-Caveat Lector-
~~~~
http://www.utne.com/bSocietyPr.tmpl?command=search&db=dArticle.db
&eqheadlinedata=Police%20Spying%20101
Feb 10, 2001
Police Spying 101
A federal court ruling just made police surveillance of political activists
even easier
By Jim Redden,
Special to Utne Reader Online
Activists are alarmed by a recent federal court ruling which eases
restrictions against political surveillance by law enforcement agencies.
The ruling was issued on January 11, 2001 by the 7th Circuit Court of
Appeals. It relaxed restrictions intended to prevent the Chicago Police
Department from spying on law-abiding political dissidents. The
restrictions were included in a 1981 consent decree stemming from a
1974 lawsuit by the Alliance to End Repression. The suit charged that
the FBI's Chicago office and the Chicago police routinely violated First
Amendment rights when investigating dissidents. The suit particularly
targeted the police department Intelligence Division, dubbed the 'Red
Squad' because of its infiltration on communist, socialist and other left-
wing organizations.
In its ruling, the court said today's political climate is so different from
the 1960s and 1970s that the rules need to be changed.
"The era in which the Red Squad flourished is history, along with the
Red Squad itself," the court said. "The instabilities of that era have
largely disappeared. Fear of communist subversion, so strong a
motivator of constitutional infringement in those days, has disappeared.
"Today, the concern, prudent and not paranoid, is with ideologically
motivated terrorism," the ruling continued. "The city does not want to
resurrect the Red Squad. It wants to be able to keep tabs on incipient
terrorist groups. And if the ... investigation cannot begin until the group
is well on its way toward the commission of terrorist acts, the
investigation may come too late to prevent the acts or identify the
perpetrators."
Douglas Lee, a lawyer and legal correspondent for the First Amendment
Center, says the ruling is based on faulty reasoning.
"From a First Amendment perspective, no distinction exists between
'communist subversion' and 'ideologically motivated terrorism'," Lee
wrote in the January 1, 2001 edition of The Freedom Forum Online. "As
long as First Amendment conduct does not directly incite imminent
illegal action, it is protected, whether it advocates communism or some
other anti-democratic message. Conduct falling outside the freedoms of
speech and assembly never has been protected by the First
Amendment and was not protected by the decree. The effect of
modifying the decree, therefore, can only be to permit investigation of
pure First Amendment conduct."
Lee is correct. And because the ruling came from a federal court, it
potentially applies to all police intelligence divisions. So political
activists across the country have a right to be concerned.
But the truth is, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies never
stopped spying on law-abiding political dissidents. That why the
Washington DC police department is able to boast that it successfully
infiltrated the protesters who demonstrated against the inauguration of
George W. Bush on January 20.
Confused? You should be. The corporate press has long pushed the
myth that political spying in this country was substantially curtailed in
the wake of the Watergate Scandal. Many aging liberals have
embraced this myth as proof that they helped drive Richard Nixon out
of office.
Reality is a little different, as I documented in my recently-released
book Snitch Culture: How Citizens are Turned Into the Eyes and Ears of
the State (Feral House, 2000).
Here's what happened.
Despite all the press coverage it received, Watergate was not the
biggest political scandal of the early 1970s. A U.S. Senate
subcommittee chaired by Frank Church discovered far more serious
examples of illegal government surveillance than the botched break-in
at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and subsequent
cover-up. Formally called the Select Committee to Study Government
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activity, the committee
documented such infamous surveillance operations as the FBI's Counter
Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO), the CIA's Operation Chaos, and
the NSA's Watch List.
The corporate media was so busy patting itself on the back over Nixon's
resignation that it hardly covered the Church Committee's final report,
which was released in April 1976. But the revelations were so shocking
that the Department of Justice adopted new guidelines aimed at
curtailing political surveillance. State legislatures and city councils
passed similar restrictions, usually under threat of lawsuits by the
ACLU.
But these victories were short-lived. For starters, the DOJ guidelines
only applied to the FBI. They did not cover such federal law
enforcement agencies as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms, which is part of the Treasury Department.
And federal, state and local law enforcement agencies quickly found
ways around the restrictions. Among other things, they established
information-sharing relationships with private organizations which spied
on political dissidents. The best example is the Anti-Defamation
League, which employs "fact finders" in major cities to track suspected
dissidents. Although the ADL calls itself a civil rights watchdog, it was
caught spying on a wide range of both left and right wing organizations
in the early 1990s. See for yourself. A list of the ADL spy files is
posted on the Feral House website.
Reporters looking into the ADL spy scandal confirmed the organization's
involvement with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. As
the liberal Village Voice said on May 11, 1993, "In fact, the ADL has
become a clearinghouse for law enforcement agencies. In the '70s and
'80s, as many police intelligence units that gathered political
information on citizens were shut down under court orders because
they violated constitutional guarantees to privacy and freedom of speech
and assembly, their files were often bequeathed to the ADL. The ADL,
in turn, would often lend the files back to their original donor or broker
them to another intelligence agency."
But law enforcement agencies also took advantage of a huge loophole in
the restrictions against political surveillance. The 7th Circuit Court of
Appeals is wrong when it claims that police cannot investigate a
political group until it is well on its ways towards breaking the law.
Police are always able to investigate anyone planning to break the law -
and the planned crime doesn't even have to be a serious one. In fact,
police can and do infiltrate groups who are merely planning peaceful
civil disobedience demonstrations, such as blocking streets, sitting on
sidewalks or occupying offices.
An example from my home town of Portland, Oregon proves this point.
In 1995, an anti-war protester named Douglas Squirrel sued the police
for opening a file on him. Squirrel had been arrested during a street
clash between the police and self-proclaimed anarchists outside a
downtown rock club on July 18, 1993.
When Squirrel tried to post the $5,000 bail required of everyone else
who had been arrested, Portland Police Captain Roy Kindrick,
commander of the bureau's Central Precinct, called the jail and insisted
that it be raised to $50,000. Kindrick said Squirrel was the leader of the
anarchists, and responsible for 'planning' the riot.
Why did Kindrick think this? Squirrel had no criminal record at the time.
But he had participated in a local group of peace activists known as
B.E.I.R.U.T., which stood for Boisterous Extremists for Insurrection
against Republicans and other Unprincipled Thugs. The name was
inspired by former President George Bush, who called Portland a 'little
Beirut' because of its long history of protest movements. Squirrel and
the others with B.E.I.R.U.T. did little more than operate a telephone
message line which announced visits by Republican officials and other
conservative political figures. Although B.E.I.R.U.T. announced the
visits, the protests were organized by other, more established
organizations. Central American solidarity groups were especially
active during the Reagan and Bush years. Nevertheless, the police had
not only identified Squirrel as a major political organizer, but punished
him for it by raising his bail.
After Squirrel got out of jail, he hired a lawyer and sued the police to find
out what they had on him. After a great deal of stalling and stonewalling
by the city, the trial finally took place on December 18 and 19, 1995. It
provided a rare look at how police across the country use the pretext of
preventing crimes to spy on political activists.
The trial was covered by journalist Mitzi Waltz for PDXS, an alternative
newspaper I published at the time. During the trial, Squirrel learned that
the police had been spying on him and his friends since 1990, when
B.E.I.R.U.T. posted a notice about an upcoming visit by Bush.
The first witness was Officer Larry Siewert, a member of the Criminal
Intelligence Division, who admitted he routinely spied on political
organizations. "I was assigned to monitor subversive groups, the
extremists on the left and on the right," he testified under oath. "Also
Earth First!, animal rights groups. I also monitored the anti-abortion
movement and provided all the dignitary protection."
Also testifying was CIS Sergeant Irv McGeachy, who said that he and
Siewert were regularly assigned to stake out political meetings, noting
who comes and goes, taking down license plate numbers and
compiling physical descriptions of everyone they see. McGeachy also
said he and Siewart would check out rumors of political gatherings.
"We'd receive information that a demonstration or protest was going to
occur," he said. "We routinely then would go out to bookstores and
college campuses to see if this were occurring. Then we would make a
tactical recommendation", about whether to send more officers or the
riot squad.
Siewart and McGeachy also admitted that CID operated Confidential
Reliable Informants (CRI) within many political groups in the Portland
area. The trial revealed the Portland police kept dozens of informants
on the payroll to infiltrate political organizations and to report on their
activities. The police also used informants who are motivated by their
opposition to the groups they are infiltrating.
The police released five confidential reports which mentioned Squirrel at
the trial. They clearly showed that the police were gathering information
on a broad range of liberal organizations, including Greenpeace
International, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Womens
International League for Peace and Freedom, Northwest Veterans for
Peace, the Portland Central American Solidarity Committee and NO on
Hate, a gay rights group. Siewart and McGeachy testified that spying
on these organizations was justified under the law because all their
protests involve criminal activity - which the two officers defined as
including such minor offenses as jaywalking and such traditional acts
of civil disobedience as blocking sidewalks. "Civil disobedience is some
sort of peaceful action that could be a criminal act," Siewert testified.
"It's still a crime."
According to the trial testimony, preventing such 'crimes' justifies a lot
of spying. Siewert testified that in the early 1990's, "It took our whole
unit just to keep on all the activities, all the different causes and
demonstrations that are going on."
At the end of the trail, Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Michael
Marcus ruled that four of the five reports on Squirrel were legal, while
one had to be purged because it contained no allegation of criminal
activity. That report concerned a gathering involving a large number of
local peace and justice activists who met at Colonel Sumner Park on
July 26, 1992 to discuss common issues. The meeting was infiltrated
by a CRI, who provided the names of the participants to Siewert. In his
report on the gathering, Siewert noted that many of the groups were
concerned about the lack of effective civilian oversight of the police.
Although the city had such a board [the Portland Internal Investigation
Auditing Committee (PIIAC)] the activists did not feel it had any real
power. "[F]or the local issues, the main topic was the need to push for
a civilian police review board," the report stated.
Testifying under oath at the trial, Portland Police Officer Greg Kurath
tried to justify spying on the Colonel Sumner Park gathering by saying
the activists might take over PIIAC and use it for some kind of 'criminal
activity.' Marcus responded by calling the theory "preposterous,"
asking, "What on earth were you thinking here."
This report would have been legal if it claimed the activists were
planning a sit-down strike outside police headquarters, however. And
this is the same argument that law enforcement agencies are currently
making to justify spying on the emerging anti-corporate globablization
movement.
After the World Trade Organization protests in Portland, law
enforcement agencies infiltrated the activists planning to demonstrate
against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in
Washington DC, the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia,
and the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. All of these
agencies claimed their surveillance targets were planning to break the
law. The corporate press ran wild stories about potential bio-terrorist
attacks. But the police didn't need to suspect that someone was going
to be killed to launch an undercover investigation.
Even before the 7th Circuit Court ruling, all it took was jaywalking rumor.
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