The American Police State Watch - November 2000 to April 2006

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

April 13, 2006 – The NYTimes publishes an article containing testimony by an AT&T employee revealing the existence of secret rooms where NSA IT specialists tap into internet hubs and “vacuum clean” phone and data transmissions, including domestic e-mail, on a vast scale. This is the exact method first disclosed in Congressional hearings in 2000 when a classified and unregulated FBI program with the code name Carnivore was investigated and released without sanction.

March 17,2006 – Internal NYPD reports are released that detail tactics used with protesters at the World Economic Forum, a private organization that met at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York from Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2002. In one report a police inspector praised the “staging of massive amounts” of armored vehicles, prisoner wagons and jail buses in the view of the demonstrators, writing that the sight “would cause them to be alarmed.” Other reports revealed proactive tactics including undercover infiltration and the deliberate spreading of misinformation. Lawyers representing some of those arrested argue that such tactics “punish, control and curtail the lawful exercise of First Amendment activities.”

Feb.25,2006 – The NYTimes reports that an AT&T data center in Kansas maintains databases which contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier, a digital-rights advocacy group, asserts in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system is the foundation of the NSA’s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.

Jan 31, 2006 – “EFF filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications. The lawsuit alleges that AT&T not only helped the NSA listen in on millions of ordinary Americans' Internet and telephone communications, but also provided access to its databases containing records of most or all communications.” - EFF

Dec. 24, 2005 – The NYTimes breaks a story about the NSA tracing and analyzing large volumes of telephone and Internet communications into and out of the US without court-approved warrants. Reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau write that nearly a dozen current and former officials served as their sources, and described a large data-mining operation. According to those officials, the NSA’s “back-door” access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency’s operational capability.

Dec. 16, 2005 – In an exclusive, the NYTimes breaks the story about President Bush’s secret decision in the months after 9/11 to authorize the warrantless eavesdropping of Americans in the United States. Two days later Mr. Bush delivers a radio address defending his actions as “fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities,” and vows to continue the highly classified program because it is “a vital tool in our war against the terrorists.”

Dec.8, 2005 – In a decision with global implications, Britain’s highest court has ruled that evidence that may have been obtained with torture cannot be used in court. The decision came in the retrial of 8 men who had been held since 2001 on antiterrorism charges.

Dec.7, 2005 – U.S. terror suspect Sami al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida, is found not guilty on any of 51 criminal counts of operating a North American front for Palestinian terrorists. Prosecutors had relied on some 20,000 hours of taped conversations culled from wiretaps.

Dec.1, 2005 – Human Rights Watch releases a list of 26 “ghost detainees” being held without due process outside the U.S. in secret prisons. The kidnapping, transport and torture of terror suspects on European soil raises alarms overseas about whether local governments are complying with American actions in violation of international law.

Nov. 18, 2005 – The Washington Post reports the Pentagon has expanded its ability to spy on citizens within the United States. According to the Post, the Bush administration is considering allowing a little known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity to investigate certain crimes domestically. The Pentagon is also pushing legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exemption to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies. Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies says, "such an exemption would remove one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies." Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon says, "We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing."

Nov. 10, 2005- U.S. Senate votes 49 to 42 to approve an amendment cutting off Habeas Corpus provisions by detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Habeas Corpus is a basic civil right afforded citizens of western nations since the Magna Carta in 1215 AD, wherein it states in Article 39: "No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised (sic) or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land." Habeas Corpus, protection for the individual against arbitrary detention by the state, is perhaps the most central tenet of western civilization, and the bedrock of democracy. Historically, in the West it has been suspended only rarely, when one-party governments make war on their own people.

Nov.2005 – The House approves extension of all 16 provisions of the USA Patriot Act. Fourteen are extended permanently, the other 2 - dealing with the government's demands for business and library records and its use of roving wiretaps - are extended for 7 years. Tens of thousands of the so-called national security letters, which the FBI uses to demand records without warrants, have been issued since 2001.

Nov.2, 2005 - The Washington Post reports that the CIA is running secret detention camps in Europe. Prisoners are flown from the US and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to former KGB prisons in Romania and Poland and perhaps as many as six other countries in a covert network set up after 9/11. A subsequent analysis by The New York Times of twenty-six CIA planes shows records of 307 CIA flights into Europe since September 2001.

Sept. 2005 - Mercenaries from private contractor Blackwater are employed in New Orleans to sweep flooded neighborhoods in a "rescue effort" and are filmed breaking down front doors while armed with assault rifles.

July 2005 - A SWAT team competition held outside San Jose, California draws heavily armed, tactical specialists from police departments around the nation.

2004/2005 – The proliferation of surveillance cameras in major cities like New York, Chicago, Baltimore and New Orleans increases in an aggressive stepping up of surveillance systems nationwide. In California banks, video cameras begin to be installed at every teller window. In New York, after the Republican National Convention, the NYPD requests an additional 400 surveillance cameras in Manhattan, even though all empirical studies in the USA and Britain have shown there is no deterrent effect on crime from prominently displayed CCTV. As for preventing terrorism, the July 7 bombings in London demonstrate that the world’s largest linked CCTV system for intelligence gathering by a centralized authority (over 6,000 cameras) serves only to document the event, not prevent it.

Nov.9, 2004 - Two tanks roll by an Iraq War protest demonstration in Los Angeles, circle the block, and then return and park in front of the federal building in Westwood.

2004 - Harsh treatment of political prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and in Afghanistan create the impression that these are the gulags of our time.

Nov. 22, 2003 - In Miami, Florida, 10,000 protestors marching against a meeting of the Free Trade Association of the Americas are harassed and intimidated by a massive police presence backed up with US Army tanks.

Aug. 2003 – Protesters at the Democratic Presidential Convention in Boston Are denied their First Amendment Right to Assemble and are herded into isolated and chain-link fenced “Free Speech Zones.” A similar attempt to contain demonstrators at the Republican Presidential Convention in New York is widely ignored and results in mass arrests and detainments on a polluted and dangerous Westside pier.

Feb.17, 2003 – American operatives kidnap an Islamic militant, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, in Milan and deliver him to authorities in Egypt for interrogation. Claiming he was tortured, he exposes a CIA practice that becomes known as “extraordinary rendition.”

2003 – Police helicopters in New York City are outfitted with night-vision cameras. During an operation shadowing bicyclists in Brooklyn, a 4-minute tape is made of a couple in flagrante dilecto on the deck of a Manhattan penthouse, then copied and circulated, resulting in a lawsuit.

2002 - Suburban police cars throughout California begin carrying assault rifles on routine patrols; a conspicuous display of disproportionate force in even the safest, crime-free neighborhoods which is less a necessity against imagined terrorists than it is an implied threat to ordinary citizens.

Sept.2001 - A law called the USA Patriot Act is rushed through Congress granting sweeping powers to the federal government to investigate, monitor and track terrorism suspects. Under this law, warrants will no longer be necessary for the FBI to demand records or perform wiretaps on law-abiding U.S. citizens - a massive unregulated breach in the wall between international intelligence gathering and domestic law enforcement, previously protected by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a 1970’s reform that struck a proper balance between national security and bedrock civil liberties in the wake of the abuses of presidential power accompanying and following the Vietnam War.

Nov. 2000 – Congress holds hearings to investigate an unregulated FBI program called Carnivore, wherein the FBI is engaged in the constant filtering of e-mail servers in search of key words in private domestic correspondence. The newly empowered conservative-majority legislature fails to act to stem a serious infringement on First Amendment Right To Privacy.