Police / Secret Service Raid & Seizure of Tea, Refridgerator Magnets & Buffy DVD

[Matariki]

Crazy times.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/16/police-seize-copies.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

<excerpt>

this Common Dreams article about a police / Secret Service raid on a pair middle-aged housemates who were using Twitter to communicate with G20 summit protestors in Philadelphia. Here's the choice bit:

Court records show the FBI seized hundreds of items, including computers, hard drives, cameras, a World War I-era gas mask, "anarchy books," even an antique needlepoint of Lenin made by Madison's wife's grandmother. Several issues of Steampunk Magazine, where Madison writes under the pen name Professor Calamity, were also seized, as was a guide on poisons (which he says he uses in the writing of mystery novels), a Mao Tse-tung refrigerator magnet, and several Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. A poster in the living room of anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin was left alone; "I guess they didn't know who he was," says Madison. At one point a hazmat team in full protective gear was brought in to investigate a jar of kombucha tea fermenting in the basement. Madison claims a JTTF agent shook his head and said, "You guys are just a bunch of hippies!"

The raid seemed to have an aimless quality. Madison was handed a ticket for a packet of fireworks, and an agent who put his hand into a suspected bag of marijuana discovered, painfully, that it was dried stinging nettles, used in homeopathy. "It was almost as if they thought, 'If we take enough stuff, we'll find something to charge them with,'" Madison says. When he was finally shown the cover sheet to the search warrant, it provided for the seizure of any items "designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws."

[LiberalFighter]

1. Then apparently violated their warrant.

it provided for the seizure of any items "designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws."

[LiberalFighter]

2. They apparently violated their warrant.

it provided for the seizure of any items "designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws."