HIV activist silenced for fear of surveillance
Newsday story about a 35-year-old woman named Jennifer Flynn, an activist who works for getting funding and treatment for HIV/AIDS patients. She noticed that cars were tailing her over long distances as she drove around visiting her family. She wrote down the license plate of one of the cars, and it's registered to a phantom company at a non-existent address.
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.Link (Thanks, Jeff!).....
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.
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That's just way too creepy, and I suppose I'd start demanding answers if I was her. It's disappointing that she would back down to this sort of intimidation. Plug her into a few episodes of Burn Notice and teach this woman some crazy skills.
Silenced by whom -- herself? I'm not clear on exactly what this person's afraid of. If she doesn't like getting attention, maybe it wasn't a great idea to organize a demonstration at the Republican National Convention. (Which was three years ago. Way to be topical, Newsday.)
To summarize mattymatt's sad point.
"We don't need no stinking Badges!!"
Yeah that's the ticket Matty. If you didn't want our thugs following you, you shouldn't have opened your mouth about that little pet issue of yours.
Not saying it's necessarily so, but I wouldn't be _surprised_ to find out this story is a result of a combination of schizophrenia and wonky DMV records in NY. That'd certainly be keeping with Occam's razor.
Agree with #2 and #4. Nobody makes her stop and in fact it should if anything push her to be even more vocal. And on #4's point, why in the world would anyone care that much to follow her?
Indeed, Mr Universe -- surely those officers could have been doing something better than trailing around after an easily-discouraged protester. For example, they could have been brushing up on their espionage training, because they were clearly pretty lousy at blending inconspicuously into the background.
Occam's Razor would explain away any one of the parts, but not the totality of them.
When we have discovered that the White House issued an entire manual on how to suppress dissidents - Google "white house protester manual" -
When observers are denied entry to public proceedings because they wear lapel buttons that state, in fourteen-point type, "I love the people of Iraq" -
When the people who are key in the White House for the past six years were key in the Nixon administration, or grew up admiring the Nixon administration -
Occam's razor demands a view of the totality, not the isolated parts.
As for what Pequot Inc. Represents, look up the word Pequot. 'Pequot' From The US Military Dictionary on Answers.com. You should be able to extrapolate from here.
An Algonquian-speaking Indian tribe located in coastal southern New England. In the 1630s, the Pequots antagonized the other tribes in the area as well as the Dutch by trying to monopolize Indian-Dutch trade. Having failed to form an alliance with the English settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, In 1637, the Pequot sachem Sassacus and his followers were attacked by the English and some Narragansetts and Mohegans and fled to the Mohawks who subsequently betrayed them. The defeat of the Pequots opened Connecticut to English settlement.
We have rights of assembly, and rights to seek redress of grievances. But groups working for laudable social progress are naturally viewed as pressure on the status quo. It's unfortunate that, in tense times, such groups sometimes attract intimidating surveillance. American history is chock full of examples worth studying.
Scrutiny by authorities has to be anticipated. Non-violent, legal, transparent organizations should have much less to worry about. Being tailed isn't always negative; social progress groups sometimes attract violent reprisals -- there are, after all, people who think HIV is a good thing.
While the average newcomer may get the shakes because they've never been exposed to this old, old game, it's par for the course. No social progress has ever been achieved without playing it.
First off no one silenced her. She silenced herself, and oh yeah, to paraphrase Arthur Dent, this must be some definition of "silenced" that I was previously unware of, since if she really was afraid of The Man, she wouldn't be blabbing about it to Newsday, and then talking about her resolve to continue to do exactly what it is she's been doing.
Second, why would you send three cars full of people to tail a single person. Now if you were going to box in the car, kidnap the driver, and then disappear them, sure. You need lots of cars and guys, but simply to follow? No. That doesn't make any sense.
This whole thing reeks of "let's tell people how bad the Bush Adminsitration is." Yeah. They're bad. Yes, they're thugs. Yes, they're cryptofacists. But you're not helping by manufacturing stories.
I haven't read anything this perposterous since Andrea Dworkin's story of being gang raped by the staff at a Paris hotel in 1999.
No idea if the story is true. It's difficult to just take someone's word on something like this without any verification.
However, I have noticed a lot of comments here and over at Newsday saying this couldn't be real because no cops would have been this obvious, used so many cars, etc. If the point is to intimidate, then you want the person you are following to know that they are being followed. That the guys were easy to pick out would seem to be the whole point.
It's because HIV is a man made virus constructed by the US government in order to moderate the world population...
There is also a certain history of activists in this country going to extreme, sometimes deadly means of supporting their causes.
Actually, there is a history of government "agent provocateurs" infiltrating activist organizations and then instigating violent act in order to disrupt and discredit them. There was a recent example of police joining a street protest dressed as protesters and then violently engaging the uniformed police.
coaxial, time to put down your dolls (I mean "action figures") and come out of your moms basement and join the adult world.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
Uppity liberals aren't entitled to harbor suspicions against the establishment; Let's ridicule them!
I'm a bit bemused when I think of all the commenters who agreed that a little MIT student wearing a blinkylight ornament on her hoodie was sufficiently suspicious to warrant her arrest outside an airport, and then consider this thread full of people agreeing that Jennifer Flynn's alarm was unjustified.
@NOEN
Since you called me out, I'll ask you what I always ask with every conspiracy theory: Why would The Man do this? What threat is there to The Man about advocating for more funding for HIV/AIDS research? Why her? Someone no one outside the NYC AIDS activist and public health communities have even heard of?
From my days of staying up in my mom's basement, surrounded by my action figures kept pristine in their original boxes, and maturbating to Gillian Anderson while watching reruns of the X-Files, I learned one thing. In order to have decent dark consperacy theory, you have to have a motive, and there's none here.
Until someone can provide a motive on why she should be singled out from everyone else that is registered Democratic, I call bullshit.
@NOEN
I know it's a faux pas to follow up my own post, but that quote you attributed to me about "activists in this country going to extreme[s]," wasn't even from me. In fact, I don't even know where that quote came from, because it's certainly not on this page.