Saint Paul 2008

The FBI likes little so much as weaving thick and impenetrable webs of abbreviations, acronyms, and code words around themself and everything they do. We expect their involvement in the 2008 RNC convention to be no different, which raises an interesting question we (and doubtless others) would dearly love the answer to - what’s the code name for the 2008 RNC Convention in St Paul, or the monitoring of demonstrators?

It’s unclear how long they’ve been using codewords for these sorts of things; the two best-documented are almost certainly MIDEM and MIREP for the surveillance of demonstrators at the 1972 Democratic and Republican national conventions, respectively, both held in Miami that year. (The latter is documented several places on the web, while both are included in the glossary in Ann Mari Buitrago’s and Leon Andrew Immerman’s 1981 paperback Are You Now or Have You Ever Been in the FBI Files.)

The 2008 Democratic convention in Denver is probably easy to guess - CODEM seems like the obvious choice, though DEDEM and even DENDEM are possible. It’s the codeword for the 2008 Republican convention here in St. Paul that gives us pause.

STREP? Don’t get us wrong, we love the idea of the counter-convention intelligence being filed under the name of a bacteria, but aren’t convinced the generally humorless Bureau would go for that. That leaves us with some unwieldy second choices, like SAINTREP, SAREP, SPREP, MIREP, MNREP, and even MINREP.

That brings us to you, dear reader. Give us your suggestions, your ideas, and - most importantly - if you “somehow” find out what the codeword for the monitoring of protestors is, share it with us. Enquiring minds want to know…