The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (45 page)

Official assurances that full-body scans would be seen only by the necessary airport authorities and quickly destroyed were shattered in February 2010 when the BBC revealed that Indian actor Shahrukh Khan had passed through a body scan and later had the image of his naked body printed out and circulated by female security staffers at Heathrow. “You walk into the machine and everything—the whole outline of your body—comes out,” said Khan. “I was a little scared…and I came out. Then I saw these girls—they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some form you had to fill. I said ‘give them to me’—and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them.”

It is not just body-scanning machines that conjure up images of a
1984
Orwellian techno-society.

SECURITY ABUSES

A
LTHOUGH POPULAR BELIEF HOLDS
that those with Middle Eastern names are most susceptible to being detained by the government, the Secret Service considered Robert Lee “Bob on the Job” Lewis enough of a threat to arrest him on the basis of an offhand remark. Lewis is a fervent Christian who has spent decades researching government scandals and worked with airline lawyers during the investigation of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In April 1998, Lewis was in a restaurant in Houston, Texas, regaling waiters with his knowledge of government skulduggery and little-reported information of former president George H. W. Bush. Lewis admitted he made a remark about Bush along the lines of “I’ll have his ass.”

Secret Service agent Tim Reilly was sitting in the restaurant near Lewis and promptly placed Lewis under arrest for threatening the former president. The next day, in a short hearing, federal magistrate Marcia Crone avoided any First Amendment issue and instead accepted the hearsay testimony of Agent Reilly. Because Lewis did not have enough money to post bail, he was held for nearly a year in federal custody. During this time, he was sent to the Fort Worth Federal Correctional Institution and was placed in the cell where Whitewater scandal figure James McDougal reportedly committed suicide. Lewis knew who McDougal had been and felt his placement there was a form of intimidation. Some months later, Lewis was transferred to a federal hospital in Springfield, Missouri, where he was involuntarily drugged until letters from journalists and academic contacts protesting his drugging gained him a release. There was never a court trial or even an adversarial hearing in the case.

For anyone who thinks that the DHS’s abuse of power might stop over time, consider this 2006 story from Bethesda, Maryland: Two uniformed men wearing baseball caps with the words “Homeland Security” on them walked into the Little Falls Library and loudly announced that the viewing of pornography was forbidden. They then asked one library Internet user to step outside.

After complaints were lodged against the two “security” officers, Montgomery County chief administrative officer Bruce Romer stated that the two officers were members of the security division of Montgomery County’s Homeland Security Department, an unarmed unit charged with patrolling about three hundred county buildings. He added that this group was not tasked with seeking out pornography and that the incident was “unfortunate” and “regrettable.” Romer said the two officers had “over-stepped their authority” and had been reassigned.

To illustrate the ease with which a TSA employee can impact a person’s life, just consider the experience of Rebecca Solomon, a twenty-two-year-old University of Michigan student. On January 5, 2010, she was stopped in an airport by a TSA agent who pretended to find a bag of white powder in her carry-on computer bag. The man then demanded to know where she had gotten the powder and, as the student stood in shock, proceeded to wave the bag in front of her and said he was just kidding. “You should have seen the look on your face,” the TSA man told her, laughing. When this incident was made public, the TSA said the agent was no longer with the agency. But if the TSA man had not admitted it was a joke, Solomon would still be behind bars somewhere. This small incident should be a sobering example to any thinking American of unwarranted and unsupervised power.

Such incidents, of course, illustrate the ease with which persons of authority can abuse that authority. It also begs the question of how many other HSD employees “overstep” their authority and how many other such stories never make it to the public.

PHOTOGRAPHERS UNDER FIRE

A
PPARENTLY EVEN TRADITIONAL
A
MERICAN
activities such as taking pictures around town are not exempt from the scrutiny of Homeland Security enforcers. Amateur photographer Mike Maginnis was intrigued by all the activity around Denver’s Adams Mark Hotel in early December 2002, which was surrounded by Denver police, army rangers, and rooftop snipers. Maginnis, who works in information technology and frequently shoots photos of corporate buildings and communications equipment, took a few snapshots. He was then confronted by a Denver policeman who demanded his camera. When he refused to hand over his expensive Nikon F2, he was pushed to the ground and arrested.

After being held in a Denver police station, Maginnis was interrogated by a Secret Service agent. Maginnis learned that Vice President Cheney was staying in the area and that he was being charged as a terrorist under the PATRIOT Act. According to Maginnis, the agent tried to make him confess to being a terrorist and called him a “raghead collaborator” and “dirty pinko faggot.”

After being held for several hours, Maginnis was released without explanation. When Maginnis’s attorney contacted the Denver police for an explanation, they denied ever arresting Maginnis.

The website PhotographerNotaTerrorist.org proclaimed, “Photography is under attack. Across the country it seems that anyone with a camera is being targeted as a potential terrorist, whether amateur or professional, whether landscape, architectural or street photographer. Not only is it corrosive of press freedom but creation of the collective visual history of our country is extinguished by anti-terrorist legislation designed to protect the heritage it prevents us recording. This campaign is for everyone who values visual imagery, not just photographers. We must work together now to stop this before photography becomes a part of history rather than a way of recording it.”

In early 2009, David Proeber, photo editor for the central Illinois newspaper the
Pantagraph,
was stripped of his camera’s memory card and threatened with arrest after he took a photo of the police in a shoot-out with a gunman. Proeber recovered the memory card more than three hours later after complaining to a sheriff’s department supervisor who was an acquaintance. After the supervisor contacted the state police, Proeber’s memory card was returned with apologies. His photo of the gunman was published on the Internet, garnering more than 1.2 million page views during the first thirty-two hours. However, Proeber later learned that the police had made a DVD of his photos, which he claimed they had no legal right to do.

In 2007, Carlos Miller, a Miami freelance photographer, was arrested, tried, and sentenced for photographing Miami police officers on a public street. Miller was found not guilty of disobeying a police officer and disorderly conduct but was convicted of resisting arrest. The prosecution recommended three months of probation, fifty hours of community service, anger management classes, and court costs. But the presiding judge, Jose Fernandez of Miami’s county court, was apparently angered that Miller had documented his trial on an Internet blog and sentenced Miller to one year of probation, a hundred hours of community service, anger management classes, and more than $500 in court costs.

The severity of Miller’s sentence upset the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), which had initially donated some funds for Miller’s defense. In a news release, SPJ president Clint Brewer said, “The fact that Mr. Miller was arrested for taking pictures in a public place was the first violation of his First Amendment rights. Those rights were violated again when Mr. Miller’s statements in his blog became factors in Fernandez’s sentence. The Society fully defends Mr. Miller’s right to speak freely in his blog.”

Even after leaving the scene of a photo opportunity, apparently photographers today are still susceptible to raids by the authorities. In September 2009, Laura Sennett, a photojournalist specializing in protests and demonstrations, filed a federal complaint stating that both the federal government and local law enforcement violated her rights under the First and Fourth Amendments after coming into her home and seizing computer hardware and data, digital cameras, memory cards, a still camera, digital storage devices, and a digital voice recorder along with other work materials and personal belongings. Only her son was home at the time of the raid.

According to Sennett, this happened because she photographed protesters at a meeting of the International Monetary Fund on April 12, 2008. In her complaint, Sennett claimed to have suffered extreme emotional and mental distress and humiliation. She sought an injunction ordering the DOJ to return her belongings plus pay $250,000 in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages. No criminal charges were filed against her.

Sennett named Attorney General Eric Holder, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, Prince William, the Police Department of Arlington Counties, and the Department of Justice in her complaint. Sennett says she was not a target of any criminal investigation and her work has been published by several media outlets, including CNN and the History Channel.

One of the long-standing tenets of journalism is that in reporting the news, both film, video, and still photographers have the right to shoot pictures, especially on public property. This right appears in grave danger as news reporting today already is limited to handouts from the authorities, reporters being held behind yellow tape blocks from the scene, and duplicate TV coverage on most channels coming from pool cameramen.

YOU’RE ON CAMERA

I
T’S NOT JUST THE
photographers who are having concerns over cameras. Recently there has been an explosion in the number of surveillance cameras being used in cities small and large that perturbs libertarians.

Instead of a conventional welcome sign outside the small city of Medina, Washington, visitors today are greeted by one reading you
ARE ENTERING A
24-
HOUR VIDEO SURVEILLANCE AREA
. Police chief Jeffrey Chen declined to say how many cameras had been installed at intersections using “automatic license plate recognition” technology to record license numbers. Should a database search turn up an outstanding warrant, police immediately dispatch units to track the car. Chen said information gathered by the cameras is stored for sixty days, which allows police to keep searching if a crime occurs.

“These cameras provide us with intelligence,” explained Chen. “It gets us in front of criminals. I don’t like to be on a level playing field with criminals.”

Chen told newsmen that in 2008 there were eleven burglaries in this town of thirty-one hundred, which boasts an average household income of more than $220,000. “Some people think [eleven burglaries] is tolerable. But even one crime is intolerable,” Chen said.

Doug Honig, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, was troubled by the new surveillance system, saying it smacks of privacy violations. “Government shouldn’t be keeping records of people’s comings and goings when they haven’t done anything wrong,” he said. “By actions like this, we’re moving closer and closer to a surveillance society.”

Despite Honig’s statements, many believe that intrusive measures are necessary today. Former Washington, D.C., mayor Anthony A. Williams is among the believers, and he warned his constituents when he was mayor that “We are in a new…really dangerous world now, and we have to maintain a higher level of security.”

Williams planned to increase Washington, D.C., security by emulating cities like London and Sydney that have thousands of video cameras throughout the city linked to a central command office. England currently has more than two million cameras in airports, train stations, streets, and neighborhoods.

Asked if such a scheme would seriously impact individual civil rights, Williams admitted, “There will be trade-offs.”

The United Kingdom is a great example of a modern surveillance society, where companies can thrive on a citizen’s penchant for voyeurism. A new company called Internet Eyes offers up to 1,000 pounds to citizen volunteers who stay at home watching several video monitors connected to some of Britain’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras. As part of this “instant event notification system,” the viewers are to report any “alert”—a suspicious activity—which according to company literature most commonly includes shoplifting, burglary, vandalism, and “anti-social behavior.” The alerts are passed to the camera owners, subscribers to the Internet Eyes service, who evaluate the alerts and decide who gets the reward money. Monitors cannot designate or control the video camera feeds nor are they allowed to know the location of the cameras.

How long will it be before some new terrorist threat, whether real, imagined, or fabricated, enlists well-meaning American television viewers to report anything they feel is suspicious behavior on the part of their neighbors? Don’t think it cannot happen. It’s already happening in what once was called “the Mother Country.”