Slashdot Mirror
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 NYPD exhibiting "Bad Faith"?
Why am I not surprised?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
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."
When I read that, I couldn't help but feel an overwhelming sense of well, nothing. Our government as a whole has fallen so far it is no longer suprising or even "despicable", it's almost routine, and that is the truly disgusting part.
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.
Of course! Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
(a) Ineffectual: writing or congresspersons, letters to the editor, voting.
(b) (Typically) Crazy: armed revolt.
It's like none of us (including me) knows how to navigate the territory between those two extremes. Heck, I don't even know whether or not there is any territory in between.
Is this why we're damned to stand bye, then get over these things and go watch the newest B.S.G episode to forget about the state of the nation? We're just convinced that there's no effective way to deal with these things without resorting to violence, which we're (sensibly) loathe to do?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
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?
How do you know the "extremists" aren't police plants? Once upon a time, that would have sounded like a paranoid remark, but with this crowd, who knows?
And kids, don't forget, not only should we start planning how to disrupt the 2008 Republican Convention, we should make "plans" even if we have no intention of going. Make those spies earn their pay. Shouldn't be hard to get their attention, if they are willing to infiltrate the Quakers and Billionaires for Bush.
Once the FSB determines who the troublemakers are, the Kremlin orders its loyalists in the city governments to suppress dissent. In fact, on March 24, Russian authorities arrested all the peaceful protestors before they could begin their rally.
Will Washington follow in the footsteps of Moscow and go to the next logical step after spying? I hope that the answer is "no", but I cannot be 100% certain that the answer is "no".
They must mean New York, USSR. Americans would never allow this type of stuff.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
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...
Ok, I did not read the part about NYPD officers posing as sympathizers. That completely blows my argument up. I was under the impression that the officers were silent, uninvolved observers. There's nothing to look at here, carry on.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Somehow I find it unlikely that the NYPD is up to date on current law in every jurisdiction where these activities took place. The likelihood of them having violated the legal rights of citizens increased with every new jurisdiction they entered for this conduct.
It should be noted, for example, that California's Constitution has an explicit right to Privacy, and the state AG has directed local law enforcement that "it is a mistake of constitutional dimension to gather information for a criminal intelligence file where there is no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity". In other words, what these officers did is blatantly unconstitutional in California, and only questionably unconstitutional in other jurisdictions.
It's okay, I support the right of you to be a fool willing to throw out the rights of anyone other than yourself, as long as they disagree with your politics. Continue to tell yourself that 90% of the world's population and 75% of the American population is wrong about current policy and that you, in your infinite wisdom, are the only one who understand how true peace and order may be brought to the world.
Thank you! If only you'd tell law enforcement agencies that, perhaps more peaceful protests could take place and we could all forget that the phrase "agent provocateur" ever existed!
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Anarchy, terror and violence are a police prerogative.
I watched this convention on television and saw the mass arrests in D.C. during the Nixon years.
Police are always politically controlled and will commit any violence necessary to satisfy their masters.
When police leave criminal investigations to enforce political decisions, no one is safe.
>>But no, you're probably right, that this admin is working hard to rise to Nixonian levels.<<
Huh? By many measures of governmental openness, this administration has surpassed Nixonian levels of secrecy. Don't forget that this administration had a long period where they controlled all three branches of government, enabling them to change policies and regulations so that secrecy became institutionalized. Nixon did not have an opportunity to do this.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Since when is the NYPD Republican?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The problem here isn't necessarily what they were monitoring, but why they were monitioring it. As the article repeatedly states, one must have grounds for an inquiry (i.e. possible illegal activity, backed up by either compelling circumstantial evidence or hard empirical evidence) before conducting a covert inquiry. As an example: it would be perfectly legal, in most cases, to begin covert surveillance of a target if the object of the investigation could in some way be demonstrated to be a possible factor involved in illegal activty, such as someone here in TN buying extremely large amounts of, say, nyquil (can be used in making crytsal methamphetamine), so long as the amounts were truly beyond any conceivable norm (compelling circumstantial evidence). While this would by no means be enough for an arrest or conviction, a judge could be convinced to allow wiretapping, diversion of assets towards surveillance, etc. However, one bottle of nyquil would not be enough (one would hope) to get this kind of permission.
In the case reported in the article, the NYPD was effectively conducting surveillance of the one bottle of nyquil people. Simply being involved in a political protest group is by no means indicitive of illegal activity; however, the police apparently deployed assets to groups with apparently peacful intentions, with no cause to suspect illegal activity (one bottle of nyquil.) Now, if the police could show that Group A. had been responsible, say, for severe property damage at the WTO riots in Seatlle, that is compelling circumstantial evidence (did it before, might do it again) that could be used in obtaining permission for covert intelligence gathering (55 gallons of nyquil, so to speak). This does not seem to be the case here, however.
The reason that this distinction is so important is that power does tend to corrupt, not necessarily morally, as the old adage is often taken to be stating, but more often ethically. You're a cop: protect and serve, preserve the peace, and all that. By the very nature of your job, if you're dedicated to it, anyways, you are going to always be pushing as close to the edge as possible. But where exactly is that edge? Where society (in the form of government, an ethical government one would hope) places it. Only when these distinctions are upheld, only when this line is constantly reinforced and restated, does the concept of checks and balances truly work. In this case, the police have overstepped their authority, it seems. Conducting an investigation with no probable cause is no different than pulling random people off of the street and interrogating them for a crime that one has no reason to suspect they comitted. Case in point: guys, how would you feel if everytime a woman was raped in your town, every male was wiretapped, followed, and snooped on? You might say that such a thing would be different, but it's not. After all, you have a penis (these people were involved in protest groups), and almost all women are raped by men (these groups are similar in form to groups that have created disruptions in the past), so all men should be surveilled equally (RTFA).
The argument can go on and on: it is logically sound. However, the thing that is most compelling to me in this instance is it reminds me of the FBI during the Cold War, expecially during the Mcarthy era, and the Vietnam war. Do we not find it disturbing that people like MLK Jr., John Lennon, and the vast majority of the faculties of NE colleges were under surveillance, that dossiers were compiled on their potential "socialist," or "Communist," leanings, due to no more evidence than that they "fit the profile,"? Same thing here. Such policies were the product of Hoover and his protegees at the FBI, which nowadays are
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
Bottom line people, the right to protest DOES not include the right to anarchy, terror and violence
It does, however, include the right to speedy processing if you are arrested.
"senior police officials had said for months that they anticipated 1,000 arrests a day during the convention" (msnbc article).
So police intelligence indicated as many as 1000 arrests per day, the state and courts geared up for the onslaught, and yet the police department decided just to hold everyone in a converted maintenance garage and then release without charging them with anything? Sounds like a bit like a police state to me. Thankfully "State Supreme Court Judge John Cataldo held officials in contempt of court. "These people," Cataldo said of those arrested, "have already been victims of the process.""
So the police had a wealth of info about who they should watch and arrest and yet they went over the top and arrested entire blocks of people.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Thinking in context. Most young people agree that the government is a failure, so most likely the hawks are going to be like you - unjustifiably condescending, poor with logic, and perhaps unlike you, at least aware of these two well-documented scandals which are hard for pro-government types to deny.
My other favorite thing is experiencing a laughable attempt at character assassination during the course of an argument. Oh Noam, you old guy! Let me call you a name without referencing any fact or ideology to which I can provide an intriguing counter-example! My reputation as a slashdot reader will certainly provide some credit to my unbeatable intellect!
Of course, I know your petty little mean streak is the only thing you can hold on to with any clarity. Please continue, and leave the thinking to the rest of us. (And if you are trolling, good job - and please, continue trolling slashdot and leave the thinking to the rest of us).
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?
It's more than that.
l /dp/1583227563/
There is no argument that USAs serve "At the pleasure of The President".
*IF* George Bush had simply asked them to resign, there would be no scandal.
*BUT* George Bush chose to lie about the reasons they were asked to leave, defaming those USAs who in fact had very highly rated performance reviews.
Pay attention to this simple fact:
It's not the action, it's the cover-up.
And the kicker here? NO COVER UP WAS NEEDED. They just did the cover-up move out of habit.
And then Gonzales lied to Congress. And it all fell apart.
Hmmm.. Why is it important for all the USAs to be "Loyal Bushies" to use the criteria Alberto Gonzales office was using according to their emails?
It's the simple fact that the entire administration is vulnerable to charges for violating 18 USC 371.
Let me excerpt a bit of Elizabeth de la Vega's book, from the Model Indictment she drew up. ( She's an ex-United States Attorney, btw. )
From USA v. Bush. http://www.amazon.com/United-States-George-Bush-a
11. Pursuant to the Constitution, their oaths of office, their status as Executive Branch employees, and their presence in the United States, BUSH, CHENEY, RICE, RUMSFELD, and POWELL, and their subordinates and employees, are required to obey Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States.
12. As used in Section 371, the term "to defraud the United States" means "to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful government functions by deceit, craft, trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest." The term also means to "impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful function of any department of government" by the use of "false or fraudulent pretenses or representations."
13. A "false" or "fraudulent" representation is one that is: (a) made with knowledge that it is untrue; (b) a half-truth; (c) made without a reasonable basis or with reckless indifference as to whether it is, in fact, true or false; or (d) literally true, but intentionally presented in a manner reasonably calculated to deceive a person of ordinary prudence and intelligence. The knowing concealment or omission of information that a reasonable person would consider important in deciding an issue also constitutes fraud.
14. Congress is a "department of the United States" within the meaning of Section 371. In addition, hearings regarding funding for military action and authorization to use military force are "lawful functions" of Congress.
15. Accordingly, the presentation of information to Congress and the general public through deceit, craft, trickery, dishonest means, and fraudulent representations, including lies, half-truths, material omissions, and statements made with reckless indifference to their truth or falsity, while knowing and intending that such fraudulent representations would influence Congress' decisions regarding authorization to use military force and funding for military action, constitutes interfering with, obstructing, impairing, and defeating a lawful government function of a department of the United States within the meaning of Section 371.
It looks like it would take a SINGLE United States Attorney with the guts to do their job, as per their oath, and the ENTIRE administration would be perp-walked at the same time.
Explains why Bush will ultimately give away whatever he's asked. That's a hella big club to hold over his head.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org