For the past few days, there has been an outrageous story developing in the local DC and Baltimore papers that I want to bring to your attention.  During the administration of Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich, the Maryland State Police's Department of Homeland Security spied on peace activists and anti-death penalty groups, classifying their activites as akin to terrorism.  One of the subjects of that abusive surveillance wrote this response [1] in The Nation this week.

According to a Washington Post article [2], "Organizational meetings, public forums, prison vigils, rallies outside the State House in Annapolis and e-mail group lists were infiltrated by police posing as peace activists and death penalty opponents, the records show. The surveillance continued even though the logs contained no reports of illegal activity and consistently indicated that the activists were not planning violent protests."