It's always worse than they first tell you.

That's pretty much my maxim for dealing with any government agency, at any level: no matter what they tell you, the situation will always turn out to be worse the more you find out about it.

You know what's going to happen when they're talking about road construction being delayed or taxes having to go up. I expect it when I hear that the economy is "having difficulties". That's bad enough. But when they start talking about infringements on your civil liberties, you might as well reach for the lube and grab your ankles.

Latest such instance:

More Groups Than Thought Monitored in Police Spying

The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored -- and labeled as terrorists -- activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.

Yeah, those evil bike-lane loving terrorists had to be watched!

Police have acknowledged that the monitoring, which took place during the administration of then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), spiraled out of control, with an undercover trooper spending 14 months infiltrating peaceful protest groups. Troopers have said they inappropriately labeled 53 individuals as terrorists in their database, information that was shared with federal authorities. But the new documents reveal a far more expansive set of police targets and indicate that police did not close some files until late 2007.

Your tax dollars at work. Well, if you live in Maryland. But note that bit about sharing the information with the federal authorities? Here's a bit more from the same article:

The activists fear that they will land on federal watch lists, in part because the police shared their intelligence information with at least seven area law enforcement agencies.

HIDTA Director Tom Carr said his organization's database became a dead end for the information because law enforcement agencies cannot access the data directly. The database instead acts as a "pointer": Investigators enter case information and the database indicates whether another agency has related material and instructs investigators to contact that agency. The activists were not a match with any other data, Carr said, and their information has since purged.

"The problem lies in the fact that once [the state police] checked it out and found it was not accurate, they should have removed it from the system," Carr said. "And they did not do that."

So of course, we should trust that they have done it now, right?

Sure.

See, if you're a member of, say, PETA or the ACLU, those organizations had a file tied to that federal database. One which indicated that there was something worth monitoring. Giving justification to any other agency which found that such a file existed to "investigate further", regardless of the fact that the file should have never existed in the first place.

Kafka would be proud.

Remember: it's always worse than they first tell you.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to Communion of Dreams.)