ACLU chapters from Massachusetts, Maine, Colorado and elsewhere are demanding records, and the national ACLU is filing suit against the Federal Govt today because the FBI has failed to answer its FOIA requests on the "anti-terrorism" surveillance of peace groups exercising their freedom of speech and assembly rights. Black vans, bogus interviews, the whole paranoid scene has been playing out for at least a year from Cambridge to San Francisco, since before the Democratic and Republican national conventions last summer and continuing now. Some documents have dribbled out:
From the Washington Post (about questioning of anti-war protesters last summer in Denver): ACLU officials said yesterday that the documents show that investigators from the FBI and the local Joint Terrorism Task Force were on a fishing expedition.
"These documents confirm that the FBI's anti-terrorism force has been collecting information about peaceful protesters and dissenters and targeting people for attention on the basis of constitutionally protected association and advocacy," said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU's Colorado chapter. "It lends credence to what a lot of critics have said: that the FBI is starting to regard some forms of dissent as potential terrorism."
Add this to your paranoia:
Senator Ted Stevens' report on personal data surfing via the Internet
Real ID passed by the Congress last week.
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