Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Police State

While the Chinese government pushed the largest commercial banks, the Big Four, to the market, the US government invested $250 Billion in the first phase into private banks and counted on share bonus in a long run. You never know which turn is the world going to make in the next day.

Thanks for efforts of the ACLU, it was revealed that numerous Maryland residents had been mistakenly targeted as terrorists, and had been under State police surveillance since 2005. In wake of the exposure of the case, the Police just announced that they would destroy the files however they would not allow the people to keep a copy of their file, nor would they be able to review their file with a lawyer.

Four residents of the Frederick county was among the targeted group, because their nonviolent opposition to the expansion of the Ft. Detrick Biodefense Facility. Ft Detrick is a Maryland National Guard base, but shared by several agents, including the National Cancer Institute and the United States Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC). The under construction National Interagency Biodefense Campus would include the highest toxic labs of Army, the USAG, FBI, and CDC. Because Ft. Detrick had a range of materiel processing problem in its history, the local community is wary of the expansion, and a grass root movement is mobilized to advocate for more scrutiny in the plan.

One of the four residents was Schmidt Kissin, a Poland immigrant who fled her homeland on a Fulbright scholarship opportunity after being jailed by then Polish communism government for political activity.

The extend of the surveillance is not known at the time of writing. The Maryland State Police agreed to expunge the record from one of their own databases. However, the record is believed to live in other government databases. For example, according to a report by former Attorney General Steven Sachs, some of the records were also listed in a Federal drug trafficking program. European Union laws prohibit cross referencing of public databases, for the exact reason to prevent false information from propagating. There's no such law in the US.

source

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