"Homeland Security was created to protect the
American people from terrorist activities - not monitor political dissent on
college campuses," said Mark Schlosberg, Police Practices Policy Director of the
ACLU of Northern California. "These documents raise significant questions about
the extent to which the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring anti-war
activities."
Students at the University of California Berkeley and Santa Cruz
campuses first learned that their activities were being monitored when NBC News
reported last December that a secret Pentagon database contained information on
several anti-war protests across the country. On March 7, 2006 the ACLU and the
San Francisco Bay Guardian filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for
documents held by the Defense Department on Santa Cruz Students Against the War
and the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, which were both listed in the portion
of the database obtained by NBC. The FOIA also seeks policy information on the
creation and maintenance of the database.
The most recent documents obtained
by the ACLU include two previously redacted reports on the Berkeley and Santa
Cruz student groups. Both documents indicate that "a special agent of the
federal protective service, U.S. Department of Homeland Security" provided the
Pentagon with information on the students.
The two Defense Department Threat
and Local Observation Notice (TALON) bulletins, dated April 4, 2005 and April
20, 2005, state that the information was provided "to alert commanders and staff
to potential terrorist activity or apprise them of other force protection
issues." The bulletins also indicate that the Defense Department briefed and
coordinated with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Francisco about the
campus demonstrations.
The documents were released by the Pentagon following
a May 26 order by U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup to expedite the ACLU's
FOIA request. In his decision, Judge Alsup wrote that the information requested
was "of significant importance to public policy and public protest."
To
date, the ACLU has received more than 150 pages of documents. Most of the
documents relate to procedures surrounding the creation of TALON reports. Based
on the documents, it appears that regulations governing the TALON reports are
still insufficient, said the ACLU.
Amitai Schwartz and Lisa Sitkin from the
Law Offices of Amitai Schwartz are cooperating counsel on the case, ACLU of
Northern California v. United States Department of Defense.
The FOIA
documents are online at www.aclunc.org/pressrel/060718-foia.html#docs.
For more information on the ACLU's efforts to uncover government spying,
including a legal challenge to the National Security Agency's warrantless
surveillance program, go to www.aclu.org/nsaspying.