Over the past year, the US government has intensified its crackdown on political
                    dissidents opposing corporate globalization, and it is used the same intimidating
                    and probably unconstitutional tactics against demonstrators at the presidential
                    inauguration. With the Secret Service taking on extraordinary powers designed to
                    combat terrorism, undercover operatives are spied on protesters' planning
                    meetings, while police restricted who is allowed on the parade route and planned a
                    massive search effort of visitors.
 

                    One activist who has had experience with how the DC police handle demonstrators
                    is Rob Fish, a cheerful young man with the Student Environmental Action Coalition
                    profiled in a recent Sierra magazine cover story on the new generation of
                    environmentalists. If you were watching CNN during the protests against the
                    International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC, in April, you would
                    have seen Fish, 22, beaten, bloody and bandaged after an attack by an enraged
                    plainclothes officer who also tried to destroy the camera with which Fish was
                    documenting police harassment.
 

                    Fish is a plaintiff in a class-action suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union,
                    the National Lawyers Guild and the Partnership for Civil Justice against the DC
                    police and a long list of federal agencies including the FBI. This suit -- along with
                    others in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, where the party conventions were held in
                    August; in Detroit, which declared a civil emergency during the June Organization
                    of American States meeting across the border in Windsor, Ontario; and in Seattle
                    -- is exposing a level of surveillance and disruption of political activities not seen on
                    the left since the FBI deployed its dirty tricks against the Central American solidarity
                    movement during the 1980s.
 

                    Among police agencies themselves this is something of an open secret. In the
                    spring the US Attorney's office bestowed an award on members of the Washington,
                    DC, police department for their "unparalleled" coordination with other police
                    agencies during the IMF protests. "The FBI provided valuable background on the
                    individuals who were intent on committing criminal acts and were able to impart the
                    valuable lessons learned from Seattle," the US Attorney declared.
 

                    Civil liberties lawyers say the level of repression -- in the form of unwarranted
                    searches and surveillance, unprovoked shootings and beatings, and pre-emptive
                    mass arrests criminalizing peaceful demonstrators -- violates protesters' rights of
                    free speech and association. "It's political profiling," said Jim Lafferty, director of
                    the National Lawyers Guild's Los Angeles office, which is backing lawsuits coming
                    out of the Los Angeles protests. "They target organizers. It's a new level of
                    crackdown on dissent."
 

                    In Washington in April and at the Republican National Convention protest in
                    Philadelphia last summer, the police rounded up hundreds of activists in
                    pre-emptive arrests and targeted and arrested on trumped-up charges those they
                    had identified as leaders. Once many of those cases appeared in Philadelphia
                    court, they were dismissed because the police could offer no reason for the arrests.
                    In December the courts dismissed all charges against 64 puppet-making activists
                    arrested at a warehouse. A month before, prosecutors had told the judge they were
                    withdrawing all fourteen misdemeanor charges against Ruckus Society head John
                    Sellers for lack of evidence. These were the same charges -- including possession
                    of an instrument of a crime, his cell phone -- that police leveled against Sellers to
                    argue for his imprisonment on $1 million bail this past August.
 

                    A major question posed by the lawsuits is whether the federal government trained
                    local police to violate the free-speech rights of protesters like Sellers and Fish. The
                    FBI held seminars for local police in the protest cities on the lessons of the Seattle
                    disorders to help them prepare for the demonstrations. It has also formed "joint
                    terrorism task forces" in 27 of its 56 divisions, composed of local, state and federal
                    law-enforcement officers, aimed at suppressing what it sees as domestic terrorism
                    on the left and on the right. "We want to be proactive and keep these things from
                    happening," Gordon Compton, an FBI spokesman, told the Oregonian in early
                    December after public-interest groups called for the city to withdraw from that
                    region's task force.
 

                    The collaboration of federal and local police harks back to the height of the
                    municipal Red Squads, renamed "intelligence units" in the postwar period. During
                    the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover and his illegal Counterintelligence Program
                    (COINTELPRO), the FBI relied on these local police units and even private
                    right-wing spy groups for information about antiwar and other activists. The FBI then
                    used the information and its own agents provocateurs to disrupt the Black
                    Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, Puerto Rican nationalists and others
                    during the dark days of COINTELPRO and after that program was exposed in
                    1971.
 

                    Local citizen action won curbs on Red Squad activity throughout the country in the
                    seventies and eighties after scandals revealed political surveillance of the ACLU,
                    antiwar and civil rights activists, among others. While Chicago police recently won
                    a court case to resume their spying, elsewhere police are evading restrictions by
                    having other police agencies spy for them. In Philadelphia four state police officers
                    who claimed they were construction workers from Wilkes-Barre infiltrated the
                    "convergence" space where the activists were making puppets and otherwise
                    preparing for demonstrations against the Republican convention.
 

                    State police (who also monitored activists' Internet organizing) initially said they
                    were working with the Philadelphia police department, which was barred in 1987
                    from political spying without special permission. And in New York last spring, police
                    apparently violated a 1985 ban on sharing intelligence when it helped Philadelphia
                    police monitor and photograph NYC anarchists at a May Day demonstration.
 

                    "We have local Washington, DC, authorities in Philadelphia -- I see no role for them
                    there except fingering people who were in lawful demonstrations in DC," says Mara
                    Verheyden-Hilliard of Partnership for Civil Justice, who is representing the activists
                    in the DC lawsuit.
 

                    Environmental activist Fish ran into a sergeant from the Morristown, New Jersey,
                    police department at demonstration after demonstration. The sergeant had helped
                    the neighboring Florham Park, New Jersey, police handle a small protest against a
                    Brookings Institution session with the World Bank on April 1, where Fish had
                    assisted in a dramatic banner hanging. At the May Day protest in New York, "much
                    to my surprise," he ran into not just the Morristown officer but "the whole crew" he
                    had seen in DC a few weeks before, including officers from DC and Philadelphia,
                    and now even someone from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
 

                    "They knew all about me being beat up in DC and that my camera was lost," he
                    said. In DC they had revealed that they knew he'd been to a Ruckus Society training
                    in Florida during spring break. They were very open about who they were, some
                    handing Fish their business cards.
 

                    Capt. Peter Demitz, the Morristown police officer, explained in a recent interview
                    that he traveled to demonstrations using funds from a program set up by the Justice
                    Department after the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Attorney General Janet Reno
                    "felt that civil disorder and demonstrations would be the most active since the
                    Vietnam War. She said police officers should learn from each other, so there's
                    more money for observing," said Demitz. According to Verheyden-Hilliard, the
                    coordination among police agencies "becomes a problem when it's being used to
                    chill people's political speech -- it's being used in a way to silence people."
 

                    Letting activists know they are under surveillance is also a time-honored tactic of
                    local intelligence units and the FBI. "I see several different components of
                    COINTELPRO, from conspicuous surveillance, spreading fear of infiltration,
                    preventive detention and false stories to the press," says Brian Glick, a Fordham
                    University law professor and author of War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S.
                    Activists and What We Can Do About It.
 

                    Among the police actions that worry civil libertarians:
 

                    - Police raids of demonstrators' gathering spaces. In DC, saying there was a fire
                    threat, the police, fire department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
                    kicked everyone out of the convergence space, arrested the "leaders" and seized
                    puppets and political materials. The ACLU prevented a similar raid on the
                    convergence center in Los Angeles during the Democratic convention by winning
                    an injunction from a federal judge, who warned the police that they could not even
                    investigate building or fire-code violations without federal court approval.
 

                    - False stories to the press. In statements later proved to be false, police in
                    Washington and Philadelphia said they found the makings of dangerous weapons
                    in convergence centers. DC police announced they had found a Molotov cocktail
                    but later admitted it was a plastic soda bottle stuffed with rags. Similarly, the
                    makings of "pepper spray," police admitted later, were actually peppers, onions
                    and other vegetables found in the kitchen area, while "ammunition" seized in an
                    activist's home consisted of empty shells on a Mexican ornament. Philadelphia
                    police also reported "dangerous" items in activists' puppet-making material. Such
                    false statements were intended to discredit the protesters and discourage people
                    from supporting them, civil liberties lawyers argue.
 

                    - Rounding up demonstrators on trumped-up charges. In Philadelphia on August 1,
                    police arrested seventy activists working in the convergence space called the
                    puppet warehouse on conspiracy and obstruction-of-traffic charges. They justified
                    the raid, which the ACLU called one of the largest instances of preventive detention
                    in US history, in a warrant that drew on an obscure far-right newsletter funded by
                    millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife claiming that the young people were funded by
                    communist groups and therefore dangerous. On April 15, Washington police
                    rounded up 600 demonstrators marching against the prison-industrial complex,
                    picking up tourists in the process. Police held them on buses for sixteen hours.
 

                    - List-making. The BBC reported that the Czech government received from the FBI
                    a list of activists that it used in stopping Americans from entering for anti-IMF
                    demonstrations in Prague in September. A journalist interviewed two such
                    Americans who said they had no criminal record but had been briefly held and
                    released in Seattle during the 1999 anti-WTO protests. MacDonald Scott, a
                    Canadian paralegal doing legal support, estimates from border-crossing records
                    that Canada turned away about 500 people during the OAS meetings last June.
 

                    - Political profiling. On May 1 the NYPD rounded up peacefully demonstrating
                    anarchists with covered faces under a nineteenth-century anti-Klan law, in addition
                    to a few other barefaced anarchist-looking activists.
 

                    - Unconstitutional bail amounts. Philadelphia law enforcement sought what lawyers
                    are calling unconstitutionally high bail, most famously the $1 million bail against
                    John Sellers of the Ruckus Society (which a judge lowered to a still-high $100,000).
 
 

                    - Brutal treatment. In Philadelphia and Washington, activists were held for
                    excessive lengths of time, not informed of their full rights or given access to their
                    lawyers, and were hogtied with plastic handcuffs attaching their wrists to their
                    ankles. Philadelphia activists in particular reported brutal treatment while in police
                    custody, but in every city demonstrators suffered from police assault on the streets.
 

                    Whether and how the Justice Department or the FBI plotted strategies for cracking
                    down on protesters is the type of information that is often only revealed by chance
                    or long after the fact. COINTELPRO was famously exposed in 1971 when activists
                    liberated documents from an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. The process of
                    uncovering the government's recent attempts to suppress dissent has just begun.
 

                    An FBI agent told the Philadelphia Inquirer the government was focusing on the
                    antiglobalization activists in much the same way they pursued Christian antiabortion
                    bombers "after the Atlanta Olympics." By expressing such urgent concern, federal
                    agencies may provide tacit permission to local police to use heavy-handed tactics
                    stored in the institutional memories of police departments from the most active
                    days of the Red Squads. Philadelphia police are notorious for preventively
                    detaining black activists, illegal raids and the bombing of the MOVE house in 1985.
                    They spied on some 600 groups well into the 1970s, and with the collusion of
                    judges, set astronomical bails to detain people on charges that later proved without
                    warrant.
 

                    Indeed, the local police may not need encouragement from the Feds for their use of
                    violence against largely (though not entirely) nonviolent demonstrators. "There's a
                    militaristic pattern to policing these days, the increasing us-versus-them attitude,"
                    says Jim Lafferty of the National Lawyers Guild in LA. The treatment of protesters is
                    an extension of the way many police treat those in poor neighborhoods, stopping
                    pedestrians who are young, black and male without probable cause, harassing and
                    even shooting with little provocation.
 

                    "In LA, apparently they decided instead of arresting people and setting high bail
                    like they did in Philadelphia, they'll just open fire," said Dan Takadji, the ACLU
                    lawyer who is suing the city for civil rights violations. When police shot rubber bullets
                    at a concert and rally of more than a thousand people outside the Democratic
                    convention center in August, "there were a few people throwing garbage over the
                    fence," Takadji said. "Instead of dealing with these few people, the police swept in
                    and fired on a crowd with rubber bullets" without giving concertgoers time to file out
                    of the small entry the police kept open. This had shades of the 1968 Democratic
                    convention in Chicago, when the National Guard blocked the exit of a permitted
                    demonstration in Grant Park as police charged with tear gas and rifle butts.
 

                    Also reminiscent of '68 is harassment of those calling for police reform. LA police
                    officers shot rubber bullets into the crowd at an anti-police-brutality rally on October
                    22. As in other demonstrations, police also targeted a videographer who was
                    filming. A few days earlier the NYPD raided the Bronx apartment of members of the
                    tiny Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, which was helping to organize a
                    similar protest.
 

                    Recent legislation has all but encouraged repressive police tactics. A 1998 federal
                    law, for example, gave federal intelligence agencies vast new powers to track
                    suspected terrorists with "roving wiretaps" and secret court orders that allow covert
                    tracing of phone calls and obtaining of documents. The Antiterrorism and Effective
                    Death Penalty Act of 1996, meanwhile, increased the authority of the FBI to
                    investigate First Amendment activity, like donations to nonviolent political
                    organizations deemed "terrorist" by the government. This would have criminalized
                    those who gave money to the African National Congress during apartheid, says Kit
                    Gage of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation. And Clinton in his
                    last days created the post of counterintelligence czar, whose mission, the Wall
                    Street Journal reports, includes working with corporations to maintain "economic
                    security."
 

                    It's not only antiglobalization activists who have faced crackdowns on free-speech
                    and free-association rights. The Immigration and Naturalization Service is
                    imprisoning and deporting people whose political views the government considers
                    unacceptable, although its efforts to use secret evidence have suffered setbacks in
                    the courts, with some people freed when evidence proved spurious. Still, Muslim
                    Arab-Americans continue to be called before secret grand juries investigating ties
                    between US residents and "terrorist" groups like the Palestinian organization
                    Hamas.
 

                    More than fifty years ago President Truman unleashed a crackdown on the left that
                    was carried on by his Republican successor. We may face a similar crisis today.
                    "There's been a massive violation of civil rights and constitutional rights. This
                    decision to suspend the Constitution is one that has been made now at one event
                    after another. It's obvious there was a conscious decision to do it," said Bill
                    Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "What lies behind
                    the decision is more disturbing. The purpose of it is to prevent the public from
                    hearing the message of the protesters."
 

                    Abby Scher is a sociologist and writer who has researched women's politics of the
                    McCarthy period. This article originally appeared in The Nation.