Pentagon to test unclassified alternative to Talon

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon, which closed its Talon intelligence database nearly a year ago amid concerns about domestic spying, will soon begin testing an unclassified alternative for tracking possible threats to U.S. military bases, officials said on Tuesday.

The system, an FBI-operated program called eGuardian, would for the first time sever the Defense Department's collection of data on suspicious activity from U.S. intelligence operations by placing the information in an unclassified database for law enforcement agencies, officials said.

Pentagon officials hope an unclassified system run by the FBI would help insulate the job of gathering information about potential threats from public concerns about domestic espionage that surrounded Talon for years.

Air Force Lt. Col. Almarah Belk, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said a Pentagon panel of experts that spent a year examining 62 different systems formally recommended eGuardian to senior defense officials on July 29.

The Defense Department will begin testing eGuardian as early as this month at sites in Florida and Virginia and the system could be formally adopted in December if the tests go well, she said.

"This is the most promising solution at this point," Belk told Reuters.

Talon, a classified database maintained by a defense counterintelligence office that the Pentagon disbanded on Tuesday, was designed to gather pieces of information about suspicious activity near U.S. defense facilities. Analysts could then examine the data for evidence of potential threats.

OUTCRY IN CONGRESS

But in 2005, the database was found to have inappropriately retained information on U.S. antiwar protesters even after they were ruled out as threats. That caused an outcry in Congress and among civil liberties advocates about the dangers of military spying on U.S. citizens.

"The concept is still good. Connecting the dots of the bits and pieces of possible information is a good thing. It just shouldn't be in a counterintelligence database," said senior Pentagon counterintelligence official Toby Sullivan.

When the Pentagon shut the Talon database in September 2007, it transferred data collection responsibilities to a classified FBI system called Guardian, which continues to collect threat information about Pentagon facilities today.

eGuardian's name is derived from the Guardian system. But unlike its classified sibling, eGuardian does not provide information directly to U.S. intelligence agencies, according to the Pentagon.

FBI officials were not available to comment on eGuardian, but the FBI's Web site described it as an automated method for sharing unclassified threat data with state and local law enforcement.

Pentagon officials said information about military installations collected by eGuardian would be available to law enforcement agencies but not the public, despite the system's unclassified nature. Data found to pose an actual potential threat would be transferred to the classified Guardian system for analysis.

This week's shutdown of the office responsible for Talon, the Counterintelligence Field Activity office, was the final chapter in the controversy.

Its former responsibilities for managing defense and armed services efforts against intelligence threats from foreign powers and militant groups now belong to the new Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, overseen by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency.

(Editing by Chris Wilson)