UPDATE: Andrew Revkin weighs in: “Climate Campaigners Were on Terrorist List“
Pictures from the rally posted here>>

Letter from Mike:

Since 2001, I have devoted my life entirely to the peaceful promotion of windmills and solar panels to solve global warming. Apparently not everyone liked my work, however. Believe it or not, the Maryland State Police – your state police – put my name in their criminal intelligence database as a “suspected terrorist” as part of their larger program of collecting information about political activists in 2005-2006. I was on this outrageous “watch” list apparently because of a single act of peaceful civil disobedience I participated in outside a coal-fired power plant in 2004. CCAN’s former deputy director Josh Tulkin was also put in the database as was another former CCAN staffer who has chosen to remain anonymous. Neither of these people has ever been arrested for anything in their entire lives. (See background below)

So about one third of the entire Maryland CCAN staff – one of the largest environmental groups in the state – was officially spied on by the police while we peacefully promoted clean electricity and clean cars for Maryland. This is, of course, an outrage and a threat, not just to civil liberties in Maryland, but to the state’s entire environmental community. When people who are trying SAVE the climate and SAVE the Bay are considered terrorists, the world has truly been turned upside down.

To fix this problem, we need your help right now. Please:

Send an email: Write an email to the Md. Gov. Martin O’Malley asking him to release all surveillance files kept on CCAN staff and other activists statewide. (Presently, the police want to destroy the files without releasing printed copies, another outrage!) And ask O’Malley to support comprehensive legislation to prevent similar abuses from happening again. Send an email>>

Help end forever these police abuses in Maryland that threaten our climate/clean energy movement, and our right to organize for causes we believe in. Why has our state wasted precious resources creating a “terrorist” watch list of innocent people instead of devoting maximum resources to solving real environmental problems? The REAL terror in Maryland is the threat of 20 feet of sea-level rise. The REAL violence is the burning of coal to create electricity while wrecking the climate.

With your help we can end ALL of these abuses.

Sincerely,

Mike Tidwell
Executive Director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network
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BACKGROUND

On July 17, 2008, the ACLU of Maryland made public shocking documents obtained days before through a Maryland Public Information Act lawsuit, revealing that the Maryland State Police engaged in covert surveillance of local peace and anti-death penalty groups for over a year from 2005-2006. So far, the ACLU-MD has received 43 pages of surveillance log summaries and database printouts, none of which refer to criminal or even potentially criminal acts, other than a few isolated references to plans for completely nonviolent civil disobedience.

At a hearing by the State Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee on October 7, the MSP revealed that 53 individuals were wrongly labeled as “terrorists” in their Case Explorer database, to which numerous federal security agencies had access. Since then, these individuals have been receiving letters and have been told by MSP that they cannot make copies of files kept on them or have their lawyers accompany them to review their files. The Maryland ACLU has been calling on Governor Martin O’Malley to urge MSP to change this wrongheaded and unlawful policy, which further violates the rights of individuals already frightened by what it might mean for their future that they have been listed as terrorists in a government database.

Go online for information about Maryland ACLU’s challenge to MSP spying: http://www.aclu-md.org/Index%20content/NoSpying/NoSpying.html