Deep Politics Forum

Imagine living in a country where big corporations work hand in glove with law enforcement agencies to spy on peaceful protests. No this is not China, North Korea or Iran. This is the United States of America.


According to a Congressional Research Service report from 2003 the FBI has a dual mission of protecting US national security and combating criminal activities. Its criminal investigative priorities also include civil rights violations. Yet FBI documents recently obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) reveal how the bureau has acted in a way that totally undermines this claim to be protecting US citizens from civil rights violations.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has called this collusion ''police-statism'' and stated:

"These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security [DHS]are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

The heavily redacted documents obtained by the (PCJF) through a freedom of information request reveal how the FBI has regarded the Occupy Wall Street Movement as a criminal and terrorist threat from its inception. The documents, which include reports from various agents during 2011, clearly show that the Occupy Wall Street movement was engaged in peaceful protests and distanced itself from any kind of political violence.

This active collaboration between branches of state and the security arms of the banks/big corporations is very disturbing and raises questions about the type of society America has become. The mainstream media both on the domestic and international stage portray America as one of the world's leading democracies where the rights of citizens are protected and cherished by the state that is supposed to represent their interests.

The documents reveal how this collusion takes place under the banner of the Domestic Security Alliance (DSAC). Its reports are prepared by FBI and DHS agents for corporate security officers of the banks and big corporations. The purpose of these reports being to,''document the Occupy Wall Street movement'' and to ''raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity''. Most of the reports have the following warning attached to them,''Recipients are reminded DSAC LIRS [reports] contain sensitive information meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released to the media, the general public...''.

Let's just look at one example from the documents which reveal the sinister and anti-democratic nature of this collusion between the FBI, DHS and corporate America: the 2 November 2011 protest at Oakland port. The DSAC coordinated a whole host of state agencies to monitor this peaceful protest including the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Agents were used to infiltrate the planning meetings of Occupy Oakland to identify how ''significant a threat'' the protest would be.

On 2 November 2011 Occupy Oakland organised a general strike that temporarily shut down Oakland port. 7-10,000 protesters used human body chains to prevent longshoremen and trucks from entering and exiting the port. This forced the port authorities to call off the evening shift.

The various reports covering this protest reveal the fear of the establishment that the protests might receive active support from the unions and the wider community. Anything that might hinder the potential profits of corporate America is seen as a serious threat. An analysis of the Oakland port protest by one agent sums up this fear of corporate America rather well.

''The protesters actions shut down the port of Oakland for 14 hours. If this movement were to spread to the port of Long Beach, the second busiest port in the United States, the disruption of port operations resulting in cargo reaching their destination late could have much more serious effects on the supply chain in the United States''.

The reports contained in the heavily redacted documents were produced during the violent state crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street movement during the autumn of 2011. They reveal the fear of the American state and its masters in big business at ordinary citizens exercising their democratic rights to protest against the enormous social and economic inequality in America. Will there be any government action to stop this abuse of citizen's rights? I fear not. It's just one more example of how America is sleepwalking into becoming a police state.

Time to "Flip The Debt": New "Debt Clock" Shows How Much the 1% Owes the US
Gan Golan
flipthedebt.org
Activists Holding the "National Debt Clock"

On January 30, members of Occupy Wall Street joined together with seniors, union members and community groups to challenge the influential Wall Street front group known as "Fix The Debt" that has been pushing for increased austerity measures in the US in the name of reducing the national deficit.

The protesters marched to the famous "National Debt Clock" near the IRS building on 44th and 6th Ave and unveiled their own colorful debt clock that said, "Hey 1%! Want to Fix The Debt? Pay Your Damn Taxes!". This alternative debt clock displayed the total amount that the 1% and corporations have stolen from the US budget by exploiting tax loopholes, tax havens and tax cuts.

The number? A staggering $2.3 trillion.

The protest action, called Flip The Debt, aims to "flip the debate" over the national debt on and shift the focus onto who is actually responsible for the massive national deficit: global corporations and super wealthy that have rigged the system to avoid paying their fair share.

In coordination with the protest, the group launched an animated version of the Debt Clock on-line which shows the massive debt of the 1% growing in real time. Within two days, their Facebook page already had received over 3,000 Facebook 'likes' and photos of the protest had received hundreds of shares.

These actions were part of a nationwide day of action happening in 50 cities.

A simultaneous action in Boston included a street performance featuring a finely dressed wall street executive with a pig's head, dancing to a parody of Kanye West's "Gold Digger".

The "Fix the Debt" Campaign is the latest incarnation of a multi-decade effort by wealthy Wall Street investors to cut back core social support programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Ironically, many of its membersGeneral Electric, Bank of America, Verizon, Boeingare themselves guilty of not paying taxes.

"It's incredible that these super wealthy CEOs are demanding we balance the budget on the backs of working people, when they won't even pay a fair share of taxes themselves," said Ben Master of United NY, one of the organizations calling for the actions. "But I guess the sheer gall of Wall Street shouldn't surprise anyone anymore."

The $2.3 trillion figure that the group is using comes from two numbers. First, the US has had to borrow over $1 trillion to pay for the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts for people with incomes incomes over $250,000. Second, since 2001 global corporations (many of them members of Fix The Debt) have dodged about $100 billion in taxes a year, using loopholes and offshore tax havens. The $2.3 trillion they have evaded is actually larger in size than the total number of cuts, $1.6 trillion, that Congress is debating and Fix the Debt is arguing for. Meanwhile, the $100 billion a year that corporations have evaded in taxes continues to grow daily.

"There's two problems. First, these corporations are trying to avoid taxes. Second, the taxes we do have are being wasted on war." Said Joe Therrien, a member of Occupy Wall Street. "If we going to make cuts anywhere, it should be to wasteful pentagon spending, not basic services."

A protester carrying the debt clock, Morgan Jenness, summed it up, "We need to stop using our resources to destroy other countries, and instead use them to build our own."

Jury Finds Occupy Wall Street Protester Innocent After Video Contradicts Police Testimony [Updated: VIDEO]
By Nick Pinto Fri., Mar. 1 2013 at 2:53 AM

Michael Premo was found not guilty of assaulting an officer after video evidence contradicted police testimony.
In the first jury trial stemming from an Occupy Wall Street protest, Michael Premo was found innocent of all charges yesterday after his lawyers presented video evidence directly contradicting the version of events offered by police and prosecutors.

Premo, an activist and community organizer who has in recent months been a central figure in the efforts of Occupy Sandy, was one of many hundred people who took part in a demonstration in Lower Manhattan on December 17 of 2011, when some protesters broke into a vacant lot in Duarte Square in an attempt to start a new occupation.

After police broke up the action in Duarte Square, hundreds of protesters marched north,
playing a game of cat and mouse with police on foot and on scooters, who tried to slow and divide the column of marchers. At 29th Street near Seventh Avenue, police finally managed to trap a large number of marchers, kettling them from both sides of the block with bright orange plastic netting. After holding the crowd in the nets for some time, a few people managed to escape, and police rushed in to the crowd with their hands up. In the commotion, Premo fell to the ground and attempted to crawl out of the scrum. (Covering the march, I was also kettled on this block for a time, though I only witnessed Premo's arrest from a distance.)

Police were kettling protesters on 29th Street using orange nets when they arrested Michael Premo.
In the police version of events, Premo charged the police like a linebacker, taking out a lieutenant and resisting arrest so forcefully that he fractured an officer's bone. That's the story prosecutors told in Premo's trial, and it's the general story his arresting officer testified to under oath as well.

But Premo, facing felony charges of assaulting an officer, maintained his innocence. His lawyers, Meghan Maurus and Rebecca Heinegg, set out to find video evidence to contradict it. Prosecutors told them that police TARU units, who filmed virtually every moment of Occupy street protests, didn't have any footage of the entire incident. But Maurus knew from video evidence she had received while representing another defendant arrested that day that there was at least one TARU officer with relevant footage. Reviewing video shot by a citizen-journalist livestreamer during Premo's arrest, she learned that a Democracy Now cameraman was right in the middle of the fray, and when she tracked him down, he showed her a video that so perfectly suited her needs it brought a tear to her eye.

For one thing, the video prominently shows a TARU cop named Bosco, holding up his camera, which is on, and pointing at the action around the kettle. When Premo's lawyers subpoenaed Bosco, they were told he was on a secret mission at "an undisclosed location," and couldn't respond to the subpoena. Judge Robert Mandelbaum didn't accept that, and Bosco ultimately had to testify [Correction: Bosco didn't take the stand; he had to appear at the District Attorney's office for a meeting with Maurus and prosecutors. Judge Mandelbaum accepted that Bosco would likely say on the stand what he said in the meeting, and didn't require him to testify.] Bosco claimed, straining credibility, that though the camera is clearly on and he can be seen in the video pointing it as though to frame a shot, he didn't actually shoot any video that evening.

Even more importantly, the Democracy Now video also flipped the police version of events on its head. Far from showing Premo tackling a police officer, it shows cops tackling him as he attempted to get back on his feet.

After watching the video, the jury deliberated for several hours before returning a verdict of not guilty on all counts.

This isn't the first time someone arrested during an Occupy Wall Street march has gone free after video evidence undercut prosecutors storyline and sworn police testimony. Photography student Alexander Arbuckle was acquitted in May after a livestreamer's footage showed police weren't telling the truth about his arrest.

Speaking after yesterday's verdict, Maurus said the case highlighted the significance of having the press, livestreamers and professional video journalists, present during demonstrations.

"That was really important," Maurus said. "Without that evidence, this would have been a very different case. There are many, many cases that don't have so much video evidence to challenge the police version of events, but in this case, we did."

For Premo, being found innocent affirms something even more fundamental:

"The biggest thing for me coming out of this," he told the Voice, "is not being discouraged by the attempts of New York City to quell dissent and prevent us from expressing our constitutional rights."

On Twitter and Facebook, Premo celebrated his not-guilty verdict by quoting the lawyer Elizabeth Fink: "There is no justice in the American justice system, but you can sometimes find it in a jury."

By Pam Martens: February 28, 2013

In several respects, Occupy Wall Street reminds me of the feminist movement. Corporate funded media has declared the women's rights movement dead ad nauseam for four decades and yet it thrives and reinvents itself. Similarly, corporate funded media has eulogized Occupy Wall Street from almost the moment of its nascent birth in the Fall of 2011.

If there is a common thread connecting these movements and the dire media prognostications of their demise, it is likely that when either one advances, entrenched power and its iron grip on the wealth of a nation loses.

Now, similar to the early court battles for women's rights, Occupy Wall Street has tossed aside its encampments and bullhorns and donned its legal garb and pro hac vices. Occupy Wall Street's brain trust, Occupy the SEC, just filed a Federal lawsuit that encapsulates the crony capitalist state that passes today for democracy.

The organization is suing every Federal regulator that resides in the pocket of Wall Street which means they are suing every Federal regulator of Wall Street. And, spunky group that they are, they're naming individuals too. Here's the rundown: Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Martin Gruenberg, Chairman of the FDIC, Elisse Walter, Chair of the SEC, Gary Gensler, Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Thomas Curry, Comptroller of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Mary Miller, Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the Treasury, Neal Wolin, Acting Secretary of the Treasury.

Occupy the SEC is serving a valiant public service in bringing this lawsuit. It explains to the court that one of the most critical components of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that was supposed to reform Wall Street has yet to be enacted by the regulators and this is in violation of law. The key component is the Volcker Rule, named after former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, that would prohibit most forms of trading for the house on Wall Street, known officially as proprietary trading.

The lawsuit informs the court that Dodd-Frank required that regulators adopt rules relating to this section "within nine months after the completion of a study by FSOC [Financial Stabilization Oversight Council] relating to the Volcker Rule. The FSOC completed that study in January 2011." The complaint proceeds to explain that the legislative language "is unequivocal in setting this mandatory deadline, which the Defendants and the agencies under their control have missed."

To bring a lawsuit of this nature, plaintiffs who have a legitimate stake in the outcome must be named on the suit. Occupy the SEC has wisely selected two individuals, Eric Taylor and Kristine Ekman, who live in Brooklyn and hold insured deposit accounts with two major Wall Street firms. That's highly relevant because the Brooklyn residences allow this case to be filed in the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York rather than the Southern District that covers the Wall Street area and lower Manhattan. Wall Street has been getting extremely sweet deals in that District Court for the past two decades, raising concerns as to whether the 99 percent can ever obtain justice there.

The complaint explains to the Court that "this delay puts Plaintiffs' deposited money at risk, because banks can continue to speculate with it as long as the Volcker Rule has not been implemented." The recent example of the implosion of insured deposits at JPMorgan Chase is cited:

"For instance, in April of 2012 it was reported that the Chief Investment Office (CIO) at the London office of JPMorgan Chase bank had utilized deposited funds, like those of Plaintiffs, to invest in extremely risky, speculative credit default swap indices (derivatives of derivatives). Further, it has recently been reported that other traders at JPMorgan actually bet against the CIO office, virtually guaranteeing that some division within the bank would suffer losses. The latest estimates reveal that the bank suffered approximately $6 billion in trading losses from the CIO debacle."

The lawsuit was filed by attorney, Akshat Tewary, who has been active in Occupy the SEC since its inception. (Read the full lawsuit here.)

Proprietary trading is, at its core, benign sounding jargon for an essential cog in Wall Street's institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism. Wall Street banks take in insured deposits on which they pay a tiny amount of interest, then use those depositor funds to speculate for the house after leveraging up the bets to obscene ratios. Frequently, they use their insider information to make sure the house wins.

If the bets blow up the institution, the taxpayer steps in with bailouts because the institution is deemed too big to fail. If the bets win, the executive suite reward themselves with obscene pay packages and retirement perks. It's heads they win, tails you lose and it continues unimpeded despite the President's lofty promises for change. The fact that his administration is not bringing this lawsuit to prevent the delay of the enactment of the Volcker Rule but the job is left to a group of concerned citizens, crystallizes the fact that Wall Street is still running things in Washington. If you need further proof, read our next story on what transpired on the Senate floor yesterday with the confirmation vote for Obama's pick for Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew.

Why the Police in Michael Premo's Occupy Wall Street Trial Are Unlikely To Face Perjury Charges
By Nick Pinto Fri., Mar. 8 2013 at 6:55 PM

This officer may be pointing a video-camera at the scene of Michael Premo's arrest, but police say they didn't shoot anything that night.
Many of the readers who commented on last week's story about Michael Premo, the Occupy Wall Street protester who beat his criminal charges last week thanks to video evidence, wanted to know: Would the police officer whose testimony was contradicted by the video face any consequences? Would he be charged with perjury?

The short answer is: Don't hold your breath.

But that's not to say that a closer look at Premo's trial doesn't reinforce the impression that the police testimony against him looks a lot like perjury.

In the initial complaint, Premo's arresting officer, Ron Vincent, described a version of events recounted to him by a second officer -- the one who actually handled Premo's physical arrest -- who he referred to as the "informant:"

"When informant was attempting to place the defendant under arrest defendant twisted defendant's body, refused to place defendant's hands behind defendant's back, and pushed informant with defendant's hands, causing deponent [sic] to fall.... Defendant's above described conduct caused informant to suffer a fractured wrist and substantial pain."

(Bizarrely, the initial complaint also alleged that Premo had interfered with police "by means including releasing and failing to control an animal under circumstances evincing the actor's intent that the animal obstruct the lawful activity of such peace officer," a claim so completely off-kilter that we're guessing it resulted from an errant keystroke in the cut-and-paste language generator used to phrase police accounts in terms most conducive to conviction.)

The problem with that initial complaint, Premo's lawyers argued in a motion, was that it failed to state underlying conduct -- that is, it charged Premo with resisting arrest and second-degree assault while resisting arrest, but didn't have any explanation for while he was being arrested in the first place. It seemed Premo had been arrested for resisting arrest. So prosecutors came back with "superceding information," effectively a second complaint.

This one featured an account from Sergeant Richard Jones, the "informant," who cuffed Premo before handing him off to Vincent. In this version, Jones says that Premo was "obstructing vehicular traffic by walking in the street" at the corner of 7th Avenue and 29th Street -- a problematic claim, given that police had already shut off both ends of the street with orange netting and there was no traffic in the street.

Otherwise Jones sticks to the initial narrative, though he walks back the claims of his broken wrist:

"When deponent was attempting to place defendant under arrest, defendant twisted defendant's body, refused to place defendant's hands behind defendant's back, and pushed deponent with defendant's hands and body, causing deponent to fall twice and causing deponent to suffer a sprained right hand and substantial pain."

Both Officer Vincent and Sgt. Jones signed the boilerplate form at the bottom their statements, which reads False statements made herein are punishable as a class A misdemeanor pursuant to section 210.45 of the penal law."

When Jones was called into court and sworn in to give his version of events in Premo's criminal case, he offered a more detailed picture. Jones first testified in a pre-trial hearing the day before the trial started, then took the stand to say much the same thing on the second day of the trial. You can read the full transcript of Jones's testimony below, but the back and forth between him and the lawyer make for a complicating read. A more concise version of Jones's story can be found in the findings of fact Judge Robert Mandelbaum articulated after listening to Jones's testimony, which read in part:

"The defendant successfully pushed his way through the measure by causing it to give way on the bottom and slipping out underneath it so as to remove himself from the detention area. In coming out, he bumped into a uniformed lieutenant, Lieutenant Welsh, who attempted to grab him, and the defendant and lieutenant went down on to the ground.

Sergeant Jones, having observed all of that, responded in an attempt to assist the lieutenant. The defendant refused to be detained and continued to attempt to try to run westbound down 29th Street. Sergeant Jones fell down on the defendant, as a result of the defendant's actions, and the defendant continued to flail and stiffen his arms, and the defendant got back to his feet. The sergeant told him to stop resisting, but the flailing and stiffing of the arms continued, such that Sergeant Jones again fell with the defendant, and finally three or four police officers were able to subdue the defendant and place him under arrest."

Specifically, Jones testified that Premo went under the mesh but "he didn't go on the ground." Rather, "he pushed his way, like you're on a line for football," before knocking over Lt. Welsh before struggling with three or four police officers and falling over twice more.

But as the jury saw, video of Premo's arrest shot by Demcoracy Now freelancer Jon Gerberg contradicted key points of Jones's sworn testimony. Lieutenant Welsh is nowhere to be seen in the video, nor is any other white-shirted senior officer. Premo is quite clearly crawling on the ground to get out of the scrum, doesn't knock anybody over, and doesn't appear to resist arrest at all.

So will Sgt. Jones face perjury charges for repeatedly swearing to statements that could have landed Premo in jail for a year of his life?

When the Voice asked the Manhattan District Attorney's office, their response was "Decline comment."

Defense attorneys and advocates of police reform certainly aren't overly hopeful.

"Officers are very rarely if ever investigated or prosecuted for the kind of "testilying" that they do, in part because the whole prosecution machine depends on testilying," said Gideon Oliver, the former president of the NYC National Lawyers Guild, who has represented many defendants in street protest arrests.

Oliver recalls working on the defense of Dennis Kyne, who was accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Kine's case was dismissed in the middle of his trial when a new video surfaced plainly contradicting the testimony of a police officer.

But while contemporary news accounts of the Kyne case wondered if the new era of cheap video equipment would turn the tide against false police testimony, Oliver says it hasn't happened yet.

"Police officers are largely insulated from the consequences. "Defendant's don't really have effective recourse," he says. "You could sue for false arrest, for false imprisonment, things like that, but with civil judgments cops don't pay individually -- usually the city indemnifies them. With a civil suit, there's no deterrent effect."

Robert Gangi of the Police Reform Organizing Project says there are a number of reasons why district attorneys are reluctant to bring perjury charges against police officers.

"One reason is the day-to-day pragmatic reality that district attorneys have to work with police in making their cases, so they're very gun-shy with taking steps that might alienate either individual officers or the NYPD as a whole," he said. "There's also the politics of it. Taking steps to impugn a police officer or the NYPD involves some political risk," Gangi says. "Every District Attorney in the city is a politician, an elected public official, and is therefore reluctant to be seen as an antagonist of the police.

Defense attorneys and police reform advocates are quick to stress that while the cases of Michael Premo and Alexander Arbuckle spotlight how video can unravel police misrepresentation, the vast majority of criminal defendants aren't so fortunate. Without video evidence, officers have even fewer reasons not to lie.

As Michelle Alexander wrote in her New York Times Op-Ed Why Police Lie Under Oath last month, police know that judges will always take their word over that of a criminal defendant, and "at worst, the case will be dismissed, but the officer is free to continue business as usual."

And while there's little encouraging officers not to lie, there can be substantial pressures to do it, says John Eterno, who retired as an NYPD captain in 2004 after 20 years on the force. Eterno, who now teaches criminal justice at Molloy College and has authored studies critical of the NYPD's focus on statistics, says testilying isn't a problem of a few bad apples, but a direct result of pressure to make quotas and protect their fellow officers. "It's a centralized issue," he says. "The pressure on individual officers to make quota and to have each others' back is just tremendous."

For a close look at how the pressure on officers to make quota can lead directly to dubious arrests, take a look at the Voice's NYPD Tapes series.

There have been a number of cases in recent years -- among them those of William Eiseman, Michael Carsey, and Adolph Osbeck -- in which district attorneys have charged officers with perjury. Critics aren't impressed, though. "My assessment is they will, from time to time, pick out a case where they charge an officer with perjury," Gangi says. "But in my view, it's almost totally cosmetic."

When Sgt. Bobby Hadid was sentenced for perjury in December after lying about unprofessional relations with a murder suspect's wife, his judge called it "A rare case of perjury." Habib got off with a sentence of probation.

With protest arrests, the profusion of video evidence may be starting to change the equation. The New York Civil Liberties Union is hoping to expand that effect to stop-and-frisk arrests with a new smartphone app. Video evidence can cut both ways. Many Occupy Wall Street protesters have been convicted or taken pleas after it became clear that the NYPD's Technical Assistance Response Unit had collected damning video. But defense lawyers are increasingly concerned that TARU footage is only being made available selectively. In Premo's case, prosecutors and police insisted there was no TARU footage shot at the scene of his arrest, even though Gerberg's video clearly showed a TARU cop staring through the viewfinder of his powered-up camera, apparently framing a shot.

Lawyers representing people arrested last March 17, when police forcefully raided Zuccotti Park, have been startled to learn that police and prosecutors claim there is no TARU footage from the entire incident. (Again, other video (like this one, starting at the 0:11 mark and this one, at 2:53) seem to undercut that claim.

"Video has resulted in some cases where the DAs will throw out a case or juries find them not guilty but it doesn't seem to have affected in any kind of sweeping way the conduct of police officers," says Gangi. "And that's because they're not being penalized. there aren't any severe sanctions. It's the same story again and again."

Homeland Security Tracked Occupy Wall Street 'Peaceful Activist Demonstrations'

Posted: 04/02/2013 8:58 pm EDT

NEW YORK -- A Department of Homeland Security division produced daily briefings on "peaceful activist demonstrations" during the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests, documents released Tuesday revealed.

The 252 pages of documents were obtained in a March 14 letter from DHS by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which in November 2011 launched a campaign to unearth public records that would show whether the federal government was spying on Occupy Wall Street. FBI records obtained by the group in December showed that the bureau investigated Occupy as a potential "domestic terrorism" threat.

"Taken together, the two sets of documents paint a disturbing picture of federal law enforcement agencies using their vast power in a systematic effort to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations," Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, said in a statement. "The federal agencies' actions were not because Occupy represented a 'terrorist threat' or a 'criminal threat,' but rather because it posed a significant grassroots political challenge to the status quo."

Many of the new documents relate to the Federal Protective Service, a Homeland Security division charged with providing security for federal buildings, including courthouses. It was the protective service "Threat Management Division," the documents show, that asked its regional intelligence analysts on Oct. 21, 2011, to report on "peaceful activist demonstrations," along with "domestic terrorist acts."

The Federal Protective Service report released Tuesday highlights an Occupy Philly demonstration against a speech by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) that was canceled because of the protest plans. The Homeland Security document noted that the planned demonstration "should not affect" any federal government buildings, but reported on it anyway.

In New York City, one document showed, a high-level Federal Protective Service official observed that "several law enforcement organizations have undertaken steps to discontinue Occupy encampments" on Nov. 14, just hours before the camp in Zuccotti Park was cleared by the New York Police Department. Regional directors should, the official wrote, "assess the potential impact" of steps made by their "local law enforcement partners."

Federal Protective Service has long been a source of concern for civil liberties advocates. Homeland Security's own Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties has previously concluded, in response to a March 2006 protective service bulletin, that the division "failed to differentiate adequately between civil activist and violent extremist organizations." But it said the protective service had provided assurances that it would make that distinction in the future.

It wasn't just Philadelphia and New York City under Homeland Security watch, the documents show. The department also was watching Occupy in places that included Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, and Tampa, Fla.

In one instance, a Homeland Security agent monitoring Occupy wrote in an email, "This meeting should be finishing up soon and I'll have access to a non-DHS computer that will allow me to do more looking." That note may suggest the agent was engaged in "off the books" intelligence gathering, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund said.

The documents are heavily redacted and in many cases leave unclear just what agents were investigating, or why. A Homeland Security spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The online investigative website Truthout reported on the Homeland Security documents last month.

Carl Messineo, legal director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, said in a statement that his group believes the latest documents represent "a fraction of what the government possesses."
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New Documents Reveal: DHS spying on Peaceful Demonstrations and Activists
Monitoring Peaceful Demonstrations and Activists as a Matter of Policy

April 2, 2013
http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/...#documents [for this article and to see the actual documents!]
Occupy Crackdown FOIA Requests

Government documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) through its FOIA records requests reveal that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an agency created after the September 11 attacks under the rubric of combating terrorism, conducts daily monitoring of peaceful, lawful protests as a matter of policy.

Functioning as a secret political police force against people participating in lawful, peaceful free speech activity, the heavily redacted documents show that the DHS "Threat Management Division" directed Regional Intelligence Analysts to provide a "Daily Intelligence Briefing" that includes a category of reporting on "Peaceful Activist Demonstrations" along with "Domestic Terrorist Activity." (p. 68)

The PCJF has obtained thousands of pages of documents pursuant to its Freedom of Information Act demands and made them available for public viewing. The newly obtained documents show coordination and intelligence monitoring by the DHS, the FBI, the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies of "Occupy-type" protests.

The documents show the routine use of Fusion Centers for intelligence gathering on peaceful demonstrations as well as the use of DHS' "Mega Centers" for collection of surveillance information on demonstrations.

One document also shows the DHS engaging in what appears to be "off the books" intelligence gathering as one DHS agent writes in response to a request for information on the Occupy movement in New England, "This meeting should be finishing up soon and I'll have access to a non-DHS computer that will allow me to do more looking." (p. 6)

The first trove of FBI documents obtained by the PCJF in December 2012 exposed that the FBI treated the Occupy movement, even before the first tent went up in lower Manhattan, as a potential criminal and terrorist threat in spite of the fact that the FBI acknowledged that the OWS organizers explicitly called for peaceful protests.

The release and PCJF analysis of the documents in December received significant media attention.

The new documents reveal DHS surveillance of protests in Asheville, NC; Tampa; Ft. Lauderdale; Jacksonville; Lansing, MI; Denver; Kansas City; Los Angeles; Boston; Dallas; Houston; Minneapolis; Miami; Jersey City; Phoenix; Lincoln, Nebraska; Chicago; Salt Lake City; Detroit and others.

In preparation for planned protests in New York City on October 15, 2011, the DHS documents show coordination between federal and local authorities to use New York City's permitting scheme to frustrate, obstruct or stop free speech activities.

In the case of the New York City protest, the documents reveal how even the most elementary exercise for conducting a lawful protest activity was the subject of information sharing and cooperation between federal and local law enforcement agencies. This was the case when the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement sought a permit for a march with the purpose, as the DHS states, "to recognize the African slaves used to build Wall Street." DHS reports on how the NYPD denied the sound permit for the planned activity and how the permit application was "kicked back and forth by the City, GSA and NPS. …" (p. 35)

As the federal and local governments and law enforcement agencies engaged in a concerted, coordinated crackdown to evict Occupy protests from public spaces in the last months of 2011, DHS officials shared and coordinated strategies. For instance, the DHS District Commander in Detroit directly communicated with a law enforcement official who was "tasked with coming up with an exit strategy for us." After writing that he had heard in the news that encampments were "broken up in California and Georgia," the DHS District Commander continued, "What is the plan for the Occupy Detroit group in Grand Circus Park? I have been reporting daily and sending it up." (p. 115)

The documents show a Department of Homeland Security that appears obsessed with the question of whether any and all protests that are being surveilled receive media attention and coverage. Reporting within the DHS on media coverage of First Amendment protected activities, even in the smallest places, appears to be a routine part of DHS intelligence reports. None of the documents explain why media coverage of peaceful demonstrations is of interest to law enforcement or concerns "homeland security" in any way.

"This production of documents, like the FBI documents that the PCJF received in December 2012, is a window into the nationwide scope of DHS and FBI surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement. Taken together, the two sets of documents paint a disturbing picture of federal law enforcement agencies using their vast power in a systematic effort to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations. The federal agencies' actions were not because Occupy represented a 'terrorist threat' or a 'criminal threat' but rather because it posed a significant grassroots political challenge to the status quo," stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF.

"The documents are heavily redacted and represent, we believe, a fraction of what the government possesses. But these documents show that federal and local law enforcement agencies, in concert with the biggest banks on Wall Street and elsewhere in the country, conducted a massive spying program and a large-scale disruption operation against the Occupy movement." stated Carl Messineo, Legal Director of the PCJF.

You can read the DHS - OWS documents below, where we have uploaded them in searchable format for public viewing.

The PCJF filed Freedom of Information Act demands with multiple federal law enforcement agencies in the fall of 2011 as the Occupy crackdown began.

This is how the revolution begins
Adbusters Tactical Briefing #42.

02 April 2013

#Goldman

Hey all you wild spirits out there,

Here is how the Global Spring begins:

A few lone wolves among us start pasting posters in and around Goldman Sachs HQ at 200 West Street, Manhattan, New York. Groups of two or three turn up and hand out leaflets at their branch office at Maria de Molina 6-5a, Madrid, Spain. People start gathering and having fun outside Goldman's offices in 50 cities...

Then . . . on Thursday May 23, when Goldman Sachs holds its annual shareholders meeting at 222 South Main Street, Salt Lake City, Utah, 500 people turn up and solidarity games are held across the world. It gets serious when thousands start playing on September 17 in front of Goldman's branches in Los Angeles, Toronto, Moscow, London, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Beijing, Mexico City. The media picks up on this fledgling global revolt. . .

And, one fine day, the whole thing suddenly catches fire . . . #GOLDMAN becomes a rallying cry for people everywhere to rise up against the financial fraudsters who have been fucking around with our lives for far too long.

When the moment is ripe, all it takes is a spark.

for the wild,
Kono Matsu / kono@adbusters.org
Culture Jammers HQ

P.S. Find teammates and Goldman Sachs locations at meetup.com/goldman

Catch up on the gameplay thus far, here.

Now print this poster, and plaster it all over the world!

#GOLDMAN is a real-time game

http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/goldm...ng-42.html

As It Spied on Occupy Wall Street, Department of Homeland Security Fixated on Media Coverage

By Pam Martens: April 3, 2013

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly Inside the Surveillance Center in Lower Manhattan. The Center Is Staffed Jointly By NYPD and Wall Street Employees

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has released new documents it obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filing with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The documents show that DHS, the sprawling Federal agency ostensibly created to combat terrorism after the September 11 attacks, routinely spies on peaceful First Amendment activities and required daily briefing on the extent of media attention being given to Occupy Wall Street activities.

Media coverage both inside and outside of New York City was of concern to DHS. On October 7, 2011, a special agent sent a memo to inquire about Kansas City, asking: "Has there been any media attention given to the Occupy KC protests?"

A DHS employee expressed concern in an October 27, 2011 memo that Federal Protective Service personnel, a division of DHS, may have been caught on camera, writing: "Was there media coverage of the events last night which may show FPS involvement?"

As we previously reported, the Department of Homeland Security funded a high-tech, joint spy center in the heart of Wall Street where too-big-to-fail bank personnel work alongside NYPD officers to spy on the activities of Occupy Wall Street protesters as well as law abiding citizens on the streets. When the acclaimed CBS news program, 60 Minutes, became aware of the joint spy center, it presented a fawning program on its presence in lower Manhattan, neglecting to mention that Wall Street personnel were bizarrely spying on citizens alongside law enforcement personnel.

The new documents released by PCJF also show that DHS was interested in the Occupy movement's ability to gain momentum through social media. In an October 2011 memo, an agent wrote:

"A distinct feature of OWS is how it was born from online organization and continues to use social media to spread its message, organize further protests, and keep protesters connected. OWS and the broader Occupy Together movement that organizes protests in other cities use services such as Twitter, Tumblr, Meetup, and Facebook to this end, as well as having set up a live video feed of the OWS encampment in New York. Announcements, videos, and images are all collected and disseminated via these social networks as well as on the OWS Web site."

Another memo notes:

"Social media and the organic emergence of online communities have driven the rapid expansion of the OWS movement. In New York, OWS leaders have also formed ad hoc committees to organize protesters and manage communications, logistics, and security. The OWS encampment in Zucotti Park features a medical station, distribution point for food and water, and a media center complete with generators and wireless Internet. Organizers hold general assembly meetings twice a day and a have established committees and working groups including an Internet Working Group and a Direct Action Committee, which plans protest activities and works to maintain peaceful and controlled demonstrations. This high level of organization has allowed OWS to sustain its operations, disseminate its message, and garner increasing levels of support."

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of PCJF, commented as follows on the emerging pattern illustrated by the documents her organization is unearthing:

"This production of documents, like the FBI documents that the PCJF received in December 2012, is a window into the nationwide scope of DHS and FBI surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement. Taken together, the two sets of documents paint a disturbing picture of federal law enforcement agencies using their vast power in a systematic effort to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations. The federal agencies' actions were not because Occupy represented a terrorist threat' or a criminal threat' but rather because it posed a significant grassroots political challenge to the status quo."

NYPD Raid on Occupy Wall Street Just Cost the City $350,000

By Adam Martin


New York City and Zuccotti Park owner Brookfield Properties have agreed to pay $366,700 to settle a lawsuit over the chaotic November 2011 police raid on the Occupy Wall Street encampment at the plaza. The bulk of that goes to cover the damages and legal fees stemming from the destruction of Occupy's supply of books and computers, known as the People's Library. City lawyers, as they often do, wanted to make sure people remembered that by settling, the city didn't admit it did anything wrong. But it sure came close.

Occupy had asked for $47,000 to cover the 3,000 books and other equipment it lost, and the city agreed to pay that amount in full (with Brookfield throwing in $16,000), plus $186,000 in legal fees. It also agreed to pay $75,000 in damages and $49,850 in legal fees for the destruction of Global Revolutions TV's live-streaming equipment, and $8,500 to Times Up New York for destroying its pedal-powered generators.

"There are many reasons to settle a case," Sheryl Neufeld of the New York City Law Department, told The New York Times. "And sometimes that includes avoiding the potential for drawn out litigation that bolsters plaintiff attorney fees."

But the language in the settlement, of which Occupy attorney Norman Siegel told the Village Voice, " we would not have settled without this," sounds downright conciliatory. After calling the destruction of the books and equipment "unfortunate," the settlement goes on:

Plaintiffs and Defendants recognize that when a person's property is removed from the city it is important that the City exercise due care and adhere to established procedures in order to protect legal rights of the property owners.

It's not a full-fledged mea culpa, but it's sure not a "here's a check, now go away," either.