SMILE!….I missed posting about this over the weekend, but the Washington Post ran a fascinating article yesterday about a multi-year effort by the Maryland State Police to spy on a wide variety of liberal activist groups. It all started with the infiltration of a group protesting a planned execution, and then spiraled out of control:
Meanwhile, the intelligence-gathering expanded in other directions, to activists in New York, Missouri, San Francisco and at the University of Maryland. Shane Dillingham’s primary crime, according to the six-page file classifying him as a terrorist, was “anarchism.” Police opened a file on the doctoral student in history a week after an undercover officer attended a College Park forum featuring a jailhouse phone conversation with Evans.
Investigators also tracked activists protesting weapons manufactured by defense contractor Lockheed Martin. They watched two pacifist Catholic nuns from Baltimore. Environmental activists made it into the database, as did three leaders of Code Pink, a national women’s antiwar group, who do not live in Maryland.
PETA was labeled a “security threat group” in April 2005, and by July police were looking into a tip that the group had learned about a failing chicken farm in Kent County and planned on “protesting or stealing the chickens.”
This all started in 2005 and went on until 2007, so it wasn’t some kind of panicked reaction to 9/11. It’s been stopped since, and according to the Post, the Maryland State Police “plan to solicit advice from the ACLU, the General Assembly, prosecutors and police about regulations that would raise the bar for intelligence-gathering to ‘reasonable suspicion’ of a crime.” Good to know.
