Techdirt. Stories filed under "occupy"

FBI, Working With Banks, Chose Not To Inform Occupy Leadership Of Assassination Plot On Its Leaders

Timothy Geigner — Wed, 2 Jan 2013 14:36:00 PST

Whatever you thought of the so-called "Occupy" movement of the past year or so, it seems clear that there has been at least a bit of overreaction to them. I mean, treating these protests, which have, by and large, been peaceful, as terrorist groups is just silly. But, as you may have seen over the past few days, that's exactly what the FBI did (as uncovered by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF)), and they did it in a coordinated manner with both Homeland Security and privately held banking corporations. This certainly isn't the first time government organizations have allowed for the appearance of impropriety this way, but just as when DHS held a press conference from Disney's HQ, there's a certain flaunting feeling when the coordination with private companies against the public is so blatant.

All that being said, you'd at least expect the FBI, no matter what level of corporate bowing they wish to engage in, to at least keep American citizens apprised of threats against their life. Unfortunately, it would appear the FBI disagrees when the citizens in question are Occupy leadership, as they allowed a plot to murder Occupy leadership in Texas with suppressed sniper rifles go untold until a rights group dug it up.

Last week, Digital Journal reported that the documents obtained by PCJF detailed how the FBI cooperated with the Department of Homeland Security, US military and private corporations to monitor and investigate Occupy Wall Street protesters as "domestic terrorists" and "criminals." The documents prove that federal agencies are "functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and corporate America," PCJF said.

Thorough analyses of the documents has now revealed a heavily redacted file that clearly mentions a plan to use snipers to assassinate Occupy protesters. The names of the groups or individuals involved in the murderous plot have been redacted, so it is impossible to identify them at this time. What is known is that the FBI never alerted any of the potential victims of the danger to their lives.

We're talking heavily redacted text here, which strips out a bunch of details, but here's the text that is available.

An identified [redacted] of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas, if deemed necessary. An identified [redacted] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. [Redacted] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.

What's plain as day is that some group somewhere was plotting to murder OWS leadership in Texas. It's also clear that the FBI never bothered to inform the targets of the threats against their lives. This stands in apparent contrast to how closely they worked and coordinated with private banks to handle the OWS protests as a whole. And, remember, this is the same FBI who has put tremendous effort over the past few years into breaking up its own terrorist plots. You'd think that when it had a chance to go after actual plots to assassinate leaders of a political movement, they might, you know, actually do something and then trumpet the success in stopping a real plot. Apparently not.

So the lesson here is simple. If you're a private bank, the FBI will help you demonize non-violent protesters as "terrorists," but if you're a protester, you don't get to know that you might have an infrared dot dancing on the back of your head -- or have the FBI take it as serious as one of its own made up terrorist plots.

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Police Chief's Custom Spam Filter Blocks Occupy Protestors, Brutality Complaints And (Oops) Federal Monitors

Tim Cushing — Thu, 8 Nov 2012 09:54:08 PST

We all enjoyed a loud, incredulous laugh when Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security Secretary, went on record as being proudly computer illiterate. "Never use email," she said as part of statement delivered by teletype. Perhaps Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan should have chosen the Luddite Way, thus avoiding his current problems. Instead, he chose to perform the digital equivalent of plugging his ears and shouting nonsensical syllables at the top of his lungs in order to actively ignore news he didn't want to hear (found via the essential Police Misconduct Reporting Project).

People who've e-mailed Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan over the past year about Occupy Oakland probably didn't get much of a response.

That's because he used a spam filter to dismiss messages sent to him with "Occupy Oakland" in the subject line, according to a federal court filing Monday. Same goes for the phrases "stop the excessive police force," "respect the press pass" or "police brutality." Instead of landing in his in-box, those messages went straight into his junk mail folder, which he apparently never looked at.

It's tough work being Chief. A steady stream of complaints about the police force under your "control" is sure to be disheartening. But, if you can't take the heat, reroute it out the nearest opening, am I right? And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for that meddling federal court monitor.

Because of those filters, Jordan missed e-mails from other city officials and a federal court monitor, who oversees the department's compliance with court-ordered reforms stemming from a police abuse scandal.

Robert Warshaw, the monitor, had sent Jordan an e-mail with the subject line "Disciplinary Actions-Occupy Oakland." Jordan told the court on Oct. 18 that he never saw those e-mails, infuriating Thelton Henderson, the federal judge in San Francisco who appointed Warshaw.

Oops. Ignoring the persistent chatter of unhappy citizens is one thing. Ignoring a federal judge is quite another. While you can safely ignore some of the people all of the time, you can't really ignore all of the people all of the time. You can attempt it, but then you end up in "unprecedented" territory, which is never a good place to be if you value your career.

Henderson will hear arguments in December about whether to place the Police Department into the hands of a federal receiver, which Oakland officials believe is unprecedented.

When you've mismanaged your post so badly that the police department ends up in receivership via a court order, you've probably done more than filter out anything resembling bad news. A year of unread email certainly didn't improve the ongoing compliance issue. The handling of "Occupy Oakland" didn't instill any confidence in the public that their law enforcement officials were there to serve and protect. Henderson's willful rerouting of email pertaining to allegations of excessive force and brutality shows a very ugly contempt for the citizens under his protection. Of course, now that the truth has come out, he has a few excuses.

He had been inundated with anonymous messages, he said in a declaration to the court.

Well, of course. Anonymity is a key ingredient in any protest. Being inundated with messages you don't like doesn't grant you the permission to revise the incoming narrative by dumping anything negative into the trash. The excuse continues:

But he forgot the e-mail filter was still in effect.

It's an easy thing to forget if you find painting a self-portrait on rose-tinted glass preferable to actually dealing with problems in the community and, indeed, within the ranks of your own force. The brain has many wonderful tricks its willing to play on you to provide you with the short term memory and justification needed to "forget" your determined pruning of incoming messages.

"It was never my intention to ignore the monitor," Jordan said in his declaration.

No. I'm sure it wasn't. You had no desire to piss off a federal judge. But it was your intention to ignore the general public, a fact that goes unacknowledged by this pitiful statement attempting to pass itself off as some sort of an apology. Turning your incoming mail into a "yes-man" approximation is just plain sad.

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Minneapolis Police Filming Their Own Work To Show Critics

Mike Masnick — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 13:04:00 PDT

We've had tons of stories about police arresting people for filming them. And we've seen plenty of other stories about mobile phone cameras being used to document and share evidence of police overreacting (especially at various protest scenes). However, the folks at On The Media had a great story recently about how the police in Minnesota are filming themselves when they deal with protests and then releasing the raw video footage in response to footage from others.

In the case above, it involved Occupy protestors using video footage of police arresting journalists. However, the police's own footage put the situation in a bit more context, including showing the police clearly reading out warnings to the crowd that if they don't help police remove obstructions in the plaza, that they will need to take enforcement action. Does this absolve the actions of the police? Perhaps not, though it may depend on where you sit. However, it is a really interesting strategy, and one that I think actually reflects a very positive development. Rather than hiding from cameras, the police can (and should) use cameras to their own advantage as well.

Amusingly, however, in the story, the police chief notes that the film in question was done by crime scene videographers, who are a little too focused on closeup shots, not knowing quite how to take wide shots that might show the scene in a bit more detail to provide additional context.

Of course, the police chief, Janee Harteau, isn't fully enlightened. While she does say that officers should always assume they're being filmed (and mentions permanent cameras in the city, as well as squad car cameras), she still complains that people with mobile phone cameras sometimes "interfere with an officer's ability to do their job." She doesn't really elaborate, beyond saying that police have a job to do in protecting the public. She does say that "the officer's word doesn't mean as much as it used to" if there isn't a video. I'm not sure why that's a bad thing. If there isn't more evidence, isn't it only proper to give the testimony less weight? Either way, I do think the overall idea of police filming themselves (and releasing that video) is a definite step in the right direction, and one that I hope other police departments start using.

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A 'Trustworthy' Social Network For The Occupy Movement: Even If They Build It, Can They Ever Trust It?

Glyn Moody — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:28:58 PST

The role of technology in the wave of protests that swept the world last year is a matter of debate. While some claim that social networks and mobile phones allowed protesters to organize themselves with an unprecedented speed and efficiency, others have seen their role as marginal – or even counterproductive, since these same technologies also allow governments to monitor events with greater ease than in pre-Internet days.

One group aligned with the Occupy movement is situated somewhere in the middle. That is, it recognizes the important role that technology can play, but sees increasing problems with today's social media. The solution, they believe, is to create a new social network specifically aimed at helping protest movements scale up their activities by linking like-minded people around the world:

What we need, at this point, is a platform that allows us to radically democratize our global organizational efforts. In addition to the local squares, we now need a global square where people of all nations can come together as equals to participate in the coordination of collective actions and the formulation of common goals and aspirations. For this reason, we call upon the revolutionary wizkids of the world to unite and assist in the development of a new online platform – The Global Square – that combines the communicative functions of the existing social networks with the political functions of the assemblies to provide crucial new tools for the development of our global movement.

The same post has an interesting list of requirements for such a system, which will be open source. That's certainly wise, since it will allow volunteers to contribute, but it does raise the question: why not use one of the existing open source social networks like identi.ca, elgg, or – perhaps the best-known example – Diaspora?

One of the key differences of the proposed social network from those is the central importance of trust, as this feature on The Global Square in Wired explains:

One challenge that all of the new efforts face is a very difficult one for non-centralized services: ensuring that members are trustworthy. That’s critical for activists who risk injury and arrest in all countries and even death in some. To build trust, local and international networks will use a friend-of-a-friend model in Knutson and Boyer’s projects. People can’t become full members on their own as they can with social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Although that sounds fine in theory, recent events in the UK suggest that it might not help much in practice. A year ago, the Guardian broke a story about a police officer there who, for seven years: lived deep undercover at the heart of the environmental protest movement, travelling to 22 countries gleaning information and playing a frontline role in some of the most high-profile confrontations
Nor was this an isolated case, as another Guardian story reported: Five of the seven undercover police officers in the protest movement who have been exposed so far have admitted having or have been alleged to have had sexual relationships with activists they were keeping under surveillance, despite claims by senior police officers that this was banned.
It seems unlikely that employing the "friend-of-a-friend" approach to trust would have kept many of them out of the network.

In fact it's hard to see how any social network technology can get around the problem that undercover agents will always find a way to subvert trust systems by exploiting their weakest points: other people. That means that the real challenge facing The Global Square is not technical – how to keep out spies - but social: how to cope with the fact that you can't.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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