The National Security Agency (NSA), a secretive government agency that has recently come under scrutiny for its monitoring of phone calls of United States citizens, extensively monitored the Baltimore-based peace group Pledge of Resistance. Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, part of the national Iraq Pledge of Resistance, works closely with various Quaker groups on the war and other issues and approaches these issues via non-violent protest, most frequently in the form of vigils and various lobbying campaigns. The group has never done anything that would constitute a threat to the United States government, yet according to documents obtained from the NSA during a trial the NSA worked with the Baltimore Intelligence Unit of the Baltimore City Police Department to monitor the group’s protest activity.
The NSA documents reveal an extensive level of surveillance of Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore. At a demonstration at the National Vigilance Airplane Memorial on the NSA’s campus, the agency filed reports every 15 minutes from 9:30am to 3:18pm detailing the movement of protestors and the slogans on their signs. During the demonstration, the NSA collected the license plate numbers, descriptions, and number of people in each car and filed a report detailing their gathering in a church parking lot. Moreover, the NSA logged their travel to the demonstration, including a stop at a gas station. At another demonstration in October of 2004, the NSA deployed their “Weapons of Mass Destruction Rapid Response Team,” assigned armed officers to monitor the protest, used mobile units to monitor the parking lots and highways, assigned K9 units to monitor the crowd, assigned agents to infiltrate the protest and provide counter-surveillance, conducted aerial surveillance in coordination with the Anne Arundel County Police and Maryland State Police, and conducted extensive photo and video surveillance.
Beyond the NSA, Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore reports having police infiltrators at protests that act as agent provocateurs. The group also believes that government monitoring is ongoing, with police setting up cookies and drinks at the site of supposedly secret demonstrations in order to greet the protestors.
