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Federal government “anti-terror” activities have penetrated a number of Northern and Central California cities including Berkeley, according to an ACLU report released last week: “The State of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political Activity in Northern and Central California.” 

“The monitoring of political groups and free-speech protest activities should come as no surprise in light of the vast resources committed to intelligence gathering post 9/11 and the gutting of regulations protecting political and religious activity from unwarranted government surveillance,” says the report, which describes spy activities directed toward peaceful demonstrations in Fresno, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. 

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.”  

“Are we turning into a police state?” Matthew Taylor, a member of the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, asked in a phone interview Monday. “What we have here is that the administration has conducted an illegal war [and is] conducting other illegal actions to cover up.” 

Documents released thus far do not reveal how or the extent to which the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition has been monitored by federal government agencies, said Mark Schlosberg, Police Practices Policy Director of the ACLU-Northern California.  

Students first learned through an NBC news report that the April 2005 protest had been reported in the TALON database. Subsequently the ACLU pursued documents related to the report. 

It is unknown how an email describing plans for the protest got into the TALON database. It was through an agent, but it is not known whether the Stop the War group was infiltrated, if emails were appropriated, or if they got to TALON via another method. 

To get answers to these questions, Schlosberg said, “We have to go to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). It’s like a treasure hunt.” (The FBI conducts anti-terrorism investigations with other law enforcement agencies through the JTTF, according to the ACLU report.) 

“Homeland Security was created to protect the American people from terrorist activities—not monitor political dissent on college campuses,” Schlosberg said in a July 18 press release. 

The ACLU is calling on cities to institute measures to safeguard the right to protest. 

“Although this right exists as a legal principle in California, there is little regulation in place to enforce it,” the report says. Although the report noted that Attorney General Bill Lockyer wrote a document known as the Lockyer Manual that requires “that law enforcement must have reasonable suspicion of a crime to engage in surveillance of political activity,” an ACLU survey of 94 police departments found that “not one department of the 94 respondents had policy or training materials that referenced the Lockyer Manual.” 

“Berkeley does not have a policy that restricts the police department from monitoring groups,” Schlosberg noted.  

Both Schlosberg and Mayor Tom Bates said they thought the Police Review Commission had a subcommittee that was examining agreements made between the department and federal anti-terrorism agencies. However, Sharon Kidd, acting PRC chair, said that no such subcommittee exists. 

“I don’t want these people running roughshod over our population,” Bates said. “I want to be sure policies are in place.” 

The complete ACLU report can be found at http://www.aclunc.org/.