December 17, 2004
The San Mateo Massacre: Judicial Fiat by the Bay
by
Peenie Wallie
.
John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore. December 15, 2004.
photos by peeniewallie
[BLOCKQUOTE]
From the "You never know who you'll run into" department, I was wandering through the San Mateo Halls of Injustice, trying to take care of a $777.21 felony parking ticket, when I noticed all of the news cameras. Turns out, it was no less than John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow, two of the founders of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to defending online privacy rights. John Gilmore is currently fighting for our right to travel anonymously on airplanes. John Perry Barlow was in court trying to defend our fourth amendment rights in the airport.
In September of 2003, as the annual Burning Man event in the parched, hostile black rock desert of Nevada drew to a close, thousands of drug saturated bohemians retreated to the regions from whence they’d come. They divided the remainder of their drugs fairly and dispersed. They carpooled, hitchhiked, or piloted their flamboyantly painted VW Microbuses across the desert roads back to middle Amerika, the left coast, and parts unknown.
Scads of these deracinated souls washed upon the bay area shores in the immediate aftermath of the show’s grand finale. Burning man was, after all, invented by Larry Harvey , a San Francisco native. The event traces its roots back to a large wooden sculpture of a man that was erected and then set ablaze here on Baker Beach. So, it’s no surprise that the bay area provides shelter to legions of the disaffected youth that frequent the annual event.
John had recently returned from burning man, and found himself at SFO attempting to board a Delta Airlines flight. When the TSA searched his checked luggage at the airport, they allegedly found some interesting items, including a “laser glove” that he wore at Burning Man, a few grams of marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, a syringe, some vials of Ketamine.
The Covenant Security notified the TSA, the TSA contacted the SFPD’s Narcotics Task Force, the Narcs contacted the DEA, and they promptly yanked John off of the plane and hauled him away in chains to the bowels of the Redwood City gulag. No Miranda rights, do not pass go, go directly to jail. You get the idea.
This sort of thing normally passes without so much as a blip in the mainstream media, especially on the Left Coast where marijuana is officially recognized as the state bird. California, after all, was the first state in the country to legally recognize Medical Marijuana. Possession of less than an ounce of Marijuana in California is a misdemeanor and is not an “arrestable offense” under state law.
Normally, in a case such as this, the drug-addled Burning Man bohemian would plead guilty to possession, and, if he asked the right people, he could pull around behind the San Mateo County evidence locker at 2:00 a.m. and buy back his drugs by the light of the moon for a small “processing fee”.
But our “John” is not just any guy. Our John, as it turns out, is John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And John seems to think that somewhere in the Constitution, it guarantees people the right to be “secure in their person and their possessions” and guarantees freedom from “unreasonable searches and seizures”.
.
.
.
[/BLOCKQUOTE]
Read the rest of PW's essay on his web site at
http://www.peeniewallie.com/2004/12/the_san_mateo_m.html
