Reply #52: You are not free in the U.S.

[400Years]

Spying On Anti-War Groups
http://www.cleveland.com/newsflash/cleveland/index.ssf?...

1/24/2006, 6:53 p.m. ET

CLEVELAND (AP) ­ The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio requested information Tuesday from the government about whether it spied on two anti-war groups and an attorney for a man suspected of terrorism connections.

ACLU officials said at news conference that members of the anti-war groups want to know whether two meetings were attended by government agents. One meeting was last year in Akron by the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, and the another was in 2004 in Cleveland by the Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition.

The ACLU filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Defense, Justice Department, the FBI and police seeking records that document any collection of information about the groups.

Gary Daniels, the ACLU's litigation coordinator, said the ACLU became involved because the groups were included on a Defense Department classified database of information about suspicious people and activity inside the United States as reported by NBC News...


Spying on and Jailing Anti-War Army Colonel and Daughter
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

Joe Mayer attended the demonstration downtown that morning in 2002 to protest what was then a brewing conflict in Iraq. He also went to ensure that his daughter Alexis did not get arrested and potentially harm her fledgling career as a lawyer.

What transpired was what the retired Army colonel most feared: He and his daughter were among a mass of protesters arrested, handcuffed and detained for as long as 36 hours, an ordeal that included hours confined on a bus and many more hours on floor mats at the Police Academy before they were released.

"It was frightening, the police charging at you in their riot gear for no apparent reason," said Mayer, 71, recalling yesterday the clash at Pershing Park. "I'm thinking, 'What's going on?' "

Whatever bitterness he and the other demonstrators experienced Sept. 27, 2002, was at least partially salved this week when the District government acknowledged that the arrests were improper and agreed to pay $425,000 to Mayer and six others who filed suit. As part of the settlement, the District is required to adopt policies aimed at preventing police from making improper arrests at demonstrations.


ACLU Releases Government Photos (spying on vegans in Atlanta)

Web Editor: Michael King
Reported By: Jon Shirek
Web Editor: Tracey Christensen
Last Modified: 1/25/2006 9:41:15 PM

The ACLU of Georgia released copies of government files on Wednesday that illustrate the extent to which the FBI, the DeKalb County Division of Homeland Security and other government agencies have gone to compile information on Georgians suspected of being threats simply for expressing controversial opinions ...

For example, more than two dozen government surveillance photographs show 22-year-old Caitlin Childs of Atlanta, a strict vegetarian, and other vegans picketing against meat eating, in December 2003. They staged their protest outside a HoneyBaked Ham store on Buford Highway in DeKalb County.

An undercover DeKalb County Homeland Security detective was assigned to conduct surveillance of the protest and the protestors, and take the photographs. The detective arrested Childs and another protester after he saw Childs approach him and write down, on a piece of paper, the license plate number of his unmarked government car.

"They told me if I didn't give over the piece of paper I would go to jail and I refused and I went to jail, and the piece of paper was taken away from me at the jail and the officer who transferred me said that was why I was arrested," Childs said on Wednesday ...

http://www.11alive.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=7...



The Other Big Brother
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

Jan. 30, 2006 issue - The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater," Parkin says.

But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection"­tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965509/site/newsweek/



Spying on Your Internet Searches
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/bush-domestic-spying-google-version.html

By KATIE HAFNER
Published: January 25, 2006
Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a "rent boy."

It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy - a young male prostitute?

Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. "I told him I'd Googled 'rent boy,' just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night," she said.

Ms. Hanson's reaction arose from last week's reports that as part of its effort to uphold an online pornography law, the Justice Department had asked a federal judge to compel Google to turn over records on millions of its users' search queries. Google is resisting the request, but three of its competitors - Yahoo, MSN and America Online - have turned over similar information.
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/bush-domestic-s...


Video of Students Protesting Domestic Spying
http://www.canofun.com/blog/videos/2006/ProtestatGeorgetownUTorturePimp.asx