Senate questions FBI hi-tech Cointelpro abuses of TIs. Court rules against GPS snoop guns

The Senate is questioning FBI abuses it is committing against Americans as the "intelligence" agency seeks to further expand its powers to target Americans. In a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, FBI Director Robert Mueller revealed that the FBI is conducting surveillance operations supported neither by evidence nor even suspicion of wrongdoing.

When Corporate-government applies a 24-7 tracking-snitching ... program, it is easy to persecute, harass, intimidate, assault or even assassinate individuals speaking out against the corporate government abuses. The treatment of Matt Smith for filming the truth in the Gulf of Mexico is being applied to thousands of innocent individuals across the nation to silence them as a cover for fascist high-level corruption and abuse.

BORDC informed the Senate hearing through a letter on behalf of a diverse coalition of nearly 50 organizations requesting further congressional oversight. Many have been calling for an investigation such as the Church Committee Investigation that exposed FBI's crimes including death squads on US soil - all under the category of "surveillance."

"Surveillance operations" involves both "foot soldiers" harassing, intimidating and assaulting targeted individual. It also involves hi-tech surveillance equipment including satellites as Paul Baird of Surveillance issues details. (See www.surveillanceissues.com)

Both of these broad general types of "surveillance" are injurious. In both cases, targets have no refuge as he medical and justice systems pretend to not know about them, are complicit or are ill-informed.

Hartford city council considers groundbreaking civil rights reforms

On August 9, Hartford City Councilor Luis Cotto introduced legislation to restore civil rights and liberties in Connecticut's capital. With the support of a diverse local coalition, Cotto's bill--based on proposed reforms developed by BORDC to stop local police participation in racial profiling, federal immigration enforcement, and surveillance--is the first of its kind in the country.

Fusion Centers play a major surveillance role in targeting innocent people for "experimentation" and to maintain the political status quo through blacklisting individuals to neutralize them. (See: National Fusion Ctr Conference starts today - ...)

ACLU's report, What's wrong with fusion centers? - Executive Summary, Dec 2007 states:

"This report is intended to serve as a primer that explains what fusion centers are, and how and why they were created. It details potential problems fusion centers present to the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans, including:

• Ambiguous Lines of Authority. The participation of agencies from multiple jurisdictions in fusion centers allows the authorities to manipulate differences in federal, state and local laws to maximize information collection while evading accountability and oversight through the practice of "policy shopping."
• Private Sector Participation. Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector corporations into the intelligence process, breaking down the arm's length relationship that protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of these companies, and increasing the risk of a data breach.
• Military Participation. Fusion centers are involving military personnel in law enforcement activities in troubling ways.
• Data Fusion = Data Mining. Federal fusion center guidelines encourage whole sale data collection and manipulation processes that threaten privacy.
• Excessive Secrecy. Fusion centers are hobbled by excessive secrecy, which limits public oversight, impairs their ability to acquire essential information and impedes their ability to fulfill their stated mission, bringing their ultimate value into doubt.

"The lack of proper legal limits on the new fusion centers not only threatens to undermine fundamental American values, but also threatens to turn them into wasteful and misdirected bureaucracies that, like our federal security agencies before 9/11, won't succeed in their ultimate mission of stopping terrorism and other crime." (ACLU)

BORDC reports that the People's Campaign for the Constitution's legal professionals team is bringing light to fusion centers' activities by filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about their work. The public can join this effort by submitting FOIA requests to federal, state, and regional fusion centers near you.

BORDC's mission is to organize and support an effective, national grassroots movement to restore civil liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

GPS Air-guns to 'dog the prey' 24/7

Other news of interest to targeted individuals is the decision released last week involving "snoop-dart blow guns."[A] three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously ruled that FBI agents should have obtained a warrant before planting a GPS device on the vehicle of a suspected drug dealer," reported Dan Goodin in San Francisco. (Goodwin, D. US appeals court bashes warrantless GPS tracking,
Law, 6th August 2010 21:25 GMT

Anyone can be accused of being drug dealer or of being a terrorist suspect and thus tracked 24/7, day and night. Most "suspects" are innocent. Police, FBI and military have merged. Military grade surveillance and other weaponry is available for urban street use.

The GPS device on the vehicle in the Appeals Court case "allowed agents to track his position every ten seconds for a full month and was accurate to within 100 feet. The device yielded more than 3,100 pages worth of data, according to documents filed in the case."

ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation attorneys "filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case arguing that absent a warrant, the planting of the device was an illegal search under the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment. The appeals firmly rejected federal prosecutors' arguments that the suspect had no reasonable expectation of privacy because the vehicle's whereabouts could have been easily tracked using human surveillance.

Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg wrote in defense of such targets. “It is another thing entirely for that stranger to pick up the scent again the next day and the day after that, week in and week out, dogging his prey until he has identified all the places, people, amusements, and chores that make up that person‘s hitherto private routine." (emphasis added)

According to the amicus brief, if adopted by appeals courts in other districts, the holding could have a profound effect on the rapidly growing use of GPS technology by police. Police cruisers in Los Angeles, for example, are outfitted with air guns that can shoot GPS-enabled darts at passing cars. Police in Arlington and Fairfax counties near Washington used GPS devices 229 times from 2005 to 2007.

Copyright © 2010 Deborah Dupre. All rights reserved. This article cannot be copied, posted, republished without author permission.

Deborah Dupré, with post-graduate science and education degrees from U.S. and Australian universities, has been a human and environmental rights advocate for over 25 years in the U.S., Vanuatu and Australia. Support her work by subscribing to her articles and forwarding the link of this article to friends and colleagues or reposting only the title and first paragraph linked to this Examiner page. Dupre welcomes emails: info@DeborahDupre.com See herVaccine Liberty or Death book plus Compassion Film Project DVDs.

Also see:

8/16, Chisun Lee, Pro Publica, Judges Reject Interrogation Evidence in Guantanamo Cases

8/15, Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun, Punishing the WikiLeaker Misses the Point

8/14, Editorial, New York Times, As Arizona Went, So Goes Virginia

8/14, Christopher Weber, Politics Daily, Army Officer Rejected for Military Panel Because of Stance on Gitmo

8/13, Cindy Cohn, Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF Files Appeal of Warrantless Wiretapping Case Jewel v. NSA