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Widespread Spying Preceded '04 GOP Convention
Frosty Piss alerts us to a story in the New York Times reporting on details that are emerging of a far-flung spying operation lasting up to a year leading up to the 2004 Republican National Convention. The New York Police Department mounted a spy campaign reaching well beyond the state of New York. For at least a year before the convention, teams of undercover New York police officers traveled to cities across the US, Canada, and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention. Across the country undercover officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists. In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with other police departments. Outlines of the pre-convention operations are emerging from records in federal lawsuits brought over mass arrests during the convention.
Police has no morality whatsoever; they are not sworn-in to the Constitution like the armed forces are, and so are open to perform all abuses for the rich and powerful.
The corruption we see today from the republican side never ceases. I am sure it has probably been as bad from the other side in the past but not in my memory. It just keeps coming. I can't think of a single truth I have heard from the current administration.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
The NYPD exhibiting "Bad Faith"?
Why am I not surprised?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Government should fear the people. The more the J. Edgar Hoover wannabees feel the need to spy on me, the more I feel like I actually have a chance to change things.
So, what I took from this article is that the NYPD has domestic and international espionage capabilities comparable to (or, worse, better than) our nation's designed intelligence bodies. They also seem to do a better job of sharing information between agencies than the CIA, NSA, the various military intelligence organizations, and the FBI.
This is yet another illustration of my point... the people that need to be in Iraq and Afghanistan are the NYPD and the LAPD. Their SWAT, negotiations, and (apparently!) intelligence teams are what's needed - these efforts ceased being appropriate "military actions" some time ago. What's needed now is an effective police force - which not the U.S. Army or Marines.
And, by the way, yes, I do agree with what will no doubt the general sentiment on there - that is an outrageous, appalling, and despicable invasion of the personal privacy rights of ordinary citizens around the globe... but, aside from whining about how corrupt our elected officials and expressing my outrage, I figured there was some small glimmer of upside in this piece.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
So let's review what we know so far...
* FBI abusing its snooping authority under the patriot act
* Major telecommunications companies provide secret rooms to the government to pick through Internet communications
* Al Gonzalez authorizes (illegal) collection of phone call databases
* "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) program continues to create mass associative database of all american entities (people, businesses)
* Inkjet printers embed hidden serial numbers
* Newly issued American passports leak personal information including pictures
* Government has access to all Americans' financial transactions
* US government contracts w/private companies to harvest information (which it itself can't do)
* Law enforcement infiltrates peaceful organizations (occasionally incites and/or foments violence)
* Attorney General removes Federal Prosecutor for lack of loyalty to Administration... (raising questions about those who WEREN'T fired)
* ???
* Someone profits.
My brother was one of the 1,800 people held for one or two days at the old vehicle maintenance facility on the west side of Manhattan. Many of these people (including my brother) were rounded up like cattle just because they were walking down a block where a protest was taking place. People were out getting groceries and arrested, with no way to place phone calls, no place to sit, and unhealthy conditions (the police who worked in the facility during the same time period have filed numerous health claims).
So all this data was gathered and used for what...to cordon off a city block with snow fence and arrest EVERYONE in that block?
Ultimately the police likely had no real way to use any of the data, and to keep their Republican guests happy they resorted instead to just rounding up as many people as they could. By the time everyone was released the convention was over. The lawsuits will drag on for years (my brother is suing the city) and cost the city a ton of money.
The police like to boast that there were no disturbances or major incidents during the convention and they take the credit. More likely the reason is that the protestors and the citizens of New York were well behaved, protested peacefully, and even welcomed many of the convention attendees. My daughters (13 and 10 at the time) and I marched in the protest on Sunday during the convention and it was a wonderful day of peaceful expression of our political feelings.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
There is an effective way to deal with these things. Vote. When elections are lost because of this kind of thing, this kind of thing will stop happening.
It doesn't matter if the other candidate is only slightly less repugnant. Eventually you'll run the crappy people out.
Apathy is the only reason politics is in it's current cesspool state.
is the fact that we have G. Gordon Liddy talking about similar plans for the '72 (or was it 76?) elections.
it's not democrat or republican specifically. It just happens that the guys who were behind what happend in '72 were also behind what happend in '04. They just happened to be republican. of course, now we have the problem that most of their ilk ARE the republican party, but that's beside the point.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The argument I constantly hear from those on the far right -- if there actually was a conspiracy, someone would have spoken out. Well, if that is the case, how come such a national "conspiracy," if you would call it, took 3 years to come out?
It's kind of annoying that extremists can't seperate themselves from peaceful protesters. I mean, if you want to throw stones at cops, do it when they are beating up on civilians, or taking bribes, or driving through red lights without the siren on. Don't go fuck up a peaceful protest.
Funny, I always thought the guys starting those riots were undercover cops. Say, the type that would go cross country and violate who knows how many laws to spy on innocent civilians wanting to use their free speech rights.
C'mon, it's easy.
1. Get a cop to dress up in street clothes.
2. Enter protest.
3. Throw a rock, push some people around, start a fistfight, whatever
4. The protest turns into a riot, the cops come down and beat the crap out of whomever they want, arrest everyone else, and go home.
They must mean New York, USSR. Americans would never allow this type of stuff.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
> What does this have to do with corruption? It's about spying on a bunch of misfits and hooligans.
But you don't understand! If they are trying to blow up Republicans they are patriots and heros. Shame on the NYPD for aiding and abetting BusHitler.
Seriously though; read the whole article and reading through the painfully obvious bias the NYT put on it it looked like a textbook example of good police work. They didn't tap any phones or break the law, they read open sourses like webpages and they put boots on the ground at meetings open to the public to collect human intelligence. Yes they kept files on threats and non threats, who wants to have each team investigate the same harmless nuts? Then when the convention hit they knew which ones were the small hardcore fringe most likely to commit crimes and they culled em out of the herd while allowing several hundred thousand (misguided fools in my humble opinion, but I respect their right to BE fools) protesters to peacefully assemble and petition their government for redress of their idiot grievences.
Bottom line people, the right to protest DOES not include the right to anarchy, terror and violence. A million or so of the diehard socialist/progressive/green side need to learn the difference, including it appears 75% of slashdot's readership.
Democrat delenda est
Hopefully you don't mean to conflate "people who planned to protest at the convention" with "destructive assholes". And that's the problem here: the police are treating people with dissenting political views as potential criminals. That's an unfortunate situation in a supposedly free society: at the very least, it certainly has a chilling effect on free speech. I've lived in a country where you had to worry about whether your neighbor or some of your college buddies were reporting on what you said to the government. That's a very effective tool for keeping a populace in line and suppressing dissent, or at least driving it underground. Paradoxically, though, the more you do that kind of thing, the more likely you are to have a huge blowup (figuratively and literally) in future.
Have you ever sat around with a group of friends who you know share your opinions, and bullshitted about how you'd like to kill someone, or see them killed, or blow up something to make a point, etc.? People say that sort of stuff all the time, even quite respectable people, especially when they're young. Now imagine there's an undercover cop in the room, and what's going to go in his report. Watch the movie "A Scanner Darkly" (or read the book) to get a bit of a feel for this, it's quite accurate in that respect. Pretty soon you've got federal agents chasing shadows, and SWAT raids on innocent people's houses. That hasn't happened all that much in the U.S. recently, yet, but the way things are going, it seems like just a matter of time. Perhaps every few generations, it's necessary to rediscover firsthand why the iron fist approach to governance doesn't work.
That all said, cops still have a job to do. But when conducting operations like this one, they need to be held to a high standard. Did you RTFA? Here's a quote:
The problem is that when you give people power over other people, abuse all too easily follows. We saw that in Abu Ghraib, and it's been demonstrated over and over in psychological experiments. When you turn someone into a spy, especially someone who isn't properly trained, it can be difficult for them to remember their real mission -- suddenly, finding anything out about anyone starts to seem important. (Some special prosecutors seem to have suffered from this effect, too.) So with operations like this, real care and oversight is needed.
Disclosure: I don't feel like registering, so I did not read the article. My comments are based completely on the summary. Feel free to correct me if the story indicates otherwise.
That said, what the NYPD did is (1) travel to cities around the world (2) to observe public meetings of groups of people (3) who were likely to be in NYC during the convention (4) and cause significant disruptions in business and city services (5) for an extended period of time.
This is not espionage, it is scouting. The NYPD did not obtain any secret information from these meetings. These were publicly open meetings intended to disseminate the information the NYPD was after to anyone in attendance. The NYPD took action that an average person could take if they were willing to spend a several thousand dollars.
This is no different than a basketball coach attending an opposing team's game or looking at their game film. This is no different, even, than a police man listening to two people talking in the middle of a busy street. It is settled law, in the US at least, that individuals or groups of individuals have no expectation of privacy in a public area.
The NYPD did not exercise any extra-jurisdictional control over these people or use any methods that would illegal under either US, New York, or Local Country law. All they did was attend public meetings without advertising their presence. There is no evidence here that NYPD was abusing its authority in observing these groups, that it infiltrated these groups to cause internal disruptions, or that its observation invaded the privacy of these groups. In short, the NYPD did nothing legally or morally wrong.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
I disagree. You'll never get good citizen oversight of elected officials and the election process (at the national level) when the average Senator represents 6 million people. Politicians are not responsible to the people, they are responsible to the media who inform the people. Even most self-described "informed" voters get the bulk of their information from television.
You're right, apathy is a problem. But ignorance and miseducation are just as big a problem, as is access to media.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Bush: Our enemies will never stop thinking of ways to harm our country and our people, and neither will we.
Isn't it clear then that the only solution is to stop corporations from buying politicans? And no, you can't use the political process to stop them.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The four boxes of Freedom:
Soap Box,
Ballot Box,
Jury Box,
Cartridge Box.
Use in that order.
We're between Soap and Ballot Box at the moment. Depending on how the elections go, we MAY get some of these guys to the Jury Box stage.
LG
Any of you Republicans-Is-Evil people remember the '68 DEMOCRAT convention? Thought not, it might open your eyes that both sides are just as bad, meanwhile the Mass Publis wastes it's time blaming each other's chosen party.
I'm pretty sure that there isn't anything in between and I'm pretty sure they're the only options.
Go for the revolt. It's obviously the only effective thing to do and it's how our country tried it the first time, maybe we can get it right now...
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Don't feed the trolls. Don't feed the trolls. Don't feed the... ah, crap.
The current controversy is because firing US Attorneys en masse in the middle of a President's term is unprecedented. Lots of presidents appoint new attorneys when they take office. If you think Clinton is getting a free pass, here's a brain twister for you: Bush did the same thing when he took office, and nobody said a thing about it. If it's really "it's okay if Clinton does it, but not Bush!" then why didn't anyone complain then? Maybe because what's happening now isn't the same thing?