May 15, 2005, The Horse Fly
by Dory Hulburt

A Vigilante Muse

Sometimes Stephanie Lee thinks she's crazy. After all, how do you prove you're under surveillance by the government?

In 2002, with reverberations of 9/11 spreading through civil society like fault lines, the 30-year Taos resident recorded her second CD, "The Old Man's Stories," in Canada, along with her single, "Get Out the Bushes, Get out the Thieves."

She and her husband, Joe Monsanto, then spent a year in New York promoting the CD by first visited home and family in Taos. Stephanie left Canada with a dozen copies of "Get out the Bushes, Get out the Thieves" in her check-in luggage. When she got to Taos they were gone. She called JFK Airport. They knew nothing.

Chilling images from her post-9/11 year in New York City haunt Stephanie, who was born and raised there, like heavily armed troops lined up beneath enormous American flags at Grand Central Station. "We were in martial law and people were in fucking denial," she says.

It was an appropriate backdrop for her experiences. Her emails, incoming and out-going, started getting "lost." People said they'd sent emails, but Stephanie never got them. Her emails to radio stations and booking agencies never arrived. Business and political emails disappeared; personal emails went through. Stephanie is technologically savvy and tried everything to fix the problem. Nothing worked. Besides, there were too many coincidences to blame on a glitch.

Like the fact that her mail wasn't getting through either. Same pattern: anything with New Goddess Records or vigilantemusesociety.com on it disappeared; personal mail was forwarded. It got so bad that she and Joe started driving from Yonkers, NY where they lived to New Jersey to do postal business. Stephanie stopped using her pre-printed business labels. "It seemed to help some," she says.

Her fax machine would say "received" when she sent something, but the recipients never got it. Incoming faxes were too garbled to read.

Stephanie has no evidence that her telephone was monitored, but "I knew it was tapped; I just knew."

Outraged, she gravitated to civil liberties work. In June '03 she performed at The Music Complex in Dobbs Ferry, NY, to benefit the local Bill of Rights Defense Committee. "I was running my mouth like a motherfucker about the Patriot Act." Interference with her communications intensified.

She was told at the ACLU in White Plains, NY that "nobody else [in Westchester County] has made a complaint like that" and taking her case "would make us look bad." Later, ACLU-New Mexico said it didn't have resources to pursue individual cases. Stephanie acknowledges that her situation pales in comparison to immigrants being disappeared and prisoners unlawfully detained and tortured at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

That's the blatant side of U.S. repression. Stephanie represents its subtle side: self-doubt, paranoia, distrust, fear. Her evidence is circumstantial, but her experiences all echo widespread civil liberties violations documented since 9/11.

A February 2004 report by the Department of Homeland Security Privacy Office indicated that jetBlue Airways' transfer of passenger data to the Department of Defense in 2001 and 2002 raised "serious concerns about the proper handling of personally identifiable information by government employees."

Email is routinely under surveillance, as Robert O'Harrow, Jr., reports in his 2005 book, "No Place to Hide." He describes how one Internet service provider, after losing a court challenge, reluctantly agreed to spy on customer emails itself rather than use the overly intrusive Carnivore device pushed by the government.

A report commissioned by the European Parliament in 1998, "An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control," indicated that "Within Europe, all email, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency" according to Thomas Powers ("Black Arts," The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2005). That's right, it says all. Think we're immune in the United States?

Stephanie hopes to participate in a class-action lawsuit with others similarly targeted someday. She has gotten no response from the "postmaster" of her ISP, hotmail to her March email demanding an explanation of ongoing interference with her correspondence.

Meanwhile, she plans monthly benefits for the national Bill of Rights Defense Committee and a summer-fall tour featuring her political songs. On June 15 she'll participate in the Po' Jazz Festival at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village. The Centre for Political Song at Glasgow Caledonian University has requested on of her songs for its collection.

Silence is a slave of repression, sowing alienation and isolation. Stephanie's way is freedom: sing out!