Can You Say 'COINTELPRO'?

Today's Chronicle has the story:

Two Oakland police officers working undercover at an anti-war protest in May 2003 got themselves elected to leadership positions in an effort to influence the demonstration, documents released Thursday show.

The department assigned the officers to join activists protesting the U.S. war in Iraq and the tactics that police had used at a demonstration a month earlier, a police official said last year in a sworn deposition....

The extent of the officers' involvement in the subsequent march May 12, 2003, led by Direct Action to Stop the War and others, is unclear. But in a deposition related to a lawsuit filed by protesters, Deputy Police Chief Howard Jordan said activists had elected the undercover officers to "plan the route of the march and decide, I guess, where it would end up and some of the places that it would go."

This was revealed in the context of a lawsuit against the Oakland PD for shooting Iraq war protestors with beanbags and wooden bullets. In the course of the litigation, all kinds of information has come out about the OPD spying on anti-war organizations. It's ugly, stupid, ineffective, and a complete waste of resources.

But this is a step beyond just spying. This takes us into agent provocateur territory. Even I'm shocked at this one.

The story concludes with a good news/bad news couple of paragraphs:

Following the Oakland port protest and disclosures about the monitoring of activists, Lockyer issued guidelines in 2003 stating that police must suspect that a crime has been committed before collecting intelligence on activist groups.

But Schlosberg said the ACLU had surveyed 94 law enforcement agencies last year and found that just eight were aware of the guidelines. Only six had written policies restricting surveillance activities, he said.

Good news: there's a policy that's supposed to prevent this kind of abuse. Bad news: nobody knows about it. Knee-jerk paranoia about citizens assembling freely is alive and well in the law enforcement community, and that's terrible news for anyone who opposes the party line.

[That's all, folks]