See, all that time we were pursuing Mr. Jeff Gannon, ace White House reporter (yes, I jest) and his Talon News connections, we were tracking down the wrong TALON. Newsweek (via Raw Story) clears it all up for us in their January 30th piece The Other Big Brother.
How could we have been so mistaken?
2003 was just the year of the talon, so it seems. This TALON is a product of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.
In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON -- short for Threat and Local Observation Notice -- that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA [Counterintelligence Field Activity] to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.
Okay, I know it's probably just coincidence that Jeff Gannon's news outfit was anointed TALON on March 29th, 2003, a bare month before Wolfowitz's version.
But odd coincidence... and intriguing.