Penn. governor-elect urged to ban surveillance
by Jon Hurdle in Philadelphia at Reuters.com
Civil rights activists on Wednesday urged Pennsylvania Governor-elect Tom Corbett to order State Police and state Homeland Security officials to halt any surveillance of protest groups deemed to be a threat to government or business.
Outgoing Governor Ed Rendell’s Homeland Security chief resigned under pressure in October after the Patriot-News of Harrisburg reported the state had hired a U.S.-Israeli company called the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response to monitor hundreds of organizations.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and about a dozen other groups called on Corbett to sign an executive order when he takes office in January that would bar officials from monitoring individuals and organizations, including peace activists, Muslims and opponents of natural gas drilling.
At his first post-election news conference, the Republican governor-elect avoided committing to a position but said he was unlikely to issue an executive order as the ACLU asked.
“I don’t see (issuing) a whole lot of executive orders unless they are absolutely necessary,” Corbett said. “I don’t think you need to issue executive orders on common-sense issues.”
The ACLU said such an order could “prohibit the state Office of Homeland Security and State Police from gathering information about people’s political or religious views and associations except as part of a criminal investigation based on reasonable suspicion of actual criminal conduct.”
The targeted organizations include the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Blair County Tea Party and the Green Party of Pennsylvania, according to the ACLU.
Rendell, a Democrat, said he was embarrassed by the surveillance. James Powers, the head of Pennsylvania’s Office of Homeland Security, resigned after admitting he had hired the company.
The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, based in Philadelphia and Jerusalem, produced a series of intelligence bulletins for state officials, reporting on events that it believed represented a threat.
They included an anarchists’ meeting expected in Philadelphia in December 2009, a gathering of peace activists outside an Army recruitment center in November 2009 and a February 2010 seminar on how to resist home foreclosure.
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Spotlight on Surveillance: Center City Press Conference and Forum Defend Dissent November 10th
by Iris Marie Bloom | Environmental Contributor at WeeklyPress.com
“You’ve got a nasty menage-a-trois going on here and the citizen activists are the ones getting fracked.” That’s Witold Walczak, legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, describing the collaboration between Pennsylvania Homeland Security; all the police forces to whom they report; and private industry, including the Marcellus Shale drillers who received 130 bulletins describing citizen activists as if they are potential terrorists.
Walczak was speaking with the Patriot News, which published an in-depth article November 7th detailing little-known Homeland Security practices, such as attempts to recruit “a network of citizen spies to combat the security threats they saw in virtually any legal political activity.”
Sara Mullen, associate director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, has been reading “terror watch” bulletins. One hundred and thirty bulletins, to be exact, all from the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security (OHS), using “intelligence” gathered by ITRR, the dubious private consulting entity hired to track citizen activists using taxpayer dollars in 2009 – 2010.
“From reading these bulletins, it’s clear that ITRR and the Office of Homeland Security found any expression of disagreement with the government or industry – even passing out pamphlets at a music festival – a potential threat. In reality, it was ITRR and OHS who posed a threat to Pennsylvanians’ constitutional rights,” Mullen said in an interview with the Weekly Press on November 8th.
Using “Right to Know” requests, the ACLU, activists, and investigative journalists continue to turn up stunning information regarding the extent, nature, and apparent intent of PA Homeland Security’s tracking of legal, nonviolent activists over the past year.
The tracking continues, according to the ACLU, despite the resignation of PA Homeland Security chief James Powers. So recent tracking bears close scrutiny.
Recipients of “intelligence” bulletins, for example, included 42 members of the “Marcellus Shale community,” including individual drilling companies and the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the lobbying and public relations arm of the cash-rich industry.
The director of the private entity hired by PA Homeland Security to track activists, ITRR (International Terrorism Research and Response), compared two nonviolent organizations, Rainforest Action Network and Ruckus Society, to Al Qaeda.
The Patriot News reported that in an email to PA Homeland Security director James Powers on May 3rd, ITRR co-founder Michael Perelman said,
“The Internet is an incredible force multiplier — example: I doubt that the Rainforest Action Network or the Ruckus Group number more than 25 people each. But they have incredible reach, sophistication, and influence on local groups.”
Perelman immediately followed with this description: “Shades of Al Qaeda!”
Commenting on these and other findings, PA ACLU legal director Witold Walczak said, “They’re not focused on illegal activity — they’re focused on people organizing, and clearly everybody’s in bed with the drilling industry… It’s one thing for private industry to hire groups like ITRR to gather information, but for the government to get involved — you’ve got a nasty menage-a-trois going on here and the citizen activists are the ones getting fracked.”
Philadelphia Defends Dissent November 10th
Responding to this challenge, two Philadelphia events on Wednesday, November 10th aim to “affirm and celebrate dissent as a core American value,” according to the newly organized First Amendment Network (FAN).
From 11 AM to 1 pm on the west side of City Hall, FAN is holding a “Public Media Event and Celebration of Free Speech, Dissent and Civil Liberties” on Wednesday, November 10th. Tracked organizations can write their names in on specially prepared posters reading DON’T SPY ON US. Speakers will call on the Governor-elect to “demand an end to the tracking of and spying on activist and protest groups in Pennsylvania,” according to a FAN statement.
Later that evening at 6:30 pm, the ACLU and FAN, with many co-sponsors, will hold “The War on Dissent: A Town Hall” at Friends Center, 1501 Cherry Street. Featured speakers include Michael German, former FBI agent now working for the ACLU; attorney Paul Hetznecker; ACLU of PA Senior Staff Attorney Mary Catherine Roper; and Jess Sundin, a target of the FBI raids on peace activists in the Midwest. Attorney Michael Coard will serve as moderator.
Both Philadelphia events are organized by the First Amendment Network (FAN), which includes the ACLU of Pennsylvania. FAN consists entirely of organizations which have experienced surveillance for legal activities ranging from screening GASLAND or testifying about wastewater treatment standards, to challenging deportations of immigrants, to being Muslim and praying in public.
Iris Marie Bloom has written over 40 articles related to the environmental impacts and politics of unconventional gas drilling for the University City Review and Weekly Press. Bloom also directs Protecting Our Waters, an all-volunteer grassroots group concerned about gas drilling’s impacts on critical infrastructure – clean water and air, climate, biological diversity, and public health.
Tracking Continues, With Consequences
Although the ITRR contract expired on Halloween, the tracking continues, according to the ACLU, and is moving “in-house,” so continued disclosure of tracking activities has heightened relevance.
The Patriot News reported on November 7th that, in addition to comparing legal, nonviolent citizen activists to Al Qaeda, the homeland security office and/or its private consultant, ITRR, were doing even more extraordinary things:
“They were tracking down protesters and grilling their parents. And they were feeding their suspicions not only to law enforcement, but to dozens of private businesses from natural gas drillers to The Hershey Co.”
People in rural areas where gas drilling, along with water contamination, is occurring, are upset. When they have questioned industry practices, their organizations’ names, possibly their individual names, and even their own words in conversations with each other which they thought were private, are released to their local police forces.
“We are identified as a ‘threat to critical infrastructure’ because we talk about water contamination issues,” said a Susquehanna County resident who prefers to remain unidentified. “These bulletins went to our local police, and all of a sudden we are perceived differently. But it’s the water contamination itself that’s the problem, not us.”
Language is power. In the 130 Pennsylvania Intelligence Bulletins released during the tracking period, terms such as “militant” and “extremist” were applied routinely and repetitively to industry critics.
Simultaneously, over the past year, gradually, those who take moderate stands – such as those pushing for a cumulative impact statement in the Delaware River watershed, or those who believe EPA oversight should be restored and gas industry exemptions from the Safe Drinking Water Act removed – began to be referred to in the mainstream press, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, as “aggressive.”
In short, efforts to protect public health and the environment before damage is done, rather than waiting for damage to accumulate which cannot be undone – applying the cautionary principle to a controversial, essentially unregulated (due to exemptions, secrecy, and lack of EPA oversight), new type of drilling – are twisted, by force of language, into their opposite.
“We are advising caution based on sound science,” commented Faith Zerbe, staff biologist for the Delaware Riverkeeper Network. “We want a cumulative impact statement assessed for our watershed, and we want that study to guide policy. Since when is that ‘aggressive’?”
Iris Marie Bloom has written over 40 articles related to the environmental impacts and politics of unconventional gas drilling for the University City Review and Weekly Press. Bloom also directs Protecting Our Waters, an all-volunteer grassroots group concerned about gas drilling’s impacts on critical infrastructure – clean water and air, climate, biological diversity, and public health.
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War On Dissent Town Hall; Documenting a failed and dangerous US intelligence network (Videos)
by Cheryl Biren at opednews.com
Please assist us in keeping the information provided in the PIB [Pennsylvania Intelligence Bulletin] to those having a valid need-to-know; it should only be disseminated via closed communications systems. Thanks for your support. We want to continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies.
JimJames F. Powers, Jr. | Director
Office of Homeland Security
Excerpt from an email by Jim Powers, former director of Pennsylvania’s Office of Homeland Security mistakenly sent to a critic of gas drilling in Pennsylvania.
The “support” Powers was referring to was intelligence information provided by the Institute for Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), a private Philadelphia/Jerusalem based company that received a $103,000 no-bid contract from the PA Office of Homeland Security. ITRR boasts that its “Analyst team is comprised of the leading experts in terrorism and international security,” and that “Intelligence is gathered by multi-language and Arab native-language who have previously served in security and armed forces positions in the war on international and domestic terror.”
However, the “intelligence” provided to Homeland Security in Pennsylvania by ITRR was comprised almost exclusively of reports on activities and events organized by political (from anti-tax Tea Party groups to anti-war organizers), environmental, LGBTQ and animal rights activists who challenged the government and private sector interests.
While researching the bulletins first made available in September, this writer discovered that her false arrest stemming from OEN reporting of a protest in September 2009 was cited and blatantly manipulated in four separate intelligence bulletins. It appears that the purpose of this manipulation was to create unnecessary alarm among local authorities and military contractors by alerting them to the potential presence of “radical elements” from “local Communist and/or Anarchist groups” at otherwise peaceful anti-war vigils.
Even though the Pennsylvania state legislature, after initial outrage, seems content to consider this an isolated incident (James Powers resigned and Governor Ed Rendell allowed ITRR’s contract to expire) and move on with business as usual, this is just a symptom of a larger issue of a failed and dangerous intelligence network in the United States. OpEdNews.com will be reporting more on these abuses in future issues.
In response to this assault on first amendment rights and in the shadow of recent FBI raids of activists in the Twin Cities and Chicago, the ACLU along with targeted activists joined forces in a town hall titled the “War on Dissent.” OpEdNews covered this event held in Philadelphia earlier this week.
The videos below include must-see presentations by Mary Catherine Roper, Senior Staff Attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania; Paul Hetznecker, a Philadelphia civil rights attorney; Michael German, former FBI agent now with the ACLU Policy Counsel; and Jess Sundin, one of the targets of the recent FBI raids on activists in the Midwest. The forum was moderated by activist and attorney, Michael Coard.
Mary Catherine Roper: “If you read the bulletins from the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security all of which are on the Internet, very interesting reading in your free time, what you see is not a collection of information about threats from people who threaten violence or property damage, what you see is a wholesale attack on the whole concept of dissent.”
Paul Hetznecker: “The danger is the label “communist” in the 1950s is now “terrorist.” So, if you can be labeled a terrorist by a private think tank and that think tank can push the federal government into an investigation, where does that leave you if you’re simply opposing gas drilling in Pennsylvania and the destruction of pristine wilderness in our state? Where does that leave you? It leaves you on a watch list, it leaves you labeled as a terrorist, it leaves you labeled as someone to be watched and afraid of…”
“Democracy is based on not a dead scroll that says you have the right to free speech. It’s a dead paper, it has no meaning. It only has meaning in the exercise of those rights, everyday, all the time…Don’t be afraid, don’t be chilled by the activities of this organization or the state police or the FBI, be emboldened by the fact that they threatened your privacy interests and your freedom. If you believe that freedom, in this country, is still alive, it’s alive and it’s in your hands, I’d ask that you exercise it.”
Michael German: “A fusion center is any two agencies who decide to get together and share intelligence information whether those agencies are federal, state or local, whether they’re law enforcement or non law enforcement can call themselves a fusion center. They can also involve private parties and private companies can be involved in the fusion centers. There are no regulations governing their activities.”
Jess Sundin: “They went through everything. They took books and CDs, computers, cell phones. They were very interested in anything with names and phone numbers. They took address books. They took sign-up lists for the activism I do. They were very interested in anything political so they took fliers from events like this one tonight or information on Palestine or Columbia which were places of interest in their investigation. They looked through my daughter’s belongings. She is six.”
For more information on the ACLU’s work on this issue visit http://www.paaclu.org/tracked
