NYPD watches over you

The New York Times confirms what many political activists of even a mildly radical stripe have long suspected: The NYPD is back in the business of spying on political groups.

The revelation comes almost three years after the 2004 Republican convention, in preparation for which city police officers traveled far and wide -- even overseas -- to monitor activist group's preparations for the upcoming event. Some of the results were, frankly comical.

Marco Ceglie, who performs as Monet Oliver dePlace in Billionaires for Bush, said he had suspected that the group was under surveillance by federal agents — not necessarily police officers — during weekly meetings in a downtown loft and at events around the country in the summer of 2004.

“It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old males asking, ‘First name, last name?’ ” Mr. Ceglie said. “Some people didn’t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn’t want to make a big stink because we didn’t want to look paranoid. We applied to the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act to see if there’s a file, but the answer came back that ‘we cannot confirm or deny.’"

The primary goal of the police infiltrators was to forestall violence at the convention. This was all in the wake of 9/11 of course, and so fear of a terrorist reprise ran deep. Honestly, it makes sense that the police would keep an eye out for anybody who might see a major-party politial convention as a plum target for a bloody political statement.

Inevitably, though, perfectly peaceful individuals and organizations came under the watchful eye of the police.

In its preparations, the department applied the intelligence resources that had just been strengthened for fighting terrorism to an entirely different task: collecting information on people participating in political protests.

In the records reviewed by The Times, some of the police intelligence concerned people and groups bent on causing trouble, but the bulk of the reports covered the plans and views of people with no obvious intention of breaking the law.

The end results included the infiltration of harmless organizations, the compilation of dossiers on political dissidents and the arrests of perfectly peaceful people, including a grad student who designed a high-tech bicycle that could spray chalk political messages on the pavement as it was pedaled along.

The arrests, in particular, are what carry the NYPD's efforts over the line from over-enthusiastic to sinister. It's easy to see the surveillance having a chilling effect on speech and activism among people who'd really rather not spend nights as guests of the city of New York. Given the potential for being arrested for planning nothing more than a pointed expression of your views, it's tempting to leave the politicking to somebody with a stronger tolerance for jail cells.

This is why the NYPD got in trouble in the first case, with it's surveillance of anti-war groups back in the 1960s.