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.
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle
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