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FOI request to investigate government spying, ACLU says
Student anti-war groups tagged by government tracking database
© 2006 Student Press Law Center
February 6, 2006
CALIFORNIA —
When California students protested military recruiters last year, they never
expected to end up on a terrorist watch list. Now they want to know
why.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California filed
a Freedom of Information Act request last week on behalf of two student groups
from California universities asking for all records and information kept on the
groups by several government agencies, including the Department of
Defense.
The request, filed by ACLU attorney Mark Schlosberg on Feb.
1, is an expedited request. The government agencies must decide whether or not
they will process the request as expedited and notify Schlosberg with their
decision within 10 days.
Department of Defense spokesman Cmdr. Greg
Hicks said he did not know if the appropriate government office had received the
FOI request. He said information requests are handled in accordance with U.S.
government regulations.
“There are specific avenues for FOIA
requests that come into the department,” Hicks said. “Each is
handled with its own merits and routinely in succession of
receipt.”
The two student groups represented by the ACLU are
the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Students Against War and the
Stop the War Coalition at the University of California at Berkeley.
The FOI request is connected to rallies organized last April by the
student groups that protested military recruitment on their campuses. The
students approached the ACLU after NBC News reported that in the wake of those
rallies, the events and participants showed up on a Department of Defense
database as potentially threatening.
The database, Threat and Local
Observation Notice, or TALON, was initiated in 2003 by former Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to monitor groups and individuals with potential links
to terrorism.
“Our major complaint is that they were
participating in protected First Amendment activities,” said Stella
Richardson, spokeswoman for the ACLU. “As students, they have a right to
do so under the Constitution. That the Pentagon would have the events listed on
a Pentagon database as potential threats is
alarming.”
Richardson said the FOI request seeks to find out
why the protests were listed on the database, what are the criteria for
inclusion on the database and why the protests and protesters were perceived as
a threat.
Schlosberg, the ACLU attorney, said that if the government
is systematically monitoring college campuses for anti-war activities, those
records have “very distributing implications for privacy, academic freedom
and political expression on university campuses.”
Kot
Hordynski, 20, was quoted in an Associated Press article as saying, “We
were expressing our patriotic rights ... engaging in civil disobedience. We want
to show it’s not OK for the Department of Defense or the Pentagon to spy
on its citizens.” Hordynski is a member of Students Against War and attended an April 5 rally against military recruiters.
Other government agencies listed on the
request include the Directorate for Freedom of Information, the departments of
the Army, Navy and Air Force and the Defense Intelligence
Agency.
Cmdr. Terry Sutherland, spokesman for the Defense
Intelligence Agency, said he is “not aware of any kind of request”
from the ACLU of Northern California.
Sutherland said the DIA has a
huge backlog of information requests that often take months or years to respond
to, even if the request is expedited.
“We have to take this
document, redact everything and go through its review process,” he said.
“It’s not as quick as people would like to think it is. It’s
very manpower intensive.”
Richardson, the ACLU spokeswoman,
said it is “never easy” for the ACLU to get information from the
government, and that information requests like this one often lead to
litigation.
—by Allison
Retka, SPLC staff writer
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