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Friday, July 18, 2008
The Baltimore Sun
Spying Uncovered: Do***ents Show State Police Monitored Peace and
Anti-Death Penalty Groups
by Nick Madigan
BALTIMORE - Undercover Maryland State Police officers repeatedly spied
on peace activists and anti-death penalty groups in recent years and
entered the names of some in a law-enforcement database of people
thought to be terrorists or drug traffickers, newly released do***ents
show.
The files, made public yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union
of Maryland, depict a pattern of infiltration of the activists’
organizations in 2005 and 2006. The activists contend that the
authorities were trying to determine whether they posed a security
threat to the United States. But none of the 43 pages of summaries and
computer logs - some with agents’ names and whole paragraphs blacked out
- mention criminal or even potentially criminal acts, the legal standard
for initiating such surveillance.
State police officials said they did not curtail the protesters’ freedoms.
The spying, detailed in logs of at least 288 hours of surveillance over
a 14-month period, recalls similar infiltration by FBI agents of civil
rights and anti-war groups decades ago, particularly under the
administration of President Richard M. Nixon.
David Rocah, a staff attorney for the ACLU in Baltimore, said at a news
conference yesterday that he found it “stupefying” that more than 30
years later, the government is still targeting people who do nothing
more than express dissent.
“Everything noted in these logs is a lawful, First Amendment activity,”
Rocah said. “For undercover police officers to spend hundreds of hours
entering information about lawful political protest activities into a
criminal database is an unconscionable waste of taxpayer dollars and
does nothing to make us safer from actual terrorists or drug dealers.”
The ACLU obtained the do***ents from the state attorney general’s office
through a Maryland Public Information Act lawsuit.
Col. Terrence B. Sheridan, superintendent of the Maryland State Police,
said in a statement yesterday that the department “does not
inappropriately curtail the expression or demonstration of the civil
liberties of protesters or organizations acting lawfully.”
“No illegal actions by state police have ever been taken against any
citizens or groups who have exercised their right to free speech and
assembly in a lawful manner,” Sheridan said. “Only when information
regarding criminal activity is alleged will police continue to
investigate leads to ensure the public safety.”
Nothing in the do***ents indicates criminal activity or intent on the
part of the protesters, ACLU officials said.
Nonetheless, the state police’s Homeland Security and Intelligence
Division sent covert agents to infiltrate the Baltimore Pledge of
Resistance, a peace group; the Baltimore Coalition Against the Death
Penalty; and the Committee to Save Vernon Evans, a death row inmate.
Using a fake e-mail address and an alias, an undercover agent joined the
e-mail list of the death penalty group, the do***ents say. Agents also
monitored the group’s organizational meetings, public forums and events
in churches, as well as rallies on Lawyers Mall in Annapolis and in
Baltimore outside the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, known as
“SuperMax.”
Most of the spies’ re****ts were innocuous. After an Aug. 24, 2005,
gathering of the Evans group, an undercover officer wrote in a log: “The
meeting concluded with members talking about trying to get the man
running for Baltimore County State’s Attorney to commit to his plans
regarding the death penalty in the county.”
Baltimore County was responsible for more capital punishment cases than
any other Maryland jurisdiction at the time.
Another entry about the Evans group revealed that agents had spent 50
hours of “investigative time” shadowing its members in March, April and
May 2005. The entry mentioned that a May 25, 2005, meeting of the group
was attended by Max Obuszewski, a former Peace Corps member and longtime
activist who moved to Baltimore in 1983, and Terry Fitzgerald, who heads
the anti-death penalty coalition and established the Evans group.
Both attended yesterday’s news conference.
State police appeared to have been specifically tracking Obuszewski’s
activities. His name, the do***ents show, was entered into the
Wa****ngton/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database, even
though there was “not a scintilla of evidence” that he deserved to be
listed, said Rocah, the ACLU attorney.
“Mr. Obuszewski has devoted his entire life to peace,” Rocah said. “If
there is anyone in the world who is further from a terrorist, it is hard
for me to imagine.”
Obuszewski agreed. “You cannot get more insulting than to call me a
terrorist,” he said. Besides, he went on, the groups he belongs to hold
open meetings and publicize their schedules. “Why would someone come to
those meetings and pretend to be someone else? Why are government
agencies targeting pacifists?”
One reason, he theorized, is that local police agencies need funds from
the federal government, and surveillance of supposed “terrorists” might
be a good way to keep getting the money. No matter the reason, the news
that the Bush administration keeps about 1 million names on a terrorist
watch-list is disheartening, Obuszewski said, since so many people
cannot possibly warrant inclusion.
In February 2006, the national ACLU and its affiliates filed multiple
federal Freedom of Information requests seeking records of Pentagon
surveillance of anti-war groups around the country. Using information
from a secret Pentagon database, NBC News re****ted that a unit of the
Department of Defense had been ac***ulating intelligence about domestic
organizations and their protest activities as part of a mission to track
“potential terrorist threats.”
“It serves no security purpose to infiltrate peaceful groups,” said
Michael German, a former FBI agent who specialized in counter-terrorism
and who joined the ACLU two years ago as policy counsel in its
Wa****ngton legislative office. “It completely misuses law enforcement
resources.”
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, German said, the government has
“actively encouraged” local police agencies to become intelligence
gatherers and to compile information that does not necessarily have a
connection to criminal activity.
Despite the fact that the Maryland infiltrators’ re****ts consistently
said the activists acted lawfully, agents continued to recommend that
the spying continue. Re****ts of the surveillance were sent to at least
seven federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, including the
National Security Agency, the police departments of Baltimore, Baltimore
County, Annapolis and Anne Arundel County, and the state General
Services police.
The do***ents released yesterday show the kind of information they were
trading. Among other things, Obuszewski and fellow activists arranged a
meeting with then-Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin in 2005 in which they asked
him to sup****t a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.
Susan Goering, executive director of the ACLU of Maryland, said she
feared that the do***ents released so far “may be only the tip of the
proverbial iceberg.”
In a letter sent yesterday to Gov. Martin O’Malley, Goering wrote that
the state police had “recorded extensive information about specific
individuals and groups, including describing their political outlook,
whether they were articulate, what political activities they are engaged
in, and attended private planning meetings in a covert capacity.”
The only potentially unlawful activity mentioned anywhere in the
do***ents, she said, were two instances of nonviolent civil
disobedience. In one, activists refused to leave a guard station during
a protest at the National Security Agency after bringing cookies and
drinks for the guards, and in the other, they hatched a plan to place
photographs of soldiers who died in Iraq on the fence surrounding the
White House.
“Maryland residents should feel free to join a peaceful protest without
fear that their names will wind up in police files,” Goering wrote.
“They should feel free to engage in nonviolent dissent without fear of
being branded as ‘terrorists’ or ’security threat groups’ in shared
law-enforcement databases.”
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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