The Pentagon's TALON Program

"In May 2003, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz initiated a new program designed to assemble and share "non-validated domestic threat information among intelligence, counterintelligence, law enforcement, security, and force protection entities."

"Grown out of the Air Force neighborhood watch program Eagle Eyes, the new reporting scheme was named TALON, Threat and Local Observation Notice. While the program is designed to record potential terrorist pre-attack activity, media reports over the past few months show that the Pentagon has been monitoring anti-war and anti-military activity, potentially overstepping the bounds of legitimate homeland security efforts. CIFA, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, oversees TALON, as part of its mission to "deliver actionable information to Defense Department decision-makers."

This is from the PBS series NOW, that aired this week. The main focus was on how this program is being used to monitor political activists, and anyone else who merely gets "tattled" on by a nosey neighbor. The program is supposed to be collecting potentially useful information that could lead to terrorist activity, but while watching the episode, I had a flashback to when the Communist East German government fell, and the public finally gained access to the State Security (STASI) headquarters and revealed tons and tons of highly detailed, yet mostly irrelevent information on virtually every single East German citizen. They had more information on their own people, than the Soviets had on theirs. Now, we'll put them all to shame with all the domestic spies we now have in every government agency from local through federal, civilian and military, all collecting information on all of us, that will have absolutely nothing to do with subversive or terrorist activity.

What gets me, is that all the spying programs are justified by saying that if they had been in place prior to 9/11, 9/11 most likely would not have succeeded. People keep buying that nonsense even after we knew the government already had information that could've stopped it, but they weren't sharing with other agencies. The CIA wasn't talking to the FBI about terrorist they knew to be in the country. 9/11 didn't happen because there wasn't enough domestic spying, it happened because of inter-agency rivalry and jealousy, and all branches of the government, along with all major news outlets, along with any of the general public who paid attention at the time, know full well that the fault did not lay in the lack of domestic spying, so that justification is pure bullshit.

This TALON program, just like what appears to me to be about 90% of all other anti-terror measures, seems less to do with catching radical Middle Eastern Islamic terrorists, than setting up the apparatus to tightly monitor, control, and manipulate 300 million suckers who live in a delusional world believing they live in a now mythical "free" country.