Greg Shipley, a state police spokesman, said the department could not address the specifics of the case. "The Maryland State Police is aware of the lawsuit. Our legal counsel staff is addressing it," Shipley said.
Officials from the NSA said they were unable to comment.
Yesterday's suit is the latest in a series of battles among local peace activists, the NSA, and federal and local law enforcement.
Previous court documents in related cases have shown that the NSA has used law enforcement agencies, including the Baltimore Police Department, to monitor anti-war groups such as Pledge of Resistance, a group loosely affiliated with the local chapter of the American Friends Service Committee. The committee's members include many veteran city peace activists with a history of nonviolent civil disobedience.
An internal NSA e-mail, posted on two Internet sites in January 2006, showed how operatives with the "Baltimore Intel Unit" provided a minute-by-minute account of Pledge of Resistance's preparations for a July 2004 protest at Fort Meade. An attorney for the demonstrators said then that he obtained the document from NSA through the discovery process.
In 2005, a federal judge in Baltimore threw out charges against two protesters charged with trespassing at the NSA. The protesters, Ellen E. Barfield and Max J. Obuszewski, had been ordered by an NSA police officer in July 2004 to move from a guard shack to a visitors parking lot during a demonstration.
Barfield and Obuszewski declined and were given criminal citations charging them with failing to obey an order to leave the agency's property. But the judge ruled that the guard shack and parking lot were within the protected space.
Those two are part of many individuals and groups who have protested at the NSA every year since 1996 -- with more recent visits opposing the war in Iraq and the agency's electronic surveillance program.
brent.jones@baltsun.com
