The document lists physical descriptions, phone numbers and other identifying information about activists in Iowa City.

Despite the infiltration, only one Iowa protester was arrested, activists say, and those charges were later dropped.

At least three other people connected to the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office were involved in infiltrating groups in Minnesota. “Norma Jean Johnson” also known as Ramsey County Deputy Sheriff Marilyn Hedstrom, infiltrated the RNC Welcoming Committee.

Rachel Nieting, a Ramsey County jail guard posed as Norma Jean’s niece, and Chris Dugger, was a confidential paid informant who now aspires to be a deputy.

Photo: Jill Brady (via The Vigil)

FBI whistleblower-turned-activist Coleen Rowley is on a roll. She ripped into the City of St. Paul’s report on Republican National Convention law enforcement in a commentary that appeared Friday at MinnPost and today at The Huffington Post. Tomorrow, as court hearings start in the cases of the RNC8 protesters, Rowley and individuals from Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) and other groups will file formal complaints against the city, state and Ramsey County over police tactics. And Rowley’s inquiries into what she suspects was overbroad surveillance during the RNC are starting to bear fruit — or at least what she calls a first “non-responsive” response from Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher’s office.

In her commentary, Rowley cites President Obama’s inauguration as an example of a National Special Security Event (like the RNC) that police pulled off “somehow, without tear gas, tasers or thousands of people dragged off in handcuffs.” St. Paul’s Heffelfinger-Luger report, Rowley points out, avoids the question of “whether such aggressive ‘police state’ action during the RNC was actually necessary.” She concludes:

Perhaps the worst mistake made in the RNC Commission Report is falling for the notion of trade-offs between security and liberty instead of seeing them as intertwined. President Obama phrased it well in his inaugural speech statement, when he said “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

After a “Mardi Gras-themed procession” at noon on Tuesday on the state Capitol lawn, Rowley and others plan to file ”Notices of Claim” (pdf) that will contain charges like this:

In the year-long investigation and planning that preceded the RNC and the police enforcement during the RNC, Sept 1-4, 2008, the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office, along with other state, local and federal law enforcement agencies and private corporations and associations of private companies, including the “Department of Homeland Security’s (now defunct) Highway Watch” and presumably the FBI’s “InfraGard” corporate partnerships did produce faulty and defamatory “intelligence” assertions that linked the organization WAMM that I am a member of to “terror networks”. Ramsey County opened an investigation approximately one year before the RNC that provided the basis of the false claims used to defame WAMM and to violate the privacy rights of WAMM members by then disseminating this information to private corporations, associations and other law enforcement agencies.

Rowley’s public-data requests to the FBI (her former employer) and Ramsey County have so far elicited only a brush-off response from Fletcher’s office (pdf).

Her draft response:

1) If I understand correctly, any data gathered on the other organizations and groups (besides the RNC Welcoming Committee) that I inquired about—to include that gained by viewing their websites–is not contained in separate files but in the same investigative file as the one that has led to prosecution of some of the “RNC Welcoming Committee”. Is that understanding correct?

2) If you are saying that the information your Department has collected on other groups and members of other groups, is all contained in one big file, there still would be no reason it cannot be segregated out for release, would there? Since there are no ongoing prosecutions related to these other groups and members of these other groups? For example: the “Women Against Military Madness (WAMM)”; “Troops Out Now”; the “Anti-War Committee”; “Protest RNC 2008” and other peace and social justice groups are charted out in a “Social Network Analysis” and “Power Centrality Ranking” that links them to the “RNC Welcoming Committee” in a Homeland Security-Highway Watch document that has recently come to light. It’s not clear whether this “intelligence” product was only produced as a result of “viewing their websites” but even if that’s so, wouldn’t there at least be notes and copies made from that law enforcement effort of analyzing the public websites?

3) I have a hard time believing that Ramsey County Sheriff Department informant(s) reported information only on the “RNC-8”. It is precisely the other individuals who are not being prosecuted and about whom information may be contained in the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office that is of interest for the research that Mr. Cox and I are conducting. Are informant report files maintained separately?

4) Again assuming I’m correct in believing that the Ramsey Sheriff Department’s information is contained in one big file that also involves the information collected on the “RNC Welcoming Committee,” what is the name of that file? How is it indexed for retrieval and further use? Was the file opened to contain all investigative data collected in the lead-up to the RNC or was it focused solely on the RNC Welcoming Committee? If the latter, why would the information on other groups and members of groups not connected to the prosecution of the “RNC Welcoming Committee” not be releasable at this time? Can you give me an idea of the size of the file and how many other individuals and groups (not being prosecuted) are documented or referenced in the file?

5) Why did you ask for a delay when first responding to my request back in December, telling me you expected my request to take a lot of time to gather up responsive materials?

I’d met Rowley in 2006, at her campaign fundraiser at my parents’ house. At the time, she seemed fierce and friendly, with a somewhat prim persona akin to her plaid-skirted appearance on the cover of TIME four years before. Now, a comfortably rumpled Rowley sidled into a courtroom seat with the more relaxed bearing of a street-level activist and occasional blogger. She had a stack of “Defend the RNC8!” postcards to pass out, and a lot to say.

Rowley recently submitted data requests about law enforcement during the 2008 Republican National Convention to the FBI (via the Freedom of Information Act) and to the Ramsey County Sheriff’s and St. Paul Police departments (through the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act). She expects to learn whether the surveillance and policing of 60 to 70 political organizations in St. Paul last September to protest the Republican National Convention (RNC)– as well as the surveillance of another 80 or so legal aids, independent media and artistic performance groups — was overly broad.

If it wasn’t, Rowley said that news will come as a relief to people like those she knows in CODEPINK who say they were pulled over repeatedly around the time of the RNC. But if the wide net she’s cast does snare examples of extra-constitutional overreaching, they’ll go into a book she’s working on with author William John Cox.

Rowley regaled me and Minnesota Public Radio’s Laura Yuen, who sat nearby, with stories about her early days as an FBI agent in the early 1980s. Hoover had died almost a decade (and several reform efforts) earlier, but his ghost still hovered over the Bureau. It was Rowley’s job to respond to the very sort of data requests she now has pending about the RNC. As we watched the defense attorneys from the National Lawyers Guild kibitz at the front of the courtroom, Rowley recalled that as an FBI agent she sat among stacks of files on the Guild’s members — a throwback to Hoover’s conviction that the Guild was a communist organization.

Back then, every new lead meant a new file, Rowley said. If folksinger Burl Ives threw a party, the next day everyone in attendance had an FBI file. She suspects that won’t be the case with the 150 groups about whom she’s requested records.

Rowley said she was always proud that the FBI fought public corruption as its top priority (it’s now the agency’s fourth priority, according to an FBI spokesman I talked to separately). I asked her about reports that the FBI is looking into allegations that businessman Nasser Kazeminy funneled money to U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman through a business he controls in Texas and Coleman’s wife’s employer in Minnesota. Does the FBI really open different levels of cases with some (like the Coleman cash question, reportedly) termed mere inquiries while others are full-fledged investigations? Rowley, who retired in 2004, said that in her day two levels of investigations did exist but the lesser was rarely used, and in any case the difference between them was nominal at best — you either had a case worth pursuing or you didn’t.

Rowley spoke in an elevated whisper — this being a courtroom, although the judge never appeared — that later put me in mind of the lower, hoarser whisper that actor Hal Holbrooke used in the “All the President’s Men” film to portray of Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, who had been Hoover’s second-in-command at the FBI. Felt died Thursday, having revealed himself as Deep Throat but taking with him any key to the internal contradictions of a man who helped engineer both the illegal surveillance on dissidents and the downfall of a president who put such dirty tricks to his own political ends. Next time I see her, I’ll ask how Rowley — who put her own livelihood at risk to root out wrongdoing within the FBI — how she felt about Felt.

The postcard Rowley was handing out this week.

This brings to at least five the number of preemptive raids by a joint force from the MPD and Ramsey County Sheriff’s office on local protesters and/or videographers in the past 24 hours.

The other four, with links to MnIndy’s coverage from earlier today: 2301 23rd Avenue South in Minneapolis; 3240 17th Avenue South in Minneapolis; the “convergence space” on Smith Avenue in St. Paul; and 3500 Harriet Avenue South in Minneapolis.