(U-WIRE) PHILADELPHIA – When a group of students at the University of California-Berkeley convened to protest on-campus military recruitment last year, they hoped their effort would get some attention.

But they didn’t expect that attention would wind up in a terror-threat database.

The day before the protest, on April 20, 2005, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security filed a report on the planned demonstration.

Among the items included: An e-mail sent by an organizer, along with the student’s e-mail address and phone number.

The agent’s report was included in a Pentagon-managed database intended to compile information on threats from international terrorists.

The report listed as a reason for the filing that “a strong potential for confrontation at this protest given the strong support for anti-war protests and movements in the past.”

Not so, says Snehal Shingavi, an English graduate student at Berkeley who helped organize the April 21 protest as part of a student group opposed to the war.

The planned protest at a career fair, intended to object to both the war in Iraq and the military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy regarding homosexuality, was peaceful, as had been several previous protests on the same subject.

Protesters intended to “inform students … about the realities of employment in a military career,” Shingavi said.

On that day, 30 to 40 students assembled to challenge the recruiters verbally, asking how they could justify recruiting in light of scandals like Abu Ghraib and civilian deaths in Iraq.

It was more of a “heated discussion” than a confrontation, Shingavi said. The group’s members “don’t believe in more violent tactics than these,” he added.

It is not fully clear how the student e-mail wound up in the database.

Hicks said that the Department of Defense did not actively monitor any student correspondence.

Shingavi has his own theory as to how a Homeland Security agent obtained it. He said that Berkeley officials can review e-mails sent over university servers and that correspondence has turned up in administrators’ hands before.

Jennifer Ward, a representative of the California state system of schools, denied that officials generally do this and said that policies are in place to prevent it.

The state system’s policy forbids the examination of e-mail without notifying the sender unless the law requires it, officials believe someone has violated a law or policy, or under “compelling,” time-dependent or critical circumstances. System records show that during a one-year period that did not include the sending of the e-mail in question, no requests for such access were approved at Berkeley.

David Millar, an information security officer at Penn, said that the University does not review such e-mails.

The incident at Berkeley last year was not the only one to appear on the Pentagon’s radar. According to documents obtained by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network — which works to combat the “don’t ask, don’t tell policy — the database at one time contained records on protests at six schools, including Berkeley, the University of California at Santa Cruz and New York University.

Such filings, called Threat and Local Observation Notices, or TALONs, were authorized in a memo by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, as a way to keep tabs on potential terrorist threats.

The memo lists a number of specific reasons for which a TALON would be justified, but also allows one to be filed in response to general “suspicious activities/incidents.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Cdr. Greg Hicks, said that the TALONs about student protests and other records that did not pertain to terrorist threats were later purged from the 13,000-entry database.

The purpose of the bank is to provide a “foreign terrorist threat nexus,” enabling the government to “connect the dots” of individual agents’ observations to form a picture of potential threats, not to keep track of campus demonstrations, Hicks said.

Now, he added, submissions are subject to multiple reviews before being included. And the information contained in the database has been helpful in assisting investigations being conducted by intelligence organizations, Hicks said.

Sharra Greer, director of Law and Policy for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, said she is glad the TALONs on student protests are gone. Protesting the policy is a legitimate use of First Amendment rights, she said, not a threat to national security.

But she added that her group is still seeking access to additional records from the database.

“I think we will feel more comfortable when we have finished the process,” she said.

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