They have a little list; if you're on it, you'll be pissed. [View All]

[weldon_berger]

The New York Times has a lengthy article on a "new" FBI program aimed at monitoring protests and protesters. Read it, and if you're old enough you'll have a delightful flashback to the good ol' days of cross-dressing FBI chiefs and COINTELPRO.

The F.B.I. is dangerously targeting Americans who are engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience is blurred, and I have a serious concern about whether we're going back to the days of Hoover."

Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law professor at American University who has written about F.B.I. history, said collecting intelligence at demonstrations is probably legal.

But he added: "As a matter of principle, it has a very serious chilling effect on peaceful demonstration. If you go around telling people, `We're going to ferret out information on demonstrations,' that deters people. People don't want their names and pictures in F.B.I. files."

The abuses of the Hoover era, which included efforts by the F.B.I. to harass and discredit Hoover's political enemies under a program known as Cointelpro, led to tight restrictions on F.B.I. investigations of political activities.

Those restrictions were relaxed significantly last year, when Attorney General John Ashcroft issued guidelines giving agents authority to attend political rallies, mosques and any event "open to the public."

The article also mentions the people suing the government in an attempt to find out how they got on the "no-fly" lists circulating among airlines. Losing your right to travel at will seems to me to be a more egregious transgression than getting your very own FBI file, but that could change in short order.

We're winning: the fewer freedoms we have, the less we'll annoy the terrorists.