Beware the clean-cut WASP cleaning crew member working in solitary late at night...

[coderman]

*grin*

[from my neck of the woods, so probably more interesting to me than
most.  it'd also be interesting to hear other stories of suspected
clandestine surveillance.  this guy is friends with Brandon Mayfield,
another PDX attorney who had represented middle eastern clients, who
was jailed on bogus finger print matches to the spain bombings - even
when spanish authorities insisted he had nothing to do with it:
www.komotv.com/news/printstory.asp?id=31353 ]

also interesting that ADT appears to comply fully with such black bag
jobs; another reason to roll your own :)

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http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1142913320152530.xml&coll=7

Lawyer thinks office was searched in secret
Surveillance - A Portland attorney, who represents a Saudi, cites
suspicious circumstances
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
BRYAN DENSON

A Portland lawyer suspects that federal authorities executed
warrantless searches of his Lloyd Center office to collect information
about a client who is the subject of an international terrorism
investigation.

Tom Nelson, who represents Saudi national Soliman al-Buthi, previously
filed a complaint that alleged warrantless interception of phone and
e-mail communications between al-Buthi and his other lawyers.

"We allege in our complaint not only that they intercepted
communications without a warrant, but they used the interceptions to
the disadvantage of the client," Nelson said.

Nelson thinks government agents, with no judicial supervision, entered
his office on a number of occasions last year. He first raised the
suspicion in September in a letter to Karin Immergut, the U.S.
attorney for Oregon, who wrote back saying she was aware of no such
warrantless searches. Nelson recounted his fears about warrantless
searches by the National Security Agency in a story this week in U.S.
News & World Report.

Two years ago, the federal government charged al-Buthi, who headed an
Ashland nonprofit called al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, with taking
charitable donations totaling $130,000 in traveler's checks out of the
United States. Federal authorities have accused the al-Haramain parent
organization, based in Saudi Arabia, of ties to Osama bin Laden.

Nelson thinks that while he was representing al-Buthi on the criminal
charge and attempting to rid his client of a suspected "global
terrorist" designation that someone posing as a janitor repeatedly
tried to, and apparently did, enter his Lloyd Center office after
hours.

Attorney Jonathan Norling, who shares office space with Nelson, said
he was sleeping on a couch at their practice early one morning last
May when a man dressed as a custodian tried to enter Nelson's office.
Norling startled the man twice one night in July when he caught the
man trying to enter the locked office.

Norling also suspects federal authorities were trying to collect
information from Nelson's desk and computer. Whoever it was, he said,
had a badge for the building that appeared valid.

"This person clearly wasn't a cleaning crew," Norling said. "I know
the cleaning crew. They come in at different times. They have a cart,
and this guy didn't have a cart. . . . I've worked here seven years,
and I've worked a lot of late nights, and I never experienced anything
like that until Tom was working (on this case)."

Nelson was suspicious of the government, having briefly represented
Brandon Mayfield, the lawyer wrongly accused of the 2004 terrorist
attack in Spain. Mayfield was the subject of intense federal
surveillance.

Nelson's suspicions deepened when he found that his computer had
inexplicably been rebooted and that papers in his cluttered office had
been moved around. "I'm not the world's best housekeeper," he said,
"but I know where things are."

After a few suspicious experiences, Nelson took his al-Buthi files to
his home in Zigzag. There he experienced what he described as
unexplained lapses in his burglar alarm, failures that the company
that monitors the alarm couldn't adequately explain.

On Sept. 23, he fired off the first of two letters to Immergut, the
U.S. attorney for Oregon, complaining of "strong indications that my
office and my home have been the target of clandestine searches"
related to the al-Buthi case. Immergut responded Jan. 19 that she
stood by her earlier statements: She was aware of no such searches
under her watch. Immergut wrote that she assumed he was referring to
news reports about clandestine intercepts by the NSA.

Immergut pointed out in her response that the NSA and Department of
Justice were separate agencies. In an interview Monday, she added,
"The (NSA) is not required to come to the U.S. attorney for the
district of Oregon for authorization to conduct any kind of searches."

All of which keeps Nelson scratching his head.

"I have no proof the government's doing these things," he said. "I
just have a very healthy suspicion they are."

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