Sometimes it’s good to read bloggers who are close to the Canadian Border. bridgett has some little-discussed news that is really pissing her off.

The Bush administration (more particularly, the FBI) has begun to use national and international criminal databases to regulate the international movement of peace activists by listing their misdemeanor arrests as “criminal activity.” (The databases are usually used for eight categories of offenses — felony sex offenders, violent repeat offenders, foreign fugitives, gang members, and so forth). The civil disobedience offenses (peaceful minor misdemeanors) are not sufficiently serious to merit suspension of a passport, so the federal government is attempting to use these digital resources to harrass and forbid exit in other ways. It’s a nuisance. It’s illegal and it won’t stand up in court. But it is meant to drain the resources and sap the resolve of women (yep, the targets are overwhelmingly Code Pink members) who denounce the war in public.

The most recent example happened on October 3. At the Canadian border (ironically, at the Peace Bridge), Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin and Colonel Ann Wright (former diplomat with the State Department) were refused entry into Canada because of their appearance on the National Crime Information Center Computerized Index.

This kind of thing really makes me mad. It seems like bullying.