Shameful Behavior (Your Tax Dollars At Work)

At the risk of becoming the target of government investigations myself, let me now go on the record as saying that, if these reports are true, our government is engaged in the worst kind of anti-democratic behaviour, activities I thought reserved for dictators (or the Nixon Whitehouse). Yes, I am talking about the latest ACLU report "The State of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political Activity in Northern and Central California." The Berkeley Daily Planet has a story here which details a local incident on the UC Berkeley campus:

The local incident featured in the report was an April 2005 demonstration at UC Berkeley, sponsored by Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, aimed at military recruitment on campus.

The incident was described in an April 21, 2005, Department of Defense Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) report released to the ACLU by the Department of Defense following a freedom of information request and subsequent lawsuit.

The information released describes the demonstration—the “incident type”—as “specific threats,” and describes the subject as “direct action planned against recruiters at University of California at Berkeley.”

The source, whose name has been redacted from the released report, is described as “a special agent of the Federal Protective Service, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

The full ACLU report can be found here: http://aclunc.org/surveillance_report/

I hope you will join me in supporting Jerry Brown as the next Attorney General for the state of California. Given the folks that currently control our national government, a strong liberal California AG may turn out to be suprisingly important for the future of Democracy in this country.