The Chronicle: Pentagon Surveillance of Student Groups as Security Threats Extended to Monitoring E-Mail, Reports Show
The Department of Defense monitored e-mail messages from college students who were planning protests against the war in Iraq and against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy against gay and lesbian members of the armed forces, according to surveillance reports released last month. While the department had previously acknowledged monitoring protests on campuses as national-security threats, it was not until recently that evidence surfaced showing that the department was also monitoring e-mail communications.
The surveillance reports — which were released to lawyers for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network on June 15 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the organization last December — concern government surveillance at the State University of New York at Albany, Southern Connecticut State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and William Paterson University of New Jersey. The documents contain copies of e-mail messages sent in the spring semester of 2005 detailing students’ plans to protest on-campus military recruitment.The reports are part of a government database known as Talon that the Department of Defense established in 2003 to keep track of potential terrorist threats. Civilians and military personnel can report suspicious activities through the Talon system using a Web-based entry form. A Pentagon spokesman, Greg Hicks, would not verify whether the reports released last month were follow-ups to tips from military or government personnel, or from civilians at the universities.
The government had already turned over one batch of surveillance reports to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network in April, which is when the group first became aware that the Pentagon’s surveillance program extended to monitoring e-mail communications. After lawyers from both sides settled a dispute over the definition of “surveillance,” the Pentagon turned over the latest group of reports.
One e-mail message from the reports, which appears to be from an organizer, describes a protest planned for April 21, 2005, at SUNY-Albany. The message details students’ intentions to deliver a petition to the university’s president and to hold a rally at which protesters would be “playing anarchist soccer and taking part in a drum circle.” The e-mail also includes information about a “Critical Mass bike ride” for later that day in which students could ride their bicycles to express “solidarity with Earth Day.”
That the government would monitor such seemingly innocuous e-mail messages raises concerns about First Amendment and privacy rights, according to Steve R. Ralls, director of communications for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.
“It’s always both surprising and disturbing to learn that our federal government believes the exercise of constitutional liberties should be a threat to our national security,” he said. “The student groups who were the subject of the Pentagon surveillance campaign were simply exercising their freedom of speech, and that is what makes our nation stronger, not more vulnerable.”
Kermit L. Hall, president of SUNY-Albany, said on Wednesday that he had not yet seen the documents, but that “when it comes to any kind of surveillance, especially on the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ issue, I am very unsympathetic to the intrusion of the government into an area where I believe it is simply inappropriate.”
He said that the university’s lawyer was looking into the details of the surveillance, and would try to determine whether the e-mail messages were actively intercepted or obtained in some other way — a distinction that would affect how the university proceeds.
The reports in question were removed from the Pentagon database following an in-house review of the Talon reporting system earlier this year, which concluded that all Talon reports must relate to international terrorist activity. As such, reports that “did not contain a foreign-terrorist-threat nexus” were removed, Mr. Hicks, the Pentagon spokesman, said in an e-mail message on Wednesday.
The Talon reporting system gained national attention in December 2005 when NBC News obtained a copy of a 400-page Department of Defense document listing more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” that had taken place across the country. Only 21 pages were released to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, since the group requested only documents related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals and student groups. Mr. Hicks would not disclose the total number of reports that have been filed under the Talon program.
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