…oh wait, they actually just spied on peaceful anti-war and anti-death penalty activists.

The Post is reporting today that the Maryland State Police actively infiltrated meetings and demonstrations held by war and death penalty protesters during the administration of Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R). The kicker? “The surveillance continued even though the logs contained no reports of illegal activity and consistently indicated that the activists were not planning violent protests.” And then there’s this:

A well-known antiwar activist from Baltimore, Max Obuszewski, 63, was singled out by the undercover agents and entered into a “Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area” database. His entry indicates a “Primary Crime” of “Terrorism-anti-government” and a “Secondary Crime” of “Terrorism-Anti-War Protesters,” according to the documents.

We’d think this was just a case of over-zealous police types if it didn’t seem to happen with such frequency in the metro area. In 2002, D.C. police illegally rounded up 400 protesters in Pershing Park during protests against the World Bank and IMF, leading to an expensive settlement, a scathing report on police conduct and a new city law protecting the right to peaceably assemble. And pretty much any time anti-globalization demonstrators show up, the city takes the somewhat excessive step of turning on their downtown CCTV network and shutting down entire blocks of the downtown area. More recently, a judge ruled that the National Park Service violated its own rules in giving organizers of President Bush’s 2005 inauguration near-total control over access to the parade route, effectively shutting out protests. We’d be remiss in remembering that even innocent amateur photography is seen as a threat in these parts nowadays.

Obviously, law enforcement agencies argue that in this era of terrorist threats, measures like these are merely meant to protect the peaceful citizenry from violent protesters. But protests in the area have become significantly less rowdy than they were in the past, so why the continued need for such police-state-like tactics, especially when they invariably result in expensive lawsuits and settlements against local jurisdictions?