Saint Nicholas has ominous company in making judgmental lists this month.
Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered federal law enforcement officials on December 4 to begin drafting lists of suspected far left-wing domestic terrorist groups.
Domestic terrorism is not precisely defined in federal law but generally means acting to change the direction of government policy through violence or intimidation. The Bondi memorandum is aimed at antifa. The Department of Justice previously concluded that Antifa is a leaderless movement of like-minded radicals. The Trump administration maintains that Antifa, is an identifiable organization of disciplined radicals. Whatever it is, Bondi is using them to order law enforcement to cast a wide net to find and prosecute its adherents.
The indispensable Charlie Sykes recorded an emergency episode of his To the Contrary podcast Wednesday to tell listeners to pay attention to the details of the new policy. The most alarming element of the Bondi directive tells law enforcement to examine people’s views in creating this “shadow terror designation.” The views for law enforcement to identify and pursue suspected domestic terrorist organizations and their supporters include “opposition to law and immigration enforcement,” “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders,” “adherence to radical gender ideology,” “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, support for the overthrow of the United States government,” and “hostility toward traditional views of family, religion and morality. ”
These are broad and vague for a reason. The intent is to silence traditional political debate, even though the memorandum includes a footnote that says the policy does not trample on our First Amendment rights of free speech. What is an anti-capitalism view? Some might think anti-capitalism can be found in a president who requires some companies to give the government an ownership interest in exchange for approving trade terms. Or one who disparages abundance by telling children and their parents four dolls is enough. That’s probably not what Bondi has in mind.
A sign of supporting the overthrow of the government could include pardoning more than 1,500 people convicted of participating in the January 6 riots as the 2020 election results were being certified. Bondi probably did not have that in mind either when she told law enforcement agencies to set up and publicize tip lines for Americans to snitch on each other.
Anti-Christianity? Martin Luther would not have stood a chance in 2025 America. No mention of antisemitism and Islamophobia? Jews remain the most common targets of religious threats and crimes. Is it anti-American to bomb suspected drug boats in the Caribbean while also pardoning the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted in the United States of facilitating the smuggling of hundreds of tons of cocaine into our country? That’s the former president who, evidence revealed Hernandez had claimed he was going to “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”
The Bondi memo expands widens the net of domestic terrorism if the government believes someone else’s words cause someone to do something violent. It is a “but for you” rule that can ensnare the merely opinionated and subject them to terrorism sentencing enhancements.
These expansions of power have become so common during this bleak year that it’s easy to believe we have all been relegated to uneasy observers. Turn that frown upside down and listen to David McGuire of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. We can stop providing vast amounts of personal data to governments that want to silence dissent under the guise of fighting domestic terrorism.
The proliferation of license plate reading technology provides governments far beyond our state with data on all of us that shreds traditional notions of privacy, McGuire told me Thursday. The technology has become more sophisticated and provides information beyond the license plate, including bumper stickers that may be affixed to a vehicle. The cameras have their uses in identifying unregistered vehicles on the road. The price is a loss of control of the data.
Ken Barone, associate director of the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at the University of Connecticut studied one Connecticut police department’s experience with the license plate readers over a nine-week period. That local department’s data, which was stored with the entity that provides the cameras, Flock Safety, was the subject of more than 500,000 searches in that period, Barone told WTNH in November. Nearly 100,000 of those came from Houston. Tens of thousands of searches originated in Florida.
In Texas, where abortion is illegal, law enforcement in one county used license plate reader data to try to prove a woman had had a “self-managed” abortion. The abuse of the data was repeatedly denied by local law enforcement and Fock.
The Connecticut State Police and more than 60 communities in the state use license plate readers. “Surveillance creep is real,” McGuire points out. Artificial intelligence has made it sophisticated and intrusive. Flock’s 89,000 cameras across the nation makes it unavoidable, providing staggering amounts of personal data to the government as, McGuire says, people are “going about our lives.”
McGuire has been in the forefront of learning what data has been collected and shared under Flock’s broad license agreements with many state and local governments. Connecticut could follow New Hampshire’s example and limit retention of the data to three days or Virginia’s 21. The state could also require restrictions on sharing data with out of state governments and mandate regular audits of the collection and use of the data.
The legislature should enact restrictions and safeguards when it returns to Hartford in February. Before then, Gov. Ned Lamont can act to impose a stringent audit standard on the State Police’s use of camera data and begin the process of reducing the period any of it is retained by anyone. We need not be relegated to spectators or inadvertent snitches.
Kevin Rennie can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com.
