A few left-leaning blogs have made reference to this article at the Washington Post:
An FBI agent in Pittsburgh photographed members of an antiwar activist group in 2002, according to documents released yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said the disclosure marks the latest incident in which the FBI has monitored left-leaning groups.
An FBI report from November 2002 indicates that an agent photographed members of the Thomas Merton Center as they handed out leaflets opposing the impending war in Iraq. The report called the group a “left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism.”
The bloggers making note of this imply that there is something wrong with such monitoring. I don’t necessarily agree.
Simply keeping tabs on what some folks are saying, and testing whether there are links to more nefarious plots or groups seems like to me to be not unreasonable.
Now, if that data collected were used against participants (e.g., making it difficult for them to get most jobs, or as a basis for permanent wiretapping) after it was determined that such activities were nothing more than a good old-fashioned exercise of free speech rights… that’s something I’d have a problem with.
I would think that it would be far more constructive for civil liberties and privacy rights activists to pressure for appropriate limitations on investigative data, and actual enforcement of those limitations, rather than just insinuating that simple monitoring of public activities is a manifestation of an emerging, totalitarian Big Brother.