Sedition (A Political Conspiracy Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

political spectrum. On one hand, they seemed to be conservative, part of the anger at the establishment so well defined by Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. On the other hand, their ideas appeared to be farther left than Senator Bernie Sanders.
    Matti puffed her cheeks. She let out the air in an exasperated sigh and ran her hand through her hair. She was reading secretly recorded voice intelligence.
    These are US citizens on these tapes!
    She was familiar with the Bush administration’s legal contention that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which guarded against unlawful search and seizure, did not apply to NSA activities. And in times of war, search and seizure was reasonable on US soil, even if the “enemy” was not foreign.
    The Department of Justice asserted warrantless communications targeted at the enemy in times of armed conflict were traditionally acceptable, arguing the NSA’s signal intelligence was included in that exception. Lawyers went so far as to suggest the NSA was a domestic military operation.
    Toward the end of the second Bush term, the Office of Legal Counsel backed off the assertion but never fully denounced it. Some suspected the government was essentially spying on its own citizens. Matti sat with the proof right in front of her.
    There were twenty pages of short, clipped conversations between various members of the group. She flipped past the logs to the short biographical pages of the suspected conspirators.
    One was a college professor; a second was an artist; another was a local businessman who owned a meat shop and a bar. Matti flipped through the black-and-white surveillance photographs snapped of the various alleged plotters. She made mental notes of the names and faces. Then one caught her attention.
    “Bill Davidson?” she whispered. “The former attorney general?”
    Davidson was connected. He was well-known. He used to run the Department of Justice and he had the ear of policymakers and financiers. He was the star of a DC think tank and was on television nearly every week. Bill Davidson could make things happen.
    Any potential threat, especially one with a DC insider, needed serious oversight. Matti was reading about Davidson’s lesser-known post-AG proclivities when her gray phone rang.
     

Chapter 5
    Art Thistlewood stared at the paper on his desk. He’d scribbled the translation to the code sent to his phone during class and couldn’t believe he was summoned to a meeting in the middle of the night.
    “One o’clock?” he whined in his small office. It was on the third floor of the Ward Building on the campus of American University and overlooked the north end of the quad from the window next to his desk.
    Every term, he found himself embroiled in a weeks-long affair with a woman at most half his age. He told them up front it was not forever. They usually obliged with a lack of interest beyond the posting of their final grades.
    Professor Thistlewood was a good-looking man. His thick mop of white hair dropped over his ears and collar. His habit of fingering back his bangs off his forehead was an unintentional turn-on to the girls who sought out his extra credit.
    Aside from women, he loved art by politically motivated artists. His small Embassy Row apartment boasted several collected pieces by artists Shepard Fairey, Robbie Conal, and Trek Thunder Kelly. He especially loved Kelly’s iPod Ghraib . It was a shocking pink canvas with the dark silhouette of a thin Iraqi prisoner under hood and cloak at Abu Ghraib prison, electrodes attached to his fingers as he stood with his arms extended outward and his feet on a box.
    In Kelly’s work, the electrode wires were replaced with earbud cables attached to a pair of iPods. It looked similar to the popular Apple advertisements in which a music listener’s dark profile was highlighted by the use of the digital music player. Thistlewood thought the piece to be magnificent and had purchased it directly from