http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=43758
US Monitored, Penetrated Civil Societies CAIRO - Posing as sympathizers and activists, undercover New York Police Department (NYPD) officers have chronicled countless of intelligence digests and field reports about civil societies and anti-war groups in the US, Canada and Europe, The New York Times revealed on Sunday, March 25. "They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department's Intelligence Division," said police records reviewed by the American daily. Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the NYPD, admitted that the monitoring program had been wide-ranging, but staunchly defended it. "Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in advance what was coming our way," he told the paper. "When the detectives went out of town," he said, "the department usually alerted the local authorities by telephone or in person." The spying program was initially limited to groups seeking to disrupt 2004 Republican conventions across the United States, but had expanded to cover a wide array of other groups, the records show. The Republican convention operations were even conducted overseas in Canada and Europe. For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, the records say, teams of undercover police officers traveled to cities across the US, Canada and Europe to nip in the bud protests against the congress. "Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms," added the records, which are stamped "NYPD Secret" and based on the counts of three New York City elected officials. Daily reports from both the field and the Internet were summarized in bullet format and these "secret" digests were circulated weekly. Penetrated Field reports included officers' observations - known as DD5s - and descriptions of group gatherings, the leaders and participants, and the groups' plans, the records show. Among the penetrated groups is an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush, which was planning "political" concerts on October 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. "Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda," said one of the intelligence digests dated October 9, 2003. The sponsors of an event planned for January 15, 2004, in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, were listed in one of the reports, which noted that it was a protest against "the war in Iraq and the Bush administration." Anti-Republican Joshua Kinberg, a graduate student at Parsons School of Design, was also the subject of four pages of intelligence reports, including two pictures. "There's no reason I should have been placed on any kind of surveillance status," he told the Times. "It affected me, my ability to exercise free speech." Police acted according to intelligence and arrested Kinberg during a protest against a Republican convention. Other intercepted organizations included the satirical performance troupe Billionaires for Bush, the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization founded in 1923, the New York City AIDS Housing Network, the Arab Muslim American Foundation, Activists for the Liberation of Palestine, Queers for Peace and Justice and the 1199 Bread and Roses Cultural Project. Illegal Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven of the 1,806 people arrested during a 2004 Republican convention, blasted the police monitoring. "The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and this wide-ranging NYPD program was wrong and illegal," Dunn told the Times. "In the coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us many more details about its pre-convention surveillance of groups and activists, and many will be shocked by the breadth of the Police Department's political surveillance operation." In February 2003, the Police Department, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's support, was given broad new authority by Judge Haight to conduct such monitoring, the report said. Documents showed in 2005 that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was spying on and infiltrating American political organizations that criticized business interests and government policies. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, US President George W. Bush authorized spying on the country's main communications systems without court-approved warrants. But a federal judge on August 17 halted Bush's "unconstitutional" domestic spying program. For the past five years, the administration has also been taping into the comprehensive Passenger Name Record database, created by global travel reservation services. An electronic file for each person who makes a reservation contains details on rental cars or hotels, credit card information and contact information for the passenger and next of kin. According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, two-thirds of Americans believe the FBI and other federal agencies are intruding on privacy rights as part of terrorism investigations. 26 March 2007 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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