The Pentagon's main spy outfit, the Defense Intelligence Agency, is building a new database which will consolidate in one system “human intelligence” information on groups and individuals—potentially including Americans—collected by DIA operatives in United States and abroad.
A notice published earlier this week in the government's regulatory bulletin, the Federal Register, says the manager of the system will be a little-known DIA unit called the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC).
Records held in the database, the notice says, could include information on “individuals involved in, or of interest to, DoD intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and counternarcotic operations or analytical projects as well as individuals involved in foreign intelligence and/or training activities.” Among the data to be stored: “information such as name, Social Security Number (SSN), address, citizenship documentation, biometric data, passport number, vehicle identification number and vehicle/vessel license data.” Actual intelligence reports from the field and analytical material which would help “identify or counter foreign intelligence and terrorist threats to the DoD and the United States” will also be included.
“That's potentially a lot of information,” Donald Black, chief spokesman for DIA, acknowledged in an interview with Declassified. But he said that material entered into the new database would be carefully reviewed—as regularly as every 90 days—to ensure that out-of-date, discredited, or irrelevant data on individuals would be destroyed if there was no longer a good reason to keep it.
Black said that the new database would not include the highly controversial aspects of TALON, a database assembled by a spooky Pentagon spy outfit called Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), set up during the George W. Bush administration. The Pentagon shut down TALON in 2007 after revelations that CIFA, whose mission included collating intelligence collected by local law-enforcement agencies and military-intelligence units on potential threats to U.S. defense installations, had assembled files on peace marchers and other nonviolent antiwar protestors. The Pentagon later said that CIFA would be broken up. Apart from its alleged monitoring of antiwar activists, the unit became tainted by a major contracting scandal that resulted in the imprisonment of former California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham. As NEWSWEEK reported here, some defense experts were alarmed when CIFA attempted—and failed—to take over a Pentagon agency responsible for inspecting the security arrangements of defense contractors, and maintaining security-clearance files on millions of contractor employees. Critics feared that such a merger could result in the creation of a military secret police.
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