The US Department of Defense announced that it was shutting down its controversial Talon data gathering program.
Talon was established in 2002 by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz as a way to collect and evaluate information about possible threats to U.S. servicemembers and defense civilians at stateside and overseas military installations. It is being closed because reporting to the system had declined significantly, and it was determined to no longer be of analytical value, said Army Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman.
A reason for its shut down was noted in an article in Government Executive,
A June 2007 report by the Defense Department's inspector general found that counterintelligence officials "maintained TALON reports without determining whether information on organizations and individuals should be retained for law enforcement and force-protection purposes."
In addition, the article notes that:
To ensure a mechanism to document and examine potential threats, Assistant Defense Secretary Paul McHale plans to propose a new, streamlined reporting system that can better meet the Pentagon's needs, an agency press release said. In the interim, Defense Department officials will send information pertaining to protection concerns to the FBI's Web-based threat tracking system.
What a "streamlined reporting system" means hasn't been explained, but past history says don't place bets that it isn't going to resemble a data vacuum cleaner.
