The presentations by Kit Bonson, Saqib Ali, Max Obuszewski, and Sue Udry were followed by a series of questions from the audience, among them:
What will the public do when these kinds of abuses are claimed? Activists are ready to be persuaded, but ordinary people don’t want to believe these kinds of things are true.
What are the real prospects for cooperation with libertarian, conservative, otherwise right-wing groups on issues like these?
What are the limits, if any, on infiltration of peaceful groups by law enforcement?
Thank you to our audience for attending the event and for your great contributions!
Rules governing infiltration of First Amendment activity groups
In Maryland, law enforcement must certify ‘reasonable articulable suspicion’ — as they see it: Section 3-701 of Maryland Code: “…(c) (1) A law enforcement agency may not conduct a covert investigation of a person, a group, or an organization engaged in First Amendment activities unless the chief or the chief’s designee makes a written finding in advance or as soon as is practicable afterwards that the covert investigation is justified because: (i) it is based on a reasonable, articulable suspicion that the person, group, or organization is planning or engaged in criminal activity; and(ii) a less intrusive method of investigation is not likely to yieldsatisfactory results. …“
Ms. Udry led off by discussing examples of environmental dissent chilled or disproportionately punished by laws, law enforcement, and the judicial system. She went on to notethat law enforcement agencies have also taken it on themselves to infiltrate and surveil all kinds of legitimate activism. Examples include the so-called “Fusion Centers” where federal, state, and local law enforcement work together on allegedly “terrorism”-related, but often simply activism-related casework, ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) maintaining a watch on peace activism(!), the DHS “Institute of Terrorism Research” monitoring right- and left-wing “extremism,” and the FBI engaging in entrapment operations against Muslim-Americans, Occupy activists, and political protesters. “It’s not the FBI’s role to take lost people and turn them into terrorists.”
Selected relevant links:
Defending Dissent “Resources” page, including links to…
Max Obuszewski recalled how he learned in 2008 that there were Maryland State Police files on him, via discovery by the ACLU of Maryland and a pro bono legal firm:
…when I got back to Baltimore there was a message and an email from David Rocah of the ACLU saying “bingo, we have something.” And it was the Maryland State Police — they said we have one page — but you can’t have it, because there’s an informant’s name on the page. [...] As it turned out there were many, many, many more pages. Initially it was thought that I was the only person in this database, but it soon came out there were at least 53…”
Former Maryland Assembly Delegate Saqib Ali (now government affairs director of CAIR-MD) addressed the audience about the civil liberties challenges faced by American Muslims. He shared some of the questionable work products of the “Demographics Unit” of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. He noted that while civil liberties and human rights abuses have often been begun by the right wing politicians, “liberals and Democrats are often complicit,” pointing out that both nominal Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the principal likely Democratic successors like Christine Quinn have supported the NYPD surveillance measures.
Mr. Ali also discussed the particularly charged issue of informants and infiltration of mosques, and how FBI informants and agents will often cajole and pressure naive, marginal, and/or unstable people into conspiracies they wouldn’t have joined without law enforcement “help.”
Muslim grade school staked out by New York’s finest; hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
Kit Bonson introduced the evening’s speakers Saqib Ali, Max Obuszewski, and Sue Udry, and then introduced the forum by noting that the issue of “defending dissent” is what sparked the formation of our group:
The Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition (MCCRC) started because in the fall of 2010, 7 activists in Minneapolis and Chicago awoke one morning to find that their houses were being raided by the FBI. Boxes and boxes of their possessions were confiscated, including computers, papers, and family photos. Although they were never charged with any crime, they were called to testify in front of a Grand Jury.
In response, activists here in our area, as well as in cities around the country, came together to protest the use of the FBI and the Grand Jury process to harass and intimidate movement organizers. Basically, we wanted to stand in solidarity with activists who had not committed crimes or advocated anything other than nonviolence action. It was from these events that MCCRC was founded.
Committee to Stop FBI Repression: a national coalition organizing to stop FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists
November 10, 2010 teach-in: videos and resources about the September 24 2010 FBI raids, the threat of grand juries, and the Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project ruling broadening the definition of “material support.”
If you’re one of those Americans with a belief or an opinion, you’re at risk these days.
That was the take home message from an excellent panel of activists at Thursday night’s “Defending Dissent: A Public Forum” event at Wheaton Regional Library, hosted by the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition and attended by activists and supporters from around the county.
Kit Bonson of the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition (MCCRC) emceed the event and introduced each of the speakers (learn about them here). In her remarks, Ms. Bonson explained how this forum returns to MCCRC’s origins in a 2010 teach-in prompted by raids and grand jury harassment of peace and social justice activists in Chicago and Minnesota earlier that year. She also described MCCRC’s evolution as a locally focused group actively educating the public and engaging government officials about civil liberties threats and like Metro bag searches, county youth curfew and related ‘loitering‘ proposals, the NDAA, and others, as well as countering harmful propaganda like the “creeping Shariah” myth or the Zero Dark Thirty movie with factual information.
American Muslim challenges
Saqib Ali (Council on American-Islamic Relations of Maryland) followed with an overview of challenges facing Muslim communities across the U.S., leading off with the infamous NYPD “Demographics” unit that singled out Muslim mosques, community centers, businesses and even elementary schools for surveillance. The former Maryland state legislator noted that while civil liberties and human rights abuses have often been begun by the right wing politicians, “liberals and Democrats are often complicit,” pointing out that both nominal Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the principal likely Democratic successors like Christine Quinn have supported the NYPD surveillance measures.
— Defending Dissent forum: seven-segment video playlist
Use small “[>]]” button, lower right, to choose a segment
—
He also discussed the particularly charged issue of informants and infiltration of mosques, and how FBI informants and agents will often cajole and pressure naive, marginal, and/or unstable people into conspiracies they wouldn’t have joined without law enforcement “help.”
Max Obuszewski (Baltimore Nonviolence Center)
Peace and death penalty activists targeted
Max Obuszewski (Baltimore Nonviolence Center) provided a personal perspective on the Maryland State Police infiltrations of peace and anti-death penalty groups during the Ehrlich administration. He pointed out that his story began well before the scandal reached newspapers and blogs in mid-2008; Mr. Obuszewski’s protests during the late 1990s at the NSA facilities at Fort Meade triggered inquiries by an FBI agent posing as a Baltimore Sun reporter. The veteran peace activist noted: “We could tell we were being watched.”
While that didn’t stop them, it eventually did result in a legal odyssey to discover just how extensive that completely unjustified surveillance had been: at least 53 activists like Obuszewski found their names in law enforcement databases — often labeled as ‘terrorists’ for their peaceful political advocacy.
Environmental advocacy penalized and chilled
The final speaker, Sue Udry (executive director of the Defending Dissent Foundation), first filled in for scheduled speaker Megan Jenny (Chesapeake Climate Action Network) who was unable to attend. Ms. Udry led off by describing regrettable legislation like so-called “Ag Gag” laws in some states prohibiting videotaping of agricultural business practices, and particularly the “Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act,” which, as the DDF web site notes, “brands as terrorism any activities that cross a state line and interfere with the operation of an animal enterprise or of any entity that deals with one,” even include mere website posts or peaceful vigils.
Audience at Wheaton Regional Library
The big picture
In addition to laws specifically targeting forms of activism, Sue Udry noted that law enforcement agencies have also taken it on themselves to infiltrate and surveil legitimate activism. Examples include the so-called “Fusion Centers” where federal, state, and local law enforcement work together on allegedly “terrorism”-related, but often simply activism-related casework, ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) maintaining a watch on peace activism(!), the DHS contractor “Institute of Terrorism Research” monitoring right- and left-wing “extremism,” and the FBI engaging in entrapment operations against Muslim-Americans, Occupy activists, and political protesters.
Ms. Udry concluded with where MCCRC began, by speaking about the abuse of “grand juries” as a means to compel testimony by advocates against each other — a key and disturbing feature of what Chicago, Minneapolis, and other activists have faced.
Rapid Response Network
Pointing out, again, that the Maryland State Police spy scandal proves unwarranted government surveillance of First Amendment activities can happen here, and that for example it’s entirely possible that local mosques are being infiltrated by law enforcement without cause, she concluded: “what we need is to be prepared for that.“
With that, Ms. Udry introduced MCCRC’s and DDF’s proposal for a local “Rapid Response Network,” likening it to the more familiar “Pledge of Resistance” model. While that is used to prepare for specific threats like an Iran War, the nature of the challenge for civil liberties advocates and the response to that is less easily defined: “We don’t know what might happen, what shoe might drop, but we want to have a network that’s ready to respond if a member of our community is targeted.”
Audience Q&A The presentations were followed by a series of questions from the audience, among them:
What will the public do when these kinds of abuses are claimed? Activists are ready to be persuaded, but ordinary people don’t want to believe these kinds of things are true.
What are the real prospects for cooperation with libertarian, conservative, otherwise right-wing groups on issues like these?
What are the limits, if any, on infiltration of peaceful groups by law enforcement?
We invite you to continue those discussions here!
Videos:
Kit Bonson on defending dissent and the formation of MCCRC
Saqib Ali on challenges to the civil liberties of American Muslims
Max Obuszewski on the surveillance and infiltration of Maryland peace, death penalty, and environmental groups
Sue Udry on the widening scope of efforts to chill or prevent dissent, and the idea of a “Rapid Response Network” to be ready to push back at the local level when needed. (Two videos; the slideshow presentation is also made accessible separately, for easier viewing.)
Let us know you’re coming and invite friends at our Facebook event page; you can also mark your Google calendar here.
Political Repression & Civil Liberties post 9/11
What effect has the “The War on Terror” had on free expression and grassroots political organizing in Maryland and across the United States since 9/11? Come to a public forum sponsored by Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition and hear from citizen organizers working to advance their causes and protect their rights.
Many people don’t understand how far-reaching the effects of the “war on terror” have been — and not just overseas, but here at home.
In Maryland, for example, we remember the notorious Maryland State Police infiltrations of peace and anti-death penalty groups during the Ehrlich administration. While that scandal led to some state reforms, the big picture remains bleak. Overly broad redefinitions of “terrorism” have ensnared environmental and animal rights activists; overzealous prosecutorial practices described variously as “manufactured crimes,” “pre-emptive prosecutions,” and/or simply “entrapment” have been used to make examples of the naive, the unwary, or the unstable. The result — and the intent — is to intimidate whole communities or movements, from American Muslims to environmentalists to Occupy or anti-war activists.
It’s critically important — not just for us, but for the country as a whole — to resist these practices. We must not let them chill our determination to profess our own beliefs — religious, political, or otherwise — or to dissent from others we can not agree to, no matter how powerful their advocates may be. The Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition will use the forum to propose a “Rapid Response Network” that would bring a diverse coalition of civil liberties, peace, environmental, and other interested groups together as a team any time local activists or others are targeted by local, state or federal agents.
One of our speakers, Sue Udry — executive director of the Defending Dissent Foundation –comments, “I’m looking forward to hearing from our neighbors about the work they are doing to better this world. It’s important to learn what challenges they are facing, obstacles to their work thrown in their way by our own government. Too often, tales of government abuse seem far away and from another time. But we know it hits close to home, and hurts the people we know and admire.”
Speakers include:
Kit Bonson (MCCRC) – Overview of civil liberties issues on a national scale and introduction of other speakers
Saqib Ali (CAIR-MD) – police profiling and pre-emptive prosecution/entrapment of Arab/Muslim communities as well as other targeted communities/groups
Max Obuszewski (Baltimore Nonviolence Center) – Maryland State Police infiltration of MD activists and similar events since then.
Sue Udry (Defending Dissent) – drawing the connections between movement experiences; future directions and coalition goals, especially regarding MCCRC’s “Rapid Response Network” in case local activists or others are targeted by local, state or federal agents
You can learn more about each of our speakers here.
A week ago I was in Annapolis to testify on behalf of a simple bill that’s so good it’s already helped me — and it’s not even a law yet. That’s because “even” people like myself, Mr. So-Called Privacy Advocate, need to be reminded to protect our privacy, and need a clear path to doing so.
===
All Delegate Bonnie Cullison’s HB1219 bill does is insist that consumers of financial institutions — which can include not just banks, but insurance companies, check cashing companies, even car dealers — must be informed in prominent, legible, 12 point font type near the top of all billing or account statements that (1) their nonpublic personal financial information can be shared with affiliates or 3d parties unless (2) they avail themselves of their right to opt out of that by (3) following equally prominent directions.
As Delegate Cullison acknowledged in her own testimony, the requirement to inform consumers that they can opt out of data sharing arrangements isn’t new. What’s new is making sure consumers actually get the message — one that’s typically buried at the bottom of the page in boring, innocuous fine print designed more to give a sense of, well, boring innocuous fine print, than of something that actually matters to you. As I put it in my testimony,
In a perfect privacy world, consumers would “opt in” to let financial institutions share their nonpublic data. But meanwhile, leading privacy advocates like the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the Electronic Privacy Information Center are clear that “opting out” of sharing such data is an important strategy in avoiding identity theft,(3) and that requirements to make that plainer to consumers would be an important improvement on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act governing this issue at the federal level.(4)
The fewer places your data are stored, the less chance of your data falling into the wrong hands. Delegate Cullison’s bill will help more consumers know that’s their decision to make.
I focused my own testimony on how the bill would help fight the plague of “identity theft,” where criminals use your private information as a way of gaining access to your money. But consumers run other risks as well:
Similarly, this bill also helps consumers reduce opportunities for unwarranted — and I use the term advisedly — privacy intrusions of other kinds. These range from unwanted but eerily well-informed solicitations to government surveillance — it’s an unfortunate fact that some federal departments and agencies buy data from so-called “data aggregator” companies for data mining purposes and aren’t held to Fourth Amendment standards in doing so.(5)
===
Two days later, I finally got around to thinking dully, “Hm. What about *my* nonpublic financial data?”
We want to thank the leadership and members of each of these organizations for agreeing to join our coalition letter in support of HB558, the “Maryland Liberty Preservation Act.” We didn’t succeed this time — wait till next year!
UPDATE: Many liaisons to organizations listed above have joined the newly formed “MD-NDAA” Google Group, a “coalition of organizations dedicated to opposing the NDAA in Maryland via state and local legislation.” If you can be a liaison to a Maryland organization that would like to join this listserv, click this “Apply for membership” link, and use the “additional information” box to tell us a little about yourself and your group. We look forward to hearing from you!
The bill would have prohibited “an agency of the State, a county of the State, an employee of the State or a county acting in an official capacity, or a member of the Maryland National Guard or the Maryland Defense Force, on official State duty, to knowingly aid an agency of the United States in the detention of a person in accordance with” the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA.
In a belated notice (dated March 12), the Maryland legislative web site provides a Friday, March 8 document displaying an almost purely party-line 16-7 vote against HB558. Regrettably, every Democrat on the House Health and Government Operations Committee voted against a bill, endorsed by the ACLU of Maryland, that required noncooperation with the unconstitutional and immoral indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA.
"...a vocal opponent of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) policy of random searches of passenger bags..." -- Government Security News
"fantastic work organizing around WMATA's search policy!" -- ACLU-Maryland
"a great example of focused grassroots action uniting transpartisan allies." -- BORDC
Many people don’t understand how far-reaching the effects of the “war on terror” have been — and not just overseas, but here at home.
MD financial consumer privacy bill supported – meanwhile, do it yourself!
A week ago I was in Annapolis to testify on behalf of a simple bill that’s so good it’s already helped me — and it’s not even a law yet. That’s because “even” people like myself, Mr. So-Called Privacy Advocate, need to be reminded to protect our privacy, and need a clear path to doing so.
===
As Delegate Cullison acknowledged in her own testimony, the requirement to inform consumers that they can opt out of data sharing arrangements isn’t new. What’s new is making sure consumers actually get the message — one that’s typically buried at the bottom of the page in boring, innocuous fine print designed more to give a sense of, well, boring innocuous fine print, than of something that actually matters to you. As I put it in my testimony,
I focused my own testimony on how the bill would help fight the plague of “identity theft,” where criminals use your private information as a way of gaining access to your money. But consumers run other risks as well:
===
Two days later, I finally got around to thinking dully, “Hm. What about *my* nonpublic financial data?”
Continue reading →
Share this:
Like this: