More on the ongoing growth of the security state system. This is nothing new. And it does not have much to do with terrorism, either. It is more about disagreeing with the positions of the PermaGov than anything else.
Disagreeing AND taking action, whether that action is “legal” and non-violent or NOT so legal and maybe a little …demonstrative like Andrew Meyer’s little meeting with the Rent-a-Kops last week.
Aids activist silenced for fear of surveillance. Newsday.
Read on for more.
Activist silenced for fear of surveillance
ROCCO PARASCANDOLA
September 24, 2007
Jennifer Flynn is not a rabble-rouser. She’s not an aspiring suicide bomber. She doesn’t advocate the overthrow of the government. Instead, she pushes for funding and better treatment for people with HIV and AIDS.
Better keep an eye on her.
Wait! Somebody already did.
On the day before a rally by the New York City AIDS Housing Network at the 2004 Republican National Convention – a rally by an organization Flynn co-founded, and a rally that the NYPD had approved – she experienced something straight out of a spy novel.
While visiting her family in Hillside, N.J., Flynn spotted a car with a New York license plate parked outside the house. When she left to head back to her Brooklyn home that evening, the car followed hers. Shortly after leaving Hillside, two more vehicles, also with New York plates, seemed to be tailing her, too.
Trying to assure herself she wasn’t nuts, Flynn tested her hunch – changing lanes, making turns, pulling over and parking. The drivers in those three vehicles mimicked her actions.
At one point, she recalled, she slowed down and one of the other vehicles ended up alongside her car. She looked over to see several men in the vehicle. She gestured toward them. The men “threw up their arms as if to say, ‘We’re only doing what we’re told,'” she remembers.
On the New Jersey side of the Goethals Bridge, her followers pulled away. But later, when Flynn pulled up in front of her Flatbush home, she spotted another car, with two men inside, both with laptops. At 4 a.m., they were still there.
Is Flynn paranoid? Well, she is now. She did, however, jot down the license plate number of one of the vehicles in Jersey – a blue sport utility vehicle. When a reporter asked for the number, Flynn couldn’t find it. Recently, it was found in a file kept by Christopher Dunn, the civil liberties lawyer she called that day in a panic.
The license plate number traces back to a company – Pequot Inc. – and a post office box at an address far from the five boroughs. Registering unmarked cars to post office boxes outside the city or to shell companies is a common practice of law enforcement agencies to shield undercover investigators.
The NYPD, however, says it didn’t follow Flynn that evening. And the department’s Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen has said no federal agency was involved in preconvention surveillance.
This little cautionary tale goes along as we all know it must…mysterious post office boxes, everybody who does this sort of thing saying that of course they do NOT do those sorts of things and it must be somebody else who does those sorts of things if of course there actually ARE other people who do those sorts of things…
YOU know.
Like in the movies.
And this was several years ago.
It has only gotten worse since then.
How many of these stories must we read before we realize that we have been totally fucked by our PermintelGov.
How do they win?
They scare people to death.
Like this.
“I feel like I’ve stepped back, in a way,” she says. “I feel I’m not as vocal as I was. I’m still going to sign a petition. I’m still going to organize a rally. I do it. But now I’m deathly afraid.”
Flynn, 35, may one day learn who was following her. Activists have decried police tactics at the GOP convention – 1,806 arrests, protesters hemmed in with orange netting, people arrested and held for hours and hours in a West Side pier warehouse. The New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven plaintiffs suing the city over their arrests, is pushing for the release of raw NYPD intelligence reports detailing police surveillance of activists and protest groups.
Flynn says the damage is done. She sees it in the attitudes of other activists. There’s less desire. More trepidation.
“When you use scare tactics, you really are curbing our right to dissent against the government,” she said. “The only thing this is serving to do is squash public dissent. By going after the organizers of a rally, you really are sending a message – ‘Don’t hold a rally.'”
Just as by supporting the restraining and eventual tasering of a passionate dissenter at an open question and answer session with a PermGov Pol after about one minute of questioning, you are sending a message to other dissenters.
“Speak your piece at your own risk.”
Have it your way, so-called centrists.
Have it your way.
AG
