Late last year, liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald had reason to believe that someone from US customs and border patrol had looked up his border entry/exit records, and posted the information to the Internet. More on that can be viewed at Glenn's old blog site here.
Thus, I fired off a FOIA request to US customs and border patrol, now part of DHS, asking for any and all records and database searches done by an employee named 'Eric Wess' for data on Glenn Greenwald...
C&BP's FOIA office got back to me last week by telephone, and told me that they do not have now, or had in the past year (the scope of my request) any employee named 'Eric Wess' on their payroll. If I wanted to do a search for any agent who had done a search on Glenn, I'd need some kind of privacy act waiver....
Not the most fantastic result, but still, a useful FOIA writing experiene, and a chance to see the US government responding to them in a reasonable amount of time.
Sorry I couldn't be more helpful Glenn.
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It bugs me that Baggi would abuse his power like this so publically, so I spent a few hours hunting him down and have the below to report. Maybe someone else can take it farther and find him, or will recognize him from the details I have gathered. Note that all of this is from Baggi’s own posts about himself.
* Recently moved to the Seattle, WA area…very possibly to work for CIS (Citizenship and Immigration Service) in Blaine, Washington
* Married 8 years , four kids oldest of which is 5 (now 6?), wife's family is Mormon
* Has a cousin in Florida
* He is a Religious fundamentalist
* Attended a Christian University for two years
* A frequent poster on shadowclan.com as Baggi
* A frequent poster on hotstockmarket.com as Baggi
* A little bit of wikipedia Intelligent Design editing and wikipedian stalker as Bagginator
* Has posted on polipundit.com with the email address Reels44@hotmail.com
* “As a United States Immigration Officer for 7 years and now a Customs and Border Protection Officer for 3 years (Still doing the same job under a new name thanks to DHS) I have some experience on the southern border. All my time has been spent here in San Diego working on the Tijuana/San Ysidro border.”
* Probably in his 30s. Certainly over 30 and very likely under 50. (Cached out a 401k worth 13k, ten year career + 2 years school)
* He likes to play stock options and forex at work (he is a federal employee) but has firewall issues.
…and the closest I have come to discovering his real identity…
* From http://polipundit.com/wp-comments-popup.php?p=12869&c=1, on the topic of immigration, Baggi says "I’ll be on Hugh Hewitts show today at 1620 pacific time talking about this. Hope you all listen in!"
-- 4/5/2006
I have gone over Hugh Hewitts’ podcast site and cannot find any transcripts for the show. The coverage of last March, April and May is a bit weak.
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