Activist Silenced for Fear of Surveillance

Activist Silenced for Fear of Surveillance

Jennifer Flynn says she's afraid after learning she was being
watched. ROCCO PARASCANDOLA, "Activist silenced for fear of surveillance,"
Newsday.com, September 24, 2007) Flynn was clueless that the FBI watches
everyone who influences others.
If the watchers were public officials she has less to fear than if they
were FBI or police informants who do harm and are seldom identified. In
Boston FBI informant and fugitive James Bulger is accused of murdering 19
civilians. Some went to the FBI to report him.
The FBI conducts character assassination and high tech harassment among
many programs. The FBI uses behavior psychologists to disrupt the lives of
people they target.
The freedom described in the US Constitution no longer exists. The FBI
believes they are the law. If Flynn is intimidated by surveillance she is weak.
Being able to continue activities in spite of surveillance is essential. Flynn
should be grateful that the FBI has not murdered or framed her. They do it to
many civilians.

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-nyroc245387882sep24,0,2760679.story
Newsday.com
Activist silenced for fear of surveillance

ROCCO PARASCANDOLA

rocco.parascandola@newsday.com

September 24, 2007

Jennifer Flynn is not a rabble-rouser. She's not an aspiring suicide bomber. She
doesn't advocate the overthrow of the government. Instead, she pushes for
funding and better treatment for people with HIV and AIDS.

Better keep an eye on her.

Wait! Somebody already did.

On the day before a rally by the New York City AIDS Housing Network at the 2004
Republican National Convention - a rally by an organization Flynn co-founded,
and a rally that the NYPD had approved - she experienced something straight out
of a spy novel.

While visiting her family in Hillside, N.J., Flynn spotted a car with a New York
license plate parked outside the house. When she left to head back to her
Brooklyn home that evening, the car followed hers. Shortly after leaving
Hillside, two more vehicles, also with New York plates, seemed to be tailing
her, too.

Trying to assure herself she wasn't nuts, Flynn tested her hunch - changing
lanes, making turns, pulling over and parking. The drivers in those three
vehicles mimicked her actions.

At one point, she recalled, she slowed down and one of the other vehicles ended
up alongside her car. She looked over to see several men in the vehicle. She
gestured toward them. The men "threw up their arms as if to say, 'We're only
doing what we're told,'" she remembers.

On the New Jersey side of the Goethals Bridge, her followers pulled away. But
later, when Flynn pulled up in front of her Flatbush home, she spotted another
car, with two men inside, both with laptops. At 4 a.m., they were still there.

Is Flynn paranoid? Well, she is now. She did, however, jot down the license
plate number of one of the vehicles in Jersey - a blue sport utility vehicle.
When a reporter asked for the number, Flynn couldn't find it. Recently, it was
found in a file kept by Christopher Dunn, the civil liberties lawyer she called
that day in a panic.

The license plate number traces back to a company - Pequot Inc. - and a post
office box at an address far from the five boroughs. Registering unmarked cars
to post office boxes outside the city or to shell companies is a common practice
of law enforcement agencies to shield undercover investigators.

The NYPD, however, says it didn't follow Flynn that evening. And the
department's Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen has said no federal
agency was involved in preconvention surveillance.

So who was following Flynn? And what, exactly, did they hope to learn about a
woman the NYPD knew well, as it had been in regular communication with her about
her organization's rally?

The answer - well, part of it - is a 99-mile road trip from NYPD headquarters:
uptown, into the Bronx, and onto I-87. A quick switch onto the Saw Mill River
Parkway, then the Taconic Parkway. Fifty more miles to go, past the leaves
turning color and the country club golf courses. After that, it's the winding
roads of tony Millbrook, with its horse farms and vineyards.

At last, we're in Amenia, population 1,115. It's so far from the city its dry
cleaners actually clean horse blankets.

The street named on the license-plate printout exists, though the address
doesn't. An auto-shop worker on the block suggests checking with the post
office. When Postmaster Bonnie Colgan and an assistant are shown the printout,
they stop dead in their tracks.

There's a Pequot Capital Management in midtown and a Pequot Construction in the
Bronx. But no Pequot Inc. in Amenia.

"That's not a real company," the assistant says. "The people who used that box,
they're from New York. They used to come here and get the mail, but not
anymore."

Colgan is tempted to elaborate, but doesn't.

"I can't because of the sensitive nature of the issue," she says.

Back in the city, Flynn takes a seat at a Starbucks near City Hall and shakes
her head. She still feels as passionately about what she does as she did three
years ago. But she concedes the experience has taken its toll.

"I feel like I've stepped back, in a way," she says. "I feel I'm not as vocal as
I was. I'm still going to sign a petition. I'm still going to organize a rally.
I do it. But now I'm deathly afraid."

Flynn, 35, may one day learn who was following her. Activists have decried
police tactics at the GOP convention - 1,806 arrests, protesters hemmed in with
orange netting, people arrested and held for hours and hours in a West Side pier
warehouse. The New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven plaintiffs
suing the city over their arrests, is pushing for the release of raw NYPD
intelligence reports detailing police surveillance of activists and protest
groups.

Flynn says the damage is done. She sees it in the attitudes of other activists.
There's less desire. More trepidation.

"When you use scare tactics, you really are curbing our right to dissent against
the government," she said. "The only thing this is serving to do is squash
public dissent. By going after the organizers of a rally, you really are sending
a message - 'Don't hold a rally.'"

Copyright © 2007, Newsday Inc.