At the ACLU Press Conference, bottom row seated left to right: Dorothy Ehrlich, Executive Director, ACLU Northern Calif.; Mark Schlosberg, ACLU-NC and author of "The State of Surveillance;" top row standing: Jack Heyman, ILWU Local 10; Camille Russell, past President of Peace Fresno; Dan Yaseen, First Vice President, Peace Fresno; Professor Donna Hardina, Faculty Advisor for the Campus Peace and Civil Liberties Coalition at Fresno State. Photo by Tom Price

by Tom Price

When ILWU longshore workers and peace activists sued the City of Oakland over police brutality at an anti-war demonstration at the port April 7, 2003, their attorneys discovered the police had engaged in illegal surveillance of the plaintiffs before the protest.

Over the next couple of years, ACLU lawyers also discovered a number of other cases where California law enforcement agencies similarly spied on and infiltrated legitimate, peaceful activist organizations and labor unions.
Most disturbingly, the justifications authorities gave for their actions—that anti-terrorist security concerns override all Constitutional  liberties—suggest that what they have learned so far is only the tip of the iceberg.

At a press conference in San Francisco July 27 the ACLU of Northern California released a report documenting numerous examples of unlawful police activities called “The State of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political Activity in Northern and Central California.” It details police spying in Oakland, Fresno, Sacramento, Santa Cruz and San Francisco. Students also faced infiltration and monitoring at U.C. Berkeley and Fresno State University. It also points out that since Sept. 11, 2001, with the help of $500 million in federal funds, California has built its own central anti-terrorism center, numerous police and sheriff departments have developed their own homeland security units and more than 20 local police departments have joined an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The ACLU report documents how the Oakland police played a covert role in the April 7, 2003 demonstration at the Port of Oakland. That morning peaceful demonstrators picketed two stevedoring companies, accusing them of profiting from the Iraq war. Their demo ended in a police riot that injured 40 protestors. Nine ILWU workers who were well away from the picket line and waiting for an arbitrator’s ruling on health and safety were also attacked and injured.

“Prior to the April 7 demonstrations, there was a secret meeting between government agencies, the Port of Oakland, the shipping companies and the police,” then-Local 10 Business Agent Jack Heyman told the press conference. “They planned out what was going to transpire April 7. There was direct collusion. The New York Times quoted then-Police Chief Richard Word saying he mobilized his troops at ‘the behest of the maritime companies.’ One wonders who the government and the police are working for.”

The cops brutally arrested Heyman while he tried to get his members away from police fire. Injured demonstrators later won a $2 million lawsuit from the city.

Other government documents, quoted in the Oakland Tribune, revealed that the Oakland police had received an “intelligence” report April 2 from the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) warning of violence at the April 7 demo. The CATIC, staffed with agents from the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other state and federal outfits, had gleaned information from websites and monitored list serves—including the ILWU Yahoo discussion group—without warrant or reasonable cause to believe illegal activities were taking place. The unlawful spying led to unlawful violence by the police on the Oakland docks.

The police action did not stop with just illegal surveillance and physical injuries. When demonstrators returned to the Oakland docks May 12 to protest the brutality of April 7, they were unaware that police agents had infiltrated their planning meetings. Police Deputy Chief Howard Jordan said April 28, 2005 in sworn testimony in the case ILWU v. City of Oakland that police had gotten two of their own elected to plan the route of the march.

Demonstrators scoffed at Jordan’s claim that his undercover agents fooled these veteran activists, pointing out that no one was “elected” to do anything. All decisions were discussed and made by a full assembly at an open planning meeting—a group they estimate at 80-100 people. 

“The police want to know about the events, but rather than meeting with the protestors, they’re infiltrating,” Heyman said. “And this provides fertile grounds for agents provocateurs. If there was something thrown at police, just who threw it?”

Jordan had hinted at infiltration in statements made two weeks after the May 12 demonstration.

“If you put people in there from the beginning, I think we’d be able to gather the information and maybe even direct them to do something we want them to do,” Jordan told the Oakland police review board.

Labor became a target again Jan. 24, 2004 when two deputies of the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Homeland Security Unit infiltrated a demonstration in San Francisco in support of striking and locked out Safeway and Albertson’s workers. United Food and Commercial Workers leaders fingered the deputies because they had visited UFCW offices in Martinez the day before, asking about the rally. When Art Pulaski, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Calif. Labor Federation, asked if they were cops, they denied it and told a cover story. After several more questions, they admitted it.

“We are alarmed at having undercover officers at a union rally,” the report quotes Pulaski telling the deputies. “I am greatly offended that you wouldn’t give your names and that you continued to lie about being in law enforcement.”
Using homeland security to justify monitoring lawful activity “is sending a chilling and intimating message to all of us,” Pulaski said. Legal experts agree.

“This kind of infiltration has the inevitable consequence of chilling the participation of innocent people in what is otherwise a constitutionally protected activity,” said law professor and former State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Groden, according to the ACLU report.

Fresno, Calif. schoolteacher Camille Russell got quite a shock when she picked up her Fresno Bee newspaper Aug. 31, 2003 and saw a picture of policeman Aaron Michael Kilner who had died in a motorcycle accident.
“We knew him as Aaron Stokes. He said he was unemployed,” Russell said at the ACLU press conference. “That’s how I discovered that Peace Fresno had been infiltrated. No one ever thought Peace Fresno was a terrorist organization. However, in the anti-terrorism hysteria following 9-11, someone was equating dissent with terrorism.”
As Stokes, Kilner participated in protests and handed out flyers, the ACLU report said.

The Oakland Tribune of May 18, 2003 quoted CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle equating dissent with terrorism.

“If you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that [protest],” Van Winkle said. “You can almost argue that a protest against that [war] is a terrorist act.”

In an apparent justification for spying on the April 7 demo, Van Winkle came up with another chilling remark:

“I’ve heard terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic impact, and shutting down a port certainly would have some economic impact. Terrorism isn’t just bombs going off and killing people,” the Tribune quoted Van Winkle as saying.

Police infiltrators comprised 10 percent of the 60 participants at a Nov. 10, 2004 Fresno State Univ. rally, according to the ACLU report. The Campus Peace and Civil Liberties Coalition had hosted a speaker from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who spoke on the benefits of a vegan diet. The Dept. of Homeland Security had declared PETA a terrorist threat, and that justified the surveillance, according to university police Chief David Huerta.

“I don’t understand what the problem is,” FSU Director of Public Safety David Moll said, as quoted in the Fresno Bee. “There’s undercover police everywhere. They’re gathering intelligence to keep order, not to repress anybody.”

Students wrote letters and held a hunger strike at the campus administration building demanding a halt to the spying. FSU President John Welty partially relented in May 2005 and issued orders that surveillance activities could not be done “unless required by law and have been expressly approved,” according to the ACLU report. However, FSU still refuses to release the police reports of the November 2004 demo.

The San Francisco Police Dept. has a policy with fairly strong protections against violating First Amendment activities. Nonetheless, without the authorization of the chief of police, officers posed as protesters to monitor demonstrations against the Iraq War in October 2002 and February 2003. One officer went so far as to wear a Che Guevara pin.

The Sacramento Police Dept. sent an employee to an anti-Iraq War rally Feb. 15, 2003 to videotape the demonstration. The camerawoman, wearing a jacket labeled “Identification Specialist,” was accompanied by two uniformed officers. When asked by rally organizers why she was taping, she reportedly replied, “This is a crime scene.”

“Bill Lockyer came out with a manual in Sept. 2003 that made it clear that law enforcement agencies under California’s constitution are not permitted to monitor or gather information on people engaging in legitimate First Amendment-protected protest activities without reasonable suspicion of a crime,” said the ACLU’s Mark Schlosberg, the report’s author.

Lockyer’s manual was printed and distributed to law enforcement agencies throughout the state. Last year the ACLU commissioned a survey of 103 law enforcement agencies to see how the manual was being implemented. They found a lack of regulation protecting people and organizations’ rights against government surveillance. Only a handful mentioned the Lockyer manual, or acknowledged having it. Only six departments had policies that restricted the monitoring of organizations engaging in First Amendment-protected activities. Only 20 provided documents regulating intelligence files, according to the report.

The ACLU of Northern California is recommending three reforms by state and local authorities to safeguard liberties: 1) Adopt and implement local law enforcement regulations on monitoring any protected activity. 2) Pass regulations through the state legislature on state and local intelligence agencies. 3) Institute regulations and training protecting the right of privacy in local police cooperation with federal agencies.

The report is available online at:www.aclunc.org/surveillance_report.