If you’d like to enliven your dull party, federal agents appear to be eager to conduct raids or searches, especially if the location is a known hangout for people of the left-wing, pacifist, resource-sharing persuasion.
On November 9, Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agents searched for a pipe-bomb-making workshop at the People’s Free Space at 144 Cumberland Avenue in Portland. They found nothing. Some Free Space users are irritated.
The site, which is known more for bicycle-repair workshops and yoga lessons, was empty at the time. Elizabeth Magnusson, a real-estate agent who has been trying to sell the building, says she let in four agents after they called her. “They got an anonymous tip that somebody was building pipe bombs,” she says.
After she got the call, “I was freaking out” over the safety of the people in the building, Magnusson says, since an apartment on the second floor is occupied by a mother and three children. “In today’s world, you have to be careful.”
Magnusson, who works at Magnusson Balfour on India Street, says she was unable to reach any of the Free Space folks, but she put the agents in touch with the building’s owner, Dong Tran, in Tennessee, by cell phone, who she says gave permission for them to search. The “extremely polite” agents in plainclothes went through only the first floor and the basement, she reports.
ATF spokesman James McNally, of the Boston field office, says the bureau “received information about potential criminal activity” at the location, but found “no evidence at all to validate the information.”
He says he would not “get into the specific allegations,” but nothing was found and “the investigation is over.”
Asked if the agency searches places based simply on tips off the street, McNally says “there has to be something more,” adding: “we’re pretty good at deciphering what is real and what is not,” and the agents “evidently, absolutely” thought the tip they received in this case was the real thing.
Several messages left for McNally asking whether the agents had a search warrant went unanswered by press time. Magnusson says she doesn’t know if they had a warrant. If given permission to enter a building, law-enforcement authorities do not need a warrant.
Some of the Free Space denizens feel the feds overreacted to the tip.
“It’s a clear infringement of privacy,” says Saul Amedee, a Web site designer and coordinator for the technology users’ group that meets there. “It’s always been like that in the prison state we’re in.”
Jordan Ruff, also a Web designer and a writer for the Free Space newspaper, People’s Free News, says the search could have a chilling effect on participation in Free Space activities: “just the fact that it was raided would deter people from joining in or benefiting from resources here.”
That sort of chilling effect has been the subject of concern by citizens’-rights groups such as the Maine Civil Liberties Union, which has been involved in legal action over potentially illegal wiretapping of Maine residents’ telephone calls and over FBI surveillance of activist groups (see “MCLU Worries FBI is Watching Peace Groups,” by Sara Donnelly, November 3).
Ruff adds: “we’re explicitly a nonviolent community-building organization.” She has never seen any weapons, she says, and there are Free Space rules that forbid weapons, illegal drugs, or alcohol.
“It’s really weird that they would have that kind of tip,” Ruff says, speaking for a group of Free Space users who discussed the search.
The People’s Free Space concentrates on “programs to share resources and teach each other skills,” Ruff says.
Its Web site — www.peoplesfreespace.org — presents its mission as “to create autonomous collective spaces for sharing information and resources, building community, and fostering sustainable alternatives and creative resistance to social, economical, political, ecological oppression.” It is opposed to the oppressions of “white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, ageism, and capitalism.”
Officially now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, ATF is part of the Department of Justice. Its criminal enforcement office — in Portland, it’s at One City Center and run by David Brown — tries to “investigate and reduce crime involving firearms and explosives, acts of arson, and illegal trafficking of alcohol and tobacco products,” among other duties, including “preventing terrorism,” according to its Web site,www.atf.gov.
