The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 78/No. 23      June 16, 2014

 
New documents highlight
extensive gov’t spying
 
BY JOHN STUDER  
A May 22 New York Times article titled “Officials Cast Wide Net in Monitoring Occupy Protests,” highlighted some 4,000 pages of recently released documents of spying on political activity and union struggles. Federal spy agencies, state police departments, city cop “counterterrorism” Red Squads in major cities and private intelligence outfits — working in concert in 78 so-called fusion centers around the country — used the occasion of Occupy Wall Street actions in 2011-2012 to step up spying on street protests, labor resistance and political organizations.

The files were originally released under the Freedom of Information Act to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which recently turned them over to the press. The new documents supplement hundreds of pages of FBI files released in 2012.

The 78 regional fusion centers, set up following the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, share spy data to 780,000 cops in 18,000 state, local and tribal agencies.

The amorphous Occupy protests became a major target of spying, infiltration, disruption and provocation. And the fusion centers allowed for concentration of significant resources on gathering and disseminating information about a wide swath of political activity. The Major Cities Intelligence Commanders Group, which was set up to coordinate intelligence work among cop departments nationwide, organized the Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Center. The center produced systematic, sometimes twice-a-week, national reports on political activity of all kinds that was sent to some 99 cop agencies and fusion centers around the country.

One area of particular interest was a labor battle by members of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21 at the Port of Longview in Washington state. Occupy demonstrations at several California ports in 2012 expressed solidarity with the port workers’ eight-month battle against a union-busting lockout by EGT Development.

The Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency circulated to the fusion center network a report from activistmap.com, a private intelligence service that calls itself the Domestic Terrorism Tracking System. Keywords the system uses to categorize entries include “protestors, activist(s), socialist(s) and communist(s).”

While its spies noted that “some of this information describes First Amendment protected activities,” they urged other agencies to take advantage of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, to help select targets.

They spied on protests by Verizon workers fighting for a contract, a Carpenters’ union picket line and rallies of the Massachusetts Teachers Union. They targeted political activists like Noam Chomsky and David Rothauser, who wrote and acted in a 2004 documentary “The Diary of Sacco and Vanzetti.”

The New York City cops sent “email blasts” to area bosses, banks and landlords on plans for protests they picked up from the fusion center network.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Militant’ wages battle against censorship at federal prison
UK court pulls back from using ‘terrorism’ law to seize home
‘Working class must organize its own political party’
‘Socialism on Trial’ presents revolutionary program in fight for workers power –
in wartime or ‘peace’
 
 
 
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