[Promoted by mole333]

When I read the article (link and excerpt below) this week in the New York Times, my mind went back to swiftboating and tight security for political party conventions. It never occurred to me that we folks in the hinterland were being checked out. Now we know.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html?

"From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.

"They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.

"From these operations, run by the department’s “R.N.C. Intelligence Squad,” the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.

"But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show."
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So a lot of people, not least of all those who were attempting to assemble and protest outrages of the season, were not only watched but are told the records are sealed. Before it appears that this comes down on just New York City, we also remember the dark hole which housed the protest pool in Boston. This is not a police thing alone. It is not a state versus federal control alone. It is reminiscing of how uptight the nation was to allow such to happen. Did we have to suffer the travail of five years of “war on terror” to come to the realization that Sunni/Shia tactics were alive and well in the USA? Below is an excerpt of NYTimes story today.
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"A federal judge refused yesterday to reissue his order preventing disclosure of police documents about surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention in New York City, saying the existing ruling to keep them secret still stands.

"Lawyers for the city requested the new order yesterday during a telephone conference with Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV of Federal District Court in Manhattan. The conference was prompted by an article in The New York Times on Sunday that described how internal police documents show that undercover detectives from the department’s elite Intelligence Unit infiltrated meetings of political activists and others who were planning to demonstrate at the convention.

"During the telephone conference, Peter Farrell, senior counsel in the city’s Law Department, accused the New York Civil Liberties Union of helping The Times by leaking the documents that formed the basis of its article. The civil liberties group had obtained many documents from the Police Department as part of a lawsuit filed on behalf of people who say they were wrongly arrested and detained during the convention."