[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:7171] Poster busters

[Al Kagan]

>Delivered-To: akagan at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
>Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 15:30:30 -0500
>From: "Carol Reid" <creid at MAIL.NYSED.GOV>
>To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
>Subject: [SRRTAC-L:7171] Poster busters
>Reply-To: srrtac-l at ala.org
>Sender: owner-srrtac-l at ala.org
>Status:  
>
>Not sure if this has been posted here yet, but Jesus...
>
>http://www.indyweek.com/durham/current/triangles.html





  The Poster Police

  A Durham student activist gets a visit from the
  Secret Service

  B Y   J O N   E L L I S T O N

  A.J. Brown, a 19-year-old freshman at Durham Tech, was thanking God 
it was Friday.
  It was 5 p.m., the school week was over, and in an hour she'd be 
meeting her boyfriend
  to unwind.

                      Then: Knock, knock ... unexpected guests at Brown's Duke
                      Manor apartment. Opening the door, she found a casually
                      dressed man, and a man and woman in what appeared to be
                      business attire. Her first thought, she says, 
was, "Are these
  people going to sell me something?"



                                             Photo By Alex Maness
             Threat or dissent? A.J. Brown and her anti-Bush poster


  But then the man in the suit introduced himself and the woman as 
agents from the
  Raleigh office of the U.S. Secret Service. The other man was an 
investigator from the
  Durham Police Department.

  "Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material," 
the male agent
  said, according to Brown. Could they come in to have a look around?

  "Do you have a warrant?" Brown asked. They did not. "Then you're not 
coming in my
  apartment," she said. And indeed, they stayed outside her doorway. 
But they stayed a
  while--40 minutes, Brown estimates--and gave her a taste of how 
dissenters can come
  under scrutiny in wartime.

  And all because of a poster on her wall.

  Though she's still a teenager, Brown is already more informed about 
political repression
  than most Americans. She's been politically aware and involved since 
grade school. "In
  second grade, I saw the Gulf War on television, and seeing those 
bombs drop, it did
  something to me," she says. "I knew from some news reports that 
there were innocent
  people dying."

  In middle school, Brown became interested in environmentalism and 
civil liberties. She
  made the shift to full-fledged activist at Jordan High School when 
she became involved
  with Youth Voice Radio, a media collective with a leftist bent. Most 
recently, she's been
  involved with the movement against the war in Afghanistan.

  Brown and fellow activists often discuss government encroachments on 
free speech and
  political organizing, she says, as do some of her favorite hip-hop 
artists. She loves her
  music--and that may have been what sparked the turn of events that 
brought the Secret
  Service to her door.

  Brown suspects it began with the noise complaints. On Oct. 22, a 
Monday evening, she
  stayed up late playing some new CDs for her boyfriend. By her own 
admission, she was
  playing them too loud. Around midnight, a Durham police officer came 
by to tell her to
  turn it down, and she obliged.

  Two nights later, someone from Duke Manor called in another noise 
complaint, and
  again a police officer came to Brown's door. This time, she says, 
her music wasn't
  playing at an offensive volume. The police officer speculated that 
the call may have been
  about someone else's stereo. During this visit, and unlike the 
first, the officer had a full
  view of the wall that faces Brown's front doorway, a detail that 
would become relevant
  two days later: On that wall hung The Poster.

  Brown got it at an "anti-inauguration" protest in Washington, D.C. 
Distributed to
  hundreds of activists, it depicts George W. Bush holding a length of 
rope against a
  backdrop of lynching victims, and reads: "We hang on your every 
word. George Bush:
  Wanted, 152 Dead"--a reference to the number of people executed by 
the state of Texas
  while Bush was governor. Brown believes that the message caused the Durham
  policeman who paid the second visit to her apartment to recommend a third.

  On Friday, Oct. 26, two Secret Service agents, along with Durham 
police investigator
  Rex Godley, came to Brown's apartment. Special Agent Paul Lalley, 
who did most of
  the talking, spoke first. "Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you 
have anti-American
  material, or something like that, in your apartment," he said, 
according to Brown. Then
  the female agent asked if they could come inside.

  When Brown pressed them for a warrant and refused to allow them in, 
she says, "They
  started to talk to me about how, 'We're not here to take you away or 
put you in jail.'
  They were like, 'We need to follow up on every report we get.' I said, 'That's
  understandable, but how would you even know what's in my apartment?'

  "They just said they had gotten information from some place," she 
says. She speculates
  that it was from the police officer who visited for the second noise 
complaint.

  Godley, the Durham police investigator, won't say where the 
authorities got their tip
  about Brown's poster. "The only thing I can tell you is that we were 
assisting the Secret
  Service on one of their cases," he says.

  Lalley referred questions about the visit to Special Agent Craig 
Ulmer, who heads the
  Secret Service office in Raleigh.

  "We went in the first place because we received a tip about a threat 
against the
  president," Ulmer says. He refuses to identify the source of the 
tip, except to say that it
  was a "concerned citizen" and not a law enforcement officer. It's 
Secret Service policy to
  keep such sources confidential.

  "We can't discuss who gives us information like that, because we 
want people to bring
  us information," Ulmer says. "If we burn our bridges, so to speak, 
we're not going to
  get help from the public."

  Ulmer added that the poster "was in plain view, even from the 
window, so anyone could
  have tipped us off."

  The agents persisted in their effort to get a peek inside the 
apartment. "They were being
  friendly, trying to get me to let them in," Brown says. After a 
while, Brown called her
  mother, an IBM employee who is in the Army Reserve. "She said to 
absolutely not let
  them in," Brown says. Not sure what else to do, Brown passed the 
phone--with her
  mother still on the line--to one of the agents.

  The standoff continued, and eventually the agents explained why they 
had come by: "We
  already know what it is; it's a target of Bush," one of them said, 
according to
  Brown--apparently a reference to the poster. She informed them it 
was no such thing.
  They then said, "Well, it's Bush hanging himself." Nope, she told them.

  Finally, Brown relented a bit, agreeing to open the door and show 
them her poster wall.
  "They looked in, and the lady was like, 'Ohhhh, that's not that 
bad.'" The male agent
  added, "We've seen worse."

  Still, Brown's brush with the authorities wasn't over. "Since they 
were just gawking at
  my wall, I decided to explain it."

  The wall features Brown's favorite art and mementos: a high-school 
photo project
  showing the perils of smoking cigarettes; a Pink Floyd poster ("It 
has that phrase,
  'Mother should I trust the government,' so I had to get it"); 
posters for two Japanese
  cartoon shows; several pictures she took at protests and rallies; 
and a headband with
  "Democracy" on it. And, of course, the Bush-as-hangman poster.

  Having seen the poster, Brown says, the agents questioned her 
further, asking: "Do you
  have any Afghanistan stuff in your apartment, or anything pertaining 
to that? Any
  pro-Taliban stuff?"

  "I kept saying no," Brown says, "and I was like, personally, I think 
the Taliban are a
  bunch of assholes." With that, the investigator and the agents bid her adieu.

  Brown was temporarily rattled by the visit from the Secret Service, 
she says, but the
  poster's still up, and she's still committed to her activism. "I'm 
definitely going to be
  vocal," she says. "If things get really hairy and they decide to 
come after activists, then
  I'd have to just grit my teeth and go through it."

  Ulmer rejects the notion that Brown was targeted because of her 
politics, and he insists
  that the Secret Service would have checked this tip out even if it 
had come in before the
  events of Sept. 11. "We were doing our job in this particular case," 
he says, "and I don't
  think we could have done it any better."

  "The Secret Service takes all threats against the president 
seriously, and we go out to
  check on every one. A citizen thought that there was a threat, and 
we went and talked to
  Ms. Brown and we found that there was not a threat." The poster, he says, was
  "misconstrued" by the tipster. "So it's not a big issue. The issue 
is that someone
  misinterpreted some writing."

  But when "some writing" on a poster is investigated by federal 
authorities, constitutional
  issues come into play. Some legal analysts are warning that the new 
national security
  vigilance, and new laws passed to counter terrorism, might impinge 
on free speech in
  big and small ways.

  "A poster of Bush, even if he's in a noose, is protected speech 
during wartime or
  peacetime," notes Alex Charns, a Durham attorney who specializes in 
civil rights. Such
  speech is all the more protected, he points out, when it's displayed 
within a person's
  home.

  "If a trained police officer doesn't know the difference between 
political speech and a
  threat to the president, then we're all in trouble," Charns says. 
"If the Secret Service has
  nothing better to do than check on political posters, that's a bad sign." 

  The Web sites of the American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org) and the
  National Lawyers Guild (www.nlg.org) offer analysis of the changing 
legal climate
  and advice for what to do if local or federal authorities come knocking.




-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu