Police infilitration and surveillance of Baltimore Activists

Jul 19, 2008

Thanks to the Maryland ACLU, an extensive program of police surveillance and infilitration against Baltimore-area antiwar and anti-death penalty activists has been revealed.  There's 46 pages of newly released and utterly chilling documents available online.

For the Red Emma's collective, these documents were especially interesting - the picture attached to this article shows the portion of the released material in which we found out that, at a January 2006 public informational event about the Death Penalty in Maryland we hosted at our storefront, an undercover agent from the Maryland State Police's Homeland Security and Intelligence Division was in attendance. 

The police reports, which document surveillance of nonviolent protestors and organizers, show that the investigation was aimed at gathering intelligence regarding "anti-war terrorism" and "anti-government terrorism" (p. 36).  For anyone who knows the activists who were victims of this program of state surveillance and infilitration, this could not be a more ridiculous concern, and we are deeply disappointed (although not entirely surprised) that the apparatus of "Homeland Security" is being used against constitutionally protected dissent. 

 If you're concerned about this situation, and would like to learn more, there's going to be a speak-out with some of activists named at 2640 on Thursday the 24th - see the events listing in the right column for more information.

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