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´from:
http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2001-11-21/triangles.html
Click Here: <A
HREF="http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2001-11-21/triangles.html";>The
Independent Weekly: The Poster Police</A>
-----
The Poster Police
A Durham student activist gets a visit from the Secret Service
B Y J O N E L L I S T O N
A.J. Brown, a 19-year-old freshman at Durham Tech, was thanking God it was
Friday. It was 5 p.m., the school week was over, and in an hour she'd be
meeting her boyfriend to unwind.
November 21, 2001
T R I A N G L E S
Then: Knock, knock ... unexpected guests at Brown's Duke Manor apartment.
Opening the door, she found a casually dressed man, and a man and woman in
what appeared to be business attire. Her first thought, she says, was, "Are
these people going to sell me something?"
Photo By Alex Maness
Threat or dissent? A.J. Brown and her anti-Bush poster
------------------------------------------------------------------------
But then the man in the suit introduced himself and the woman as agents from
the Raleigh office of the U.S. Secret Service. The other man was an
investigator from the Durham Police Department.
"Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material," the male
agent said, according to Brown. Could they come in to have a look around?
"Do you have a warrant?" Brown asked. They did not. "Then you're not coming
in my apartment," she said. And indeed, they stayed outside her doorway. But
they stayed a while--40 minutes, Brown estimates--and gave her a taste of how
dissenters can come under scrutiny in wartime.
And all because of a poster on her wall.
Though she's still a teenager, Brown is already more informed about political
repression than most Americans. She's been politically aware and involved
since grade school. "In second grade, I saw the Gulf War on television, and
seeing those bombs drop, it did something to me," she says. "I knew from some
news reports that there were innocent people dying."
In middle school, Brown became interested in environmentalism and civil
liberties. She made the shift to full-fledged activist at Jordan High School
when she became involved with Youth Voice Radio, a media collective with a
leftist bent. Most recently, she's been involved with the movement against
the war in Afghanistan.
Brown and fellow activists often discuss government encroachments on free
speech and political organizing, she says, as do some of her favorite hip-hop
artists. She loves her music--and that may have been what sparked the turn of
events that brought the Secret Service to her door.
Brown suspects it began with the noise complaints. On Oct. 22, a Monday
evening, she stayed up late playing some new CDs for her boyfriend. By her
own admission, she was playing them too loud. Around midnight, a Durham
police officer came by to tell her to turn it down, and she obliged.
Two nights later, someone from Duke Manor called in another noise complaint,
and again a police officer came to Brown's door. This time, she says, her
music wasn't playing at an offensive volume. The police officer speculated
that the call may have been about someone else's stereo. During this visit,
and unlike the first, the officer had a full view of the wall that faces
Brown's front doorway, a detail that would become relevant two days later: On
that wall hung The Poster.
Brown got it at an "anti-inauguration" protest in Washington, D.C.
Distributed to hundreds of activists, it depicts George W. Bush holding a
length of rope against a backdrop of lynching victims, and reads: "We hang on
your every word. George Bush: Wanted, 152 Dead"--a reference to the number of
people executed by the state of Texas while Bush was governor. Brown believes
that the message caused the Durham policeman who paid the second visit to her
apartment to recommend a third.
On Friday, Oct. 26, two Secret Service agents, along with Durham police
investigator Rex Godley, came to Brown's apartment. Special Agent Paul
Lalley, who did most of the talking, spoke first. "Ma'am, we've gotten a
report that you have anti-American material, or something like that, in your
apartment," he said, according to Brown. Then the female agent asked if they
could come inside.
When Brown pressed them for a warrant and refused to allow them in, she says,
"They started to talk to me about how, 'We're not here to take you away or
put you in jail.' They were like, 'We need to follow up on every report we
get.' I said, 'That's understandable, but how would you even know what's in
my apartment?'
"They just said they had gotten information from some place," she says. She
speculates that it was from the police officer who visited for the second
noise complaint.
Godley, the Durham police investigator, won't say where the authorities got
their tip about Brown's poster. "The only thing I can tell you is that we
were assisting the Secret Service on one of their cases," he says.
Lalley referred questions about the visit to Special Agent Craig Ulmer, who
heads the Secret Service office in Raleigh.
"We went in the first place because we received a tip about a threat against
the president," Ulmer says. He refuses to identify the source of the tip,
except to say that it was a "concerned citizen" and not a law enforcement
officer. It's Secret Service policy to keep such sources confidential.
"We can't discuss who gives us information like that, because we want people
to bring us information," Ulmer says. "If we burn our bridges, so to speak,
we're not going to get help from the public."
Ulmer added that the poster "was in plain view, even from the window, so
anyone could have tipped us off."
The agents persisted in their effort to get a peek inside the apartment.
"They were being friendly, trying to get me to let them in," Brown says.
After a while, Brown called her mother, an IBM employee who is in the Army
Reserve. "She said to absolutely not let them in," Brown says. Not sure what
else to do, Brown passed the phone--with her mother still on the line--to one
of the agents.
The standoff continued, and eventually the agents explained why they had come
by: "We already know what it is; it's a target of Bush," one of them said,
according to Brown--apparently a reference to the poster. She informed them
it was no such thing. They then said, "Well, it's Bush hanging himself."
Nope, she told them.
Finally, Brown relented a bit, agreeing to open the door and show them her
poster wall. "They looked in, and the lady was like, 'Ohhhh, that's not that
bad.'" The male agent added, "We've seen worse."
Still, Brown's brush with the authorities wasn't over. "Since they were just
gawking at my wall, I decided to explain it."
The wall features Brown's favorite art and mementos: a high-school photo
project showing the perils of smoking cigarettes; a Pink Floyd poster ("It
has that phrase, 'Mother should I trust the government,' so I had to get
it"); posters for two Japanese cartoon shows; several pictures she took at
protests and rallies; and a headband with "Democracy" on it. And, of course,
the Bush-as-hangman poster.
Having seen the poster, Brown says, the agents questioned her further,
asking: "Do you have any Afghanistan stuff in your apartment, or anything
pertaining to that? Any pro-Taliban stuff?"
"I kept saying no," Brown says, "and I was like, personally, I think the
Taliban are a bunch of assholes." With that, the investigator and the agents
bid her adieu.
Brown was temporarily rattled by the visit from the Secret Service, she says,
but the poster's still up, and she's still committed to her activism. "I'm
definitely going to be vocal," she says. "If things get really hairy and they
decide to come after activists, then I'd have to just grit my teeth and go
through it."
Ulmer rejects the notion that Brown was targeted because of her politics, and
he insists that the Secret Service would have checked this tip out even if it
had come in before the events of Sept. 11. "We were doing our job in this
particular case," he says, "and I don't think we could have done it any
better."
"The Secret Service takes all threats against the president seriously, and we
go out to check on every one. A citizen thought that there was a threat, and
we went and talked to Ms. Brown and we found that there was not a threat."
The poster, he says, was "misconstrued" by the tipster. "So it's not a big
issue. The issue is that someone misinterpreted some writing."
But when "some writing" on a poster is investigated by federal authorities,
constitutional issues come into play. Some legal analysts are warning that
the new national security vigilance, and new laws passed to counter
terrorism, might impinge on free speech in big and small ways.
"A poster of Bush, even if he's in a noose, is protected speech during
wartime or peacetime," notes Alex Charns, a Durham attorney who specializes
in civil rights. Such speech is all the more protected, he points out, when
it's displayed within a person's home.
"If a trained police officer doesn't know the difference between political
speech and a threat to the president, then we're all in trouble," Charns
says. "If the Secret Service has nothing better to do than check on political
posters, that's a bad sign."
The Web sites of the American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org) and the
National Lawyers Guild (www.nlg.org) offer analysis of the changing legal
climate and advice for what to do if local or federal authorities come
knocking.
More Civil Liberties Stories:
* A Radical on the Road? - The latest North Carolina notable to turn up in
the FBI files is veteran CBS reporter Charles Kuralt. - Jon Elliston (June
13, 2001)
RECENTLY:
* All Aboard - Democratic mayors get their chance to make the Triangle's
trains run on time. - Bob Geary (November 14, 2001)
* Square One - Citizens want Raleigh officials to start over on a redesign
of Moore Square and this time, to include them in the process. - Bob Geary
(November 7, 2001)
* Telltale Signs? - Black votes from Raleigh's Southeast neighborhood could
be key to the tight mayoral race. - Damien Jackson (October 31, 2001)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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