the beginning of the story
Alright here I come again to continue with my boring story. I want to retell the beginning in more detail.
The ipods have their secret history of being doubled as surveillance devices. The first time I saw ipod being so used was May 2006, some months before the story of the Department of Homeland Security began. I was on a flight from Los Angeles to Montreal. At the time I was under FBI surveillance. The FBI decided to take extra caution of me for this flight, and they sent a super-athletic woman -- whose hand was bigger than my head -- to sit on my right and two marines to sit on my left. The woman was wearing earphones with ipods. As the plane was about to take off, she started manipulating her ipod and these words popped up on the screen: "The plane is taking off the ground." I watched the whole thing from behind her shoulder without her noticing.
I'm not here to tell the story of my encounter with the FBI -- how the FBI decided to investigate me -- but only the story of the Department of Homeland Security. I shall only note that the FBI investigation was just a passing phenomenon. The FBI came and went. But they must have left me on some sort of watch list, for when my second flight to Montreal in August 11 last year coincided with timing of the London terror plot, that day I was pulled aside and then put back into line several times at the airport as I was getting ready to board my plane. The Department of Homeland Security must have found the coincidence suspicious and thusly they came into my life.
After I came back from Montreal to Southern California, at first I ran into between 10 to 20 surveillance agents per day: at coffeehouses, at the university campus (Cal State Long Beach), on buses, etc. I bore it but then events started building up momentum. In late September one day when I went to meet with my doctor (who knew I was under surveillance) in Westwood Los Angeles she warned me to stay out of the north side because the President himself was in town for fund-raising activities. I returned to my home in the south but I was escorted by several surveillance agents on the metro rail. The authorities must have thought that problematic individuals like me must be under watch when the President was in town to keep him (the President) safe. The surveillance was not so different than usual but that night I blew up because more than a year and nine months of being considered a threat had finally got to me. I talked angrily on the phone about this with my best friend in Albany, New York, saying that I had enough of all these investigations by one agency after another. The next day I was still angry and talked to someone else about my being annoyed by the constant surveillance. The Department of Homeland Security became alarmed -- they probably thought I was about to snap and do something! -- and increased their surveillance of me, which made me even more angry. The day after I decided to take a trip to ACLU but I rode the bus from downtown L.A. to Beverly Hills and back to downtown again without being able to find it. As I stood at the downtown bus stop frustrated as ever, a man who looked obviously like he came from the military came wearing an ipod to conduct surveillance on me. I felt the situation oppressive and left but then came back to him and started begging him for help, tears running down my cheeks. I asked him to take me to ACLU and when he refused I just clung to his presence and followed him. "You cannot follow me" he said but I in my frustration followed him onto the bus anyway with tears pouring down my face. The surveillance agent man was quite surprised by the development -- I just wouldn't let him go nor stop crying -- while I just thought, since he was there to find out where I wanted to go, and since I couldn't find where I wanted to go, we might as well help each other by having him -- the surveillance agent -- take me to where I wanted to go. But he was not amused by the tactic and he slipped off the bus in Beverly Hills and although I followed him out the bus I lost him. Some passersby did direct me to ACLU, which apparently I passed over near downtown without noticing. I went. On the bus to ACLU the DHS used relays: one surveillance agent would exit the bus while another one would come up. When I came out of ACLU, another surveillance agent, wearing earphones as usual, came next to me at the bus stop. I decided to follow him again as we both exited the bus at downtown. This seems to have alarmed the DHS even more and they sent out a helicopter to track me. I got on another bus with more surveillance agents on board to go to my next destination, my grandfather's place in Alhambra, to discuss the possibility of returning to Taiwan, my home country. When I came back to the downtown transit station late at night a DHS agent came up to me looking bemused and tried to talk with me. Apparently the way I dealt with their surveillance that day -- especially the first agent -- had amused some in the DHS as well.
By this time the Department of Homeland Security had realized that this target of theirs was wildly resistant to surveillance and started mobilizing more surveillance agents. When I went to the Cal State Long Beach campus, the place would be filled with surveillance agents; and when I went to the alumni office to get my alumni card (I was a graduate of CSULB), the office lady there was scared out of her body to see me. The same with bus drivers. I was pissed off to the extreme by the fact that the DHS had informed the entire town that a major threat was here when I was no such thing at all. My resistance consisted in publicly counting out the surveillance agents; and when the Department of Homeland Security became ever more alarmed and continued to increase the number of surveillance agents around me, it also made it even easier to identify them, since my environment had literally changed. And then for inexplicable reasons -- I think it was because I one day threw out from my wallet a piece of paper with the extension of a phone number on it -- the DHS suddenly went into a state of emergency and the next day they locked down the part of Los Angeles that I traversed through as I rode the bus to meet my doctor. That day I counted 70 or so surveillance agents. As I returned home that night another DHS agent on the rail with me was amused by me as ever and wanted to converse with me. I had again amused the DHS because that day I kept saying hi to their surveillance agents with a dorky smile and telling jokes while many surveillance agents were around recording me, both of which caused not a few of them to burst into laughter. But the DHS only intensified their effort afterwards. My doctor had been for a while required to wear wires to spy on me, and my website went down. (It was hosted on a server in Britain. What is usually done is that the agents here call up the security service in Britain to move the server in question to another server for a day, and then move the content back to the original server; the second server is then carried off for analysis. You would then notice that your website is down during the time of the transfer of the server and that when it comes back on the content you have added to your website during that day of transfer disappeared: it has been carried off.) The DHS continued to increase the number of surveillance agents around me, and I continued to count them out publicly ever more easily. This was partly because their surveillance agents looked more grotesque than ordinary people. By the later half of October, my count of DHS surveillance agents had reached 500.
Then DHS started gearing up for a full-scale surveillance war....
