WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- Some Pentagon leaders say its domestic spying program may have gone too far.
A Pentagon memo obtained by Newsweek shows that some reports gathered for the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity program may have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained.
The CIFA was created by the Defense Department in 2003 to track threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States.
In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON -- short for Threat and Local Observation Notice -- that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents," Newsweek said. The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process."
The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, a senior Pentagon official told Newsweek. Officials acknowledge some of the information may violate regulations.
It isn't clear how many groups and individuals were snagged by CIFA's dragnet, Newsweek said, though they include Quakers and students.
Vice President Dick Cheney last week called the program "vital" to the country's defense against al-Qaida. "Either we are serious about fighting this war on terror or not," he said in a speech to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
