Breaking: DHS uses time, resources wisely!

So, the latest move in the war on terror?

A federal Department of Homeland Security agent passed along information about student protests against military recruiters at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, landing the demonstrations on a database tracking foreign terrorism, according to government documents released Tuesday.

Unsurprisingly, it was the ACLU who obtained these documents. Apparently, the students were put in a government database called TALON--Threat and Local Observation Notice--after a DHS agent reported the group to Military counterintelligence. Whoa!

Now, I think protests against military recruiters aren't really helpful or appropriate, but they are clearly not any kind of a threat to U.S. security; including these students in a terror database seems to be an obvious violation of their civil liberties. Though the reports have been removed from the database, one hopes that this issue will be pursued by the ACLU and other groups like it, and certainly campus newspapers.

I'm not sure what's more worrisome, that students can get caught up in a national security database for activism, or that an agent of the DHS actually thought these students were dangerous enough to include.