Dear FBI: Show Your Work
While we’ve been celebrating with our families, the Partnership for Civil Justice and the NYT have been reading through a set of documents showing the nationwide surveillance of Occupy Wall Street.
The documents and the FBI’s defense of them exposes several long term claims by the FBI to be false. First, that their domestic mapping program, the Domain Management Program, is not inappropriate surveillance directed at domestic politics.
An October 2011 memo from the bureau’s Jacksonville, Fla., field office was titled Domain Program Management Domestic Terrorist.
The memo said agents discussed “past and upcoming meetings” of the movement, and its spread. It said agents should contact Occupy Wall Street activists to ascertain whether people who attended their events had “violent tendencies.”
Domain Management also gets directed at Muslims and Latinos in the name of preparing to investigate terrorism and drugs. If it weren’t already clear this is about domestic spying, the inclusion of Occupy should now make that clear.
Then there’s FBI’s claim that it can’t investigate solely on the basis of speech or religion.
“The F.B.I. recognizes the rights of individuals and groups to engage in constitutionally protected activity,” said the spokesman, Paul Bresson. “While the F.B.I. is obligated to thoroughly investigate any serious allegations involving threats of violence, we do not open investigations based solely on First Amendment activity. In fact, the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.’s own internal guidelines on domestic operations strictly forbid that.”
Bresson overstates this, of course. The Domestic Investigation and Operations Guide prohibits opening an investigation solely on the basis of First Amendment activity. But it permits using such activity as part of the predicate for an investigation.
Which is why I find the FBI’s redactions so interesting.
Even the first pages of the actual documents show how FBI repeatedly acknowledged that Occupy “does not openly condone the use of violence.” But then it notes that Occupy trained for civil disobedience and its response, and from that the FBI concludes “that violence and/or illegal activity is expected by event organizers.” The FBI ascribes the violence that organizers correctly expected from cops to the organizers themselves, and used the intent to engage in civil disobedience as the means to use First Amendment activity as a predicate for investigation.
More interesting, on page 2, the FBI claims that Occupy’s website, “suggested that protestors bring ‘billy clubs and taser guns.'”
Well, that doesn’t sound like the Occupy I know (not to mention most Occupy adherents would have a tough time getting a taser gun). Luckily, the FBI included handy-dandy endnotes to show from what public sources (here, Occupy’s own website) they drew these observations.
But FBI redacted all these endnotes as a b(7)(E) exemption, which allows FBI to hide techniques used in law enforcement investigations.
These are–at least according to the claims in the document–public websites (and would have to be to be permissible under preliminary investigation rules). And yet, the FBI refuses to tell us on which public websites these claimed suggestions were made.
Probably, because that would show that FBI is using the timeworn “investigation techniques” of “drawing illogical conclusions from public claims” and “just making shit up” to invent the reason to use First Amendment activities as the predicate for an investigation.
Don’t let the technological razzle dazzle of web surfing for cause blind you.
It looks like the old intelligence community saw that “Not much of anybody over there could find a place to piss without a paid informant” is still true. From the heads of FBI’s securities fraud and white collar crime units today: “We had people who were telling us things, but we didn’t have anybody who was in a conspiracy that was going to tell on what the others did,” he said. http://www.npr.org/2012/12/26/168021457/wall-street-wiretaps-investigators-use-insiders-own-words-to-convict-them?ft=1&f=1001
Long long ago in the anti-war movement we often found that the most radical advocates of violence were FBI affiliated. That advocacy was then used to justify lots more infiltration and suppression of exercising the right to assemble and the obligation to petition government to help it see the error of its ways.
What’s better than “just making shit up”? It is paying someone else to make it up, then using that to open further investigations. Doesn’t look like things have changed much. But ya gotta admire them boys for hanging 10 on a browser, dontcha?
This is just bizarre, but probably typical.
I find the statements about how they do not open investigations for first amendment activities to be a blatant lie. The Quaker group in Florida comes to mind.
I spent a lot of time on Occupy activities and the only violence or domestic terrorism that I saw came from the NYPD.
This whole thing about how the feds were coordinating activities against Occupy disgusts me. And I remember when people talked about how it was happening and were attacked viciously by the “Obama can do no wrong” fierce defenders for even suggesting that Obama’s Homeland Security and federal law enforcement were involved with it. I particularly remember an article by Naomi Wolf about Homeland security involvement getting many responses by several called progressive bloggers, tearing her apart. Meanwhile, Homeland Security had closed off the block of the first precinct where she and another person were supposed to be taken after being arrested for being on a sidewalk. But when she wrote about it, several articles popped up on some progressive blogs (not Marcy, of course) attacking Wolf, calling her a conspiracy theorist, etc. and the same articles were then linked on other progressive blogs and used as a basis for more attacks. So who are these people anyway? Who are these bloggers? Now, a year later, are they going to go back and apologize to all of the writers and commenters who they attacked and smeared as conspiracy theorists?
http://current.com/shows/countdown/videos/occupy-wall-street-naomi-wolf-calls-attention-to-the-disturbing-involvement-of-homeland-security-in-her-arrest
Brings to mind Seth Rosenfeld’s FDL Book Salon chat about his book “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power.”
From the set-up post by Todd Gitlin:
As does Marcy.
More than a few commenters noted a similar approach by the FBI to Occupy, and the redactions mentioned here seem to be clear evidence that “transparency” is a nice word with little meaning at the FBI.
This is a redux of the threat the FBI made against the Quakers and Ragging Grannies.
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/documents-shed-new-light-pentagon-surveillance-peace-activists
http://progressive.org/mag_mc121605
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0116-09.htm
http://afsc.org/category/topic/fbi-raids
Glenn Greenwald with powerful comment on this horrifying and sickening display of Police State abuse and surveillance:
Documents just obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal, as the New York Times put it, that “the [FBI] used counterterrorism agents to investigate the Occupy Wall Street movement, including its communications and planning” and in general show “how deeply involved federal law-enforcement authorities were in monitoring the activities of the movement.” The heavily redacted documents reveal numerous instances of the FBI collaborating with local police forces and private corporations to monitor and anticipate the acts of the protest movement.
As obviously disturbing as it is, none of this should be surprising. Virtually every seized power justified over the last decade in the name of “terrorism” has been applied to a wide range of domestic dissent. The most significant civil liberties trend of the last decade, in my view, is the importation of War on Terror tactics onto US soil, applied to US citizens – from the sprawling Surveillance State and powers of indefinite detention to the para-militarization of domestic police forces and the rapidly emerging fleet of drones now being deployed in countless ways. The true purpose of this endless expansion of state power in the name of “terrorism” is control over anticipated domestic protest and unrest.
It should be anything but surprising that the FBI – drowning in counter-terrorism money, power and other resources – will apply the term “terrorism” to any group it dislikes and wants to control and suppress (thus ushering in all of the powers institutionalized against “terrorists”). Those who supported (or acquiesced to) this expansion of unaccountable government power because they assumed it would only be used against Those Muslims not only embraced a morally warped premise (I care about injustices only if they directly affect me), but also a factually false one, since abuses of power always – always – expand beyond their original application.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/26/drones-yemen-fbi-occupy-terrorism
The FBI seems to make up a lot of the ‘evidence’ they claim to have.
Remind me again why they’re considered to be law enforcement?
I like the FBI’s typo at the end, “uncalssified”, especially after practicing that word in every sentence before it.
It would have been harder to spot if the rest of the text had been released from censorship.
@P J Evans: They are, for the most part, the protectors of the corporate class.
Well, truth to tell, I am seriously more worried by the ‘private corporations’ part than the “federal law-enforcement authorities… (and) local police forces” bit. Although both are totally terrifyling, actually. Any idea who these ‘private corporations’ might be?
@lefty665: I remember this comment on Naked Capitalism during the Republican Convention:
Also youtube on Kent State rotc bldg fire set by police costumed as hippies: