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US Shuts Down Controversial Anti-Terror Database
coondoggie writes "The massive anti-terror database established by the US government has been criticized for keeping track of regular everyday citizens. Computerworld reports that as of September 17th, the database will be shut down. 'The Threat and Local Observation Notices or TALON, was established in 2002 by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz as a way to collect and evaluate information about possible threats to U.S. service members and defense civilians all over the world.
Congress and others protested its apparent use as an unauthorized citizen tracking database. The TALON system came under fire in 2005 for improperly storing information about some civilian individuals and non-government-affiliated groups on its database. The Air Force developed TALON... in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a way to gather data on possible terrorist threats. Anti-war groups and other organizations, protested after it was revealed last year that the military had monitored anti-war activities, organizations and individuals who attended peace rallies.'"
And replaced by..?
You can't take the sky from me...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The problem with these closed systems, any closed system really, is the inability to find and locate not only the errors, but the correct data either. The more erroneous data there is, the less likely one will find and retrieve the needed data. If anything, you get a "security through obfuscation" situation, but you're giving the security for the folk you need to target!
Keep your lists pruned and accurate. And the best method for this is with open and honest auditing in the public light. Not necessarily by the public themselves, but with public employees such as in the judicial system. Trained, skilled and non-biased eyes are always the best tools to not only perform oversight, but to keep this country or any country safe and secure.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
By "shutting it down" do they mean that they will simply stop adding new data to it? Or stop using it? Or will they locate every copy of every bit related to them and erase them? This would include all bits stored in backup tapes, offsite, etc.
In any case what happens to the data? Will this be magically "forgotten" Will all records that came from the database and got copied to other departments (e.g. FBI files) be deleted as well?
That's the trouble with data collection. Once it is collected it may never disappear.
I'll believe it when (a) an indpendent agency - not a government one, but someone like the ACLU - verifies that they watched the procedure of wiping the drives per DoD standards of data erasure, and (b) pigs fly. Even if they invite an independent auditor in to watch the erasing and decommissioning of the database, you know for a fact there's a second (or third, or fourth) copy out there, simply for redundancy and disaster recovery. And I really doubt that the Bush administration will allow anyone into their secret data lairs. This is more PR to get the monkey to shift shoulders for a while.
How on earth does something like this get "Insightful" ? If it will get replaced, then you can just say "see, I told you so" despite apparently not being more secretive. If it doesn't, then you can say "well, they're more secretive." There's absolutely no way you can disprove such a statement.
I am a cynic, but could it be that we are supposed to forget 'til then that something like this existed and continue to be good citizens and vote 'em in again?
But most likely it's just going to be replaced by a less public version, so we don't question our leader's intentions.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You people are such cynics! I for one believe that the government has learned its lesson and this project will never return. I'm sure however that there was some public/private partnerships to pull the data together, and that the govt will soon be able to contract out for the same data it used to just have internally. I wonder how attending a peace rally affects your credit rating?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
There's absolutely no way you can disprove such a statement.
That doesn't mean it's not true. Experience suggests it is.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yes, freedom is worth the sacrifice.
"We are land of the free because we are home of the brave."
Its time for someone to grow a backbone and stick to traditional American values like bravery instead of blatant cowardice.
This is tagged as slashdotliberalwhining? I thought limited government used to be a conservative ideal. Everything the current administation does isn't automatically "conservative" just because the President is a Republican.
-- dR.fuZZo
While avocate strongly for the right to privacy, to complain that there are groups out there collecting information on people is the height of trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
We are in the INFORMATION AGE. Your information is going to be collected whether you like it or not. What you should be agitating for is more responsible use of that information by the collectors and consumers and more education on what information being collected and how for the 'targets'.
What you should be agitating for is for companies and governments to stop basing their security/identification on now publicly avaliable information (Dates of Birth, SSN, "mother's madien name").
Don't waste your time on trying to 'control' what is being collected, the bad guys won't pay any heed and the good guys already have enough problems on their plate. Instead, spend your time on pushing for this information to be handled responsibly and INTELLIGENTLY, and not just as an afterthough.
The only reason they would come out and say, "Ohh you all were right and we are going to end this project." Is because they must have something better. Otherwise they would defend it, and tell us we needed it.. also why wait 2 months? Because the new system must be in testing..
May I ask who is being held accountable for implementing this citizen tracking system? Wait, let me guess.. nobody as usual, right?
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
... to maximize the publicity.
We are going into an election cycle and everyone is going to need to trot out their sound-bytes on this subject. I have no doubt this move will be spun as a blow for freedom, a blow against the war on terror, an example of liberal spinelessness in the pursuit of justice, an example of the American people calling the govt out and winning, and on and on and on and on...
On another note, how likely is it that the military is simply giving up an effective tool? My bet is that this particular system has either been surpassed by another, was shown to be completely ineffective in the first place, or has been thrown to the wolves in exchange for concessions of another type.
Regards.
To make sure all the data is backed up and they have a new name for the program, duh.
The non-sensationalist version of this story?
TALON is really just used to schedule when bases need to ramp up security to accommodate peace protester groups. It's actually there to benefit the protesters. Not some scary conspiracy to track them. If a protest is staged at a base, and there isn't enough security, there can be traffic issues, counter-protest issues, saboteurs can use genuine peaceful protests as cover for distraction, there are a lot of legitimate reasons for the operators of a secure facility to have a way to coordinate and even cooperate with protest groups. The army has to do their job; protect the country - but protesters are often "the country" they're trying to protect.
The mainstream media doesn't report this angle of the story. I don't know why - maybe it's bias, or maybe it's just not controversial (profitable) when told this way.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
..or the thousands of private databases across this world tracking everything from purchases made with Visa to issuance of a visa? In effect, we did...we all 'clicked through' something long ago, but for some reason, the government, on a mission to find the terrorists among us, are not permitted?
To think this is the only one...to think the government is the only agent-of-study...it's all kinda naive, isn't it?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
So the DoD wants to keep track of who is at what rally? In what way does that infringe on civil rights anymore than video monitoring of street corners in Baltimore, for instance?
Keeping lists of citizens excercising their constitutional rights to speech and association is bad because the information can be used to intimidate citizens in subtle and hard to prove ways. While I personally don't know how being in the "Threat and Local Observation Notices" database could possibly do any harm, some people might worry that it would cause them to fail background screenings often required for employment, audits by the IRS, being singled out for "special treatment" at the airport etc. The more paranoid among us might even worry that if things were to really get bad then the first people they would come for would be those on these lists.
OK folks, read up on the public/private datamining partnerships post 9-11. I recommend:
Jerry Berman, "Security, Privacy and Government Access to Commercial Data," and
Zoe Baird and James Barkdale, "Building a Trusted Information-Sharing Environment,"
which both are published in _Protecting What Matters: Technology, Security, and Liberty Since 9/11_ by Clayton Northouse
And you can probably preview some of their text in Amazon or Google.
The basic point is that the government has been data mining private company data to try and predict criminal/terrorist activity, but has been operating without any good privacy or civil liberty guidelines or oversight. Worse, the public/private nature of the activity leads to very murky distinctions in who (govt or private contractors and data clearinghouses) "owns" what, and where said data lives and gets backed up.
Another major issue here is the total lack of mechanisms for redress if your information is incorrect, compounded by differing goals of the various organizations collecting said data. A company errs on the side of more data with which to sell you stuff; it's no sweat off their back if they lose the cost of a poorly directed bulk-mail garden supply catalog because you let a friend use your loyalty card to buy their fertilizer every week for a discount (bad example, sure, but you get the point?). If said fertilizer gets implicated in a bomb making plot, the fact that you have weekly purchases of it tied to your name becomes very important to the government, at a high potential cost to your freedom.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
You mistake their purpose. They seek to make us bow and huddle in terror, not to kill us. Think about why we call them terrorists instead of murders.
If I have done nothing wrong, then they should have no right to have a file on me what so ever, at least not on things which should be private. They just simply need to do more with what information they already had. After all, they had the pieces of the puzzle. I don't see how adding innocent men, women, and children's data can make this work better. To be honest, its just something that makes it easier for them to abuse in unlawful ways. Really they probably need to get back to the basics of investigation and communication.
There's no way in hell to stop people from gathering public information. For SURE new laws won't. After all, it's alredy illegal to abuse the data in the first place. Another new law would be just about as effective as gun crime laws, drug laws, etc.- they just make what was already illegal illegal again, woohoo!
Data will go into databases because data is available and valuable. The only way forward that makes sense is not to try to stop it, but instead to make it less valuable. If you can't use someone's SSN and address to steal their identity, watch as that information becomes much less interesting to would-be thieves. Technology has reduced the cost of holding and searching and storing data, which reveals that mostly our personal security in the past has been protected by the fact that it was expensive to parse and mostly unavailable to thieves that didn't have access to your mailbox.
We need to invent better security, not try to throw out everything that's valuable about technology.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
I find your story explaining their side of it very thin. Downright anorexic even. What you speak of is called a "shared calendar". You don't need a database detailing individuals to keep track of events.
For example, the database isn't going to be deleted - it's just getting moved to a different agency. They'll give it a different name, but that database will live on. And those errors in the data? Nobody said anything about correcting them.
So it's really a "Tom shuts it down then gives it to Bob who turns it right back on" kind of deal. Politics as usual...
This is more than likely a stunt exactly like was pulled with Echelon. They're "officially" deactivating it and will continue to fund it and operate it secretly using alternate funding.
there are a lot of legitimate reasons for the operators of a secure facility to have a way to coordinate and even cooperate with protest groups.
Unfortunately one of the reasons is to render the protest invisible. When protesters are relocated into "first amendment zones" they are most often out of sight of the political figures they are trying to make aware of their outrage, and the protesters are out of sight of the press covering the political event being protested. The entire point of a protest is to disrupt an event or the regular flow of life. If UN delegates cannot get into the UN because of the thousands of protesters around it, that sends a message to the world. If those same thousands of protesters are herded into a park half a mile away, there is no message(other than a big "go fuck yourself" to the protesters) With things like first amendment zones and hate crime (punishing the intent not the actions) and seperating suspected terrorists from the Geneva Convention rights (again punishing intent) and databasing protest groups right along with with terrorist groups, we are rapidly criminalizing certain thoughts and ideals. We are well along the path towards outlawing any passionate dissent in our country. What is freedom if not the right to passionately and vocally disagree with the established powers?
I am not actually against the War in Iraq, I don't want the spread of Shira law and I think it is right for free nations to fight it. But I do think the way this war has been run is criminal, and many of the actions taken in the name of "The War on Terror" are treason. If I want to express this patriotism and thus end up on a database/watchlist created to protect the government from "threats". What does this say about the legitimacy of any protester tracking program?
We are all just people.
My favorite example of this came early on after 9/11, when word broke that the Pentagon had developed a new program to disseminate lies and misinformation among the public in order to throw the terrorists off or something. There was a large uproar, so the Pentagon quickly came forth to say the program was canceled. Now that's smooth.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
*sigh* I really hate these bullshit "they can't do anything with it anyway" responses from you Americans. The whole point of civil liberties and such is so that you can live without persecution. It's easy to persecute people without convicting them... in fact, it's the only way. True convictions aren't persecution if they are the result of a fair trial.
The issue here is that they might be "monitoring" you due to some things you've said, done, or believe. Let's say you decide to go for a high paying, high priority job in a large company. I wonder what these military fascists will do then? Let you get the job? Or maybe anonymously tip off the HR department that you're a dangerous person, etc.
Gee, that's no violation of your freedoms.
Anyway, I hope your goverment hangs itself at the next election, either that or your smartest people start an uprising to get rid of these nutcases in control of your country.
I hope that my country never ends up like yours... ever.
I am not actually against the War in Iraq, I don't want the spread of Shira law and I think it is right for free nations to fight it.
1) It's Sharia law
2) Saddam wasn't ruling by anything remotely close to Sharia law
3) There's now a good chance Iraq will be ruled by Sharia law
In short, your position makes no sense.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings