Undercover Supreme Court Police Deployed Outside Courthouse to Spy on Protests
By: Kevin Gosztola
FireDogLake, Monday November 17, 2014 10:18 am
When J. Edgar Hoover was FBI director, he wanted agents to enhance people’s paranoia and make them feel like there was an agent behind every mailbox. His agents were particularly targeting dissent. Now, these days, the use of undercover agents in criminal investigations or general operations has grown to such a degree that a citizen may feel like there is a federal agent behind every action.
According to a report from the New York Times based off information from officials, former agents and documents, there are forty different agencies granting their employees the authority to impersonate people. That is stunning in and of itself, because it is not only the FBI conducting undercover operations anymore. But what truly stands out is the fact that some of these operations are targeting protests at the United States Supreme Court.
William Arkin and Eric Lichtblau describe, “At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity.”
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In a rare protest in February, Kai Newkirk interrupted oral argument in the Supreme Court and shouted, “Money is not speech,” “Corporations are not people,” and “Overturn Citizens United.” He was protesting the courts Citizen United decision that made it possible for huge amounts of money to be used by corporations or special interest groups to influence the outcome of federal elections.
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Which means it is impossible to truly know how often the Supreme Court may have targeted individuals, including students, to suppress protest. It is equally impossible to know if agents are being deployed in a content-neutral manner, meaning anti-abortion protests garner same amount of attention from officers as money in elections. However, given the institutional attitude of the highest ranking court in the judicial branch, a fear that undercover Supreme Court police are snooping on First Amendment activity with virtually no oversight is certainly valid.
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http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/11/17/undercover-supreme-court-police-deployed-outside-courthouse-to-spy-on-protests/
Can you imagine Scalia as head of the Secret Police? Well, the situation looks a whole lot worse than that.
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SSDD
ETA: John Roberts appoints nothing but pukes to the FISA court, charged with all manner of perversions of the Bill of Rights in the name of national security.
