Is Obama Admin Fabricating Iranian Assassination Plot To Distract From Fast & Furious Investigation? ………

How one man tracked down Anonymous – and paid a heavy price

http://www.sott.net

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 02:17 CST

Nate Anderson
ArsTechnica

© ArsTechnica

Aaron Barr believed he had penetrated Anonymous. The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code.

In a private e-mail to a colleague at his security firm HBGary Federal, which sells digital tools to the US government, the CEO bragged about his research project.

“They think I have nothing but a heirarchy based on IRC [Internet Relay Chat] aliases!” he wrote. “As 1337 as these guys are suppsed to be they don’t get it. I have pwned them! “

But had he?

© ArsTechnica
Aaron Barr

“We are kind of pissed at him right now”

Barr’s “pwning” meant finding out the names and addresses of the top Anonymous leadership. While the group claimed to be headless, Barr believed this to be a lie; indeed, he told others that Anonymous was a tiny group.

“At any given time there are probably no more than 20-40 people active, accept during hightened points of activity like Egypt and Tunisia where the numbers swell but mostly by trolls,” he wrote in an internal e-mail. (All e-mails in this investigative report are provided verbatim, typos and all.) “Most of the people in the IRC channel are zombies to inflate the numbers.”

The show was run by a couple of admins he identified as “Q,” “Owen,” and “CommanderX” – and Barr had used social media data and subterfuge to map those names to three real people, two in California and one in New York.

Near the end of January, Barr began publicizing his information, though without divulging the names of the Anonymous admins. When the Financial Times picked up the story and ran a piece on it on February 4, it wasn’t long before Barr got what he wanted – contacts from the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence, and the US military. The FBI had been after Anonymous for some time, recently kicking in doors while executing 40 search warrants against group members.

Confident in his abilities, Barr told one of the programmers who helped him on the project, “You just need to program as good as I analyze.”

But on February 5, one day after the Financial Times article and six days before Barr’s sit-down with the FBI, Anonymous did some “pwning” of its own. “Ddos!!! Fckers,” Barr sent from his iPhone as a distributed denial of service attack hit his corporate network. He then pledged to “take the gloves off.”

When the liberal blog Daily Kos ran a story on Barr’s work later that day, some Anonymous users commented on it. Barr sent out an e-mail to colleagues, and he was getting worked up: “They think all I know is their irc names!!!!! I know their real fing names. Karen [HBGary Federal's public relations head] I need u to help moderate me because I am getting angry. I am planning on releasing a few names of folks that were already arrested. This battle between us will help spur publicity anyway.”

Indeed, publicity was the plan. Barr hoped his research would “start a verbal braul between us and keep it going because that will bring more media and more attention to a very important topic.”

But within a day, Anonymous had managed to infiltrate HBGary Federal’s website and take it down, replacing it with a pro-Anonymous message (“now the Anonymous hand is bitch-slapping you in the face.”) Anonymous got into HBGary Federal’s e-mail server, for which Barr was the admin, and compromised it, extracting over 40,000 e-mails and putting them up on The Pirate Bay, all after watching his communications for 30 hours, undetected. In an after-action IRC chat, Anonymous members bragged about how they had gone even further, deleting 1TB of HBGary backup data.

They even claimed to have wiped Barr’s iPad remotely.

The situation got so bad for the security company that HBGary, the company which partially owns HBGary Federal, sent its president Penny Leavy into the Anonymous IRC chat rooms to swim with the sharks – and to beg them to leave her company alone. (Read the bizarre chat log.) Instead, Anonymous suggested that, to avoid more problems, Leavy should fire Barr and “take your investment in aaron’s company and donate it to BRADLEY MANNINGS DEFENCE FUND.” Barr should cough off up a personal contribution, too; say, one month’s salary?

As for Barr’s “pwning,” Leavy couldn’t backtrack from it fast enough. “We have not seen the list [of Anonymous admins] and we are kind of pissed at him right now.”

Were Barr’s vaunted names even correct? Anonymous insisted repeatedly that they were not. As one admin put it in the IRC chat with Leavy, “Did you also know that aaron was peddling fake/wrong/false information leading to the potential arrest of innocent people?” The group then made that information public, claiming that it was all ridiculous.

Thanks to the leaked e-mails, we now have the full story of how Barr infiltrated Anonymous, used social media to compile his lists, and even resorted to attacks on the codebase of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon used in attacks – and how others at his own company warned him about the pitfalls of his own research.

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Top Secret America: Expensive, Chaotic and Dangerous

http://www.thenewamerican.com Written by Bob Adelmann

Wednesday, 22 December 2010 16:00

1 Last July the Washington Post published a three-part story on “the huge security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.” This week, the Post published “Monitoring America,” the fourth installment of its “Top Secret America” series, describing security efforts at the local level. After two years of research, hundreds of interviews, and thousands of hours poring over documents, the Washington Post investigation was unable to determine anything for sure — except, of course, that the security system is massive: The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work…. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is [that] the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine. The system now spreads over more than 10,000 locations, employs an estimated 1 million people, and involves 1,300 government organizations and almost 2,000 private companies. And yet, it was virtually helpless in the face of the Fort Hood shooter or the Christmas Day bomber, both of whom had left tracks that had gotten buried under volumes and reams of incoming and irrelevant data. The study did reveal Top Secret America’s mind-numbingly complex operations. In a moment of candor, retired U. S. Army Lt. General John Vines, who was asked to review just part of the system, exclaimed: I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities. The complexity of this system defies description. And the growth of the agencies tasked with keeping the country safe (the mission defined as “defeating transnational violent extremists”) is astonishing. The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency has more than doubled since 2002, the National Security Agency has doubled in size, and the number of FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces jumped from 35 to 106. The researchers could provide only rough estimates of the cost of the operation: $40 billion was committed by Congress nine days after the attacks, followed by an additional $36 billion in 2002, $44 billion in 2003 — “and that was only a beginning.” The number of agencies involved in “Top Secret America” (TSA) grew from 24 at the end of 2001, with 37 more being added in 2002, 36 new ones in 2003, and successively larger additions in the following years, for a total, so far, of 263 organizations created in the wake of the attacks. After reviewing the Washington Post’s findings last July, retired Admiral Dennis Blair succinctly summed up the effort: “After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country: the attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.” At the end of its study, one was left with the impression of enormous waste, inefficiency, and mind-boggling complexity — all in the name of freedom. As Warren Mass pointed out, the real danger of such a massive intelligence operation was ignored entirely: “the danger posed to our freedom by building [such a] powerful secret intelligence network that’s exempt from Congressional oversight … the only power Congress maintains over them is control of their budgets.” Thus was laid the groundwork for the next effort at the Washington Post which was published this week: “Monitoring America.” The dangers to individual citizens as a result of Top Secret America are now in full public view. The web of agencies involved in intelligence-gathering has grown to “4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions,” and it now collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U. S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. [Emphasis added.] The Post found that the technologies and techniques which were “honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America. The FBI is building a database with the names and … personal information … of thousands of U. S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. (Emphasis added.) The Post’s findings paint a picture of a country at a crossroads, where long-standing privacy principles are under challenge by these new efforts to keep the nation safe. As one example, in Memphis the technology now allows police officers to “troll” for suspects through the use of a military-grade infrared camera mounted in the cruiser. The camera moves eerily from side to side, scanning for license plates and then analyzing the results instantly. Suddenly, a red light flashed on the cruiser’s screen along with the word “warrant.” “Got a live one!” an officer called out: “Let’s do it!” The Maricopa, Arizona, County Sheriff’s Facial Recognition Unit uses the same technology provided by L-1 Identity Solutions in war zones to record 9,000 biometric digital mug shots every month. Predator drones fly over the Mexican and Canadian borders, courtesy of the U. S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, taking pictures with real-time, full-motion video cameras. When quizzed informally about these drones, the senior military official involved in directing military operations in Desert Shield and Desert Storm told the author that these drones “had the capability not only of seeing someone make an ATM withdrawal, but could determine the amount of the withdrawal and the name and address of the individual making the withdrawal.” And these are just a few examples. Others exist but could be not revealed to the researchers. Memphis Police Department Director Larry Godwin said, “We have got things now that we didn’t have before. Some of them we can talk about. Some of them we can’t.” There’s fingerprint technology as well. Fingerprints from crime records are entered into the FBI’s data base located in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Those fingerprints are stored along with others collected by American authorities from prisoners in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan. As the authors chillingly observed: “There are 96 million sets of fingerprints in Clarksburg, a volume that government officials view not as daunting but as an opportunity.” (Emphasis added.) Myra Gray, head of the Defense Department’s Biometrics Identity Management Agency, explained that this year, for the first time, the FBI, the DHS and the Defense Department will be able to search each other’s fingerprint databases: “Hopefully, our relationship with these federal agencies — along with state and local agencies will be completely symbiotic.” And so, despite the enormous amounts of money unceremoniously dropped into the laps of agencies tasked to “defeating transnational violent extremists,” with no concern for or accountability about how that money is being spent, little attention is being paid to the jeopardy faced by innocent citizens who have been targeted for a “suspicious activity,” which the government has defined as “observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity.” Being lost in all these efforts to keep citizens safe is the loss by those citizens of their rights to be “secure in the persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” .

FBI Expands ‘Witch Hunt’ Against Antiwar Activists

http://www.commondreams.org

Published on Wednesday, December 22, 2010 by Change.org

by Charles Davis

The FBI on Tuesday added four more names to the list of antiwar activists subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury as part of an investigation into whether members of the peace movement provided “material support” for terrorism.

[Photo Credit: Committee to Stop FBI Repression]Photo Credit: Committee to Stop FBI Repression
In all, 23 people have been subpoenaed since September 24, when the FBI raided the offices and homes of prominent activists in Chicago and Minneapolis. None has been charged with a crime. Several have also refused to testify in what they say is a witch hunt aimed more at intimidating those who dare speak out against U.S. foreign policy than uncovering actual ties to terrorists.

And they’re probably right.

Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling this past June, the definition of “material support” for terrorism is now so broad as to include any sort of “advice” to a State Department-designated terrorist group, even if that advice is “stop engaging in terrorism and embrace nonviolence.” Former President Jimmy Carter and groups such as the ACLU and Human Rights Watch have spoken out against the ruling.

Because the definition is so broad, though, it provides the perfect legal basis for the government to go after those opposed to its policies abroad. And as the Bush administration ably demonstrated, there are plenty of people in government who would be all too happy to equate opposition to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen – just to name a few – as de facto support for terrorism.

“We are being targeted for the work we do to end U.S. fundig of the Israeli occupation, ending the war in Afghanistan and ending the occupation of Iraq,” says Maureen Murphy, editor of the news outlet The Electronic Intifada and one of those subpoenaed on Tuesday. “What is at stake for all of us is our right to dissent and organize to change harmful US foreign policy.”

Meredith Aby, another prominent antiwar activist who had her home raided by the FBI, likewise believes she is being targeted for exercising her right to free speech, not because the government actually believes she and other committed pacifists would actually support terrorist violence. She says that the questions U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald wants activists to answer – like which activists they met with abroad and what ideas did they express – proves as much. And like other activists, she said she wasn’t interested in answering.

“I’ve never killed anyone,” Aby says in an interview. “I have no blood on my hands. The blood is on the hands of the U.S. government, on the Israeli government, on the Colombian government. I’m not interested in helping kill people, and so there’s no way that I can testify at a grand jury about what people’s political ideas in places as dangerous as Colombia and Palestine.”

“We need to send a message that this has gone far enough,” she said. “We need to send a message to politicians that they will understand.”

Her advice? Tell Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald that you oppose using the law to intimidate committed, nonviolent peace activists whose only crime is exercising their right to dissent. Fitzgerald’s office can be reached at (312) 353-5300, while Obama and Holder can be contacted by signing this petition.

“At the end of the day, these men are politicians,” Aby says, “and they will make their decision in a political fashion about … how wide this investigation will go.”
© 2010 Change

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US reality : Knock ,knock ,it’s the FBI !

 

North American Union – “U.S. Super Spy Center” Uncovered in Mexico

http://www.sott.net

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:54 CST

Jorge Carrasco and Jesus Esquivel
Proceso

 

© unk

- Mexican Magazine Proceso reveals the location of a US Military-Intelligence Megaplex in Mexico City. 

-Megaplex includes offices for the CIA, FBI, DEA, Defense Intelligence, BATF, Department of Treasury and others.

- U.S. Intelligence Operatives will no longer have to disguise themselves as diplomats.

- Mexico will now have a Military ‘Liaison’ for NORTHCOM.

- U.S. is now in charge of all tactical efforts against the drug war, counter-insurgency, and counter-terrorism in Mexico.

- Obama and Hillary Clinton are credited for the creation of the Office of Bi-lateral Intelligence in Mexico (OBI).

With the approval of Felipe Calderón’s Administration, the U.S. Government finally got what it always wanted: To set up a super spy center in Mexico City. It was the escalation of the drug war in the country what opened the door to all U.S. intelligence agencies, including the military, to operate out of the Federal District without having to disguise their agents as diplomats.

The establishment of the Office of Bi-national Intelligence (OBI) was authorized by Calderon, after negotiations with Washington, which began under the government of his predecessor, Vicente Fox Quesada. The creation of the super spy center was authorized by the director of the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN), Guillermo Valdés Castellanos, without taking into account any objections from the Mexican military.

Through the OBI, Calderon has given the green light to U.S. Intelligence agents to spy on organized crime syndicates and drug cartels. They can also spy on Mexican government agencies, including the Secretariat of National Defense, Navy, and the diplomatic missions in Mexico.

The building headquarters, which includes offices from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Treasury is located at 265 Paseo de la Reforma Avenue, approximately 250 meters from the U.S. embassy.

The most significant presence at the OBI building is that of the Pentagon, which includes the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Security Agency (NSA). It is followed by the U.S. Department of Justice, also with three agencies: the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

With two services, there is the Department of Homeland Security: Coast Guard Intelligence (CGI) and the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), while the Treasury Department has officers of the Bureau of Intelligence on Terrorism and Financial Affairs (TFI) .

In addition, the OBI opened two remote offices: one in Ciudad Juarez and one in Tijuana, housing U.S. agents and “task force commanders” who coordinate operations against drug trafficking with the support of Mexican Government personnel.

It is not known how many intelligence agents from the U.S. are operating in Mexico with the authorization of the Mexican Federal Government, since the creation of this center was announced on August 31st. The maintain that the exact number is “classified.”

The building occupied by the OBI in the Federal District is right next to the Mexican Stock Exchange and is part of what the security and intelligence services in Mexico define as a “soft target area” in reference to the possibility of an attack on U.S. interests in Mexico.

At this strategic point for Washington in the Mexican Federal District, there are also facilities for transnational corporations such as Ford, American Airlines, as well as Marriott and Sheraton hotels, among others.

The building where the OBI is located gives the impression of an ordinary business facility, with banks, insurance, telecommunications, commercial offices and private offices. The only thing that stands out is the entry and departure of U.S. citizens.

The building directory lists the names of the occupants all the way up to the 21st floor. However, after the 22nd floor, there are three penthouses that are only listed as “occupied.” And on the roof there is a dozen satellite dishes placed just above the logo of the telecommunications company Axtel.

“It’s the best covert location for the agencies to operate,” said the source that provided the location of the OBI. The ordinary appearance of the building is the way in which the United States often disguise intelligence centers around the world.

The reception and parking are guarded by private security services, while Federal District Police provide outside support.

Furthermore, the city government has installed special surveillance cameras with sirens to observe the movement of pedestrians and vehicles outside the building.

The scope and power of the OBI in Mexico is similar to the El Paso Intelligence Center, in Texas (EPIC), which dates back to 1974 and operates exclusively to combat drug trafficking, weapons and money laundering on the border between Mexico and United States.

EPIC has been credited for creating the strategies launched against drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico. Among the most successful are Operation White Tiger, which was used to investigate the activities of the Hank Rhon family in 1997, the capture and extradition, a year earlier, of Gulf Drug Cartel Leader Juan Garcia Abrego, and the discovery of narco-graves in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, in 1998.

Subordination

Overrun by drug trafficking, the government of Felipe Calderón agreed to the establishment of the OBI in Mexico a proposal of the then head of National Intelligence in the United States, Admiral Dennis Blair, who last March was accompanied by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, during his working visit to Mexico.

According to the formal agreement, the new U.S. office workers interact with their Mexican counterparts, under the coordination of the State Department and the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE).

For the Pentagon, the strong presence of its agents in Mexico is intended to merge the intelligence and espionage services of both countries to identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of drug trafficking organizations and organized crime gangs.

Under this directive, issued on 18 March by Gen. Victor Eugene Renuart, then head of Northern Command (NORTHCOM), Mexico has carried out several operations against drug traffickers.

Since then, among some of the actions taken the drug lords have been the killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva, (aka El Barbas), Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, and Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen (aka Tony Tormenta), in addition to the arrests of other drug lords, such as Edgar ‘Barbie’ Valdez Villarreal.

Since the killing of Beltran Leyva in December of 2009, U.S. intelligence services, mainly the DEA, have mentioned their participation in various operations, against the very Arturo Beltran Leyva, Barbie Valdez, Teodoro Garcia Simental (aka El Teo), Jose Gerardo Alvarez Vazquez (aka El Indio or El Chayán), operator of the Beltran Leyva organization and Carlos Ramon Castro, a drug dealer who worked for several organizations.

As part of the Mexican government’s need to justify the militarization of the fight against drug trafficking, the Pentagon has strengthened its cooperation with the Mexican military. In early 2009, just as the Department of State and the Mexican Exterior Relations Secretariat (SRE) fine-tuned the details for the establishment of the OBI, the U.S. Department of Defense stepped up military training for Mexicans in Mexico and in several U.S. military bases.

The training has been an unprecedented event in the history of military relations between the two countries. For the first time, the Pentagon has brought counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism expertise from Iraq and Afghanistan to their offices in central Mexico.

In the case of Mexico, the training courses are developed and run by the Defense Department, and are focused on intelligence and tactical operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and the implementation of counterinsurgency tactics.

In addition to the courses offered in Mexico, the Mexican military has significantly increased the number of special forces troops in the Army, Air Force and the Navy to attend specialized intelligence training in U.S. military bases.

Liaisons

The main example of this cooperation is the presence -for the first time in the bilateral relationship- a member of the Mexican Army as a “liaison” between the Mexican military (Central Command) and the Northern Command in Colorado (NORTHCOM), according to a military source who spoke to the Mexican magazine Proceso.

On Wednesday 10, The Washington Post published on its front page a note informing that the liaison will also serve as deputy commander of the Institute for Security and Cooperation in the Western Hemisphere at Fort Benning, Georgia. From the sixties to the eighties, these facilities housed in the so-called School of the Americas, which went down in history as a supplying center for Latin American dictators, which are characterized by the systematic violation of human rights.

A U.S. official, who told the Post on condition of anonymity, said that given the seriousness of the drug violence in Mexico, “we have received direct instruction from the President (Barack Obama) and the highest levels in government, to really examine what more can be done in this counter-narcotics cooperation with Mexico.”

The establishment of the Office of Bi-national Intelligence (OBI) implies that for the first time in the history of Mexico, surveillance, supervision and qualification of work against organized crime between federal government agencies, including the military, rests in part on foreign officials.

According to the document unveiled by the White House on March 25, 2009 on the establishment of the OBI, the office is also responsible for overseeing the proper use of resources that Washington provides the Calderon administration in combating drug trafficking through the ‘Merida Initiative.’

“We will be coordinating our efforts with the government of Mexico through high-level contacts, which in part are related to the new intelligence services responsible for overseeing the implementation of Merida Initiative,” according to the document released by the White House (published by Proceso).

A year later, on March 23, 2010, Hillary Clinton announced during her working visit to the Federal District, in the context of the implementation of Plan Merida, the establishment of two “pilot programs” in the Tijuana-San Diego and Ciudad Juárez-El Paso corridors.

The two governments declared in a joint statement, that in the case of Ciudad Juárez, the program considers the development of “a model for the Mexican Government to collect and analyze tactical intelligence” as well as to “take action against drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and other criminal activities.”

However, the actual operations of the OBI in security and intelligence services, Mexicans will be subordinates of the U.S.. Agencies of the U.S. Government will play the role as experts in intelligence work, apart from previous advisory roles in order to increase Mexico’s ability to use information resources against drug cartel operations.

Link to Original Article in Spanish

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related Art .

U.S. squirm in Scandinavian spying row

 

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FBI Targets US Palestine Activists

http://www.commondreams.org

Published on Thursday, September 30, 2010 by Al Jazeera English

Searches, subpoenas, but no charges for anti-war activists ‘providing support to terrorists’ in Colombia and Palestine.

by Chris Arsenault

Tracy Molm sometimes has a hard time paying rent, so it came as a surprise when American security forces banged on her door at 7am one morning, and searched her apartment under suspicions she provided material support to a terrorist organisation.

Warrants indicate that investigators believe Molm and at least seven other activists from the Minnesota anti-war committee and other groups provided material support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), groups the US considers terrorist organisations.

“My assumption is that material support means money and guns, but they [police] wouldn’t explain anything,” Molm told Al Jazeera. “I think the real thing is that they are trying to intimidate those of us who are standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine and Colombia.”

Activists from Minneapolis and Chicago have been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury investigation in October, after coordinated police raids on September 24.

Activists say they are trying to educate the public about suffering caused by US foreign policy (GALLO/GETTY)

No charges

Despite the searches and seizures of computers, cheque books, mobile phones, documents and photographs, Molm and other activists have not been charged with committing a crime.

“The searches were conducted pursuant to a warrant issued by a federal judge,” Royden Rice, a special agent with US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Chicago, told Al Jazeera.

“No arrests have been made or charges filed in connection with this investigation,” he said, leading activists to call the searches a trolling expedition targeting Americans who object to their government’s foreign policy ventures.

More than 200 people demonstrated in Minnepolis on Monday, denouncing the raid, according to the Minnesota Daily, while at least 100 rallied in Chicago on Tuesday to support the anti-war activists. More demonstrations are planned in other American cities and activists expect the numbers to increase drastically, as they only had three days to plan the first round of protests.”The FBI does not investigate any person or group because of their political views,” said agent Rice. “We investigate allegations that federal criminal law has been violated.”

‘Suppressing political activity’

Bernardine Dohrn, a law professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, thinks the police are trying to do one of two things. “Either it is a fishing expedition, as there is not enough evidence to indict [formally charge] anyone; or it is an attempt to suppress political activity. Neither are good news,” she said.

As a legal scholar, Dohrn worries about the vague nature of national security laws instituted after the September 11, 2001 attacks on US targets.

“If you write articles, is that material support [for terrorists]? If you contribute resources for computers or healthcare clinics in occupied territories, or territories resisting government control, is that material support?”

She says grand jury investigations, the legal manoeuvre activists are facing, represent a way to “circumvent other constitutional protections.”

People who appear before a grand jury “cannot bring in a lawyer. It is the prosecutor, you [the person being investigated] and a group of grand jurors … in short it is a coercive method to get information.”

Jessica Sundin, a clerical worker at the University of Minnesota, also had her belongings taken by security forces in the coordinated searches and seizures. Like Molm, she denies providing material support to any group and says she has done nothing illegal or unethical.

She believes that the “biggest task of our anti-war movement [in the US] is to educate our own people.”

Visit to an occupied country

In that spirit, Molm and other American activists travelled to Palestine in 2004 to see the conditions there for themselves. “Every day people [in occupied lands] go through checkpoints with guns pointed at their heads and they have this horrendous situation, but they continue to live and laugh,” she said.

“The occupation of Palestine is as brutal as it is because US tax dollars, my tax dollars, support that. Sending people there to bring back [personal] accounts and pictures is important to building solidarity.”

Israel, the power responsible for occupying Palestinian land, received $2.55bn in American military aid in 2009, according to the US State Department. That number is expected to increase to $3.15bn per year from 2013 to 2018.

“I don’t know why it would be a crime to have a scarf with the Palestinian flag on it, but they [police] took that,” she said.

As for Colombia, the country has received at least $5bn in US military aid since 1999.

Amnesty International USA, a human rights group, said it “has been calling for a complete cut off of US military aid to Colombia for over a decade due to the continued collaboration between the Colombian Armed Forces and their paramilitary allies.”

Justifying terror cash

Rather than a vast attempt by security forces to intimidate critics of US foreign policy, the searches may have a simpler motive: an excuse for police to justify the massive infusions of federal cash they received under the pretext of ‘fighting terrorism.’

“In Minnesota [the state containing Minneapolis where most searches took place] a lot of money was put into anti-terrorism efforts,” says Sheila Regan, a reporter with the TC Daily Planet who has been covering issue for a local audience.

“It has one of the biggest terrorism bureaucracies anywhere; they [security forces] need something to do to justify their salaries,” she told Al Jazeera.

Like other subpoenaed activists, Molm works for a group called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which had been critical in organising major demonstrations against the US war in Vietnam back in the 1960s and 70s.

Dohrn was a national leader of the group from 1966-70 and has direct experience with the grand jury subpoenas which a new generation of activists is now facing.

“When I was called before a grand jury and refused to collaborate … I went to jail and was released eight months later by the same judge, who said ‘apparently there is no evidence against you.’ It is a strange way to have to prove your innocence.”

Back in the anti-war movement of the 1960s, a few US activists did travel to Vietnam to see the affects of B52 bombers, toxic Agent Orange and support for the western-backed government in South Vietnam.

Jane Fonda, the former activist and work-out video queen, famously stood next to an anti-aircraft gun with North Vietnamese communists, and decried the US for what she called its “illegal” bombing campaign against the country.

New activist tools

But today, travelling to places which face foreign military interference – Palestine or Colombia, Iraq or Afghanistan, Somalia or Yemen – is far easier, due in part, to technological innovations and the cheap prices for transportation fostered by global capitalism.

Travel makes human connections easier. And activists in the US say they are struggling to educate average people about injustices committed, in their name, in places far from Minnepolis or Chicago.

When Molm went to Palestine in 2004, she says the American media were not at all interested in the public talks she gave or the “injustices” she witnessed. “Now I have major media stations asking what I saw there. Now I can talk about home demolitions and [Israel's separation] wall.”

On this front, she says, the grand jury subpoena may prove helpful in the battle for the hearts and minds of average Americans.

© 2010 Aljazeera.net