[Infowarrior] - N.Y. Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention

[Richard Forno]

March 25, 2007
N.Y. Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention
By JIM DWYER
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=s
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For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of
undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the
country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who
planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and
interviews.

>From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York
police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as
sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.

They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed
daily reports with the department¹s Intelligence Division. Other
investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.

>From these operations, run by the department¹s ³R.N.C. Intelligence Squad,²
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 ³N.Y.P.D. Secret,² the Intelligence
Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent
intention of breaking the law, the records show.

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and
antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to
the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New
York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity
was shared with police departments in other cities. A police report on an
organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was
planning concerts on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San
Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would be
political speeches and videos.

³Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush
sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates
sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda,² said the report,
dated Oct. 9, 2003. ³Police departments in above listed areas have been
contacted regarding this event.²

Police records indicate that in addition to sharing information with other
police departments, New York undercover officers were active themselves in
at least 15 places outside New York ‹ including California, Connecticut,
Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New
Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. ‹ and
in Europe.

The operation was mounted in 2003 after the Police Department, invoking the
fresh horrors of the World Trade Center attack and the prospect of future
terrorism, won greater authority from a federal judge to investigate
political organizations for criminal activity.

To date, as the boundaries of the department¹s expanded powers continue to
be debated, police officials have provided only glimpses of its
intelligence-gathering.

Now, the broad outlines of the preconvention operations are emerging from
records in federal lawsuits that were brought over mass arrests made during
the convention, and in greater detail from still-secret reports reviewed by
The New York Times. These include a sample of raw intelligence documents and
of summary digests of observations from both the field and the department¹s
cyberintelligence unit.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, confirmed
that the operation had been wide-ranging, and said it had been an essential
part of the preparations for the huge crowds that came to the city during
the convention.

³Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in
advance what was coming our way,² Mr. Browne said. When the detectives went
out of town, he said, the department usually alerted the local authorities
by telephone or in person.

Under a United States Supreme Court ruling, undercover surveillance of
political groups is generally legal, but the police in New York ‹ like those
in many other big cities ‹ have operated under special limits as a result of
class-action lawsuits filed over police monitoring of civil rights and
antiwar groups during the 1960s. The limits in New York are known as the
Handschu guidelines, after the lead plaintiff, Barbara Handschu.

³All our activities were legal and were subject in advance to Handschu
review,² Mr. Browne said.

Before monitoring political activity, the police must have ³some indication
of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or organization to be
investigated,² United States District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. said
in a ruling last month.

Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil
Liberties Union, which represents seven of the 1,806 people arrested during
the convention, said the Police Department stepped beyond the law in its
covert surveillance program.

³The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and this
wide-ranging N.Y.P.D. program was wrong and illegal,² Mr. Dunn said. ³In the
coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us many more details
about its preconvention surveillance of groups and activists, and many will
be shocked by the breadth of the Police Department¹s political surveillance
operation.²

The Police Department said those complaints were overblown.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the convention lawsuits are
scheduled to begin depositions of David Cohen, the deputy police
commissioner for intelligence. Mr. Cohen, a former senior official at the
Central Intelligence Agency, was ³central to the N.Y.P.D.¹s efforts to
collect intelligence information prior to the R.N.C.,² Gerald C. Smith, an
assistant corporation counsel with the city Law Department, said in a
federal court filing.

Balancing Safety and Surveillance

For nearly four decades, the city, civil liberties lawyers and the Police
Department have fought in federal court over how to balance public safety,
free speech and the penetrating but potentially disruptive force of police
surveillance.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Raymond W. Kelly, who became police commissioner
in January 2002, ³took the position that the N.Y.P.D. could no longer rely
on the federal government alone, and that the department had to build an
intelligence capacity worthy of the name,² Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Cohen contended that surveillance of domestic political activities was
essential to fighting terrorism. ³Given the range of activities that may be
engaged in by the members of a sleeper cell in the long period of
preparation for an act of terror, the entire resources of the N.Y.P.D. must
be available to conduct investigations into political activity and
intelligence-related issues,² Mr. Cohen wrote in an affidavit dated Sept.
12, 2002.

In February 2003, the Police Department, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg¹s
support, was given broad new authority by Judge Haight to conduct such
monitoring. However, a senior police official must still determine that
there is some indication of illegal activity before an inquiry is begun.

An investigation by the Intelligence Division led to the arrest ‹
coincidentally, three days before the convention ‹ of a man who spoke about
bombing the Herald Square subway station. In another initiative, detectives
were stationed in Europe and the Middle East to quickly funnel information
back to New York.

When the city was designated in February 2003 as the site of the 2004
Republican National Convention, the department had security worries ‹ in
particular about the possibility of a truck bomb attack near Madison Square
Garden, where events would be held ‹ and logistical concerns about managing
huge crowds, Mr. Browne said.

³We also prepared to contend with a relatively small group of self-described
anarchists who vowed to prevent delegates from participating in the
convention or otherwise disrupt the convention by various means, including
vandalism,² Mr. Browne said. ³Our goal was to safeguard delegates,
demonstrators and the general public alike during the convention.²

In its preparations, the department applied the intelligence resources that
had just been strengthened for fighting terrorism to an entirely different
task: collecting information on people participating in political protests.

In the records reviewed by The Times, some of the police intelligence
concerned people and groups bent on causing trouble, but the bulk of the
reports covered the plans and views of people with no obvious intention of
breaking the law.

By searching the Internet, police investigators identified groups that were
making plans for demonstrations. Files were created on their political
causes, the criminal records, if any, of the people involved and any plans
for civil disobedience or disruptive tactics.

>From the field, undercover officers filed daily accounts of their
observations on forms known as DD5s that called for descriptions of the
gatherings, the leaders and participants, and the groups¹ plans.

Inside the police Intelligence Division, daily reports from both the field
and the Web were summarized in bullet format. These digests ‹ marked
³Secret² ‹ were circulated weekly under the heading ³Key Findings.²

Perceived Threats

On Jan. 6, 2004, the intelligence digest noted that an antigentrification
group in Montreal claimed responsibility for hoax bombs that had been
planted at construction sites of luxury condominiums, stating that the
purpose was to draw attention to the homeless. The group was linked to a
band of anarchist-communists whose leader had visited New York, according to
the report.

Other digests noted a planned campaign of ³electronic civil disobedience² to
jam fax machines and hack into Web sites. Participants at a conference were
said to have discussed getting inside delegates¹ hotels by making hair salon
appointments or dinner reservations. At the same conference, people were
reported to have discussed disabling charter buses and trying to confuse
delegates by switching subway directional signs, or by sealing off stations
with crime-scene tape.

A Syracuse peace group intended to block intersections, a report stated.
Other reports mentioned past demonstrations where various groups used nails
and ball bearings as weapons and threw balloons filled with urine or other
foul liquids.

The police also kept track of Richard Picariello, a man who had been
convicted in 1978 of politically motivated bombings in Massachusetts, Mr.
Browne said.

At the other end of the threat spectrum was Joshua Kinberg, a graduate
student at Parsons School of Design and the subject of four pages of
intelligence reports. For his master¹s thesis project, Mr. Kinberg devised a
³wireless bicycle² equipped with cellphone, laptop and spray tubes that
could squirt messages received over the Internet onto the sidewalk or
street.

The messages were printed in water-soluble chalk, a tactic meant to avoid a
criminal mischief charge for using paint, an intelligence report noted. Mr.
Kinberg¹s bicycle was ³capable of transferring activist-based messages on
streets and sidewalks,² according to a report on July 22, 2004.

³This bicycle, having been built for the sole purpose of protesting during
the R.N.C., is capable of spraying anti-R.N.C.-type messages on surrounding
streets and sidewalks, also supplying the rider with a quick vehicle of
escape,² the report said. Mr. Kinberg, then 25, was arrested during a
television interview with Ron Reagan for MSNBC¹s ³Hardball² program during
the convention. He was released a day later, but his equipment was held more
than a year.

Mr. Kinberg said Friday that after his arrest detectives with the terrorism
task force asked if he knew of any plans for violence. ³I¹m an artist,² he
said. ³I know other artists, who make T-shirts and signs.²

He added: ³There¹s no reason I should have been placed on any kind of
surveillance status. It affected me, my ability to exercise free speech, and
the ability of thousands of people who were sending in messages for the bike
to exercise their free speech.²

New Faces in Their Midst

A vast majority of several hundred reports reviewed by The Times, including
field reports and the digests, described groups that gave no obvious sign of
wrongdoing. The intelligence noted that one group, the ³Man- and
Woman-in-Black Bloc,² planned to protest outside a party at Sotheby¹s for
Tennessee¹s Republican delegates with Johnny Cash¹s career as its theme.

The satirical performance troupe Billionaires for Bush, which specializes in
lampooning the Bush administration, was described in an intelligence digest
on Jan. 23, 2004. ³Billionaires for Bush is an activist group forged as a
mockery of the current president and political policies,² the report said.
³Preliminary intelligence indicates that this group is raising funds for
expansion and support of anti-R.N.C. activist organizations.²

Marco Ceglie, who performs as Monet Oliver dePlace in Billionaires for Bush,
said he had suspected that the group was under surveillance by federal
agents ‹ not necessarily police officers ‹ during weekly meetings in a
downtown loft and at events around the country in the summer of 2004.

³It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old
males asking, ŒFirst name, last name?¹ ² Mr. Ceglie said. ³Some people
didn¹t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn¹t
want to make a big stink because we didn¹t want to look paranoid. We applied
to the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act to see if there¹s a file,
but the answer came back that Œwe cannot confirm or deny.¹ ²

The Billionaires try to avoid provoking arrests, Mr. Ceglie said.

Others ‹ who openly planned civil disobedience and expected to be arrested ‹
said they assumed they were under surveillance, but had nothing to hide.
³Some of the groups were very concerned about infiltration,² said Ed
Hedemann of the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization founded in
1923. ³We weren¹t. We had open meetings.²

³If the police want to infiltrate and waste their time ‹ well, it¹s a waste
of taxpayer money,² Mr. Hedemann said.

The war resisters announced plans for a ³die-in² at Madison Square Garden.
They were arrested two minutes after they began a silent march from the
World Trade Center site. The charges were dismissed.

The sponsors of an event planned for Jan. 15, 2004, in honor of the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.¹s birthday were listed in one of the reports, which
noted that it was a protest against ³the R.N.C., the war in Iraq and the
Bush administration.² It mentioned that three members of the City Council at
the time, Charles Barron, Bill Perkins and Larry B. Seabrook, ³have endorsed
this event.²

The report said others supporting it were the New York City AIDS Housing
Network, the Arab Muslim American Foundation, Activists for the Liberation
of Palestine, Queers for Peace and Justice and the 1199 Bread and Roses
Cultural Project.

Many of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention were held for up to
two days on minor offenses normally handled with a summons; the city Law
Department said the preconvention intelligence justified detaining them all
for fingerprinting.

Mr. Browne said that 18 months of preparation by the police had allowed
hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate while also ensuring that the
Republican delegates were able to hold their convention with relatively few
disruptions.

³We attributed the successful policing of the convention to a host of
N.Y.P.D. activities leading up to the R.N.C., including 18 months of
intensive planning,² he said. ³It was a great success, and despite
provocations, such as demonstrators throwing faux feces in the faces of
police officers, the N.Y.P.D. showed professionalism and restraint.²