As a new report charged that the US Department of Homeland Security is illegally delaying the citizenship applications of thousands of immigrants by profiling Muslims and subjecting them to indefinite security checks, a major American-Arab advocacy group launched a campaign to end a controversial post-9/11 program it says discriminates against Muslim visitors to the US.
In a surprise move, the Pentagon itself announced it wants to close the domestic terrorism spying venture known as Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON). The program has been attacked by civil and human rights organizations for collecting information on peaceful activists inside the United States.
According to a Pentagon spokesman, the new undersecretary of defense for intelligence, James Clapper, found "disappointing results" during a review of the TALON database.
Clapper "has assessed the results of the TALON program and does not believe they merit continuing the program as currently constituted, particularly in light of its image in Congress and the media," Ryder said.
The Pentagon acknowledged last year that part of the information collected in the database "either should have been purged, or was data that was not appropriate for reporting in that system."
The TALON program began in 2003 to track suspects with possible links to terrorists as part of the post-9/11 "war on terror."
But information leaked to news reporters revealed that the Pentagon was collecting information on peace activists and monitoring antiwar protests across the country.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last year filed several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking to uncover the identities of peace groups being spied on by the Pentagon.
The filing was on behalf of several national groups and seven Florida-based peace activist groups, including Florida members of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker religious-based peace group. More on the story.
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