Report: Suspicious Cookies

The petty and pernicious spying operation of Maryland's state police

WHAT HAVE we learned from the Maryland State Police's undercover spying program targeting peaceable groups opposed to the death penalty and the war in Iraq, other than that the police are prone to ludicrous misspellings? Well, here's a sampling of the "intelligence" gleaned during 288 hours of police surveillance in 2005-06, in reports unearthed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland:

· On Oct. 3, 2005, an undercover state police agent attending a meeting of activists ferreted out the fact that antiwar protesters were laying plans to distribute fliers at the Towson Town Center mall.

· On July 11, 2005, an officer attending an antiwar meeting held by "an activist named Bernie" and "five middle-aged women" discovered that in a protest held a week earlier at the National Security Agency, peaceniks shared cookies with NSA guards who issued them a citation for trespassing.

· On June 6, 2005, an agent who infiltrated an anti-death-penalty protest in Baltimore reported "no problems" at the event, attended by about 25 known and "currently unidentified recurrent death penalty protestors."

American governments have an inglorious history of spying on domestic dissidents; compared with FBI operations during the Red Scare, the Maryland State Police seem like Keystone Kops. But it's a mistake to dismiss Maryland's police espionage against its own residents as the work of hapless bunglers. In fact, it is pernicious and symptomatic of a post-Sept. 11 erosion of respect for fundamental civil liberties.

Justice Department regulations explicitly prohibit police from gathering information on groups and individuals unless "there is reasonable suspicion that the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct or activity." But with state and local law enforcement agencies awash in federal money meant to root out domestic terrorist plots, civil libertarians have warned that police will start seeing potential terrorists and plots everywhere, "reasonable suspicion" be damned. The Maryland episode and other recent cases in Colorado and Massachusetts suggest their concerns are justified.

If the authorities equate dissent with criminal intent, they undermine the impulse for free speech and political activity itself. The specter of police infiltration can sow suspicion and paranoia and prompt people to keep their mouths shut. Could anything be more anti-American than that?

The police, invoking the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, suggest that any operation undertaken for any reason is legitimate. "In a post-9/11 world," said Col. Terrence B. Sheridan, superintendent of the Maryland State Police, officers are duty-bound "to protect the citizens of Maryland from threats foreign and domestic." But if they cannot distinguish five middle-aged peaceniks from criminals, the police themselves become the real threat to American society.