The FBI is hard at work monitoring, tracking and investigating the latest terrorist threat to American democracy and freedom.

An insidious new cadre of evildoers is on the rise. According to a confidential FBI memo, the group uses extensive “training” to prepare its members for their criminal activities, and to develop “innovative strategies” for “intimidating” police officers, initiating litigation and legal challenges against law enforcement, and fund raising.

Most recently, fanatics of this kind have been responsible for the ouster of the president of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, the civil disobedience against free trade talks in Latin America and opposition to the policies of the government of the United States. There are even cells operating in Madison.

The FBI is, of course, concerned about the scourge of protesters, demonstrators and outspoken political activists that plague the land. Their First Amendment-protected zealotry threatens the security of America with “potentially illegal acts,” “criminal activity” and “terrorism,” according to the department memo.

Thanks to the memo and a recent spate of interviews with various FBI officials, it has come to light that the agency has been collecting widespread information on the organization and political, legal and demonstration strategies of antiwar protesters.

This is a chilling revelation, as it is evocative of the practices of the COINTELPRO program under the J. Edgar Hoover era-FBI, under which political protesters such as Martin Luther King Jr. were secretly and illegally spied upon and intimidated.

But now the FBI has gone a step further: it is telling local law enforcement agencies to report “suspicious activity” to agency counterterrorism squads — that civil disobedience is terrorism.

The agency insists that it is not monitoring the protected speech of protesters, but rather that it is seeking out “extremist elements” in organized political rallies and demonstrations. Apparently the FBI sees potential anarchists in all law-abiding citizens who take it upon themselves to make their opinions heard publicly.

Never mind that the agency itself admits that there has been no evidence of illegal organizing or conspiracy in any of the protests during the current administration.

On the face of it, there is nothing technically illegal about the FBI’s current monitoring program. Last year, in name of the “war on terror”, Attorney General John Ashcroft significantly expanded the powers for FBI agents to attend rallies, religious services and events “open to the public.”

But it is hard to see how the agency could not understand that such practices would have a chilling effect on the constitutionally protected dissent and protest that are vital to the life of American democracy.

The FBI points to the preparations and precautions taken by well-organized demonstrators — wearing gas masks, forming human chains, videotaping police officers making arrests, and raising funds for legal representation before demonstrations — as indicating a proclivity for violence among protesters.

Quite the contrary: such preparations indicate the propensity for heavy-handed and sometimes violent tactics used by law enforcement when confronted with public demonstrations.

For example, in the most recent series of American protests, against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) talks in Miami, a relatively small showing of demonstrators was greeted by local law enforcement with tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets. Plainclothes and undercover police officers attempted to create disturbances so as to incite violence and justify a stronger police crackdown. Individuals who tried to leave the protests were arrested and in some instances beaten. Over 100 demonstrators were treated for wounds and many were hospitalized.

Miami police chief John Timoney (who, for much of his career, has harbored what appears to be a personal grudge against demonstrators, referring to them as “basically … spoiled rich kids trying to provoke you”) said, “If [protesters] engage in lawful activity, we’re gonna arrest them.”

It was apparently a misstatement — but a telling one. Mayor Manny Diaz called the heavy — almost paramilitary — police presence “a model for homeland defense.”

If that’s not equating civil disobedience with terrorism, I don’t know what is.

Federal and local law enforcement officials point to the violence accompanying the WTO and IMF protests in Seattle in 1999 as a precedent for viewing large-scale protests as potential hotbeds of anarchic or even terroristic violence.

Yet the numbers present in Miami were a fraction of those in Seattle, and they were overwhelmingly — indeed overbearingly — contained by a disproportional law enforcement presence. And no protests to date have been marked by Seattle-style violence.

One FBI official recently stated that it would be “a great opportunity for an act of terrorism, when all your resources are dedicated to some big event and you let your guard down.” To suggest that large demonstrations could increase the risk of terrorism is disingenuous at best. Terrorist targets would be safer if counterterrorism units were used for their intended purpose — combating terror — rather than chasing after phantoms of perceived anarchy.

By monitoring and infiltrating the activities of legal political organizations and threatening to have their activities reported to counterterrorism programs, the federal government is not protecting public safety. Much like Chief Timoney and Mayor Diaz, federal law enforcement is seeking to provoke existing demonstrators to violence and to instill fear in potential protestors.

Both contingencies play into the hands of an administration that has persistently sought to undermine the constitutional rights of Americans to organize and speak on behalf of their grievances through draconian legislation such as the PATRIOT Act.

Such a government must not be challenged with violence or regarded with apathy, but engaged with peaceful civil disobedience, an activity that the FBI now considers to be a crime against the state.

Rob Hunter ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in philosophy and political science.