Activists’ Names Put on Terror Lists
From the Washington Post yesterday:
The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.
It goes downhill from there. To summarize, these are people who committed no crime, and they were sent a letter by the Maryland State Police Superintendent, Col. Terence B. Sheridan, admitting as much.
In a legislative hearing, Col. Sheridan and his predecessor, Thomas E. Hutchins, blamed the classification in part on the limitations of the tracking database:
Both Hutchins and Sheridan said the activists’ names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.
Every time privacy advocates protest the use of these databases to keep tabs on the public, they get dismissed as nervous nellies by the lovers of big government. This is crystal clear proof of the danger of placing technology in the hands of buffoons. The result:
The police also entered the activists’ names into the federal Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database, which tracks suspected terrorists. One well-known antiwar activist from Baltimore, Max Obuszewski, was singled out in the intelligence logs released by the ACLU, which described a “primary crime” of “terrorism-anti-government” and a “secondary crime” of “terrorism-anti-war protesters.”
I’m not familiar with Obuszewski, but when being “anti-government” or “anti-war” gets hyphenated with “terrorism” we have a problem. Databases can’t tell the difference between nonviolent, legal dissent, and apparently the Maryland State Police can’t either:
“I don’t believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government,” he said. Hutchins said he did not notify Ehrlich about the surveillance. Ehrlich spokesman Henry Fawell said the governor had no comment.
No, it’s not, but what counts as “disrupting the government?” If they disrupted the government, shouldn’t they be charged with a crime first? Is there no need for those formalities anymore?
HT to TheZoo.
