In keeping with the right’s penchant for harassment, wiretapping, and invasion of privacy, right-wing bloggers have establed an amateur surveillance program, including “undercover” secret tapings, on the leftist political group A.N.S.W.E.R. (”Something Something Stop War and End Racism”). The group is a mainstay of anti-administration protesting, and professes a grab-bag of left-wing policies that, frankly, don’t make a lot of sense - but they are energetic and ubiquitous at protest rallies. (Powerline, naturally, characterizes them as “communists”, which is one thing they are not, but it’s a cliche that never dies for the right wing.)

A.N.S.W.E.R. was organizing a rally to support undocumented workers last weekend. The blog “Vital Perspective” sent two people into their planning meeting pretending to be supporters, but toting hidden tape recorders. They got dramatic, damning evidence of such things as that ANSWER supports undocumented workers (”If you really think about who the undocumented worker is in America, you know, you easily come to the conclusion that they’re modern day slaves. . . . The money that they’re paying into the system, remains in the system to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Nobody’s talking about that!”), look forward to “revolution” (”The Sensenbrenner bill is so odious, such a threat, so far reaching . . . that it provoked the beginning of what could be a new revolutionary movement. Maybe it won’t be the ultimate revolution, but certainly it has the ingredients and elementary factors that make up all revolutionary movements. If you think about it, this is the way that all great movements start, including the American Revolution.”), oppose the war in Iraq (”a criminal war, a war of aggression.”), they oppose corporatism (”where all the benefits legislated by the respective countries are to directly benefit first and foremost, and almost exclusively, the corporations to the detriment of the national worker populations of those countries.”), and they support worker benefits (”The pension is being eliminated. Health care benefits, being eliminated. If you’re a young worker and you’re under 25 year old, the idea that you’re going to have what your parents had – or what some of your parents at least aspired to have – which is a decent job at a decent wage with health care benefits, that’s a myth, that’s a fiction, that’s gone. Because the globalization of capital, meaning the elimination of all obstacles that stand in the way of maximizing profit, that’s come home.”). As VP’s own commenters pointed out, this is hardly radical stuff. (Ooh! They used the word “revolution”! So did the supporters of Ronald Reagan, who managed to make it synonymous with “business as usual, only worse”.) I’m sure VP thinks they have some sort of journalistic coup on their hands, but this kind of rhetoric is hardly unreasonable, and pretty much standard for left organizers who haven’t got a real revolution to talk about. Anybody who’s attended a few campus protests has heard this a hundred times. I’m more worried about self-righteous yahoos with hidden tape recorders than I am about “revolutionaries” who hold openly-announced public meetings and tell their plans to any total stranger who comes in to listen.

Powerline, however, was galvanized by the shocking revelation that a workers’ interests group was concerned about the interests of workers. They organized an amateur video surveillance program aimed at ANSWER’s planned public demonstration - asking readers to attend the demonstration (maybe they’ll learn something!) and get the shocking truth down on tape:

 

How many people are participating in the demonstration? What signs are they carrying? What flags? Who seems to be in charge? If people are arriving in buses, who runs the buses? Are professionally made signs being distributed? If so, by whom? How about flags? How visible are radical groups like A.N.S.W.E.R.?

Good going, “citizen journalists” - it’s possible you might even discover that the organized demonstration was . . . organized, with, like, professionally printed signs (be sure to videotape the “Labor donated by Printers’ Local ###” stamp at the bottom). (One wonders why they care who runs the buses. Every large demonstration includes bused contingents - they hire commercial charter buses, run by . . . commercial charter bus companies. Unless they intend to harass the bus companies to prevent them serving clients the right wing does not approve of - as anti-abortion activists did to construction companies building a clinic in Texas - this information has no political meaning.) And why do you care who provides the flags? Somehow I get the feeling that Hindrocket has never actually attended a demonstration.

This behavior is not illegal, but it is certainly worrisome. There’s nothing wrong with photographing or taping actual newsworthy incidents - the Zapruder film and the Rodney King video are vital legal records - but there is something wrong with people being under surveillance all the time. This is why they object to police cameras in public areas, and to unnecessary collection of personal information by stores or marketers. When private citizens begin surveillance on each other, legally or not, there is then no public place - and sometimes no private place - people can enjoy the expectation of non-interference. And when hostile groups take it on themselves to pressure and harass people they oppose, simply as a means of exerting political force, one’s personal life becomes ammunition for someone else’s belligerent self-indulgence.

This is standard practice on the right. Dinesh D’Souza - a “researcher” whose every written word evokes pages of factual disproof - made himself a right-wing star by infiltrating gay-interest groups at Dartmouth and publicizing personal remarks made by the members. Anti-choice forces have made a science of harassment, stalking abortion providers to their homes, sending anonymous death threats by phone and mail, and videotaping clients and staff at abortion clinics and posting their photos, license plate numbers, and home addresses on the Web. Secret tapings of policital meetings, or organized surveillance of peaceful marches, are minor in comparison. Again, much of this is not illegal, but it is a deliberate breakdown of social order in the service of political goals. They are making the world a worse place, and harassing people exercising basic personal freedoms, in order to score cheap political points.