Surveillance Plane Circles 80 minutes over City Hall Living Wage Rally.

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As labor union representatives, Disney workers, and their supporters gathered at City Hall last Tuesday (May 1) to turn in 20,000 signatures to place an initiative on the ballot requiring that they be paid a living wage, a plane circled high over the peaceful crowd for EIGHTY MINUTES.

Unlike the usual APD helicopters, this sort of plane, which we learned about in 2016 through documents released by the ACLU, flies too high to be easily seen – BUT a friend of this blog, who spends some of his spare time tracking flight patterns locally, discovered that this Cessna, registered to the City of Anaheim, was circling repeatedly over the rally for that length of time:

Flight path for the Cessna during those 80 minutes. Click for larger image.

We aim to find out how much this 80-minute flight cost Anaheim taxpayers, and at whose request it was undertaken.  Again, the peaceful citizens below were merely exercising the initiative process constitutionally allowed to them in the state of California, to attempt to get a fair wage from the most profitable, and publicly subsidized, employers in the city.  But those employers have been doing everything they can, sparing no expense, to stop this process.  Who decided, at what level, that these citizen/employees needed to be spied on for 80-minutes, at no doubt huge expense?  Is this a great Company Town, or what?

The plane was too high for us to photograph it, but this is the type. (Mickey added.)

What we know from the ACLU is that these planes, used since 2014 or earlier by the Anaheim police department, are equipped with a “dirtbox,” a device mounted to a plane, to secretly spy on thousands of conversations, emails and text messages:

 

 

Anaheim Cops Have Had A Massive Spy Program For Years,” Huffington Post 2016

“Police in Anaheim, California — home to Disneyland and about 16 million tourists annually — apparently have built an extensive surveillance arsenal using military-grade spy equipment that has been used to eavesdrop on cell phone calls for years, according to newly published documents. The documents, obtained by American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and published Wednesday, show a massive and sophisticated cell phone spying program that stretches back to at least 2009.”

This fancy police spy plane that can illegally listen to all phone conversations was intended, supposedly, to track down deadly criminals and terrorist infiltrators. But on May 1st it flew exclusively over city hall monitoring a demonstration by workers asking for a living wage.  In fact these same unions are famous “specifically” for peace demonstrations in the past!

When the KKK had an altercation at the local park, Unite Here 11, OCCORD and CLUE called for a peace demonstration – the very same peace march organizers were treated like a terrorist organization on May 1 st at city hall, as the super secret “not so secret” spy plane circled ominously over head, round and round and round.

Now the police seem to be targeting those same groups, treating them like the terrorists they were paid to look for. Now the police or someone in power is overextending their illegal reach listening to the phone conversations of union leaders, peace protesters and those asking simply for a living wage from Disney, the Wincome Group and O’Connell Hotels (the three subsidized corporations being asked to pay $15 an hour as many of their competitors in the Anaheim Resort District do.)

More updates to come…

(co-written by “Fingal O’Flahertie” and Vern Nelson)


About Fingal O'Flahertie

Fingal is an Orange County resident/entrepreneur, sometimes world traveler and man about the house.