Legislation that would prohibit police from spying on peaceful activist groups or keeping intelligence files on their members would not limit law enforcement’s ability to protect public safety from terrorist attacks, said ACLU members who rallied Monday in Annapolis to support the bill.
“This bill and these standards protect the integrity of criminal intelligence gathering and First Amendment rights,” said Cynthia Boersma, ACLU of Maryland legislative director.
“It’s not a zero-sum game.”
State lawmakers outlined a bill this past month that would require police to have “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity before conducting covert surveillance of activist groups. It also would prohibit police from keeping files on individuals unless the information is part of a criminal investigation.
“This bill really just codifies federal law enforcement best practices that already exist but were not applied in this case,” said Mike German, former special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations.
“It’s not a further limitation on law enforcement activities. In fact, it’s designed to help law enforcement be more efficient rather than wasting time investigating innocent people. By having a reasonable suspicion of criminality, they’d be more likely to use their resources to catch criminals.”
Calls for legislation began after the ACLU sued state police this summer to obtain information about a 14-month surveillance operation in which activists were improperly labeled “terrorists” or “drug traffickers” in an intelligence database disseminated among federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
After a state review concluded in October that police violated federal regulations and intruded on law-abiding residents’ rights to express themselves freely, Col. Terrence Sheridan, the state police superintendent, agreed to purge the “terror files” on more than 50 individuals and implement policies to prevent such surveillance from happening again.
But clearing their smeared names from multiple law enforcement databases will be a daunting task for the victims, German said.
“With the way information is now shared between agencies, once the state police inappropriately collected data it was passed up through federal databases,” German said.
“We built all these systems to seamlessly share information. … It was disseminated to federal government, state and local agencies, so trying to track where this information has gone becomes very difficult.”
Gov. Martin O’Malley has introduced similar legislation essentially codifying the state review’s recommendations, but the ACLU said it doesn’t go far enough in protecting First Amendment rights, because the bill only applies to state police and does not prohibit file sharing with other agencies.
