Police Spying 101 A federal court ruling just made police surveillance of political activists even easier By Jim Redden, Special to Utne Reader Online Activists are alarmed by a recent federal court ruling which eases restrictions against political surveillance by law enforcement agencies.
The ruling was issued on January 11, 2001 by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. It relaxed restrictions intended to prevent the Chicago Police Department from spying on law-abiding political dissidents. The restrictions were included in a 1981 consent decree stemming from a 1974 lawsuit by the Alliance to End Repression. The suit charged that the FBI's Chicago office and the Chicago police routinely violated First Amendment rights when investigating dissidents. The suit particularly targeted the police department Intelligence Division, dubbed the 'Red Squad' because of its infiltration on communist, socialist and other left-wing organizations.
In its ruling, the court said today's political climate is so different from the 1960s and 1970s that the rules need to be changed.
"The era in which the Red Squad flourished is history, along with the Red Squad itself," the court said. "The instabilities of that era have largely disappeared. Fear of communist subversion, so strong a motivator of constitutional infringement in those days, has disappeared.
"Today, the concern, prudent and not paranoid, is with ideologically motivated terrorism," the ruling continued. "The city does not want to resurrect the Red Squad. It wants to be able to keep tabs on incipient terrorist groups. And if the ... investigation cannot begin until the group is well on its way toward the commission of terrorist acts, the investigation may come too late to prevent the acts or identify the perpetrators."
Douglas Lee, a lawyer and legal correspondent for the First Amendment Center, says the ruling is based on faulty reasoning.
"From a First Amendment perspective, no distinction exists between 'communist subversion' and 'ideologically motivated terrorism'," Lee wrote in the January 1, 2001 edition of The Freedom Forum Online. "As long as First Amendment conduct does not directly incite imminent illegal action, it is protected, whether it advocates communism or some other anti-democratic message. Conduct falling outside the freedoms of speech and assembly never has been protected by the First Amendment and was not protected by the decree. The effect of modifying the decree, therefore, can only be to permit investigation of pure First Amendment conduct." Lee is correct. And because the ruling came from a federal court, it potentially applies to all police intelligence divisions. So political activists across the country have a right to be concerned.
But the truth is, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies never stopped spying on law-abiding political dissidents. That why the Washington DC police department is able to boast that it successfully infiltrated the protesters who demonstrated against the inauguration of George W. Bush on January 20.
Confused? You should be. The corporate press has long pushed the myth that political spying in this country was substantially curtailed in the wake of the Watergate Scandal. Many aging liberals have embraced this myth as proof that they helped drive Richard Nixon out of office.
Reality is a little different, as I documented in my recently-released book Snitch Culture: How Citizens are Turned Into the Eyes and Ears of the State (Feral House, 2000).
Here's what happened. http://www.utne.com/bSociety.tmpl?command=search&db=dArticle.db&eqheadlinedata=Police%20Spying%20101