OntheWilderSide

In what can be called a Kafkaesque abuse of taxpayer money and citizen’s political rights, the Connecticut Central Criminal Intelligence Unit set up a surveillance of the Connecticut Green Party in 2006. In a detailed account posted at Hartford Courant website, Government Watch reporter Jon Lender lays out what the Central Criminal Intelligence Unit did, the reasons they gave, and the outcome of the domestic spying they engaged in.

The police were on the alert for a protest by Green Party supporters who were upset that their candidate for governor, Cliff Thornton, was not being allowed in debates between Democrat John DeStefano and incumbent Gov. M. Jodi Rell. The Greens had protested a week or so earlier outside a debate in New London.

But that night, they didn’t show up.

Details of the operation were only recently exposed in papers filed by the defendants in a law suit brought by Ken Krayeske, a freelance journalist who was arrested for taking photographs of Governor Rell in her inaugural parade. Krayeske had served at Cliff Thornton’s campaign manager in the same gubernatorial race. Thornton is now one of the national Green Party’s co-chairs, and started the drug law reform website Efficacy.

Krayeske first appeared on the radar for the mainstream media after he asked University of Connecticut men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun to justify his multi-million dollar salary at a time the state faced a two billion dollar deficit.