Still a free country?

Via The Agitator, here's one I almost missed. Forget about Bill O'Reilly's list. You haven't truly arrived, as Doug Thompson found out, until you make the White House enemy list for having “written and promoted opinions that are contrary to the government of the United States of America.”

My file begins on September 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. A Marine guard standing post at the Navy Yard in Washington jotted down the license number of my Jeep Wrangler after I was spotted taking pictures of armed guards at the locked-down military facility.

He was subsequently visited by the FBI.

I thought the matter was dead until a few weeks ago when an old friend from Washington called, said he was in the area, and suggested lunch. At lunch, he showed me the 100-plus pages of the file on me that grew out of that first encounter with Agent Ryan of NCIS.

“Much of this information was gathered through what we call ‘national security letters,’” he said. “It allows us to gather information from a variety of sources.”

...According to my file, the banks where I have both business and checking accounts have been forced to turn over all records of my transactions, as have every company where I have a charge account or credit card. They’ve perused my book borrowing habits from libraries in Arlington and Floyd Counties as well as studied what television shows I watch on the Tivos in my house. They know I belong to the National Rifle Association, the National Press Photographers Association and other professional groups. They know I attend meetings of Alcoholic Anonymous on a regular basis and the file notes that my “pattern of spending” shows no purchase of “alcohol-related products” since the file was opened in 2001.

There is much more intimate detail, some unknown even to his family, but no evidence of criminal activity in the file, which pre-Bush would have seen it destroyed by now. Now by executive order, the file is kept indefinitely and shared with all government agencies and also “appropriate private sector entities” although the order does not explain what those entities might be.

One suspects it's probably those private contract intelligence agents no one bothered to tell us about. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is pushing for ever expanding powers to spy on Americans, with no oversight whatsoever.

Rightwingers keep telling me that I should be grateful I live in a country where I'm free to criticize my government. Tying up FBI assets for four years spying on a law abding American, on the basis of his "writing and promoting contrary opinions" suggests that may not be as true as it once was.

Ready to believe in the police state yet?