ANNAPOLIS, Maryland - October 9, 2008 - Maryland State police placed the names of 53 left-leaning political activists into federal and state databases, labeling them as terrorists, the state's police chief admitted Tuesday.

Evidence that the state police had been infiltrating anti-war and anti-death penalty groups first came to light in July following a government sunshine lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of a prominent peace activist named Max Obuszewski.

Police added Obuszewski and others to a federal database called the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database. The nation's main terrorist watch list is built from nominations from federal databases, but Maryland's current police superintendent told Maryland lawmakers that he didn't think the activists made their way onto that list, according to the Washington Post.

The Maryland State Police spying on peace groups took place in 2005 and 2006, under the leadership of then-police superintendent Thomas Hutchins.

Hutchins defended the spying and the use of undercover informants in anti-war planning meetings, the Post reported.

"I don't believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government," Hutchins said.

But Sen. James Brochin (D-Baltimore County) noted that undercover troopers used aliases to infiltrate organizational meetings, rallies and group e-mail lists. He called the spying a "deliberate infiltration to find out every piece of information necessary" on groups such as the Maryland Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance. When Hutchins called their members "fringe people," the audience of activists who filled the seats in the hearing room in Annapolis sighed.