Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com: "Yesterday, Attorney General Gonzales sent Congress a 42-page legal defense of warrantless surveillance, expanding on arguments made in December that the President, under his Constitutional authority as commander-in-chief and as authorized by post 9/11 Congressional resolution granting him the use of force, has the authority to circumvent the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to conduct eavesdropping."

Meanwhile, the Pentagon also released a 2-page January 13 memorandum (pdf) directing "all DOD intelligence and counterintelligence (CI) personnel" to receive "refresher training on the policies for collection, retention, dissemination and use of information related to U.S. persons."

Early warning on December 14 reported the Pentagon program of domestic spying, in cooperation with NBC News. A Defense Department database covering the time period of 2004-2005 and leaked to this reporter gave a rare look at accelerated U.S. military intelligence collection since 9/11, including reporting on anti-war and anti-military recruiting protests throughout the United States.

Now Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordan England is not only order sensitivity training at the Pentagon, but also directing CIFA to purge its "TALON" database of "any reports that should not be in the database.

TALON was a program initiated in May 2003 by former Deputy Secretary Pail Wolfowitz to provide the military services with a common reporting scheme for "non-validated" threat warnings with a possible link to terrorism. At least between 2003 and December of last year, that reporting was used to characterize the "threat" to the U.S. military domestically, and included reporting on incidents that had nothing to do with terrorism or had any conceivable terrorist connection.

It's somewhat funny that the Pentagon is now directing a review and purging of the TALON program, even though I reported on December 22 that the database in question is actually one that is larger and broader than TALON called the Joint Protection Enterprise Network (JPEN) database, an intelligence and law enforcement sharing system managed by CIFA.

JPEN incorporates not just TALON reporting from the military services, but also intelligence reporting and law enforcement information. Though it must comply with the same requirements to purge information about U.S. "persons" after 90 day if there is shown to be no foreign government, terrorist, or law enforcement connection, the Pentagon has so far managed not to discuss this expanded program of domestic information collection, nor the overall work of the super-secret CIFA.

The Pentagon's willingness to make changes does stand in stark contrast to the administration's insistence not only as to the legality of the NSA program but also to its continuation."