Court rules that peace activists can sue over spying by military informant

Military? It’s my understanding the military doesn’t have a right to do a goddamn thing with “civilian citizens” on American soil.

Someone please, enlighten me.?

Vote all my posts down again because you carry a grudge and don't think I won't post them here again.

Good to see there are still judges who understand the constitution. I think this is the first time such a ruling has been made.

Good! This is excellent news. Thanks for posting, Jan. We're tired of Big Brother.

It is unfortunate because "peace activists" is almost always a euphemism for "anarchist," "anti-American," "communist," "anonymous," and other destructive and malevolent reprobrate groups.

WHO THE HELL SPIES ON PEACE ACTIVISTS?!

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/12/18/challenge-to-military-spying-on-peac...

"From 2006 to 2009, a group called the Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) in Olympia and Tacoma, Washington, organized demonstrations against the “use of civilian ports in Puget Sound for striker vehicles and other military cargo being shipped over to Iraq and then shipped to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” Some of these demonstrations included acts of nonviolent civil disobedience.

Thomas Rudd, head of Force Protection at Fort Lewis, sent in John Jacob Towery, a civilian employee of Force Protection, to infiltrate groups, build friendships, provide reports on what was happening and being planned, etc. According to Hildes, Rudd would then disseminate these report to civilian and other military agencies. They would sit down and put together a list of individuals that needed to be targeted. They would list the targets’ license plate numbers and work to ensure the individuals were arrested over and over again and stopped over and over again. They would systematically harass these people, arrest them and even go so far as to get their landlord to kick them out of where they were living.

As Hildes detailed, this violated their First Amendment rights, their right to engage in peaceful protest. This also violated their right against unreasonable search and seizure because they were being targeted not because they were threat to military but because they were protesting against it. Rudd said they went out to “neutralize” PMR and had “no business” being involved in civilian demonstrations.

“There’s criminal law. Posse Comitatus makes it a crime for the military to engage in civilian law enforcement,” Hildes asserted. “Here they are not only engaging in it—They are leading it, directing it and targeting our folks. All of that violates their First Amendment rights and their Fourth Amendment rights.”

Brendan Dunn, part of a Students for a Democratic Society chapter, said on “Democracy Now!” in July 2009, after obtaining documents where he uncovered the true identity of Towery who had befriended him and claimed to be an anarchist:

…[W]hen I met him, he admitted to several things. He admitted that, yes, he did in fact spy on us. He did in fact infiltrate us. He admitted that he did pass on information to an intelligence network, which, as you mentioned earlier, was composed of dozens of law enforcement agencies, ranging from municipal to county to state to regional, and several federal agencies, including Immigration Customs Enforcement, Joint Terrorism Task Force, FBI, Homeland Security, the Army in Fort Lewis.

So he admitted to other things, too. He admitted that the police had placed a camera, surveillance camera, across the street from a community center in Tacoma that anarchists ran called the Pitch Pipe Infoshop. He admitted that there were police that did put a camera up there to spy on anarchists, on activists going there…

Hildes explained, “The job of the military, to put it bluntly, is to identify the enemy, seek them out and destroy them. When they decide that the enemy is the people who are dissenting from the wars they’re engaging in, we are in enormous trouble. If the enemy is us, the American people, when we dissent, when we speak out, when we organize demonstrations, then the Constitution has no effect.”

Good to see there are still judges who understand the constitution. I think this is the first time such a ruling has been made.