They Screw-up And Innocent People Pay
Pentagon admits errors in spying on protesters
The original NBC News report, from December, focused on a secret 400-page Defense Department document listing more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a 10-month period. One such incident was a small group of activists meeting in a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., to plan a protest against military recruiting at local high schools.
In his Wednesday letter, Rogalski said such anomalies in the TALON database had been removed.
“They did not pertain to potential foreign terrorist activity and thus should never have been entered into the Cornerstone database. These reports have since been removed from the Cornerstone database and refresher training on intelligence oversight and database management is being given,” Rogalski wrote.
Rogalski said only 43 names were improperly added to the database, and those were from protest-related reports such as the Quaker meeting in Florida.
“All reports concerning protest activities have been purged,” the letter said.
The activities have been “purged” from these databases, but what about all of the other databases created using them? Is the “Do Not Fly” list purged? Are people being issued apologies and official letters of explanation that will help them clear up all of the “misunderstandings” caused by appearing on these lists?
Update: Laura Rozen reminded me that this program was run by Mitchell Wade’s MZM, one of the contracts Wade received for bribing “Duke” Cunningham.
