Bill Arkin says the Pentagon is breaking the law with its domestic surveillance activities:

...I now know that the database of "suspicious incidents" in the United States first revealed by NBC Nightly News last Tuesday and subject of my blog last week is the Joint Protection Enterprise Network (JPEN) database, an intelligence and law enforcement sharing system managed by the Defense Department's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA).

What is clear about JPEN is that the military is not inadvertently keeping information on U.S. persons. It is violating the law. And what is more, it even wants to do it more. [...]

But JPEN is more than just a compilation of TALON's. It is a near real-time sharing system of raw non-validated force protection information among Department of Defense organizations and installations. ... JPEN shares this information at all levels...

Under the provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. 552a), the military can maintain information on specific individuals (name of individual or other personal identifiers such as Social Security number or driver's license number) in the JPEN database system for 90 days. JPEN then is supposed to purge all Privacy Act information after 90 days, unless it is part of an ongoing investigation. [...]

Evidently though, the JPEN maintainers didn't abide by the law, and the collectors feeding TALON and other reports into the system overreached in monitoring and retaining information on anti-war and anti-military organizations of no conceivable threat. ...

Any ex JAGs out there want to weigh in? Intel Dump?

Posted by Laura at December 22, 2005 05:03 PM