This’ll go on your permanent record…
Still think this war is strictly about freedom for Iraq?
Wonder if any of these names will show up on voter purge lists… like what happened in Florida…
Police Stop Collecting Data on Protesters' Politics
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
When a series of large antiwar protests began nearly eight weeks ago, the New York Police Department started questioning hundreds of people arrested at the demonstrations about their prior political activity and recording the information in a database.
But yesterday, after the practice came to light, the Police Department said it would destroy the database, created with a debriefing form, and largely abandon the initiative, which civil libertarians and constitutional law experts said was deeply troubling.
"After a review, the department has decided to eliminate the use of the Demonstration Debriefing Form," Michael O'Looney, the department's chief spokesman, said in a statement. "Arrestees will no longer be asked questions pertaining to prior demonstration history, or school name. All information gathered since the form's inception on Feb. 15 has been destroyed."
Several constitutional scholars and civil libertarians said that the practice raised grave questions about whether asking people about their political affiliations or activity would have a severe chilling effect on protest and speech that are protected by the First Amendment.
Central to the practice was the debriefing form, which detectives used to record where the arrested protesters went to school, their membership in any organizations and their involvement in past protests.…
Mr. O'Looney said that the department would continue to ask arrested protesters what groups they were affiliated with and would retain the information in the form of a tally, but not with individuals' names. He said that knowing how many people had been arrested from particular groups would help the department assign the right number of officers to future protests by the same groups.
He also said that because the department viewed the questioning of the arrested demonstrators as "debriefings" rather than "interrogations," they were not entitled to a lawyer, a position with which Mr. Dunn and other civil liberties lawyers vehemently disagreed.…
The disclosure of the practice and the department's decision to halt it came just two weeks after a federal judge relaxed guidelines that for nearly 20 years had limited police surveillance and investigation of political groups. The guidelines, which are known as the Handschu Agreement, were put in place as a result of a class action lawsuit brought in 1971 on behalf of people who felt threatened by police surveillance of political activities in the late 1960's and early 1970's. They required the department to seek approval of a special panel to investigate political groups or activities.
The judge, Charles S. Haight of Federal District Court in Manhattan, eased the limits after the police sought greater latitude to conduct terrorism investigations. The lawsuit stemmed from the activities of the Intelligence Division, the same unit responsible for the questioning.…
"I was very concerned," said Brendan Knowlton, 26, a computer programmer who was arrested as he was trying to reach the protest that day on First Avenue. "I felt that the cops were on a fishing expedition," he said. "The whole thing felt sketchy. It felt inappropriate and irrelevant for why we were actually there."
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