded that it was an important tool in counterterrorism investigations. The review also found that as many as 260 reports were improperly collected or kept in the system.

At the time, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said there were about 13,000 entries in the database, and that less than 2% either were wrongly added or were not purged when determined not to be threats.

The ACLU lawsuit argues that the organizations and individuals monitored by the Pentagon have a right to know what information the military has collected about them.

"Spying on citizens for merely executing their constitutional rights of free speech ... marks a troubling trend for the United States," said Joyce Miller, assistant general secretary for justice and human rights of the American Friends Service Committee.