It was just a tad bit surreal. Two days ago, I'd been inhaling pepper spray and dodging concussion grenades for having the temerity to stand outside a hotel, because these guys were in it.

And now I was their friend?

What a difference a plastic name badge makes. So much bother for an annual meeting for 500 members of a group that, two weeks previous, most people in Seattle hadn't heard of.

The occasion: a rare one-on-one interview with Cap. Richard Wright, a Simi Valley, Calif. cop who is the newly reelected, volunteer General Chairman of the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU).

Simi Valley, lest you've forgotten, is L.A.'s Copland, the Bellevue-sized suburb where an all-white jury once acquitted Rodney King's attackers.

And 48 hours after at least a dozen protesters were injured by his colleagues for no apparent reason, Wright seems faintly bemused.

He should probably get used to the visibility. Given rapidly expanding post- 9/11 police powers, and rampant stories of political activists across the country being the targets of "anti-terror" lists or investigations, the concern that brought hundreds of protesters onto downtown Seattle streets isn't fading soon. Given that the LEIU's sole purpose is to facilitate sharing of information amongs local police agencies, the LEIU is a natural target for questions and suspicion. It doesn't help that despite being supported by dues from public law enforcement agencies, the LEIU itself is private and need not tell anyone what it's up to.

>From the LEIU perspective, it's all a misunderstanding.

LEIU says it does not itself spy on anyone, or hold anyone else's files. Its 240 member agencies--all of them state and local--"collect their own information based on their legal parameters, whether it's local ordinances, state law, whatever it might be," Wright explains. "It's a pointer system. What they submit to LEIU is basic information regarding a subject that's involved or suspected of being involved in criminal activity....name, description, date of birth, identification, those sort of things." If Seattle police submit my name, and San Francisco police want information on me, what LEIU would give them, Wright says, is the name of the relevant Seattle investigator to call. The list of who to call about whom is kept by the California Department of Justice; there is no LEIU office, paid staff, or web site.

The last era in which LEIU drew any public scrutiny was the mid-'70s. A series of local lawsuits revealed that many local police departments were using the private LEIU to keep intelligence files away from public scrutiny. Lawsuits and investigative boards in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and elsewhere turned up not only LEIU involvement in local police disruption of and spying on legal political activity, but a bewildering variety of invisible police and private spy groups sharing information on citizens convicted of no crime. Such abuses led to Seattle's intelligence ordinance, now under fire by SPD and the police guild.

Today, 30 years later, there's no telling how many such groups still operate in the shadowy and ever-expanding world of private surveillance.

Wright, however, claims all that was ancient history, the combination of a tumultuous political era and the lack of standardization among local agencies. It was the first decade after 1965's landmark US Supreme Court case, Griswold v. Connecticut, which for the first time established privacy rights under the constitution. Subsequent appellate court rulings expanded that right to include protection from unwarranted police surveillance.

Since 1976, LEIU and its member agencies have operated under a universal standard for the collection, storage and auditing, and dissemination of files on individuals or organizations suspected of criminal activity. "If we're gathering information," Wright says, "It must relate to crime."

Of course, who defines "crime"?

The settlement of a 1987 lawsuit by the ACLU and National Lawyers Guild included an agreement by the city of Albuquerque to begin using the standards. Wright calls it a watershed event: "Civil liberty groups acknowledged that LEIU standards provided a proper balance between the needs of law enforcement and the privacy needs of individuals."

So far, he adds, those standards have not changed significantly in 27 years. Since 9/11, only John Ashcroft's federal agencies have adopted standards that allow police to spy regardless of whether criminal activity is suspected.

But that's changing.

Monday, mere hours before Seattle's latest police riot, the Global Intelligence Working Group (GIWG), a committee charged with advising Congress on intelligence sharing, presented a first draft of a plan to create a uniform set of intelligence standards that would cover all types and levels of US law enforcement. The target for final recommendations is this coming October. Those standards are expected to be considerably more lax than LEIU's current ones.

Wright says the LEIU is likely to be lukewarm to the plan. "We have found a standard that is not only operationally effective, but legally acceptable. I think we have some issues with being persuaded to come off of that standard, because it works."

However, it didn't work for the over 3,000 people and 240 groups--almost all of them left-leaning activists--on whose behalf ACLU sued Denver's police department last year. Among those Denver's police kept files on were former US Senator James Abourezk (D-SD), comedian George Carlin, Cherokee Nation leader Wilma Mankiller, historian and author Vine Deloria, and groups from the American Friends Service Committee to the American Indian Movement. While the Denver case is, again, the work of a local agency--not the LEIU--it's a reminder of what any police department might do once free to spy on whomever it dislikes.

Such precedents make many people--not just political activists--leery of a private organization with so little public accountability. In the 1950s, Wright says, LEIU was set up as an alternative to federal surveillance files specifically because J. Edgar Hoover's FBI wouldn't share information with local agencies. But with all concerned likely to be adopting the same standards and sharing information, soon the private, inscrutable LEIU will face a different question.

Why should it continue to exist?