The US Government Is Running A Massive Spy Campaign On Occupy Wall Street

May 24, 2012 - Business Insider

Since last November, when the NYPD closed the Zuccotti Park encampment in downtown Manhattan –the Occupy Movement’s birthplace and symbolic nexus—Occupy’s relevance has seriously dwindled according to the mainstream media. We’re told that this erosion is due to Occupy’s own shortcomings—an inevitable outcome of its disjointed message and decentralized leadership.

While that's the corporate media’s take, the U.S. Government seems to have a different view.

If recent documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) are any indication, the Occupy Movement continues to be monitored and curtailed in a nationwide, federally-orchestrated campaign, spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In response to repeated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by the Fund, made on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild, the DHS released a revealing set of documents in April. But the latest batch, made public on May 3rd, exposes the scale of the government’s “attention” to Occupy as never before.

The documents, many of which are partially blacked-out emails, demonstrate a surprising degree of coordination between the DHS’s National Operations Center (NOC) and local authorities in the monitoring of the Occupy movement. Cities implicated in this wide-scale snooping operation include New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Denver, Boston, Portland, Detroit, El Paso, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles.

Interest in the Occupy protesters was not limited to DHS and local law enforcement authorities. The most recently released correspondence contains Occupy-related missives between the DHS and agencies at all levels of government, including the Mayor of Portland, regional NOC “fusion centers,” the General Services Administration (GSA), the Pentagon’s USNORTHCOM (Northern Command), and the White House. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF, contends that the variety and reach of the organizations involved point to the existence of a larger, more pervasive domestic surveillance network than previously suspected.

These documents show not only intense government monitoring and coordination in response to the Occupy Movement, but reveal a glimpse into the interior of a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people. These heavily redacted documents don’t tell the full story. They are likely only a subset of responsive materials and the PCJF continues to fight for a complete release. They scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement. (justiceonline.org)

As alarmist as Verheyden-Hilliard’s charge may sound, especially given the limited, bowdlerized nature of the source material, the texts made available contain disturbing evidence of insistent federal surveillance. In particular, the role of the “Fusion Centers,” a series of 72 federally-funded information hubs run by the NOC, raises questions about the government’s expansive definition of “Homeland Security.”

Created in the wake of 9/11, the Fusion Centers were founded to expedite the sharing of information among state and local law enforcement and the federal government, to monitor localized terrorist threats, and to sidestep the regulations and legislation preventing the CIA and the military from carrying out domestic surveillance (namely, the CIA ban on domestic spying and the Posse Comitatus Act).

Is nonviolent citizen dissent truly an issue of national security? The DHS, for its part, is aware of the contentiousness of civilian monitoring. That’s why, in a White House-approved statement to CBS News included in the dossier, DHS Press Secretary Matthew Chandler asserts that

Any decisions on how to handle specifics (sic) situations are dealt with by local authorities in that location. . . DHS is not actively coordinating with local law enforcement agencies and/or city governments concerning the evictions of Occupy encampments writ large.

However, as a reading of the documents unmistakably demonstrates, this expedient PR nugget is far from the truth. In example after example, from its seeking of “public health and safety” grounds from the City of Portland for Occupy’s ejection from Terry Schrunk Plaza, to its facilitation of information sharing between the police departments of Chicago and Boston (following a 1500-person Occupy protest in Chicago), the DHS’s active ”coordinating” with local authorities is readily apparent. Other communiqués are even more explicit in revealing a national focus, such as the DHS’s preemptive coordination with the Pentagon about a port closure in Oakland, and its collection of identity and contact information of Occupy protesters arrested at a Bank of America in Dallas.

Those Pesky Amendments

The right to public assembly is a central component of the First Amendment. The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect Americans from warrantless searches—with the definition of “search” expanded in 1967 to include electronic surveillance, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Katz v. United States. Assuming the Occupy protesters refrain from violence—and the vast majority do, in accord with a stated tenet of the Occupy movement—the movement’s existence is constitutionally protected, or should be.

The DHS’s monitoring, documenting, and undermining of protesters may in fact violate the First Amendment. In a recent piece for Dissent Magazine, sociologist James B. Rule explains the fundamental importance of a movement like Occupy in the American political landscape.

This surveillance campaign against Occupy is bad news for American democracy. Occupy represents an authentic, utterly home-grown, grassroots movement. Taken as a whole, it is neither terrorist nor conspiratorial. Indeed, it is hard to think of another movement so cumbersomely public in its deliberations and processes. Occupy is noisy, disorderly, insubordinate, and often inconvenient for all concerned—statements that could equally well apply to democracy in general. But it should never be targeted as a threat to the well-being of the country—quite the contrary.

Accordingly, Rule calls for the White House to rein in the ever-expanding surveillance activity of the DHS—which he contends is motivated by its own funding interests, and which prioritizes security at the expense of civil liberties.

The resource-rich Department of Homeland Security and its allies no doubt see in the rise of the movement another opportunity to justify their own claims for public legitimacy. We can be sure that many in these agencies view any noisy dissent as tantamount to a threat to national security.

[snip]

Nobody who cares about democracy wants to live in a world where simply engaging in vociferous protest qualifies any citizen to have his or her identity and life details archived by state security agencies. Specific, overt threats of civil disobedience or other law-breaking should be dealt with on a piecemeal basis—not by attempting to monitor everyone who might be moved to such actions, all the time. Meanwhile, the White House should issue clear directives that identification and tracking of lawful protesters will play no further role in any government response to this populist moment.

Optimistic as it may be, Rule’s appeal to the White House is a problematic one, given the ubiquitous influence of the DHS revealed by these documents. If the White House-approved press release is any indication, the Oval Office, while not directly authorizing the DHS’s initiatives, is certainly turning a blind eye to the Department’s focus on the Occupy movement as a potential terrorist threat. Federal surveillance of citizens in the Bush years, most visible in NSA warrantless wiretapping controversy, has apparently not ceased with Obama’s inauguration.

Which raises the question: Does Obama, as he claims, “stand with the 99 percent,” or with those who cannot stand them?

(No, of course not. The Obama White House coordinated the crackdown on Occupy in major cities across the country, including my home town. Obama works for the top 1%. They are his base and his controllers.--jef)

Fake Facebook Identity Used By Military Contractors Plotting To Hack Progressive Organizations

Friday, August 19, 2011 by Think Progress

by Lee Fang 

 

Earlier this year, ThinkProgress obtained 75,000 private emails from the defense contractor HBGary Federal via the hacktivist group called Anonymous. The emails led to two shocking revelations. First, that an assortment of private military firms collectively called “Team Themis” had been tapped by Bank of America to conduct a cyber war against reporters sympathetically covering the Wikileaks revelations. And second, that late in 2010, the same set of firms began work separately for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican-aligned corporate lobbying group, to develop a similar campaign of sabotage against progressive organizations, including the SEIU and ThinkProgress.

In presentations obtained by ThinkProgress from the e-mail dump detailing the tactics potentially used against progressives, HBGary Federal floated the idea of using “fake insider personas” to infiltrate left-leaning groups critical of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s policies.

As HBGary Federal executive Aaron Barr described in several emails, his firm could work with partner companies Palantir and Berico Technologies to manipulate fake online identities, using networks like Facebook, to gain access to private information from his targets. Other presentations are more specific and describe efforts to use social media to hack computers and find vulnerabilities among even the families of people who work at organizations critical of the Chamber.

In one email from the dump, Barr discusses a fake persona he created called “Holly Weber.” She would be born in Portland in 1984, attend Reynolds High School, and work for Lockheed Martin after a stint in the Air Force. Earlier this week, Twitter users actually identified the phony account. Before it was taken down, ThinkProgress snagged screen shots of the fake persona’s Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. (Barr also described his strategy for pretending to be teenagers online). View a screenshot of the fake account below:

Barr, who sold his illicit talents to the highest bidder, appears to be drawing on Maxim for inspiration. A Maxim covergirl named Holly Weber was also born in 1984. Unlike Barr’s creation, the Maxim one is real.

Hunton and Williams, the law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had been immersed in talks with HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico to deliver on a $2 million deal to move forward with the hacking plot against the Chamber’s critics. However, after Anonymous leaked HBGary’s emails and a few reporters picked up on the story, the Chamber distanced itself from the deal. The emails show that HBGary Federal had also worked to sell “persona management” solutions to the U.S. government for cyber intelligence work.

Censorship: Made in the USA

Wednesday, March 30, 2011 by SavetheInternet.com
by Tim Karr

 

March has been a stormy month across the Arab world as the hope for new democracy faces the harsh reality of despots armed with guns, tanks and the tools of censorship.

In Libya, the Gaddafi regime plunged the nation into digital darkness during the first week of March, turning off Internet access to keep Libyans from organizing one another and documenting Gaddafi's crimes for the world to see.

In Bahrain, the kingdom reacted to democracy demonstrators by blacking out websites where locals shared cell phone videos, blocking YouTube pages containing videos of street protests, and taking down a large Facebook group that called for more demonstrations.

It doesn't end there.

According to a new report by the not-for-profit OpenNet Initiative (ONI), Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, UAE and Sudan have joined the ranks of censors, using software to block access to homegrown protest sites.

This crackdown is having a ripple effect across the United States, in ways many might not expect. Much of the censorship technology in use in the Arab world was made by American companies willing to look the other way as regimes use it to smother opposition.

The ONI report fingers several American companies, including Intel-owned McAfee, Inc., San Diego-based Websensce, Inc., and Palo Alto Networks, for selling software that red lists websites and blocks all access.

Last month, I reported on another U.S. company, Narus of Sunnyvale, California, which sold to Egypt and Libya an Internet spying technology that lets state security forces track online and cellphone communications and even target the speaker's whereabouts for arrest.

The Narus report prompted Republican and Democratic members of the House Foreign Relations Committee to demand a State Department investigation, the results of which are pending.

In the Senate, Dick Durbin of Illinois slammed the U.S. tech industry for not owning up to the abusive application of their products. He wrote, "If U.S. companies are unwilling to take reasonable steps to protect human rights, Congress must step in."

It's encouraging to hear members of Congress speak out. But curtailing the sale of this technology won't happen until they match words with action.

Rep. Bill Keating of Massachusetts is the only voice on the Hill to pledge to take that next step, proposing legislation that would prevent U.S. trafficking in censorship technology.

"People are losing their lives based on this technology," he said during a House Foreign Relations Committee hearing. In a later statement he said he would introduce legislation "that would provide a national strategy to prevent the use of American technology from being used by human rights abusers."

I'm hopeful we'll see this legislation soon. (You can contact both congressmen Keating and Durbin to encourage them to act, too.)

Freedom of speech and assembly shouldn't end at America's border, or whenever we log on to the Internet. It's time Washington took action against U.S. technology companies that are helping despots silence their people.

How Energy Firms Spy on Environmental Activists

Leaked documents show how three large British companies have been paying private security firm to monitor activists
by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
Monday, February 14, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Three large energy companies have been carrying out covert intelligence-gathering operations on environmental activists, the Guardian can reveal.

The energy giant E.ON, Britain's second-biggest coal producer Scottish Resources Group and Scottish Power, one of the UK's largest electricity-generators, have been paying for the services of a private security firm that has been secretly monitoring activists.

Leaked documents show how the security firm's owner, Rebecca Todd, tipped off company executives about environmentalists' plans after snooping on their emails. She is also shown instructing an agent to attend campaign meetings and coaching him on how to ingratiate himself with activists. The disclosures come as police chiefs, on the defensive over damaging revelations of undercover police officers in the protest movement, privately claim that there are more corporate spies in protest groups than undercover police officers.

Senior police officers complain that spies hired by commercial firms are – unlike their own agents – barely regulated.

Sir Hugh Orde, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, which until recently ran the secretive national unit of undercover police officers deployed in protest groups, said in a speech last week that "the deployment by completely uncontrolled and unrestrained players in the private sector" constituted a "massive area of concern".

Revelations about Mark Kennedy and three other undercover police officers in protest groups caused a furore last month and led to four official inquiries into their activities.

Now a Guardian investigation has shed new light on the surveillance of green campaigners by private security firms whose intrusive operations include posing as activists on mailing lists and infiltrating full-time agents into campaign groups over many years.

Multinational companies, ranging from power producers to arms sellers, hire these firms to try to prevent activists running campaigns against them or breaking into their sites.

The leaked documents lay bare the methods of one firm, Vericola, run by 33-year-old Todd. Based in Canterbury, Vericola, according to Todd, is a "business risk management company" offering a "bespoke" service to clients "regarding potential threats" to their businesses.

Over the past three years, Todd, using different email addresses, has signed up to the mailing lists of a series of environ-mental groups organising major demonstrations such as the G20 rallies in London, demonstrations against E.ON's Kingsnorth power station and the expansion of Heathrow airport, giving her access to communications and advanced notice of demonstrations.

Last July, she forwarded details about Climate Camp campaigners to two company directors she called "the usual suspects".

One was Gordon Irving, the security director of Scottish Power since 2001 after spending 30 years in Strathclyde police force. The other was Alan Somerville, then a director of Scottish Resources Group which produces a large amount of Britain's coal.

Todd highlighted a call from campaigners to submit more objections to coal-producing developments which needed planning permission.

Activists say she regularly attended meetings of an environmental group, known as Rising Tide, for around a year in 2007/08.

The documents also show her advising a colleague on how to fit in with the other activists at meetings held to organise future protests. One tip was that he should not mention he was flying to Germany as "obviously" the environmentalists "hate short-haul flights".

Todd, who says she is not a corporate spy, told the Guardian that all the information she acquires comes from public sources such as subscribing to emailing lists through the websites of the environmental groups.

Despite emails revealing how she repeatedly tried to find ways for her agents to access protest gatherings, Todd denied her company "infiltrates" meetings of protest groups as they are open to any member of the public.

The environmental activists are angry that, by posing as a supporter, she has gained access to emails and meetings where tactics and strategies are discussed. Eli Wilton, a Climate Camp organiser, said: "It's frightening that in a meeting about how to stop the fossil fuel industry, the person sitting next to you might be a spy paid for by the energy giants themselves."

He said Todd and her colleagues "couldn't have gotten subscribed without attending our meetings. These were internal lists where, for example, we strategised about how to stop new coal-fired power stations being built by E.ON."

E.ON said it had hired Vericola and another security firm, Global Open, on an "ad hoc" basis as its executives wanted to know when environmentalists were going to demonstrate at or invade its power stations and other premises, as they had done in the past.

The E.ON spokesman said it asked Vericola only for publicly available information and if Todd and her colleagues had obtained private information, they had done so "under their own steam".

SRG and Scottish Power did not comment.

Homeland Security works for the oil & gas companies

Published on 09-15-2010 - Source: Tech Eye

The US Department of Homeland Security has been spying on people who don't like gas drilling and handing on the data to the oil companies.

According to recently leaked documents, the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security has been using high-tech tracking of anti-gas drilling groups and their meetings.

It has then sent bulletins to gas companies drilling in the Marcellus Shale.

The local State Homeland Security Director James Powers said the Oil Companies needed to have all the data because there have been "five to 10" incidents of vandalism around the state related to the natural gas industry.

He said that the briefings are sent to local coppers and the owners and operators of "critical infrastructure."

However once the information has been sent to the oil companies they have been sharing the data and publishing it on pro-drilling internet site and disseminated among anti-drilling activists.

Powers admitted that was a cock-up and said he had emailed the woman who posted it.

In that email, which confusingly ended up in the paws of the anti-drilling groups, he was quoted as saying Homeland Security wanted to continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale formation natural gas stakeholders, while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies.

The status that Homeland Security is giving the anti-drilling movement is somewhat strange. The bulletin also includes information on anarchists, "black power radicals," Ramadan, the "Jewish High Holiday season" and anti-war activists.

He confirmed to the local press that "someone" was monitoring the web traffic of the anti-drilling groups.

The protesters point out that the only thing Homeland Security has not given the oil companies is a "An enemies-of-gas-drilling" compiled by the government so that police can keep an eye on them.

They are calling for the government to investigate why public money was being used to spy for private companies.

They are not going to get much support from their local governor. His spokesman has gone on record saying that it was part of Homeland Security's responsibility to "alert local law enforcement, local officials and potential victims" to any possible problems.