Surveillance State: Government Snooping, Prying, and Informing Worse Than You Think

[kas125]

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Here is the continuum at work. A group is singled out by an intelligence report -- a Quaker “cell” opposed to the wars in the Middle East, for instance, or opponents of Marcellus Shale drilling, or those who disagree with G-20 policies. Once the group is identified, federal agencies and state and local police move to insert informers in it and/or aggressively investigate it. Such surveillance, whether done by informers or by agents picking through trash bags, generates names. Names go into databases and are networked nationwide. Databases grow.

Michael Perelman, one of the principals in the Institute of Terrorism Response and Research, defended his group’s work by arguing that even peaceful protests have security implications and that the institute did not track individuals. This is disingenuous. The institute and the state fusion center, officially known as the Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center, may work in parallel worlds, but their methods mirror each other. The state fusion center, run by the state police, provides access to law enforcement nationwide. Names of groups and members of groups are its stock in trade, the meat of all surveillance. In the same way, the state Homeland Security Office distributed the institute's reports to hundreds of agencies and private companies.

The tracking of legitimate political groups and people engaged in lawful political activity is, of course, a fundamental corruption of American democracy. Consider what happened in Oakland at the onset of the Iraq war. A peaceful protest at the Oakland port was met by police who opened fire on fleeing demonstrators and bystanders alike, shooting wooden bullets and tear gas canisters. In my book, Mohamed’s Ghosts, I report that police had been alerted to potential violence by the California Anti-Terrorism Training Center, a state fusion center tracking political groups -- exactly the same thing done by the Institute of Terrorism Response and Research. About 60 people were injured, including 11 longshoremen, and 25 protestors were arrested. This event was justified by the fusion center’s spokesman who claimed that a protest of a war waged against “international terrorism” is itself “a terrorist act.”

But the story didn’t end there. A month after the initial 2003 protest, demonstrators, led by Direct Action to Stop the War among other groups, held another Oakland protest to denounce the earlier police violence. Leaders of that protest, it turned out, were undercover Oakland police operatives who directed the protest’s planning. Deputy Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan shrugged it all off, saying it was important for his department “to gather the information and maybe even direct to do something that we wanted them to do.”

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read it all at - http://www.alternet.org/story/148390/surveillance_state:_government_snooping,_prying,_and_informing_worse_than_you_think?page=entire

[OnyxCollie]

1. Hi Agent Mike!

:hi:

[inna]

2. kr

[Uncle Joe]

3. This can only lead to general estrangement between the people and their government, which in turn

feeds mistrust and cynicism against the system; thereby weakening the government while paradoxically undermining national security.

Informers have multiple, often conflicting motives, and Withers, who died in 2007, is not around to explain or defend himself. The report on his activities during the civil rights movement, his betrayals of the movement’s most prominent leaders, and his hand in destroying local activist groups, however, is a powerful reminder of the long history of political surveillance in this country and the corruptions and animus it breeds. Whether it is the FBI’s use of informers within the civil rights movement or the state of Pennsylvania’s monitoring of legitimate dissent in the post-9/11 world, the ultimate victim of such activity is American civil society itself.

The tainting of character, the undermining of basic trust, the disruption of democratic politics -- these are the great achievements of state surveillance. Thanks to 9/11 and truckloads of homeland security money, the stain of those achievements is now flowing as swiftly and freely as streams of data on a vast fiber optic network.

Thanks for the thread,kas.

[kas125]

4. You're welcome, Uncle Joe. And you're very right, too.