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March 26, 2007
NYC Police Spied Broadly Before GOP Convention
On one level this is neither surprising or overly concerning. The job of the police force is to maintain law and order. So the fact that they worked to figure out who had plans to be violent and collected information about them isn't a matter for concern. But then you read something like this.
From these operations, run by the department's "R.N.C. Intelligence Squad," the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped "N.Y.P.D. Secret," the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.
What??? RNC Intelligence Squad??? I think I need some clarification now if this was a temporary working group or a permanent extension of the police force that is still alive today. We've heard for years that the GOP has abused it's political power to manipulate the justice system into being an extension of the Republican party, but this borders on just being criminal!
I know this may sound strange to the Republican readers out there, but we have this thing called a constitution...I know wild concept there, but it guarantees certain inalienable rights to American citizens and one of them is the "the right of the people peaceably to assemble". That means protesters no matter how annoying or misguided have the right to protest your convention no matter how it will make you look in the media. Trust me a few protesters would look a lot less scary to the world than an RNC Intelligence division spying on Americans trying to exercise their constitutionally protected rights of assembly.
Read more over at Crooks and Liars.
Update: 9:45 PM: Just read a great expanded post on the subject of spying on protesters over at Daily Kos.
Posted by Jamison at March 26, 2007 7:23 AM
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