MORE HARASSMENT OF A BLOGGER

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Last time it was Sheboygan. Now, it’s Whitewater.

The local police chief is using police resources to identify an anonymous blogger who’s been critical of local government, including the chief.

The blog is called Free Whitewater. The blogger’s pseudonym is, appropriately, John Adams, after one of our Founding Fasthers. The police chief in his crosshairs is James Coan, although Free Whitewater has gone after the local school district — always an easy target — and a local judge who was convicted of lewd conduct.

Case in point: Coan’s use of city employees to try to unmask Adams — exposed in a series of posts on his blog earlier this month — that is part Keystone Cops and part challenge to Adams’ constitutional rights.

According to Whitewater Police Department e-mails obtained by Adams under the state’s open records law, Coan involved at least two detectives, the city’s director of public works, its information technology officer and the city clerk — all working on city time and using taxpayer-funded resources — to find the identity of a man described as a “suspect” but who had not committed a crime.

You can read the series from John Adam exposing the witch hunt against him here. It’s an insightful look into petty, political hacks with thin skin who can’t stomach any criticism directed at them by someone who pays their salaries.

What’s more, it depicts a petty, vindictive man so intent on silencing dissent and criticism that he went to the house of a man h believed was the blogger. Turns out it was the wrong man, and the chief and other subordinates even referred to the man as “the suspect” in e-mails even though the man had committed no crime. John Adams obtained the information through Public Records requests, something else I’m sure the little collection of fascists in Whitewater hates.

However, one man whom the chief erroneously accused of being the blogger said Coan never mentioned anything about a threat. Laird Scott and his wife, Mariann, a former Whitewater City Council member, said that during a Jan. 4 interview at their house, the chief repeatedly asked Scott to stop publishing the blog.

The investigation culminated in a Jan. 4 visit from Coan and Whitewater Police Lt. Tim Gray to the home of Scott, whom Coan said afterward he was “99.9 percent convinced” was the blogger.

In fact, said Adams, who revealed his identity to the Wisconsin State Journal on condition of anonymity, the chief was “100 percent wrong.”

Apparently Coan believes political speech directed against him and other public officials is a crime. Since when is criticizing public officials a crime? Hasn’t Chief Coan or anyone else in his Keystone Kops police department ever heard of the First Amendment? The Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment specifically to prevent people from being persecuted and imprisoned for criticizing public officials.

John Adams responds to what he calls “the Municipal Opponents of Free Speech” here.

My website, and my postings, are a very small part of a great American tradition of constitutionally-protected anonymous or pseudonymous speech on public matters, involving public figures. It’s been part of the American legal tradition for over two hundred years, since the founding of this republic.

No one in my city, or my state, or anywhere in America has a right to overturn this tradition, and act against constitutional protections. No one. And yet, in Whitewater, city officials have placed themselves above, apart, and against these legal protections.

In doing so, they have shown themselves ignorant of the political heritage of their own country, and have brought embarrassment on themselves.

He also points out that City Manager Kevin Brunner believes that Coan’s use of taxpayer resources to visit the house of a taxpayer and confront him, ordering him to stop publishing a blog with which he has no connection and manpower was legitimate. Those are police resources and manpower, which belong to the taxpayer. They aren’t Coan’s personal investigative force.

Clearly, Brunner needs to be clued in on what the First Amendment means. This was a horrible use of taxpayer dollars and manpower, and everyone who used them in this mannher or condoned this use should be fired. And forced to attend basic classes on the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Coan refers to “potential threats.” I read John Adams’s blog. Nowhere did I see any threat, either real or implied. It’s nothing but criticism of local government, something we do here on a regular basis. Should I now expect jackbooted thugs with Nazi bucket helmets investigating me for what I write about our local politicians and elected officials?

Here’s another fascist revealed:

“I think it is someone we want to keep an eye on…,” Whitewater Police Detective Tina Winger wrote in an e-mail to Coan. “Seems like an anti-government radical to me.”

So anyone who criticizes the government warrants surveillance and is a dangerous radical? Spare me.

This unfortunately is how too many public officials, elected and career bureaucrats, view the public. As the little people. The Great Unwashed. They forget that they work for the taxpayers, not the other way around. Their attitude is: “How dare you criticize me!” Arrogant and condescending.

There are potential legal ramifications as well. Check what the ACLU has to say about this:

“It sounds like this individual may have a claim against the (police) department for a violation of his or her civil rights,” said Christopher Ahmuty, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

The right to criticize government officials anonymously has long been protected in the United States, Ahmuty said. Launching a police investigation into an anonymous speaker’s identity, he said, could be construed as an unconstitutional government effort to chill that speech.

“The case law is certainly strongly supportive of anonymous speech, so long as it isn’t libelous … or part of a criminal conspiracy,” Ahmuty said.

Federal law also prohibits law enforcement from obtaining license plate registration information for non-law enforcement purposes.

Through open records requests, we’ve learned that Whitewater police ran various license plate check on people Coan thought might be “John Adams.” Coan engaged in full CYA mode, saying the checks were related to a threat and that he couldn’t discuss that threat. Wanna bet a lawsuit makes him discuss that threat?

I firmly believe the man confronted at his home by Coan and his lieutenant has a case for harassment against the city and the police department. To wit:

Scott said about three weeks after the police visit, he got an anonymous card addressed to “Mr. John Adams c/o Laird Scott” in the mail, wishing him a happy belated birthday. Scott said the card was unsettling because it accurately stated his birthday was a month earlier. He added that he believes the card was an attempt to intimidate him into silence, and he wondered how the card’s author knew police suspected he was the blogger, John Adams.

In other words, someone in city government used public records to locate the birthday of the man Coan suspected was the blogger and send him a belated birthday card in an attempt to harass and intimidate him.

Patrick has more here at Badger Blogger.

For the record, I don’t believe John Adams is a coward for publishing anonymously. It’s his perfectly legitimate right to do so. The man from whom he takes his pen name wrote a series of editorials anonymously to generate support for the Revolutionary War.

And seriously, if your local government was this vindictive, would you risk exposing yourself and your family to the use of government powers to harass them? I wouldn’t. If the local police chief is willing to go to the house of a man he just suspects is the blogger to confront and intimidate him, imagine what he and other city bureaucrats would do if the man’s identity were actually known.

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Filed under 1st Amendment, Blogging, Government