Maryland troopers spied on activist groups

Shaun Waterman
UPI
Friday, July 18, 2008

Undercover Maryland state troopers infiltrated three groups advocating peace and protesting the death penalty — attending meetings and sending reports on their activities to U.S. intelligence and military agencies, according to documents released Thursday.

The documents show the activities occurred from at least March 2005 to May 2006 and that officers used false names, which the documents referred to as “covert identities” – to open e-mail accounts to receive messages from the groups.

Also included in the 46 pages of documents, obtained by the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, is an account of an activist’s name being entered into a federally funded database designed to share information among state, local and federal law-enforcement agencies on terrorist and drug trafficking suspects.

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ACLU attorney David Rocah said state police violated federal laws prohibiting departments that receive federal funds from maintaining databases with information about political activities and affiliations.

The activist was identified as Max Obuszewski. His “primary crime” was entered into the database as “terrorism – anti govern(ment).” His “secondary crime” was listed as “terrorism – anti-war protestors.” The database is known as the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA.

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One Response to “Maryland troopers spied on activist groups”

1. vein Says:
   July 20th, 2008 at 4:50 pm

   You americans are lucky with your laws, constitution, and powerful independent activist groups with access to real ‘freedom of information’ options. Things are very different in the UK.

   Actually, there is an historic reason for this. Traditionally, the US government covertly collects evidence for later prosecutions. The security services in the UK are vastly more intelligent. Their actions are almost never used as evidence in court. If they select a target for prosecution, they will then help the ordinary police force to collect standard evidence, using covert operations to guide them if need be.

   The UK security services run to one main rule- NO OVERSIGHT EVER. Public accountability must never ever be an issue, so their actions must never be presented in a public theatre, like a court.

   The consequence of this is that ALL activist groups of any size, with any centralisation, are automatically targeted for infiltration. No organised activist group in the UK can be trusted. Government agents take key command and control positions in the organisations they need to direct (including political parties like the Liberals, BNP, and Greens). Few of these agents are full time- most were recruited at university. Agents are compartmentalised, so that their natural political allegiances, or personal outlooks, appear to be supported by their government handlers. They are NOT all of one political type, or even supporters of the current government- the british state is far more advanced in guile than that.

   Many of the agents are chosen because they hold some natural sympathy with the groups they are requested to infiltrate. The british encourage their agents to feel ’smarter’ than the state that employs them. This fatal psychological flaw allows the agents to be manipulated that much more easily.

   Their level of success must be seen in terms of the british anti-war movement. Almost the entirety of the UK population was against the recent war, and prepared to act to stop it. London saw the greatest demonstration ever. However, the security services had already created a new, mock anti-war activist group, to be led by a senior veteran agent, Galloway. His first task was to flavour the movement as an radical muslim grouping, so that all media coverage could emphasis this image. His second task was to ensure that no anti-war party had a unified presence on the ballot box across the nation during the next general election (Blair and New Labour could NOT have won a majority had there been such an option for british voters).

   To their amazement, the vast majority of british voters found that their own constituency had no anti-war candidate. Galloway was able to suggest, on the national news, that only those areas of the UK with a significant muslim population deserved such a candidate. He himself became MP again as the only winning candidate for RESPECT (the mock anti-war party) in a part of the UK that the national press could happily show as resembling some location in Afghanistan or Pakistan. After that, the british anti-war movement was dead-and-buried.