Police spied on peace groups

[babylonsister]

Police spied on peace groups
Posted July 18, 2008 12:30 PM
Death penalty protesters were spied on



Anti-death penalty protesters gather in the December 2005 incident noted in a recently released police document. (Sun file photo by Gene Sweeney Jr. / December 5, 2005)
The Swamp

by Nick Madigan

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 documents 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."

more...

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/07/police_spied_on_peace_groups.html

[Occam Bandage]

1. Forget privacy for a second. What the fuck are they thinking wasting so much taxpayer money

and police-officer time? Shouldn't they be patrolling the streets and keeping neighborhoods safe?

[halobeam]

2. That is all.

My country tis of thee
can now just piss on me
hard as the rain....

let yellow droplets fall
deny my right to call
induce my pain is all,
that is left of thee.


the end.
:patriot:

[ZombieHorde]

3. Peace scares that shit out of some people...

MLK jr. and Ghandi are the first to come to mind.

edit: I looked at my post again and it looks like I am saying the those two men are scared of peace. I was referring to their assassinations.