Government Surveillance Silences AIDS Activist

Three years ago, Jennifer Flynn was among the hundreds of thousands of people who protested the Republican National Convention in New York City. Her pet cause: HIV research and treatment. Not too threatening, but the government apparently thought otherwise.

Flynn is a co-founder of the AIDS Housing Network. One day before an AHN rally, she went to New Jersey to visit her parents. She noticed a car with New York plates parked outside their house. When she drove home to Brooklyn that night, the car followed her -- and was joined by two others. She did all the detective story check-your-tail maneuvers: making random turns, chaning lanes, parking. They continued to follow. Reports Newsday:

At one point, she recalled, she slowed down and one of the other vehicles ended up alongside her car. She looked over to see several men in the vehicle. She gestured toward them. The men "threw up their arms as if to say, 'We're only doing what we're told,'" she remembers.

On the New Jersey side of the Goethals Bridge, her followers pulled away. But later, when Flynn pulled up in front of her Flatbush home, she spotted another car, with two men inside, both with laptops. At 4
a.m., they were still there.

It got weirder. She wrote down one of the license plate numbers;
recently, a civil liberties lawyer identified the number and traced it back to Pequot Inc., a company registered to a P.O. box in Amenia, a small town in upstate New York. But there's no company by that name in
Amenia -- and the town's postmaster claims the people who used to check the box were from NYC, but refuses to say more because of the
"sensitive nature of the issue."

The NYPD insist they didn't put Flynn under surveillance; city intelligence officials say the feds weren't involved, either. But dummy-company registration is also known to be a standard spook trick, and the allegations fit well with what is known about the widespread surveillance and intimidation of domestic political activists -- something that traces back to the late-90s anti-globalization movement, but intensified after September 11 and was in full effect for the RNC.

Since her experience, Flynn has continued to organize, though she says she's not so enthusiastic before, and has seen other activists pull back. Was she really followed? We might never find out. But when we hear stories about political activists losing their civil liberties, we shouldn't assume that they're potentially violent folks bent on smashing Starbucks and the capitalist state. They might just want a cure for AIDS.
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Related Wired coverage: dragonfly spybots, the US Army trains for the RNC in 2000, bike activists busted in NYC.*

Activist silenced for fear of surveillance [Newsday]