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At The Tombs
In a kind of poetic justice, it turns out my friend Martha has the same court date as I have -- the morning of Dec. 8 at the New York City Criminal Court building (aka "The Tombs") at 100 Centre Street in New York, where I spent the night/morning of Oct. 30/31. She was arrested with about 100 others at a Sept. 22 action dubbed "Flood Wall Street," protesting the important role of the financial industry in facilitating air pollution and global warming.
In an aside, Martha told me that the police had as much trouble getting handcuffs on the "polar bear" sitting next to her that day as they did on Oct. 30 trying to bend my injured left shoulder back far enough to get the cuffs on me. I look forward to standing at the same dock where Martha will be defending her action which was very much in the tradition of "Grannie."
My Catholic Worker friends comfort the afflicted, while in no way shying away from afflicting the comfortable, as the saying goes. And for that, they often pay a price, including being snooped upon, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, for exercising their rights under the First.
I am not making this up: In the fall of 2010, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine criticized the FBI for conducting "anti-terrorism" spy operations against the Catholic Worker Movement and even the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh. According to Fine, spies were sent into the Merton Center to "look for international terrorists." One of the informers photographed a woman he thought was of "Middle Eastern descent" to have her checked out by "terrorism analysts."
So my possible tradecraft lapse may have been contacting my Catholic Worker friends. On Oct. 26, I sent Martha an email with the innocuous title, "Room in the Inn?" It contained the usual request for simple lodging at the Catholic Worker together with details regarding my classes at Fordham and Manhattan and the Petraeus event.
While the title and other metadata accompanying that message might seem singularly unsuspicious, eavesdroppers covering Martha's or my email addresses (or both) would have had no trouble ferreting out an email exchange following an earlier attempt to attend an event at the 92ndStreet Y, three years ago.
On Sept. 8, 2011, a group of Catholic Workers, together with others -- all of us with valid tickets -- were summarily expelled, most of us 10 minutes before an event sponsored by the Jewish Policy Center. That event bore the title "9/11 a Decade Later: Lessons Learned and Future Challenges" and featured former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, ex-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and George W. Bush's press spokesman Ari Fleisher. It was moderated by neoconservative talk show host Michael Medved.
Since I was not among those subjected to Y security's preventive strike before the performance, I sat quietly for Medved's opening rant about radical, fundamentalist Muslim terrorists, but then stood up in silent witness against the right-wing invective. I was unceremoniously, violently thrown out after a mere two minutes.
More relevant here: I still have in my email inbox a message of encouragement dated Sept. 12, 2011, in which Martha reminded me that every action, "successful" or not, is important; adding, "We of the Catholic Worker are 'fools for Christ,' as the saying goes."
Only Metadata
You are perhaps thinking that the National Security Agency stores only metadata; and, if so, you would be wrong. Content is saved. So if the government wants to access the content of emails from the past, no problem.
As Bill Binney reminded me, former FBI director Robert Mueller let that particular cat out of the bag three-and-a-half years ago. In his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 30, 2011, Mueller bragged about having access to "past emails and future ones as they come in."
Binney explains that the metadata is used to access the content. And, thanks to the documents provided by Edward Snowden, we know that under NSA's PRISM operation, data is routinely collected directly from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple (and God knows where else, again assuming God is cleared).
So my best guess is that I can blame the "subversive" activities of the Catholic Workers and the monitoring of them by the organs of state security, for my recent arrest and overnight accommodations in The Tombs.
The people at the World Can't Wait in New York, who were also aware of my plan to take in the Petraeus performance, are known to have been targets of eavesdropping, too. With the surfeit of people sorting through emails from suspicious folks, it may be that both the Catholic Workers and the World Can't Wait were both monitored -- all to keep us safe, of course.
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