Three MA bills seek to regulate law enforcement’s investigatory abilities and require warrants to spy on residents

As governmental surveillance revelations stoke worldwide debate on the balance between privacy and security, civil liberties advocates in Massachusetts are pushing their own agenda to regulate law enforcement’s investigatory abilities. 

“We hope the time is right,” said American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts spokesman Chris Ott. He said, “We had been working on this for quite a long time.”

A test for the ACLU and its allies will be a Tuesday hearing of the Legislature’s Committee on the Judiciary, where three bills that would limit law enforcement’s ability to probe individuals are among the 209 bills on the agenda.

The three bills concern prosecutors’ ability to demand records from phone and Internet providers, law enforcement’s monitoring of political speech, and the ability of employers to demand access to an employee or job applicant’s social networking accounts.

“We had to sue to get information from the Boston Police Department about what they were doing to peaceful protesters in the Boston area,” Ott said. He said, “Police were actually spending resources on monitoring these peaceful groups.”

An October 2012 report by the ACLU of Massachusetts and the National Lawyers Guild Massachusetts Chapter found that the Boston Regional Intelligence Center monitored the late academic Howard Zinn, former Boston City Councilor Felix Arroyo and others, labeling as a “criminal act” a March 2007 talk at the Congregational Church in Jamaica Plain and subsequent rally.

Citing a report by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, the ACLU said “millions of dollars” went into intelligence fusion centers around the country that have “failed to uncover a single terrorist plot.” 

Twin bills (S 642/H 1457) filed by Senate Assistant Majority Leader Harriette Chandler (D-Worcester) and Rep. Jason Lewis (D-Winchester) would require such fusion centers to produce annual reports and prohibit them from monitoring the “political, religious or social views, associations or activities” of individuals or groups unless that information relates directly to criminal activity.

According to the ACLU, Massachusetts law changed in 2008 to allow law enforcement to issue an administrative subpoena for phone records – but not the content of phone calls – without approval by a judge. 

Bills (S 796 / H 1684) filed by Sen. Karen Spilka (D-Ashland) and former Rep. Martha Walz would require a warrant for police to collect information such as contacts, locations where a phone was used and email. 

O’Keefe said he was open to the idea of requiring warrants in those situations, but said that would add a burden on prosecutors and the police detectives they work with to solve serious crimes.
http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/07/massachusetts_aclu_hopes_polic.html#incart_river_default

Boston police store license plate data for “intelligence” purposes:

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/boston-license-plate-data-goes-may-never-come-out


MA State police tweets on July 4th., neglect to mention all the other people acting peacefully:

The Massachusetts State Police was out in force over Fourth of July weekend, and wanted the world to see just how attentive its officers were to security concerns surrounding the celebrations at the Esplanade. The police's media relations people tweeted tens of pictures of everything from an image of the video downlink from its surveillance helicopter (pictured above), to press conferences, to a photo of kids playing with a K-9 dog.

And then something bizarre happened, attracting a bit of press attention and a Twitter outrage storm: police tweeted a number of images of protesters, with weird hashtags, in a manner that implied the protesters were potential threats to public safety -- unlike the masses of other Massachusetts people who descended on the Esplanade to celebrate the Fourth.

Of course, public demonstrations are public, and anyone has a right to to photograph them. The ACLU has also fought to defend the right to videotape police. But just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should, particularly when it comes to our police forces doing it. What are the police trying to accomplish by doing this? These tweets seem like another sign that police consider peaceful expression a public threat.

Especially amidst the Boston Police Department's recent history of spying on people exercising their First Amendment rights, the tweets read as chilling to political expression and utterly tone deaf regarding the context.

The protest was about government surveillance, after all.

Here's the most offensive tweet:

Trooper observing the protestors that arrived at the #Esplanade. They left #peacefully. pic.twitter.com/ouiZfJWs66 - MASS STATE POLICE (@MassStatePolice) July 4, 2013

Whether inadvertently or not, this tweet seems to imply that the police are protecting the public (a group that ostensibly excludes the protesters) from the people demonstrating their First Amendment rights. The pro-Fourth Amendment activists are a blurry mass in the distance; in between the viewer and the mob is a State Police officer shown in sharp relief, his back turned to 'monitor' the protest, his face obscured. The faceless state protects the cooperative, non-political citizen from the demonstrators.

But the protesters are the people, and the people are the protesters. Why the arbitrary distinction? 

Why the photography of activists? And weirdest of all, why the "#peacefully" hashtag?

The State Police didn't find it remarkable that other groups of people left the Esplanade #peacefully, but there were so many of them. Just look at all these people hanging out at the Fourth of July celebrations without hurting anyone!

Fireworks goers leaving #peacefully:

The crowd is leaving the #esplanade from the @TheBostonPops fireworks event. pic.twitter.com/hjPPi1LyWL - MASS STATE POLICE (@MassStatePolice) July 5, 2013
Massachusetts police officials, who presumably left #peacefully:

Colors presented at the Hatch Shell. pic.twitter.com/7jz7bxzkhl - MASS STATE POLICE (@MassStatePolice) July 5, 2013

To read more tweets click on the link below:
http://privacysos.org/node/1112

Only 1% of so called terrorists nabbed by the FBI were real:

Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, dug into these supposedly dastardly plots and found that they are much less than meets the eye.

Aaronson recently appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Joshua Holland: Trevor, the raw statistical data say that Americans have a significantly better chance of being struck dead by lightning than of being killed in a terrorist attack here at home. It’s obviously different for people in some other countries.

I got that from the official terrorism statistics put out by the FBI and other related agencies. And they also track foiled attacks. These law enforcement agencies say that these foiled attacks prove that they are saving American lives. How would you respond to that?

Trevor Aaronson (TA): I’d say that the majority of the foiled attacks that they cite are really only foiled attacks because the FBI made the attack possible, and most of the people who are caught in these so-called foiled attacks are caught through sting operations that use either an undercover FBI agent or informant posing as some sort of Al-Qaeda operative.

In all of these cases, the defendants, or the would-be terrorists, are people who at best have a vague idea that they want to commit some sort of violent act or some sort of act of terrorism but have no means on their own. They don’t have weapons. They don’t have connections with any international terrorist groups.

In many cases they’re mentally ill or they’re economically desperate. An undercover informant or agent posing as an Al-Qaeda operative gives them everything they need… gives them the transportation, gives them the money if they need it, and then gives them the bomb and even the idea for the terrorist attack. And then when that person pushes a button to detonate the bomb that they believe will explode—a bomb that was provided to them in whole by the FBI—agents rush in, arrest them and charge them with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and then parade that person out to the public saying, "Look at us. We caught a terrorist. This is us keeping you safe."

TA: For the purposes of my book, I used the 10 years after 9/11 as the area that I was going to analyze data in, and what we know is that in the 10 years after 9/11, there were a little more than 500 defendants who were charged with federal crimes involving international terrorism. About 250 involved people who were charged with things like immigration violations or lying to the FBI and who are somehow linked to terrorism.

Their charges did not involve any sort of terrorist plot. Of the 500, you have about 150 who were caught in sting operations; these operations that were solely the creation of the FBI through an FBI informant or undercover agent providing the means and the opportunity, the bomb, the idea and so on.

Then if you’re really being generous, you can find only about five people of the 500 charged with international terrorism who were involved in some sort of plot that either had weapons of their creation or their acquisition or were connected to international terrorists in some way. These include Najibullah Zazi who came close to bombing the New York City subway system, Faisal Shahzad, who delivered a bomb to Times Square that fortunately didn’t go off, and then you have Jose Padilla—the dirty bomber—the underwear bomber and the shoe bomber, for example.

Being generous, those are the five that you can point to in the decade after 9/11 who seemed to pose a significant threat. Fortunately, none of them were successful. That’s a handful compared to the more than 150 who were caught in these sting operations, and in these sting operations the men never had access to weapons; it was only the FBI that provided it as part of the sting operation that they were controlling from beginning to end.

JH: Trevor, let’s talk a little about the incentives here. It seems to me—and this isn’t an original thought—that there’s a bureaucratic imperative to justify agency budgets. After 9/11, kind of in a panic, we basically doubled the size of our intelligence agencies, created a new Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI refocused its mission. 

How much of this tendency to entrap these people comes from that imperative to justify bloated counter-terrorism budgets in your view?

TA: Actually a lot. I’m not of the opinion that there are high-ranking people at the FBI who are saying, You know what? We want to stick it to Muslims in the United States. Although there’s evidence of xenophobia and a certain amount of Islamophobia within the FBI, I don’t think that’s the real reason behind this. 

Instead, I think the reason we’re seeing these really aggressive sting operations is the result of something of a bureaucratic evil. That is every year Congress allocates the FBI’s budget, and they set the counter-terrorism budget at $3 billion, which is the largest part of the FBI’s budget, more than it receives for organized crime and financial fraud. 

The FBI can’t exactly spend $3 billion and say, Hey; you know what? We spent your money and we didn’t find any terrorists. Even though the truth is that there’s a lot of money for counter-terrorism and just not a lot of terrorists going around today. What happens is that these sting operations are a very convenient mechanism for the FBI to say, Hey look at us. We’re keeping you safe. 

From the highest levels of the FBI, there’s pressure to build counter-terrorism cases because they just received $3 billion from Congress and that pressure then flows down to the field offices, which then, in turn, put pressure on individual agents to build counter-terrorism cases and those individual agents then incentivize informants who can make hundreds of thousands of dollars per case. 

They’re sent out in the communities looking for people interested in committing acts of terrorism. What they’re not finding are people who are actively building bombs or getting involved in significant terrorist plots. 

Instead, they’re finding these outliers, these people on the fringes of communities who for the most part are loudmouths who might aspire to violence but have no means of their own. And then they’ll bring them into the plot knowing that if they get someone on the hook, they can make lots of money, and then when they get a prosecutable case, that case floats up and you have a situation where FBI director Robert Muller consistently testifies before Congress about counterterrorism and cites these cases involving sting operations and what he describes as, Oh, this would have been a terrible, terrible thing had it been allowed to occur … it was a bombing of synagogues in the Bronx, or whatever it might be and never fully describes how that plot to bomb synagogues in the Bronx was really only made possible through an FBI informant who provided everything that the guy needed.

My criticism of this is not only that this bureaucratic evil exists and this is what is happening, but on a greater level the question people should be asking is, Why, despite all of this money and 15,000 informants employed by the FBI today are they finding it so easy to catch these people who are mentally ill and economically desperate while they’re missing the really dangerous people? 
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/fbis-terror-scam