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Police
Spying in the Birthplace of the First Amendment
By DAVE LINDORFF
This past Thursday I was invited by
the group World Can't Wait to talk about impeachment and Bush's
preparations for war against Iran at a Philadelphia rally--part
of the group's Oct. 5 "Drive Out the Bush Regime" campaign
of 170 such rallies around the country. Assembled on the mall
in front of the Rizzo Municipal Offices building in central Philadelphia
in front of me were some 300 people, mostly young, and all well-behaved,
if high spirited.
While I was talking about the
Bush administration's impeachable crimes against the American
people and the Constitution--in particularly the ramming through
Congress of a bill that, for the first time since American patriots
drove the British out of the 13 colonies, authorizes indefinite
detainment
without charge and imprisonment of American citizens without
the right to a trial--I noticed two men in sunglasses with a
high-quality video camera and a high-quality still camera with
telephoto lense filming the assembled crowd of several hundred
mostly young people.
After I spoke, I walked over
to the two men and asked what station they were with. I was pretty
certain they were police, despite their total lack of identification,
because normally news organizations plaster their cameras with
their station call letters and these cameras had no such identification
on them. When I pressed them, both men turned their cameras directly
on me, from just two feet away, filming me as I denounced their
intimidation.
"You should be ashamed
of yourselves," I said, as young people around me looked
on in surprise. "This rally has a police permit, and all
the people here are legally exercising their First Amendment
rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly."
The two men remained silent,
and continued to grimly film and photograph me as I spoke. I
began telling everyone around me who the men were and what they
were doing, and some of the young people began to pester the
officers themselves.
I later saw a member of the
Philadelphia Police Department's Civil Affairs Unit, a Captain
William Fisher, who unlike the camera detail, was clearly identified
as a police officer by both a card pinned to his shirt, and by
a prominent armband saying: Philadelphia Police Department.
Asked why the men were filming
the crowd, he responded briskly, "This is a free country.
This is a public space. You're free to be here, and they're free
to come too and to take your picture."
I allowed as this was true,
technically, but that clearly there was an element of intimidation
involved when police come and film the faces of everyone who
comes to an event that is about criticizing the government.
"Oh, you're so `70s,"
he said, looking at my gray beard and balding head. "This
is the 21st Century. Get with it, man."
Indeed, he's right.
It is the 21st Century.
When I was a newspaper reporter
in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, it was discovered that the
Los Angeles Police Department was sending unmarked police officers
like these armed with video cameras to press conferences at places
like the Los Angeles Press Club, where they were setting up and
filming certain events as part of a campaign of keeping tabs
on activist groups.
This revelation caused a sensation,
with front-page articles in the Los Angeles Times, and inquiries
into the practice by irate members of the Los Angeles City Council.
In the end, the police were forced to back down and cease the
practice, at least for a time.
Now, here in Philadelphia,
birthplace of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, this trampling
of the freedom of assembly and speech seems to merit no attention
at all in the local mainstream media. When I called the Inquirer's
police reporter, Barbara Boyer, to alert her to what had happened,
her response was "Well, I could take your picture on the
sidewalk, too, if I wanted. It's not illegal."
Apparently the Philadelphia
Police Department and most of the local media think that it's
appropriate for police to film people who are exercising their
Constitutional rights, and that this is what we do in "21st
Century America." To me, though, this seems more like 1930s
Germany, or 21st-Century China.
Inspector Robert Tucker, who
heads the counter-terrorism task force of the Philadelphia Police
Department, confirmed in a phone conversation the next day that
the two men with the cameras were working for him. He apologized
for their lack of identification, and for their unwillingness
to identify themselves, promising that at future public events,
they and others doing that kind of work would wear prominent
identification showing they were with the police. But he insisted
that their work was appropriate.
"At events like these,
there are usually anarchists who show up," he argued, "and
they're the ones that sometimes end up breaking glass and causing
problems." (It's an argument that might justify video cams
on every street corner of Philly, since crime is everywhere.)
He said that by filming the whole group, it would be possible
to identify those people later if there were incidents. Asked
why the officers were videotaping the entire crowd--and the speakers
like myself who were clearly identifiable anyhow--he offered
no answer. Tucker claimed that the tapes and photos made at the
event would ordinarily not be retained, but would be "taped
over at the next event" unless there were an incident involving
an arrest, but he also noted that the department does maintain
files on "some people."
What makes this whole thing
feel particularly creepy is the anti-terrorism bill just passed
by a Congress of supine Republicans and cowardly Democrats, which
gives the president the authority, on his own, to call anyone
an "unlawful combatant," or a supporter of terrorism,
and to lock them away in a military brig with no right to a trial
or even a lawyer. When you put this police surveillance in that
context, it becomes intimidating indeed. Especially since the
Philadelphia Police counter-terrorism unit is an integral part
of the federal joint counter-terrorism strike force, making it
easy for such film materials to migrate over into federal hands.
It seems to me it's time to
get back not to the 1970s, but to the 1770s, when Americans knew
what was happening to them, and stood up and said, "No more!"
CounterPunch
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