NEW YORK, Nov 23: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of anti-war demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counter-terrorism squads, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
The paper said the memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of anti-war demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters had sometimes used “training camps” to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against teargas. The memorandum analyzed lawful activities like recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities like using fake documentation to get into a secured site.
FBI officials told the paper in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and “extremist elements” plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters.
But the civil rights advocates and legal scholars said the monitoring programme could signal a return to the abuses of the 1960s and 1970s, when J. Edgar Hoover was the FBI director and agents routinely spied on political protesters like the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the paper said.
“The FBI is dangerously targeting Americans who are engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent,” Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the paper. “The line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience is blurred, and I have a serious concern about whether we’re going back to the days of Hoover.”
Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law professor at American University, who has written about FBI history, said collecting intelligence at demonstrations “is probably legal”.
But he told the Times: “As a matter of principle, it has a very serious chilling effect on peaceful demonstration. If you go around telling people, ‘We’re going to ferret out information on demonstrations,’ that deters people. People don’t want their names and pictures in FBI files.”
The abuses of the Hoover era, which included efforts by the FBI to harass and discredit Hoover’s political enemies under a programme known as Cointelpro, led to tight restrictions on FBI investigations of political activities, the paper said.
However, the paper noted that those restrictions were relaxed significantly last year, when attorney-general John Ashcroft issued guidelines giving agents authority to attend political rallies, mosques and any event “open to the public”.
Mr Ashcroft said the Sept 11 attacks made it essential that the FBI be allowed to investigate terrorism more aggressively. The bureau’s recent strategy in policing demonstrations is an outgrowth of that policy, officials told the paper.
