A Conversation With Jeremy Hammond, American Political Prisoner Sentenced to 10 Years

Jeremy Hammond, the Chicago activist and hacktivist (an activist who uses computer networks for political
protests and other actions), was sentenced last week to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release for hacking into the intelligence contractor Strategic Forcasting (or Stratfor) and other government, law enforcement and military suppliers’ websites.

The Stratfor hack resulted in a cache of 5.2 million leaked emails and account information for approximately 860,000 Stratfor subscribers and clients, including information from 60,000 credit cards. To list a few of the many revelations, the emails revealed domestic spying on activists, including Occupy Wall Street; surveillance through persona management programs or fake online personas (“sock puppets”); and attempts to link American activist and journalist Alexa O’Brien to al-Qaeda. The Stratfor hack pullled back the curtain on the ofttimes illegal goings-on in the shadowy world of intelligence contractors.

Mr. Hammond’s supervised release includes limited computer access and prohibits him using encryption and from associating with civil disobedience groups. The ban on encryption shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works. Encryption is used in nearly every online transaction, such as email, social networking and online banking. The broad ban on freedom of association raises potential Constitutional issues. At the time of his arrest, Mr. Hammond was working under the banner of AntiSec, an offshoot of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Jeremy Hammond, American Political Prisoner, courtesy of @FreeAnons.

The packed courtroom looked more like a church wedding than a sentencing, with dozens of Westpoint cadets on a field trip sitting on the left and Mr. Hammond’s parents, friends and supporters — who caravanned from all over the U.S. to show solidarity for their fallen comrade — sitting on the right. Mr. Hammond, his attorneys, Sarah, Emily and Margaret Kunstler and Susan Kellman faced the stoic Judge Loretta Preska presiding over the solemn ceremony.

On September 10th I visited Jeremy Hammond at Manhattan Correctional Center where he had been incarcerated for 18 months. Mr. Hammond, who was denied bail, was also disallowed all visitors, including family members. I am the first journalist with whom Mr. Hammond met since his arrest in March 2012. This interview was held months before sentencing. At the request of Mr. Hammond’s attorneys, who feared his words would be used at sentencing against him, I delayed publishing.
____________________________

Vivien Lesnik Weisman: You are both a boots on the ground activist and a hacktivist. Can you explain hacktivisim, hacking for political purposes and off line activism?

Jeremy Hammond: Hackers are by nature critical of systems, hacking is activism. The very act of hacking is inherently activist and political.

VLW: How effective is activism without the added thread of technology, or hacktivism, in the modern world? Which is more effective?

JH: Hacking is never going to take the place of grassroots community organizing. They complement each other.

There is more to it of course than hacking. Hacktivism involves online social networking, sharing ideas. Protest is predictable; they know how to contain it. The government knows how to ignore it. Both direct action and civil disobedience are unpredictable. I’m all for it.

I see hacktivism as a direct action tool. Offensive hacking with political intent is really nothing more than one more direct action tool. What you do when you get the information is what determines its efficacy as a direct action tool.

And now because of the state of the world — foreclosures, the wars — hackers are becoming politicized. We break into systems and then movements like Occupy deliver the message. It all works together. There is street protest. There is direct action, and hacking is one more tool.

Subverzo, hacktivist, at post-sentencing rally, Foley Square. Photo credit: Still from The Reality Wars, A.J. Abucay DP

VLW: How did the decision to target the intelligence contractor, Stratfor, come about and what was your involvement?

JH: Another hacker, who has not been indicted and therefore I will not name, brought the vulnerability. He had the credit cards already, before I ever got involved, on the Dec 5th. He chose Stratfor and brought it to us. There were 12 of us in the IRC (chat room) at that time.

Stratfor was chosen by that hacker because Stratfor had targeted Anonymous and specifically #OpCartel (Anonymous action against Mexican drug cartels).

Then the 12 of us in a private IRC channel approved it on the merits, as a meritocracy, the Anon way.

None of the 12 in that chat room that included me and Sabu [hacker leader turned FBI informant] have ever been caught.

Amongst the 12 were not only hackers. Some were social media types who brought attention to the actions.

I did the Stratfor hack all by myself except for the original vulnerability. I was the main hacker in Anti-Sec.

Sabu refers to Hetcor Xavier Monsegur, hacker and leader of LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous. LulzSec was an elite hacker collective that obtained notoriety as much for their high profile targets as for their clever self-promotion. Sabu was arrested by the FBI and began working for them that day. The following day he announced the formation of AntiSec, “the biggest unified collective of hackers in history.” Both in private IRC and through his various public Twitter accounts he encouraged hackers to join AntiSec and commit hacking crimes. Many hacktivists and rights organizations see these — including the Statfor hack — as government created crimes given that Sabu was working for his FBI handlers at the time he was inciting hackers to join AntiSec. After Sabu was turned, all of his actions can be seen as government actions. In essence, the name Sabu and the government can be used interchangeably in this context.

He is responsible for the arrests of many Anons including Jeremy Hammond.

Hector Xavier Monsegur Jr, hacker known by his nom de guerre Sabu, FBI informant.

VLW: Did you ever suspect that Sabu was a Fed (FBI informant) before that became public?

JH: I was in a chat room with 12 hackers. Chances are someone in there was a Fed. I don’t work with anyone who has not taken risks alongside me. Sabu had taken risks and hacked himself. Still, I could have done this all on my own. I was the main hacker in Anti-Sec.

VLW: And that hacker who provided the exploits also came with the credit cards? And were the credit cards live?

JH: Yes. The credit cards were live. We all spoke on Dec 6th and planned a coordinated day of action when we would choose charities and use the credit cards to make donations for Christmas to these charities, Christmas donations.

VLW: LulzXmas?

JH: Yes.

Jeremy Hammond is often referred to as a digital Robin Hood for his participation in LulzXmas. Margaret Ratner Kunstler, Hammond’s attorney, clarified that her client did not himself make any donations or use the credit cards. He also did not personally profit from the hacked credit cards.

JH: But our main focus was the emails, to reveal the spying. Stratfor was spying on the world. We revealed the anti-WikiLeaks actions by Stratfor. Stratfor was spying on Occupy Wall Street, WikiLeaks, and Anonymous.

We didn’t even know about the Venezuelan coup discussions proving U.S. involvement in the attempted coup until we saw that in the Strafor emails later.

It was all revealed on WikLeaks but I had moved on. I’d rather be hacking.

[He smiles.]

VLW: There is speculation that the Stratfor hack was designed by the government and carried out by their informant Sabu as an attempt to entrap Julian Assange by getting him to solicit information or even sell him information. Were you aware of such a plan and if so did you make a conscious decision to foil that plan by dumping on the Pirate Bay before the transaction could be completed?

JH: No, that did not happen. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks was not a factor.

In fact, many hacktivists make the claim that the Stratfor hack was designed to entrap Julian Assange. Hammond is not necessarily in a position to know whether that was the case or not.

VLW: Stratfor was notified by the government that they had been penetrated and told to do nothing. Why did they allow Stratfor to be sacrificed?

JH: We do not know to what degree they notified Stratfor. Interesting question, but we don’t know.

VLW: Why did the Stratfor hack take so long to complete? And why destroy the servers?

JH: I had to get to the mail servers. It takes time. We always destroy the servers.

First you deface, then you take the information, then you destroy the server, for the Lulz [for fun], and so they can’t rebuild the system. We don’t want them to rebuild. And to destroy forensic information that could be used to find out who did it and how it was done.

VLW: What are your preferred targets?

JH: My preferred targets are military contractors, military suppliers and law enforcement.

VLW: Intelligence contractors like Stratfor?

JH: Tech intelligence firms are a preferred target. Tech firms — where white hat hackers are paid to target the 99% for their corporate overlord clients.

Chris Hedges, journalist, TruthDig columnist, speaks at Hammond Rally. Photo credit: Still from The Reality Wars, A.J. Abucay DP

Those firms also contain the keys to their corporate clients so there is a big payoff — Endgame Systems and Palantir, for example.

Endgame Systems is the subject of much discussion. Engame Systems is self-described as providing offensive and defensive vulnerability research, mitigation of cyber-threats and cyber operations platforms. It is in the business of selling “zero day exploits.” That is, the vulnerabilities that have not yet been detected. According to a Business Week article, these zero day exploits are militarized and include entire blueprints of the computer systems of airports and other critical infrastructure including that of our western allies for example Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport. It is difficult to see how the sale of these exploits makes us more secure.

A package of these zero day exploits can be purchased for 2.5 million dollars a year. The price list was revealed in a cache of emails in the HBGary hack, an earlier Anonymous operation. Endgame weaponry is sold by region — China, the Middle East, Russia, Latin America, and Europe. There are even target packs for European and other allies. That raises the question of whether these exploits are being sold to foreign actors. Even if not sold directly to enemies of the U.S., cyber munitions like conventional arms have a way of showing up in unintended places. Once these exploits are out there they are vulnerable to rouge hackers and rogue states.

JH: White hat hackers are being paid to do supposedly defensive actions but they are offensive. White hat hackers are supposed to identify a vulnerability and then announce. But instead they sell the vulnerability, the exploits. So if you hack for the thrill it’s not ok. But for money, like Endgames, then somehow it is. And instead of going to jail for hacking you get awarded a government contract.

At least, the NSA is supposed to — and that is a big “supposed to” — have some kind of government oversight and again that’s overstated; these government contractors, intel firms and tech firms like Stratfor have no oversight whatsoever. They are not bound by any laws. They are above the law. No FOIA (request for classified or other non-public information from the government under the Freedom Of Information Act) can compel them to reveal what they do. Rogue hackers have better access to vulnerabilities than government hackers.

VLW: That reminds me of The Conscience of a Hacker by the Mentor. Did you read that?

Known as the Hacker Manifesto, it could just be Jeremy Hammond’s ethos.

It reads:
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.

My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

JH: From the 90’s? You hate me because I’m better than you are. Yeah, yeah.

[He smiles.]

Citizen journalist/activist and Hammond supporter Tara Jill Livestreams outside the court house. Photo credit: Still from The Reality Wars, A.J. Abucay DP

VLW: What do you think about the new battlefield, or cyberwarfare?

JH: The government calls it cybersecurity, but it’s really offensive hacking not just defensive.

The Department of Defense deals in war and aggression but it is not called Department of War is it? The government calls what they do mitigation of the threat of a cyber offensive. But these are offensive acts. They are acts of war. This is the new terrain. The new battlefield.

The war is on and it’s for the Internet. They spy on us, they spy on others, intellectual property rights wars, censorship….

For example, when encryption first came out PGP (Pretty Good Privacy, the first publicly available encryption software) it was called a munition and they immediately tried to ban it.

Encryption is part of our arsenal. It trumps the surveillance state.

As Mr. Hammond was waiting to be handcuffed in order for me to be escorted out of the small room at Manhattan Correctional Center where Mr. Hammond and I had conversed for over 4 hours, I asked him one last question.

VLW: You want to challenge the political system in the US and the world with technology. Is technology your weapon in the same way rifles were weapons in the past? Are you willing to die for your cause?

Handcuffed and standing before me with the guard awaiting my exit he pondered the question. As the guard ushered me out he responded.

JH: Die for my cause? Yes.
Go to prison, die for my cause… or choose to live a life of submission.
____________________________

Mr. Hammond’s bold and principled stand is sure to inspire others to make a similar choice.

This is part one of a two part article.

I am currently working on The Reality Wars, a feature length documentary about the targeting of activists, hacktivists and journalists by the US government and the nexus between intelligence contractors and the surveillance state. Jeremy Hammond and the Stratfor hack are covered in my film.

Posted: 11/19/2013 10:18 am

Find this story at 19 November 2013

© 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Cyber-Activist Jeremy Hammond Sentenced to 10 Years In Prison; The hacker, who pleaded guilty in May, is given the maximum sentence by a federal judge

Cyber-activist Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison this morning by Judge Loretta A. Preska in a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan for hacking the private intelligence firm Stratfor. When released, Hammond will be placed under supervised control, the terms of which include a prohibition on encryption or attempting to anonymize his identity online.

Hammond has shown a “total lack of respect for the law,” Judge Preska said in her ruling, citing Hammond’s criminal record – which includes a felony conviction for hacking from when he was 19 – and what she called “unrepentant recidivism.” There is a “desperate need to promote respect for the law,” she said, as well as a “need for adequate public deterrence.”

Read ‘Enemy of the State,’ Our 2012 Feature on Jeremy Hammond’s Rise and Fall

As Hammond was led into the courtroom, he looked over the roughly 100 supporters who had shown up, smiled, and said, “What’s up, everybody?” Prior to the verdict, he read from a prepared statement and said it was time for him to step away from hacking as a form of activism, but recognized that tactic’s continuing importance. “Those in power do not want the truth exposed,” Hammond said from the podium, wearing black prison garb. He later stated that the injustices he has fought against “cannot be cured by reform, but by civil disobedience and direct action.” He spoke out against capitalism and a wide range of other social ills, including mass incarceration and crackdowns on protest movements.

The Stratfor hack exposed previously unknown corporate spying on activists and organizers, including PETA and the Yes Men, and was largely constructed by the FBI using an informant named Hector Monsegur, better known by his online alias Sabu. Co-defendants in the U.K. were previously sentenced to relatively lighter terms. Citing Hammond’s record, Judge Preska said “there will not be any unwarranted sentencing disparity” between her ruling and the U.K. court’s decision.

Hammond’s supporters and attorneys had previously called on Judge Preska to recuse herself following the discovery that her husband was a victim of the hack she was charged with ruling on. That motion was denied. (Full disclosure: This reporter previously spoke at a rally calling on Judge Preska to recuse herself.)

Hammond’s defense team repeatedly stressed that their client was motivated by charitable intentions, a fact they said was reflected in his off-line life as well. Hammond has previously volunteered at Chicago soup kitchens, and has tutored fellow inmates in GED training during his incarceration.

Rosemary Nidiry, speaking for the prosecution, painted a picture of a malicious criminal motivated by a desire to create “maximum mayhem,” a phrase Hammond used in a chat log to describe what he hoped would come from the Stratfor hack. Thousands of private credit card numbers were released as a result of the Stratfor hack, which the government argued served no public good.

Sarah Kunstler, a defense attorney for Hammond, takes issue with both the prosecution and judge’s emphasis on the phrase “maximum mayhem” to the exclusion of Hammond’s broader philosophy shows an incomplete picture. “Political change can be disruptive and destructive,” Kunstler says. “That those words exclude political action is inaccurate.”

Many supporters see Hammond’s case as part of a broader trend of the government seeking what they say are disproportionately long sentences for acts that are better understood as civil disobedience than rampant criminality. Aaron Swartz, who faced prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – the same statute used to prosecute Hammond – took his own life last year, after facing possible decades in prison for downloading academic journals from an MIT server. “The tech industry promised open access and democratization,” says Roy Singham, Swartz’s old boss and executive chairman of ThoughtWorks, a software company that advocates for social justice. “What we’ve given the world is surveillance and spying.” Singham says it’s “shameful” that “titans of the tech world” have not supported Hammond.

Following his first conviction for hacking, Hammond said, he struggled with returning to that life, but felt it was his responsibility. That decision ultimately lead to the Stratfor hack. “I had to ask myself, if Chelsea Manning fell into the abysmal nightmare of prison fighting for the truth, could I in good conscience do any less, if I was able?” he said, addressing the court. “I thought the best way to demonstrate solidarity was to continue the work of exposing and confronting corruption.”

by John Knefel
NOVEMBER 15, 2013

Find this story at 15 November 2013

©2013 Rolling Stone

Meet the Private Companies Helping Cops Spy on Protesters

Promotional materials for private spy companies show that mass surveillance technology is being sold to police departments as a way to monitor dissent

The documents leaked to media outlets by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden this year have brought national intelligence gathering and surveillance operations under a level of scrutiny not seen in decades. Often left out of this conversation, though, is the massive private surveillance industry that provides services to law enforcement, defense agencies and corporations in the U.S. and abroad – a sprawling constellation of companies and municipalities. “It’s a circle where everyone [in these industries] is benefitting,” says Eric King, lead researcher of watchdog group Privacy International. “Everyone gets more powerful, and richer.”

Promotional materials for numerous private spy companies boast of how law enforcement organizations can use their products to monitor people at protests or other large crowds – including by keeping tabs on individual people’s social media presence. Kenneth Lipp, a journalist who attended the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia from October 19th to 23rd, tells Rolling Stone that monitoring Twitter and Facebook was a main theme of the week. “Social media was the buzzword,” says Lipp. He says much of the discussion seemed to be aimed at designing policies that wouldn’t trigger potentially limiting court cases: “They want to avoid a warrant standard.”

While the specifics of which police departments utilize what surveillance technologies is often unclear, there is evidence to suggest that use of mass surveillance against individuals not under direct investigation is common. “The default is mass surveillance, the same as NSA’s ‘collect it all’ mindset,” says King. “There’s not a single company that if you installed their product, [it] would comply with what anyone without a security clearance would think is appropriate, lawful use.”

The YouTube page for a company called NICE, for instance, features a highly produced video showing how its products can be used in the event of a protest. “The NICE video analytic suite alerts on an unusually high occupancy level in a city center,” a narrator says as the camera zooms in on people chanting and holding signs that read “clean air” and “stop it now.” The video then shows authorities redirecting traffic to avoid a bottleneck, and promises that all audio and video from the event will be captured and processed almost immediately. “The entire event is then reconstructed on a chronological timeline, based on all multimedia sources,” says the narrator. According to an interview with the head of NICE’s security division published in Israel Gateway, NICE systems are used by New Jersey Transit and at the Statue of Liberty, though it isn’t clear if they are the same products shown in the video.

“Thousands of customers worldwide use NICE Security solutions to keep people safe and protect property,” says Sara Preto, a spokesperson for NICE. She declined to confirm any specific clients, but added: “We work with law enforcement and other government agencies within the framework of all relevant and national laws.”

Another program, made by Bright Planet and called BlueJay, is billed in a brochure to law enforcement as a “Twitter crime scanner.” BlueJay allows cops to covertly monitor accounts and hashtags; three that Bright Planet touts in promotional material are #gunfire, #meth, and #protest. In another promotional document, the company says BlueJay can “monitor large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals,” as well as “track department mentions.” Bright Planet did not respond to a request for comment.

A third company, 3i:Mind, lays out a scenario for a potential law enforcement client that begins: “Perhaps you are tracking an upcoming political rally.” It continues:

Once you set up the OpenMIND™ system to profile and monitor the rally, it will search the web for the event on web pages, social networking sites, blogs, forums and so forth, looking for information about the nature of the rally (e.g. peaceful, violent, participant demographics), try to identify both online and physical world activist leaders and collect information about them, monitor the event in real-time and alert you on user-defined critical developments.

The scenario concludes: “Your insight is distributed to the local police force warning them that the political rally may turn violent and potentially thwarting the violence before it occurs.” The 3i:Mind website gives no clues at to which governments or corporations use their products, and public information on the company is limited, though they have reportedly shown their product at various trade shows and police conferences. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Other companies are less upfront about how their products can be used to monitor social unrest. A product that will be familiar to anyone who attended an Occupy Wall Street protest in or around New York’s Zuccotti Park is SkyWatch, by FLIR, pointed out to Rolling Stone by Lipp, the journalist who attended the police conference. SkyWatch is a mobile tower in the form of a two-person cab that can be raised two stories high to provide “an array of surveillance options,” according to a promotional brochure. Those options include cameras and radar, as well as “customizable” options. The brochure says SkyWatch is perfect for “fluid operations whether on the front lines or at a hometown event.” As of this writing, the NYPD still has a SkyWatch deployed in a corner of Zuccotti Park, where Occupy activists were evicted by the police nearly two years ago.

These promotional materials, taken together, paint a picture not only of local police forces becoming increasingly militarized, but also suggest departments are venturing into intelligence-gathering operations that may go well beyond traditional law enforcement mandates. “Two things make today’s surveillance particularly dangerous: the flood of ‘homeland security’ dollars (in the hundreds of millions) to state and local police for the purchase of spying technologies, and the fact that spook technology is outpacing privacy law,” says Kade Crockford, director of the Massachusetts ACLU’s technology for liberty program and the writer of the PrivacySOS blog, which covers these issues closely. “Flush with fancy new equipment, police turn to communities they have long spied on and infiltrated: low-income and communities of color, and dissident communities.”

Many of the legal questions surrounding these kinds of police tactics remain unsettled, according to Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice. Information that is publicly available, like tweets and Facebook posts, is generally not protected by the Fourth Amendment, though legal questions may arise if that information is aggregated on a large scale – especially if that collection is based on political, religious or ethnic grounds. “This information can be useful, but it can also be used in ways that violate the Constitution,” says Patel. “The question is: what are [police departments] using it for?”

Rolling Stone contacted police departments for the cities of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. for comment on this story.

“The Philadelphia Police Department has their own cameras,” says that force’s spokesperson Jillian Russell. “The department does not have private surveillance companies monitor crime.” She directed follow-up questions about software used to process big data to a deputy mayor’s office, who didn’t return a phone call asking for comment.

When asked if the LAPD uses programs to monitor protesters, a media relations email account sent an unsigned message that simply read: “We are not aware of this.”

The other police departments did not respond to requests for comment.

By JOHN KNEFEL
October 24, 2013 3:16 PM ET

Find this story at 24 October 2013

Copyright ©2013 Rolling Stone

Eskom apologises for spying on NGOs

Nongovernmental organisations (NGO) GroundWork, Earthlife Africa and Greenpeace Africa have agreed to rejoin State-owned power utility Eskom’s NGO forum after the parastatal acknowledged that an investigation into its now-terminated contract with intelligence support services company Swartberg revealed that the firm was “spying” on the environmental groups.

Eskom said in a statement on Monday that security management at the Medupi coal-fired power station, in Limpopo, had entered into the contract with Swartberg to “ensure protection of the Medupi site and to better anticipate threats to personnel and property”, following civil unrest at Medupi in May 2011.

However, following media reports that Swartberg was gathering intelligence from the three organisations, the NGO forum members suspended their participation in February, calling for an investigation by the energy provider.

After terminating the contract with Swartberg, Eskom commissioned independent legal firm Bowman Gilfillan to initiate an investigation, which revealed “concerns” about the way in which the contract was managed.

After disclosing the extent, process and outcome of the investigation to the three affected NGOs, Eskom CEO Brian Dames said the use of private companies to gather intelligence from stakeholders was “unacceptable” and “not how Eskom does business”.

“To the extent that this may have happened as a consequence, even if unintended, is regrettable and Eskom apologises for this,’’ he commented.

The NGOs said in a statement that they believed their key demand for a full internal investigation and a public apology had been met.

“We, therefore, think it is in order to return to the stakeholder forum, where we will continue to engage and, where necessary, challenge Eskom on its energy choices,” they stated.

Eskom said it had, since the outcome of the investigation, taken steps to strengthen internal controls and brought the matter to the attention of the South African Police Service to determine whether any laws were contravened, and if any further action was required.

The group said it would also implement the recommendations made following the investigation, including pursuing disciplinary action against individuals who did not comply with Eskom policies.

Published 11 Nov 2013
Article by: Natalie Greve

Find this story at 11 November 2013

Copyright © Creamer Media (Pty) Ltd

“Terrorism is Part of Our History”: Angela Davis on ’63 Church Bombing, Growing up in “Bombingham”

Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a watershed moment in the civil rights movement. On Sept. 15, 1963, a dynamite blast planted by the Ku Klux Klan killed four young girls in the church — Denise McNair, age 11, and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, all 14 years old. Twenty other people were injured. No one was arrested for the bombings for 14 years. We hear an address by world-renowned author, activist and scholar Angela Davis, professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz. She spoke last night in Oakland, California, at an event organized by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a watershed moment in the civil rights movement. On September 15, 1963, a dynamite blast planted by the Ku Klux Klan killed four little girls in the church Denise McNair was 11 years old, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins were all 14. Twenty other people were injured. No one was arrested for the bombings for 14 years.

We turn now to world renowned author, activist, scholar Angela Davis, Professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz. She spoke last night in Oakland, California, at an event organized by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law.

ANGELA DAVIS: And remembering and paying tribute to this tragic event, let us not pretend that we are simultaneously celebrating the end of racist violence, and the triumph of democracy. Let us also not labor under the illusion that this church bombing was an anomaly. We know that Robert Chambliss, who was eventually convicted of carrying out the bombing, along with three others, we know that he had been responsible for bombing black homes and churches over so many years. As a matter of fact, during the eight years prior to the church bombing, there had been 21 bombings in Birmingham. This man’s nickname was “Dynamite Bob”. He was known in white communities, you know, talking about terrorism. And I want to emphasize the importance of understanding how much terrorism, racist terrorism, has shaped the history of this country. And there are lessons we need to learn from that.

But I’ve often pointed out that some of my very earliest childhood memories, are the sounds of dynamite exploding. Homes across the street from where I grew up were bombed when they were purchased by black people who were moving into a neighborhood that had been zoned for whites. So many bombings took place in the neighborhood where I grew up. And we know now that Chambliss was probably responsible. That the neighborhood came to be called “Dynamite Hill”. And of course as you know, the city of Birmingham was known as “Bombingham”. In fact on September 4, 1963, less than two weeks before the 16th Street church bombing, the home of the leading civil rights attorney in Birmingham, Arthur Shores was bombed. And that house was right down the street from our house.

You’ve also heard that from Margaret that on the day of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, two other black youth were killed. Johnny Robinson and Virgil Weir. Bombings continued to plague black communities in Birmingham after September 15, and everyone, including the FBI, knew who was behind them. But Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss was simply charged with the possession of dynamite. And J Edgar Hoover refused to reveal the evidence that the FBI had gathered against the perpetrators so that there was no trial during that period.

Now I’m not arguing that justice would have necessarily prevailed had Robert Chambliss and the others, Thomas Blanton, Bobby Cherry and Herman Cash had been immediately tried and tried and convicted, although, since that was the only way we had to deal with such transgressions, they should have been tried and convicted. But true justice is about transformation. Justice is about changing the relations that link us together. And as you’ve heard, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project attempts to forge justice in a much deeper sense than is possible within the existing criminal justice system.

A broader way of thinking about justice in the case of the Birmingham bombing would require, first of all, a fuller understanding of the event and its historical context, and would require us to ask questions about the way our lives today bear the historical imprint of that era. What I fear is that many of the 50th anniversary observances, and there are many as Margaret pointed out, many that have taken place, many to come, that many of them are just to close the book on the racist violence of the civil rights era so that we can embalm that violence and transform it into something to be gazed at through the conventional lens of the museum.

Maybe there is something to be learned from the way that Birmingham Civil Rights Institute frames that bombing. As opposed to regular museum exhibit, and if any of you have ever visited the Civil Rights Institute, you know that it is an absolutely incredible museum with amazing exhibits. But for the church bombing, there is simply a window. There is a window through which one can see the church, meditate on its history, and see it as it changes and transforms. Remembering that this was the site of one of the most vicious terror attacks this country has witnessed.

If you have ever visited Birmingham and the museum, you will also know that across 6th Avenue from the museum and kitty corner from the church is the Kelly Ingram Park, where demonstrations that were organized in the 16th Street Baptist Church were staged. It was the home base for the Children’s Crusade. And how many of us remember that it was young children, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old, some as young as 9 or 10, who faced police dogs and faced high-power water hoses and went to jail for our sake? And so there is deep symbolism in the fact that these four young girls’ lives were consumed by that bombing. It was children who were urging us to imagine a future that would be a future of equality and justice.

It’s important that we resist the temptation of abstraction. How easy it is to think about four innocent young black girls whose lives were violently taken away by white supremacists. And I’m not suggesting that this did not happen. Of course it did. What I’m saying is that it was a lot more complicated. And if we don’t attempt to understand the complexity of this historical event, then we will certainly not be capable of comprehending that violence, that racist violence, and its connections with sexist violence or homophobic and xenophobic violence, which continues to erupt in our lives today. Resisting the temptation of historical abstraction requires us to realize that this was not an extraordinary event that erupted one Sunday morning 50 years ago in otherwise peaceful city. As I pointed out, violence was very much the norm.

When I was growing up, Bull Connor, Eugene Bull Connor, was the commissioner of public safety. And of course his notoriety is linked to the way in which he used those high-power water hoses and dogs against the children and because of the KKK violence, against the Freedom Riders in Birmingham, and violence, in which the police whom Bull Connor controlled did not intervene. But I remember hearing when I was growing up, I remember growing up hearing when black people moved into previously white neighborhoods, Bull Connor would announce that there would be bloodshed. And indeed, there would be a bombing or a house would be burned.

As much talk as there has been about terrorism over the last decade, I have not heard one official acknowledgment of the terrorism that prevailed in places like Birmingham. Terrorism is a part of our history. It is not something that is alien. And, by the way, no one ever suggested that we plant dynamite in white communities as a response to that terrorism. So I guess I would say, why do we need to respond with devastating violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria?

It is also not widely known that black people arm themselves. This is a story that has been excised from the official record of the “freedom movement”. And interestingly, Condoleezza Rice has described her minister father, this was recently in an interview with Al Sharpton. She described her minister father as being a leader of an armed patrol of black men in her neighborhood. And as she pointed out, no one was ever shot. Guns may have been fired to scare the Klu Klux Klan away, they may, have been, she says they may have been fired in the air, but no one was ever shot. No one was ever hurt. And I wonder why she didn’t learn this lesson about ways to respond to terrorism, you know which she could’ve used during her tenure as Secretary of State. And I should say I was happy to see that this morning Melissa Harris Perry called her out on this after showing clips of her interview with Al Sharpton.

But my father was also a member of an armed patrol in our neighborhood. Black people had guns, but only because we had no other choice. Black people had to arm themselves after the 1877 Hayes Tilden compromise in which the Republican Rutherford Hayes was handed the presidency under the condition, remember, the Republicans were supposed to be the good guys in those days, OK, under the condition that he would draw all federal troops from the south. And so black people were effectively informed that they were on their own from then on, from 1877 on. This is the period that witnessed the emergence of official structures of white supremacy that did not begin to come down until the resistance of the mid-20th century freedom movement.

Just as sediments of slavery are still with us, most dramatically represented by the country’s incarceration practices and by the racism of the death penalty. The vestiges of an era where racist violence was the norm and was condoned by officials from local governments to Washington are still haunting us. We know the names of young black and brown people who have been killed by the police or by vigilantes. We know the names of Trayvon Martin in Florida, of Haditha Pendleton in Chicago who was killed shortly after having participated in the second Obama inauguration. And then of course, here in Oakland, we know the name of Oscar Grant, Oscar Grant. And I can say, that no matter how long an individual perpetrator is sent to prison in any of these cases and any others, no one can say that justice has been done. Because we know that the roots of racist violence, the roots of the violence that claimed their lives are so tightly woven into our country’s social fabric that an eye for an eye will not do it. An eye for an eye will not do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Author, activist, scholar, Angela Davis. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, knew two of the girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing 50 years ago Sunday. She spoke in Oakland Sunday night at an event organized by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, in Northeastern School of Law.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Find this story at 16 September 2013

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Tightening the Screws; Azerbaijan’s Crackdown on Civil Society and Dissent

Azerbaijan’s record on freedom of expression, assembly, and association has been on a
steady decline for some years, but it has seen a dramatic deterioration since mid-2012.
Since then the government has been engaged in a concerted effort to curtail opposition
political activity, punish public allegations of corruption and other criticism of government
practices, and exercise greater control over nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It has
done so by arresting and imprisoning dozens of political activists on bogus charges,
adopting restrictive legislative amendments, consistently breaking up public
demonstrations in the capital, and failing in its duty to investigate and punish those
responsible for violent attacks and smear campaigns against critical journalists.
The crackdown started in response to youth groups’ attempts to organize protests in Baku
soon after the uprisings broke out in the Middle East and North Africa in early 2011. It
intensified in mid-2012, apparently in anticipation of the October 2013 presidential
elections.
This report, based on more than 100 interviews, documents the cases of 39 individuals
detained, charged, convicted, and/or harassed in the 18 months from February 2012 to
August 2013. The government of Azerbaijan has for many years used bogus charges to
imprison some of its critics and has a long record of dispersing – often violently – peaceful
public protests and arresting protesters. However, the sheer number of arrests, the
adoption of harsher laws, and extensive government efforts to stop and prevent peaceful
public protests indicate a new concerted government effort to curtail political and civic
activism in the country.
Arrest and Imprisonment
Individuals arrested and imprisoned have included several high-ranking members of
opposition political parties, government critics who frequently blog or have large
followings on social media, and people who have been consistently involved in political
protests in Azerbaijan, which have increased since the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East
and North Africa.
TIGHTENING THE SCREWS 2
Activists in youth wings of political parties and the youth opposition movement NIDA have
been particular targets. NIDA, which means “exclamation mark” in Azeri, was founded in
2010 and campaigns for democratic reforms and the rule of law in Azerbaijan. From March
7 to April 1, 2013, police arrested seven NIDA members, claiming they were involved in an
alleged plan to instigate violence at a peaceful protest. Another NIDA board member and
two other youth activists were arrested on misdemeanor charges and had their heads
forcefully shaven while they served their brief jail terms. All are active Facebook and
Twitter users who frequently posted criticism about alleged government corruption and
human rights abuses.
Others who have been arrested or imprisoned include at least six journalists, two human
rights defenders who had worked on getting assistance to flood victims, one defender who
documented abuse in police custody, and a lawyer who tried to secure adequate
compensation for people forcibly evicted from their homes.
Bogus Charges and Other Due Process Irregularities
The authorities have used a range of misdemeanor and trumped-up criminal charges
against these activists, including narcotics and weapons possession charges, hooliganism,
incitement, and even treason. In many of the cases described in this report, Human Rights
Watch documented numerous irregularities as well as due process and other violations
that have marred the investigations and legal proceedings against the victims. Authorities
have in many cases denied defendants’ access to lawyers of their own choosing whilst in
detention. Courts have ordered defendants to be held on remand despite the absence of
any evidence justifying the need for pretrial detention. In 17 cases documented here, the
authorities did not adequately – if at all – investigate credible allegations of beatings,
threats, and other abuses.
In a vivid example of this, two days after the arrests of the first three NIDA members, nearly
all Azerbaijani television channels, including the state channel and the public broadcaster,
broadcast a police video of two of them allegedly confessing to a plan to use Molotov
cocktails at a street protest. The televised statements had been made while the activists
were in custody without access to their lawyers, and the statements gave the impression of
being coached, raising fears that the activists were coerced or threatened in order to give
3 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2013
false confessions. Yet the police did not effectively investigate allegations by several of the
detained NIDA activists that they were beaten or otherwise ill-treated in custody.
The Azerbaijani government also has a longstanding practice of pressing bogus drugs
charges against its critics, and it has used this method in the current crackdown. From May
2012 to May 2013 at least six government critics were arrested on charges of possession of
narcotics. In these cases, the defendants’ lawyers were not present during the searches
and could not access their clients for several days following their arrest. Furthermore,
during interrogations several of the men were questioned primarily about their political
activities rather than the allegations of possession of narcotics, further highlighting the
political nature of their prosecution.
Targeting of Journalists and Attacks on Freedom of Expression
State antagonism toward independent and opposition media has been a serious problem
in Azerbaijan for many years. In the past six years dozens of journalists have been
prosecuted and imprisoned or fined on defamation and other charges. Police and
sometimes unidentified assailants physically attacked journalists with impunity. In 2012
the authorities released several journalists who had been wrongfully imprisoned, and
there has been a sharp decline in criminal defamation suits pursued by the authorities.
However, since January 2013 at least six more journalists have been handed prison
sentences on spurious charges in apparent retaliation for doing their job of engaging in
critical and investigative journalism. We documented four cases taking place in February,
March, and April 2013 alone in which threats, smear campaigns, and violent attacks clearly
sought to silence critical journalists and a writer.
Since at least 2011 the Azerbaijani government has committed to decriminalize libel, a
promise for which it has received not insignificant praise. However, in May 2013 the
parliament of Azerbaijan expanded the definition of criminal slander and insult to
specifically include content “publicly expressed in internet resources.”
Targeting of NGOs
The crackdown has also affected NGOs. Azerbaijan has a large and vibrant community of
NGOs devoted to such public policy issues as human rights, corruption, democracy
promotion, revenue transparency, rule of law, ethnic minorities, and religious freedom.
TIGHTENING THE SCREWS 4
Legislative amendments adopted in February 2013, however, make it impossible for
unregistered groups to legally receive grants and donations. In recent years the authorities’
refusal to register several human rights groups and their closure and harassment of
several others demonstrates the government’s determination to interfere with NGOs in
order to restrict controversial work or criticism of the government.
The amendments also increased by fivefold fines for NGOs that receive funding from a
donor without concluding a grant agreement and registering it with the Ministry of Justice.
The amendments give the government greater latitude to exercise control over registered
groups while at the same time significantly restricting the ability of unregistered groups to
receive donations and grants. Human Rights Watch is concerned that the cumulative effect
of these factors will be to marginalize the activities of organizations that are outspoken,
challenge government policies, and/or work on controversial issues.
Restrictions on Freedom of Assembly
Another manifestation of the government’s crackdown has been severe limitations on
freedom of assembly. The Baku municipal authorities have implemented a blanket ban on
all opposition demonstrations in the city center since early 2006. The authorities have
broken up unsanctioned ones – often with violence – and have arrested and imprisoned
peaceful protestors, organizers, and participants. Our research shows that the
misdemeanor trials of those charged for involvement in unsanctioned protests are
perfunctory. In an effort to further limit the right to assembly, in November 2012 and May
2013 parliament adopted amendments to laws increasing by more than hundredfold the
fines for participating in and organizing unauthorized protests. Other amendments
increased the maximum jail sentence for minor public order offenses often used to
incarcerate protesters from 15 to 60 days.
What Should be Done?
The government of Azerbaijan should take immediate steps to ensure the release of
political activists, journalists, human rights defenders, and other civil society activists
held on politically motivated charges and end the use of trumped-up or spurious charges
to prosecute government critics.
5 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2013
The authorities should conduct prompt, thorough, impartial, and effective investigations to
end impunity for violence and threats of violence against journalists. The investigations
should be capable of leading to prosecutions of the assailants, as required under
Azerbaijan’s international obligations.
The government should also abolish criminal defamation laws, allow peaceful assemblies,
and repeal legislative changes establishing harsher penalties for the participants and
organizers of unsanctioned, peaceful protests.
The government should also take immediate steps to end any undue interference with the
freedom of the Azerbaijani people to form associations and revise the NGO law in line with
the recommendations made by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, particularly
ensuring that overly complicated registration requirements do not create undue obstacles
to freedom of association.
Under international law, and as a state party to both the European Convention on Human
Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Azerbaijani
government has specific legal obligations to protect the rights to freedom of expression,
assembly, and association. International human rights law recognizes those freedoms as
fundamental human rights, essential for both the effective functioning of a democratic
society and the protection of individual dignity. Any limitations to those rights must be
narrowly defined to serve a legitimate purpose and must be demonstrably necessary in a
democratic society. Furthermore, the European Court of Human Rights has consistently
made clear, including through four rulings against the government of Azerbaijan, that the
right “to form a legal entity in order to act collectively in a field of mutual interest is one of
the most important aspects of the right to freedom of association, without which that right
would be deprived of any meaning.”
For many years, and particularly since Azerbaijan became a member of the Council of
Europe in 2001, it has been receiving international assistance from multilateral and
bilateral donors, including the Council of Europe, the European Union, the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the United States, to meet its commitments on
freedom of expression, association, and assembly. While Azerbaijan’s international
partners have been critical of Baku’s serious shortcomings in meeting its commitments,
the criticism appears to have had little impact on these actors’ relationships with the
government, perhaps because most actors prioritize the country’s geostrategic importance
and hydrocarbon resources in their relations with it. Azerbaijan’s international partners
should set clear benchmarks for improvements on human rights if the international
community is to succeed in persuading Baku to respect its commitments under freedom of
expression, association, and assembly and should be prepared to impose concrete policy
consequences should those expectations not be met.

Find this story at 9 September 2013

© 2013 Human Rights Watch

 

 

US stops jailed activist Barrett Brown from discussing leaks prosecution

Federal court order prohibits Brown from talking to the media in what critics say is latest in crackdown on investigative journalism

Brown’s lawyer says the gagging order is a breach of Brown’s first amendment rights. Photograph: Nikki Loehr

A federal court in Dallas, Texas has imposed a gag order on the jailed activist-journalist Barrett Brown and his legal team that prevents them from talking to the media about his prosecution in which he faces up to 100 years in prison for alleged offences relating to his work exposing online surveillance.

The court order, imposed by the district court for the northern district of Texas at the request of the US government, prohibits the defendant and his defence team, as well as prosecutors, from making “any statement to members of any television, radio, newspaper, magazine, internet (including, but not limited to, bloggers), or other media organization about this case, other than matters of public interest.”

It goes on to warn Brown and his lawyers that “no person covered by this order shall circumvent its effect by actions that indirectly, but deliberately, bring about a violation of this order”.

According to Dell Cameron of Vice magazine, who attended the hearing, the government argued that the gag order was needed in order to protect Brown from prejudicing his right to a fair trial by making comments to reporters.

But media observers seen the hearing in the opposite light: as the latest in a succession of prosecutorial moves under the Obama administration to crack-down on investigative journalism, official leaking, hacking and online activism.

Brown’s lead defence attorney, Ahmed Ghappour, has countered in court filings, the most recent of which was lodged with the court Wednesday, that the government’s request for a gag order is unfounded as it is based on false accusations and misrepresentations.

The lawyer says the gagging order is a breach of Brown’s first amendment rights as an author who continues to write from his prison cell on issues unconnected to his own case for the Guardian and other media outlets.

In his memo to the court for today’s hearing, Ghappour writes that Brown’s July article for the Guardian “contains no statements whatsoever about this trial, the charges underlying the indictment, the alleged acts underlying the three indictments against Mr Brown, or even facts arguably related to this prosecution.”

The gag order does give Brown some room to carry on his journalistic work from prison. It says that he will be allowed to continue publishing articles on topics “not related to the counts on which he stands indicted”.

Following the imposition of the order, Ghappour told the Guardian: “The defense’s overriding concern is that Mr Brown continue to be able to exercise his first amendment right as a journalist. The order preserves that ability.”

The lawyer adds that since the current defence team took over in May, Brown has made only three statements to the media, two of which where articles that did not concern his trial while the third ran no risk of tainting the jury pool. “Defendant believes that a gag order is unwarranted because there is no substantial, or even reasonable, likelihood of prejudice to a fair trial based on statements made by defendant or his counsel since May 1, 2013.”

Brown, 32, was arrested in Dallas on 12 September last year and has been in prison ever since, charged with 17 counts that include threatening a federal agent, concealing evidence and disseminating stolen information. He faces a possible maximum sentence of 100 years in custody.

Before his arrest, Brown became known as a specialist writer on the US government’s use of private military contractors and cybersecurity firms to conduct online snooping on the public. He was regularly quoted by the media as an expert on Anonymous, the loose affiliation of hackers that caused headaches for the US government and several corporate giants, and was frequently referred to as the group’s spokesperson, though he says the connection was overblown.

In 2011, through the research site he set up called Project PM, he investigated thousands of emails that had been hacked by Anonymous from the computer system of a private security firm, HB Gary Federal. His work helped to reveal that the firm had proposed a dark arts effort to besmirch the reputations of WikiLeaks supporters and prominent liberal journalists and activists including the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

In 2012, Brown similarly pored over millions of emails hacked by Anonymous from the private intelligence company Stratfor. It was during his work on the Stratfor hack that Brown committed his most serious offence, according to US prosecutors – he posted a link in a chat room that connected users to Stratfor documents that had been released online.

The released documents included a list of email addresses and credit card numbers belonging to Stratfor subscribers. For posting that link, Brown is accused of disseminating stolen information – a charge with media commentators have warned criminalises the very act of linking.

As Geoffrey King, Internet Advocacy Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, has put it, the Barrett Brown case “could criminalize the routine journalistic practice of linking to documents publicly available on the internet, which would seem to be protected by the first amendment to the US constitution under current doctrine”.

In its motion to the Dallas district court, US prosecutors accuse Brown and his associates of having “solicited the services of the media or media-types to discuss his case” and of continuing to “manipulate the public through press and social media comments”.

It further accuses Ghappour of “co-ordinating” and “approving” the use of the media, and alleges that between them they have spread “gross fabrications and substantially false recitations of facts and law which may harm both the government and the defence during jury selection”.

But Ghappour in his legal response has pointed out that several of the specific accusations raised by the government are inaccurate. Prosecutors refer to an article in the Guardian by Greenwald published on 21 March 2013 based partly on an interview between the journalist and Brown, yet as Ghappour points out that piece was posted on the Guardian website before the accused’s current legal team had been appointed.

Under his legal advice, Ghappour writes, Brown has maintained “radio silence” over his case and has given no further interviews, thus negating the government’s case for a gagging order.

Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 September 2013 22.50 BST

Find this story at 4 September 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years in Jail; But no one can figure out what law he broke. Introducing America’s least likely political prisoner

The mid-June sun is setting on the Mansfield jail near Dallas when Barrett Brown, the former public face of Anonymous, shuffles into the visitors hall wearing a jumpsuit of blazing orange. Once the nattiest anarchist around, Brown now looks like every other inmate in the overcrowded North Texas facility, down to his state-issued faux-Crocs, the color of candy corn.

Who Are America’s New Political Prisoners?

Brown sits down across from his co-counsel, a young civil-liberties lawyer named Ahmed Ghappour, and raises a triumphant fist holding several sheets of notebook paper. “Penned it out,” he says. “After 10 months, I’m finally getting the hang of these archaic tools.” He hands the article, titled “The Cyber-Intelligence Complex and Its Useful Idiots,” to his lawyer with instructions to send it to his editor at The Guardian. Brown used to write for the British daily, but since he’s been in prison, it’s written about him and his strange legal ordeal that has had him locked up for nearly a year while he awaits trial next month. Should he be found guilty of all the charges the federal government is bringing against him – 17 counts, ranging from obstruction of justice to threatening a federal officer to identity fraud – he’ll face more than 100 years in prison.

Given the serious nature of his predicament, Brown, 32, seems shockingly relaxed. “I’m not worried or panicked,” he says. “It’s not even clear to me that I’ve committed a crime.” He describes his time here as a break from the drug-fueled mania of his prior life, a sort of digital and chemical fast in which he’s kicked opiates and indulged his pre-cyber whims – hours spent on the role-playing game GURPS and tearing through the prison’s collection of what he calls “English manor-house literature.”

Brown has been called many things during his brief public career – satirist, journalist, author, Anonymous spokesman, atheist, “moral fag,” “fame whore,” scourge of the national surveillance state. His commitment to investigating the murky networks that make up America’s post-9/11 intelligence establishment set in motion the chain of events that culminated in a guns-drawn raid of his Dallas apartment last September. “For a long time, the one thing I was happy not to see in here was a computer,” says Brown. “It appears as though the Internet has gotten me into some trouble.”

Encountering Barrett Brown’s story in passing, it is tempting to group him with other Anonymous associates who have popped up in the news for cutting pleas and changing sides. Brown’s case, however, is a thing apart. Although he knew some of those involved in high-profile “hacktivism,” he is no hacker. His situation is closer to the runaway prosecution that destroyed Aaron Swartz, the programmer-activist who committed suicide in the face of criminal charges similar to those now being leveled at Brown. But unlike Swartz, who illegally downloaded a large cache of academic articles, Brown never broke into a server; he never even leaked a document. His primary laptop, sought in two armed FBI raids, was a miniature Sony netbook that he used for legal communication, research and an obscene amount of video-game playing. The most serious charges against him relate not to hacking or theft, but to copying and pasting a link to data that had been hacked and released by others.

“What is most concerning about Barrett’s case is the disconnect between his conduct and the charged crime,” says Ghappour. “He copy-pasted a publicly available link containing publicly available data that he was researching in his capacity as a journalist. The charges require twisting the relevant statutes beyond recognition and have serious implications for journalists as well as academics. Who’s allowed to look at document dumps?”

Brown’s case is a bellwether for press freedoms in the new century, where hacks and leaks provide some of our only glimpses into the technologies and policies of an increasingly privatized national security-and-surveillance state. What Brown did through his organization Project PM was attempt to expand these peepholes. He did this by leading group investigations into the world of private intelligence and cybersecurity contracting, a $56 billion industry that consumes 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget.

Meet Jacob Applelaum, the American Wikileaks Hacker

“Barrett was an investigative journalist who was merely doing his professional duty,” says Christophe Deloire of Reporters Without Borders. “The sentence that he is facing is absurd and dangerous.”

B
rown grew up in the affluent North Dallas neighborhood of Preston Hollow, where, following his parents’ divorce, he lived with his New Age mother. Karen Lancaster always believed her only son was special – he once wrote that she called him “an indigo child with an alien soul.” Among her house rules was that mother and son meditate together daily. She instructed him in the predictions of Nostradamus and made sure he kept a dream journal for the purpose, as Brown described it, “of helping him divine the future by way of my external connection to the collective unconscious.” (For her part, Brown’s mother says she was progressive, but not “New Age”, and that her son’s comments were made in jest.)

The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond, Enemy of the State

A precocious pre-adolescent reader and writer, Brown produced a newspaper on his family’s desktop computer while in elementary school. When he started writing for the student paper at his private high school in the mid-Nineties, he quickly clashed with the paper’s censors over his right to criticize the administration. “Barrett always challenged authority, even as a kid, and anytime you go up against authority, you’re going to get in trouble,” says Brown’s father, Robert. “You could sort of always see this coming.”

By the time he reached high school, Brown had discovered Ayn Rand and declared himself an atheist. He founded an Objectivist Society at school and distinguished himself from other Randians by placing second out of 5,000 entrants in a national Ayn Rand essay contest. (Brown now expresses regret over this.) By all accounts, Brown hated everything about organized education, preferring to follow his own curricula and chat up girls on the bulletin-board systems of a still-embryonic Internet.

After his sophomore year, Brown told his parents he wasn’t going back. He signed up for online courses and spent his junior year in Tanzania with his father, a Maserati-driving conservative, safari hunter and serial entrepreneur who was trying to launch a hardwood-harvesting business. “Barrett loved living in Africa,” says his father. “He preferred adventure to being in school with his peers. We weren’t far from the embassy that was bombed that year.”

Brown returned to the U.S. and in 2000 joined some of his childhood friends in Austin, where he spent two semesters taking writing classes at the University of Texas. After dropping out, he spent a summer doing what one friend calls a “heroic” amount of Ecstasy and acid before settling into the charmed life of a pre-crisis Austin slacker – working part-time, smoking pot and paying cheap rent in a series of group houses with enormous porches. Brown’s roommates remember his rooms as being strewn with leaning towers of books and magazines – he especially liked Gore Vidal, P.J. O’Rourke and Hunter S. Thompson – but say he was not especially political. “After 9/11 and Iraq, there were a lot of protests in Austin,” says Ian Holmes, a childhood friend of Brown’s. “I don’t remember him participating in it or being extra vocal, but he was against it all like everyone else.”

As Brown built up his clip book and matured as a writer, his ambitions began to outgrow Austin. In 2007, Brown moved to Brooklyn with a group of old friends that called itself “the Texadus.” Their Bushwick apartment emerged as a hub for Lone Star State refugees who liked to get high, crush beers and play video games. “People were always hanging out and coming and going,” says Caleb Pritchard, a childhood friend of Brown’s who lived with him in Austin and Brooklyn. Among the apartment’s large cast of characters were a crew of weed-delivery guys from Puerto Rico and Honduras who used the apartment as a daytime base of business operations. “They brought over an Xbox, bought us beer and food and played strategy games with us,” Pritchard says. “It was a good cultural exchange for a bunch of skinny white kids from Dallas.”

As virtual-world games grew increasingly sophisticated, Brown spent more time in front of his computer. But he didn’t play the games like most people. In Second Life, he linked up with a group of people known as “griefers,” the term for hackers who in the mid-00s became known for generating chaos inside video-game worlds. Socializing on the bulletin board 4chan.org, they formed the first cells of what would later become Anonymous. In the documentary We Are Legion, about the hacktivist group, Brown waxes nostalgic over his griefer period, when he’d spend entire nights “on Second Life riding around in a virtual spaceship with the words ‘faggery daggery doo’ written on it, wearing Afros, dropping virtual bombs on little villages while waving giant penises around. That was the most fun time I ever had in my life.”

When everyone else went out to the bars, Brown stayed in. Aside from video games and the odd afternoon of pick-up basketball, he also pounded out columns, diaries and blog posts for Vanity Fair, Daily Kos and McSweeney’s, as well as restaurant reviews and essays for weeklies like New York Press and The Onion’s A.V. Club. Though he had some paying gigs, he published most heavily in unpaid, self-edited community forums like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post. “Barrett wasn’t really working in New York so much as getting by with the help of friends and family,” says Pritchard. Among his unpaid gigs was his work as the spokesman for the Godless Americans PAC, which led to Brown’s first TV appearance, on the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends.

In Brooklyn, Brown resumed shooting heroin, which he’d dabbled in off and on since he was 19. Over the years, doctors have diagnosed him with ADHD and depression. Accurate or not, the diagnoses suggest Brown was drawn to opiates for more than just the high. “When I joined him in Brooklyn in ’08, Barrett was already basically a functional junkie,” says Pritchard.

Heroin did not mellow Brown when it came to America’s pundit class. Brown’s critique made clear he didn’t want to join the journalistic establishment so much as lash it without mercy. Then, in March 2010, he announced in a blog post the goal of replacing it, of making its institutions irrelevant and rebuilding them in the image of an overly self-confident 28-year-old junkie named Barrett Brown. It was perhaps his first public manifestation of extreme self-assurance that could come off as imperious self-importance. Brown himself did not deny it, once saying, “I don’t think arrogance is something I’m in a position to attack anyone on.”

The project envisioned by Brown was a new kind of crowdsourced think tank to be “established with a handful of contributors who have been selected by virtue of intellectual honesty, proven expertise in certain topics and journalistic competence in general.” He named it Project PM, after a gang in William Gibson’s Neuromancer called the Panther Moderns.

Brown conceived his new network partly as a response to what he saw as the sad state of affairs at the two main homes for his work, Daily Kos and HuffPo. After years of vibrancy, both now suffered from “the watering-down of contributor quality,” he said. At Project PM, he assured that “below-average participants will have only very limited means by which to clutter the network.”

How Anonymous Took Down the Music Industry’s Websites

With typical cigarette-waving flourish, Brown declared, “Never has there existed such opportunity for revolution in human affairs.”

Had Project PM developed along the lines of Brown’s original vision – as a kind of exclusive, experts-only, friends-of-Barrett blogger network – it is extremely unlikely that Brown would now be in jail. Or that the FBI would have subpoenaed the company hired to secure its server, as it did in March. But Project PM ended up taking a different route.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview

T
he event that locked Brown’s path into a collision course with the federal government came on February 11th, 2010, when he posted an essay on Huffington Post that he grandiloquently titled “Anonymous, Australia and the Inevitable Fall of the NationState.”

At the time, Anonymous was in the news after some of its hackers, in an action they called Operation Titstorm, brought down Australian government servers in retaliation for the government’s attempt to block certain kinds of niche pornography. For Brown, Titstorm was a world-historic game-changer, a portent of an age in which citizens could successfully challenge state power on their laptops and neutralize government propaganda and censorship.

In the comically aggrandizing tone that had become his trademark, Brown concluded, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and underreported social developments to have occurred in decades.”

Among those taken by Brown’s interpretation of Titstorm was Gregg Housh, a Boston Web designer and early Anonymous associate, who had emerged as a sort of quasi-spokesman for the group. Through Housh, Brown gained entrance to the online inner sanctums of the hackers he thought were turning history on its head. Housh, who was starting to feel burned out from fielding the barrage of international media requests, saw Brown as someone who could step in and talk to reporters for Anonymous.

“Barrett ‘got it’ in a way few journalists did,” says Housh. “Soon, he was one of us, and that pretty much set the course for everything that happened next.”

Brown always denied holding any official capacity as the spokesman of Anonymous, maintaining such a thing was not even possible given the amorphous nature of the group. Yet he embraced the media role with relish, sometimes using the royal “we” during interviews. In March 2011, Brown described himself to a visiting NBC News crew as a “senior strategist” for Anonymous. He also, along with Housh, began writing a book about the group, detailing the transformation of Anonymous from a community of amoral videogame-playing punks into an ethical crusade, assisting street protests across the globe during the Arab Spring.

From the beginning, Brown’s public role was a subject of internal controversy. A minority dismissed and attacked him as a preening “name fag” – Anonymous slang for people who use their real names and speak to the press. Others were more bothered that Brown was a “moral fag,” the term used by unrepentant griefers to describe the new generation of hacktivists who began flocking to the Anonymous banner in 2008. In We Are Legion, Brown makes his allegiance clear, hailing the hacktivists for turning a “nihilist, ridiculous group” into a “force for good.”

Yet something of the old griefer remained in Brown even after his and the group’s politicization process had converged to take on the world of intelligence outsourcing. “He was just trolling the hell out of these corporate-surveillance guys,” says Joe Fionda, a New York activist who assisted Brown in his investigations. “Not just doing the serious research work no one else was doing – getting tax files and all that – but calling them at their homes to introduce himself, sometimes straight up pranking them. He’s legit funny and sees the humor and the absurd in everything.”

Another former colleague, a Boston Web developer and activist named Lauren Pespisa, shared Brown’s love of prank calls: “Sometimes we’d drink and prank-call lobbyists for fun. We went after this one group, Qorvis, because they were helping the kingdom of Bahrain handle its image when they were shooting people. So we’d call them up and ‘dragon shout’ at them,” she says, referring to a sound effect in one of Brown’s favorite video games, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

By combining the two ethos of Anonymous, Brown won over more people than he alienated. Part of his appeal was the act of his drily affected pseudo-aristocratic-asshole persona, which he exaggerated during media appearances. He preferred a corduroy sports jacket to the Guy Fawkes mask that Anonymous members favor. A typical portrait showed Brown’s arm slung over a chair, a Marlboro dangling off his bottom lip and a stuffed bobcat on the wall behind him. He was oth loved and hated for being one of the more colorful characters found in the Internet Relay Chat rooms where hackers gathered. He famously once conducted a strategy session while drinking red wine in a bubble bath.

“Barrett became a bit like the court jester of Anonymous,” says Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University who has written about the network. “His behavior was legendary because he was the ethical foil. Anonymous isn’t just for hackers. People like Barrett Brown can thrive: the organizer, the media-maker, the spectacle-maker.”

W
hen Brown met Housh, he was nearing the end of his three-year stint in Brooklyn. In the spring of 2010, Brown called his parents and told them he had a heroin problem. At their urging, he returned to Dallas and began an outpatient treatment that included the heroin replacement Suboxone. It was from a tiny Dallas apartment that Brown deepened his involvement with Anonymous. Since most of his friends lived in Austin, his new social life consisted of the IRC rooms populated by hacktivists. It was a world of nonstop, petty cyberintrigue, which to outsiders can appear like a hellish fusion of The Hollywood Squares, WarGames and Degrassi Junior High.

Bradley Manning Explains His Motives

Pritchard remembers the first time Brown crashed on his couch in Austin after his return to Dallas. “I’d wake up, and he’d be online having conversations with these kids on Skype or something,” he says. “Barrett would say, ‘I know what you’re doing!’ The other guy would be stroking his chin like he’s Dr. Claw, saying, ‘No, I know what you’re doing.’ It was nonstop cyberwar, with these dorks just dorking it out with each other. It seemed like a bunch of kids trolling each other.”

Still, Pritchard appreciated that beneath the dorkery, Brown was involved in serious business. This was Brown’s first year as an unofficial spokesman for Anonymous, and it was eventful. The hackers were aiding the uprisings of the Arab Spring, and assaulted PayPal and credit-card companies in retaliation for their refusal to process donations to WikiLeaks. This latter action, called Operation PayBack, earned the attention of the Justice Department. In the summer of 2011, the FBI issued 35 search warrants and arrested 14 suspected hackers.

The Trials of Bradley Manning

By the time of the arrests, Brown’s focus had settled squarely on the nexus between government agencies, private intelligence firms and the information-security industry – known as InfoSec – contracted to build programs and technologies of surveillance, disruption and control that Brown suspected were in many cases unconstitutional. What’s more, he was as bratty as ever about it. He phoned CEOs and flacks at their homes and called them liars. He boasted about bringing the whole system down. As the first raids and arrests took place following Operation PayBack, some observers of Brown’s antics began to suspect that the court jester of Anonymous was not a very safe thing to be.

“You could just tell it was going to end badly,” says an Anonymous member and veteran hacker. “When he really started making noise about going after these intel-contracting companies, I was like, ‘You’re going to get locked up, kid.'”

A
fter Operation Payback, Anonymous was on the radar of every private security firm looking to build a quick reputation. In the office of Aaron Barr, CEO of a struggling digital-security contractor called HBGary Federal, it was the biggest thing on the radar. Barr was convinced that taking down Anonymous before it struck again was a fast track to industry juice and massive contracts. In February 2011, he bragged to The Financial Times about the supersecret sleuthing techniques he had developed to get the goods on Anonymous. He claimed to know the identities of the group’s leaders. Implicit in Barr’s comments was the possibility of federal raids on those identified.

Partly to avoid that outcome, and partly out of curiosity, an Anonymous cell hacked HBGary’s servers. They discovered that Barr’s techniques involved hanging out on major social-media sites and compiling lists of mostly innocent people. It wasn’t the only example of his staggering miscalculation: Within minutes, the hackers easily got around the firm’s security defenses, ransacking company servers, wiping Barr’s personal tablet and absconding with 70,000 internal e-mails. Stephen Colbert devoted a segment to the fiasco, based around the image of Barr sticking his penis in a hornets’ nest.

Once the hackers who broke into HBGary’s servers discovered that Barr was basically a clown, they abandoned pursuit. “There were tens of thousands of e-mails and no one wanted to go through them,” says an Anonymous associate who observed the HBGary hack. “Everyone was like, ‘We’re not even going to dump these, because there’s no point.'”

Brown disagreed. When the hackers posted the e-mails on a BitTorrent site, he used Project PM to organize the painstaking work of collating and connecting the dots to see what picture emerged.

“Nobody was reading more than a couple of the e-mails before getting bored,” says the Anonymous associate. “But Barrett has this strangely addictive and journalistic kind of mind, so he could stare at those e-mails for 10 hours. He’d be sitting alone in the HBGary channel, yelling at everyone, ‘You’ve got to pay attention! Look at the crap I found!'” Brown quickly drew in some 100 volunteers to help him trawl through and make sense of the e-mails.

The HBGary cache offered one of the fullest looks ever at how corporate-state partnerships were targeting groups they considered subversive or inimical to the interests of corporate America. The projects under consideration at HBGary ranged from cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns targeting civic groups and journalists to Weird Science-supermodel avatars built to infiltrate and disrupt left-wing and anarchist networks.

Project PM volunteer investigator Joe Fionda remembers the disturbing thrill of uncovering HBGary’s use of a Maxim pinup to create online personas designed to spy for corporate and government clients. “I couldn’t believe how much crazy shit they were up to,” Fionda says. “My brain still feels like it’s going to explode.”

The biggest fish flopping in Brown’s net was the story of a cluster of contractors known as Team Themis. The origins of Team Themis dated to Bank of America’s alarm over Julian Assange’s 2010 claim to possess documents that “could take down a bank or two.” The Department of Justice recommended Bank of America retain the services of the white-shoe D.C. law firm Hunton & Williams and the high-­powered intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. On behalf of Bank of America, Hunton & Williams turned to the large and growing world of InfoSec subcontractors to come up with a plan, settling on HBGary and two dataintelligence shops, Berico Technologies and Palantir Technologies.

The Themis three were also preparing a proposal for Hunton & Williams on behalf of another client, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The leaked HBGary documents revealed that Themis was exploring ways of discrediting and disrupting the activities of organized labor and its allies for the Chamber. The potential money at stake in these contracts was considerable. According to Wired, the trio proposed that the Chamber create a $2-milliona-month sort of cyber special-forces team “of the kind developed and utilized by the Joint Special Operations Command.” They also suggested targeting a range of left-of-center organizations, including the SEIU, watchdog groups like U.S. Chamber Watch, and the Center for American Progress. (The Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America have denied ever hiring Team Themis or having any knowledge of the proposals.)

In pursuit of the Chamber and Bank of America contracts, the Themis three devised multipronged campaigns amounting to a private-sector information-age COINTELPRO, the FBI’s program to infiltrate and undermine “subversive” groups between 1956 and 1971. Among the The mis ideas presented to Hunton & Williams: “Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.”

The revelations represented a triumph for Brown and his wiki. A group of Democratic congressmen asked four Republican committee chairs to hold hearings on the “deeply troubling” question of whether “tactics developed for use against terrorists may have been unleashed illegally against American citizens.” But the calls for investigation went nowhere. The lack of outrage in Washington or on influential editorial pages didn’t shock Brown, who had long ago lost hope in the politicians and pundits who are “clearly intent on killing off even this belated scrutiny into the invisible empire that so thoroughly scrutinizes us – at our own expense and to unknown ends.”

It was Brown’s finest moment, but his relationship with Anonymous was rapidly deteriorating. By May 2011, Brown had begun turning on the network. “There’s little quality control in a movement like [Anonymous],” Brown told an interviewer. “You attract a lot of people whose interest is in fucking with video-game companies.”

Brown’s haughty dismissal of the new crop of hacktivists was not a feeling shared by the FBI. The government continued to see Anonymous as a major and growing threat. And in the summer of 2011, it acquired a key piece in its operation to destroy the network. On the night of June 7th, four months after the HBGary hack, two federal agents visited the Jacob Riis publichousing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and introduced themselves to a 27-year-old unemployed hacker named Hector Monsegur, known inside Anonymous as “Sabu.” As a leader of an Anonymous offshoot called Lulzsec, he had hacked a number of state and corporate servers. In early 2011, he made some rookie errors that led the FBI to his door: Facing the prospect of being indicted on 12 counts of criminal conspiracy, Sabu rolled over on his old hacker associates. He signed a cooperation agreement and began feeding the FBI information on Anonymous plots. The biggest of these involved a private global intelligence contractor located in Barrett Brown’s backyard, the Austin-based Stratfor.

I
n early December 2011, a young Chicago Anon named Jeremy Hammond cracked Stratfor’s server and downloaded some 5 million internal documents. With the apparent blessing and supervision of the FBI, Sabu provided the server for Hammond to store the docs. Hammond then proceeded to release them to the public. Sifting through the data dump would require a massive coordinated effort of exactly the kind Project PM had been training for. Brown and his dedicated volunteers attacked the mountains of e-mails. “We had between 30 and 50 people involved, usually 15 at a time,” says Lauren Pespisa, the Boston Project PM volunteer who now helps organize Brown’s legaldefense fund.

Did the Mainstream Media Fail Bradley Manning?

After six months of work, Brown would discover what he considered the fattest spider amid the miles of Stratfor web: a San Diego-based cybersecurity firm called Cubic. As Brown followed the strings, he discovered links between Cubic and a data-mining contractor known as TrapWire, which had ties to CIA vets. Brown thought that he had stumbled on a major find illuminating new technologies for spying and surveillance, but the media pickup was not what Brown had hoped. Major dailies shrugged off the story, and Gawker and Slate poured cold water on his alarm, calling it “outlandish.” Brown responded to the criticism with a rambling, connect-the-conspiracy-dots YouTube video.

It wasn’t just gossip sites that viewed Brown’s reading of the Stratfor docs with a skeptical eye. Even sympathetic students of intelligence contracting urged caution about interpreting the TrapWire materials. “I applaud anyone digging into this stuff, but you can’t really draw conclusions from what these contractors say in these e-mails because they’re bragging and they’re trying to land business,” says Tim Shorrock, whose 2008 book Spies for Hire first exposed the scope of the intelligence-contracting industry. “Some of the quote-unquote intelligence that Stratfor was reporting on was ludicrous. Why would an intelligence agency buy this stuff?”

WikiLeaks Stratfor Emails: A Secret Indictment Against Julian Assange?

Meanwhile, deeply buried in the TrapWire debate was the fact that included in the Stratfor docs were the credit-card numbers of 5,000 Stratfor clients. Brown likely did not give the numbers a second thought. But it’s these numbers that form the most serious charges against Brown. The government alleges that when Brown pasted a link in a chat room to the alreadyleaked documents, he was intentionally “transferring” data for the purpose of credit-card and identity fraud.

“If the Pentagon Papers included creditcard info, then would The New York Times have been barred from researching them?” says Brown’s co-counsel Ghappour. “There is nothing to indicate Barrett wanted to profit from this information, or that he ever had the information in his possession. He was openly critical of such motives and disapproved of hacking for the sake of it. This was a big part of his rift with Anonymous – why he was considered a ‘moral fag’ by some.”

The FBI raided Brown’s Dallas apartment on the morning of March 6th, 2012, three months after the Stratfor hack, and one day after Jeremy Hammond was arrested in Chicago. More than a dozen feds led by agent Robert Smith knocked down the door with warrants for Brown’s computers and seized his Xbox. Brown was staying at his mother’s house nearby. Later that morning, the agents appeared at the home of Brown’s mother with a second warrant. They found his laptop in a kitchen cabinet, and she was later charged with obstruction. Brown, who was in the shower preparing for a TV interview when the agents arrived, was not arrested. The agents left with his laptop.

Among hacktivists, theories differ on the motive behind the FBI action. As one of the few public figures associated with Anonymous, Brown made a soft target with a potentially very valuable hard drive or two. Some say it was meant as a warning; others say Brown had simply pissed off too many powerful people, or was getting too close to something big.

Then there is the theory, advanced by Gregg Housh, that Brown and Hammond were targeted out of frustration with a blown sting against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. After looking into the Stratfor hack, Housh believes that the FBI allowed the hack to proceed not in order to arrest Hammond but Assange. “The idea was to have Sabu sell the stolen Stratfor material to Assange,” says Housh. “This would give them a concrete charge that he had knowingly bought stolen material to distribute on WikiLeaks.”

Housh believes Hammond got wind of Sabu’s plan to sell the documents to Assange and dumped them before the transaction could take place. While there is no proof of contact between Sabu and Assange, Sabu reportedly communicated with Sigurdur Thordarson, a teenage Icelandic WikiLeaks volunteer and an FBI informant.

“Hammond had no idea what he’d done,” says Housh. “The FBI were a day away from having evidence against Assange, and Hammond screwed it up for them. That’s why they went after him so hard.”

Yet Hammond, who led the Stratfor hack, faced only 30 years before cutting a plea deal for 10. Why is Brown facing 105?

F
ollowing the March raid, Brown continued his investigations and planned for the future of Project PM. 2012 was going to be a big year. He had a new nucleus of friends and colleagues in Boston, where he was going to move and live in an activist group house. His investigations increasingly took place outside the Anonymous network. Brown had new allies in groups like Telecomix, a collective that operated its own crowdsourcing investigations into the cybersurveillance industry. That summer, he visited New York for the Hackers on Planet Earth conference, an annual gathering of hackers and activists, where he met a few of his Project PM colleagues offline for the first time. “I remember he was wearing a full suit in this crazy heat, sweating profusely in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania,” says Fionda. “He was still struggling with kicking heroin, he had tremors and looked like he was in a lot of pain. But he was full of energy. He was telling everyone, ‘We’re going to the center of the Earth with this story!'”

But Brown’s mental state seemed to deteriorate during the summer of 2012. Having battled depression throughout his life, he had gone off his meds and was simultaneously struggling with cold-turkey breaks from Suboxone for heroin withdrawal. His YouTube channel documents the effects. In August, Brown posted a clip that showed him skeet-shooting over the words of Caligula’s lament: “If only all of Rome had just one neck.” In early September, as Brown planned his move to Boston, he struggled to contain his rage at the local FBI agent Robert Smith, who had raided his mother’s home and taken his beloved Xbox.

In September, Brown uploaded a discombobulated three-part video series, the last one titled “Why I’m Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith.” In the videos, Brown struggles to maintain focus. He demands the return of his Xbox and warns that he comes from a military family that has trained him with weapons – weapons he says he’ll use to defend his home. He calls Smith a “fucking chickenshit little faggot cocksucker” before uttering the words he has since admitted were ill-considered, as well as the result of a chemically combustive mental state.

Why Shouldn’t Freedom of the Press Apply to WikiLeaks?

“Robert Smith’s life is over,” says Brown. “And when I say his life is over, I don’t say I’m going to go kill him, but I’m going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids. How do you like them apples?”

It takes a suspension of disbelief to hear a credible physical threat as defined by law. The rail-thin Brown appears a desperate, pathetic character in need of psychiatric help. A more humane FBI office might have sent a doctor rather than a car of armed agents. But the FBI didn’t send a shrink. That evening a team of armed agents stormed Brown’s apartment, threw him violently to the ground and arrested him for threatening a federal officer.

WikiLeaks Releases ‘Beat the Blockade’ Benefit CD

Over the next four months, federal grand juries issued three multicount indictments for obstruction and “access devicefraud” related to the Stratfor link. It is the last of these that concern civil-liberties activists and that could have a possible chilling effect. “One can’t apply the transfer provision of the statute to someone conducting research,” says Ghappour. “If cutting and pasting a link is the same as the transfer of the underlying data, then anyone on the Internet is prone to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.”

The FBI has shown interest in expanding that theoretical “anyone” to include Brown’s circle of volunteers. In March, the bureau went hunting for the digital fingerprints of Project PM administrators with a subpoena. The action has shaken the group’s inner circle, as it was surely intended. “It was a pretext to sow discord and fear in Barrett’s project,” says Alan Ross, a U.K. investigator for Project PM. “They were desperate to bolster their case. After the subpoena, people began to worry about being monitored. I worry about my personal safety even though I acted within the confines of the law. I worry about travel.”

Travel is one thing Brown does not have to worry about at the moment. Nor, if the government gets its way, will he have to worry about handling the media, his former specialty. In August, the prosecution requested a gag be placed on Brown and his lawyers, a move that suggests they understand the dangers of public scrutiny of the legal peculiarities of United States vs. Barrett Lancaster Brown.

Meanwhile, Brown has not joined the prison tradition of mastering the law behind bars. Rather than study up on cyberfraud statutes, he has resumed his writing on intel contractors and the pundits who defend them. “Nobody talks to me here,” Brown says of his year in jail, “but I was pretty unsociable on the outside too.” One of the hardest things about incarceration for the atheist has been contending with his cellmates’ singing of hymns. “Prison is great for reading and for thought, until they start in with their Pentecostal nonsense,” says Brown. “It ruins everything.”

His friends keep him supplied with articles and printouts, which lately have included material related to the Edward Snowden leak. Snowden gained access to information about secret NSA spying on private citizens while working for the intelligence subcontractor Booz Allen Hamilton, a company that had been on Brown’s radar long before most Americans learned of it in the wake of Snowden’s bombshells.

“This is all much bigger than me,” Brown says in the visiting room. “What matters is this.” He leans over to tap his handwritten manuscript. The pages of the essay are messy on the table, and sticking out from under the pile is the last sentence on the last page. “This is the world that we accept if we continue to avert our eyes,” it says. “And it promises to get much worse.”

This story is from the August 29th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/barrett-brown-faces-105-years-in-jail-20130905

by Alexander Zaitchik
SEPTEMBER 05, 2013

Find this story at 5 September 2013

Copyright ©2013 Rolling Stone

Five police forces investigated over alleged Stephen Lawrence smear campaign; Police fractured my arm, says ‘smear victim’

The investigation into alleged police attempts to smear the Stephen Lawrence campaign and undermine the credibility of witnesses attending the Macpherson inquiry into the black teenager’s racist murder is focusing on the activities of five forces, The Independent has learnt.

Investigators are understood to be waiting for senior officers from Avon and Somerset Constabulary and West Midlands Police to complete urgent trawls of their records in relation to possible surveillance or intelligence gathering operations carried out in Bristol and Birmingham.

The cities, alongside Bradford and Manchester, hosted regional sittings of the Macpherson Inquiry in 1998 where race relations campaigners aired a string of grievances against their local forces over stop and search and other flashpoint issues.

The former Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, Sir Norman Bettison, who is already at the centre of an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) inquiry into an alleged cover-up in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster, was referred to the watchdog this week by Police and Crime Commissioner Mark Burns-Williamson.

It followed revelations that leading anti-racism campaigner Mohammed Amran was the subject of a potentially damaging special branch report prior to his giving evidence to the inquiry in Bradford. A number of junior officers from West Yorkshire are also being investigated by the IPCC after being referred by the present Chief Constable.

Greater Manchester Police has also been referred over an internal memo suggesting intelligence was gathered on individuals or groups attending the inquiry in the city.

The cases are likely to be reviewed by Mark Ellison QC – who successfully prosecuted Gary Dobson and David Norris for Stephen’s murder in 2012 – as part of an investigation into the Metropolitan Police following claims of a smear campaign against the teenager’s family and friends made by a former undercover officer.

The inquiry will need to uncover whether the regional forces were acting on behalf of the Met, which was embroiled in one of the biggest crises in its history following the repeated failings to investigate the student’s 1993 murder. It was eventually found to be “institutionally racist” by Macpherson.

West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner Bob Jones met Chief Constable Chris Sims on Monday to discuss the issue. In a statement the force confirmed it was examining material to see whether any potentially inappropriate intelligence or surveillance activity had taken place.

A team of officers from Avon and Somerset Constabulary have now begun a second trawl of documents after the Home Secretary Theresa May ordered forces nationwide to search their records. A first hunt carried out by an assistant chief constable was said to have discovered no incriminating material. Forces have until next Wednesday to report their findings to Ms May.

Mr Amran, 37, who became the youngest ever Commissioner for Racial Equality (CRE) following his role as a peacemaker in the 1995 Bradford riots, has been told he will not know for at least two weeks what evidence was gathered against him although it is not believed he was placed under surveillance.

His lawyer, Ruth Bundey, said: “He is someone who has helped and advised the authorities in the past and it is very disconcerting for him not to know what is involved here – other than to have been told that it is ‘alarming.’”

It is unclear whether evidence allegedly gathered about Mr Amran resurfaced in a further dossier put together by West Yorkshire Police as part of its alleged attempt to prevent him being re-elected by the CRE. The dossier led Ms Bundey to pursue a successful case of racial discrimination against the force, who settled out of court in 2002.

Mr Amran told The Independent that he was repeatedly arrested after publicly questioning the policing of in Bradford’s multi-racial community.

Despite widespread concern over policing and community relations leading up to the 1995 riots, more disturbances took place in the city in the summer of 2001.

“I challenged the police openly after the 1995 riots and that created a reaction that made my life very difficult,” Mr Amran said. “The arrest I remember most vividly came when I was going to my family home and three officers grabbed me and told me I was under arrest.

“They said ‘You should not be here.’ I was letting myself into my house at the time and they said ‘drop the keys. You are under arrest.’ I sustained a hairline fracture of my arm. They just let me go. On another occasion I was dragged from my car by police. I told them who I was and they didn’t believe me.”

Ian Herbert, Jonathan Brown
Saturday, 6 July 2013

Find this story at 6 July 2013

© independent.co.uk

Dozens of undercover officers could face prosecution, says police chief

Chief constable leading investigation also says he will look at claims that Stephen Lawrence campaigners were spied on

Dozens of police officers could be put on trial for stealing the identities of dead children, and sleeping with female activists they were spying on, according to the police chief leading an inquiry into Metropolitan police undercover work against protest groups.

Mick Creedon, the chief constable of Derbyshire, also said his team would investigate claims from a police whistleblower, Peter Francis, that senior officers wanted him to spy on, and even undermine, the Stephen Lawrence campaign.

In an interview, Creedon offered a “100%” assurance the matter would be properly investigated. He said prosecutors were already being asked to consider whether criminal offences had been committed by generations of undercover operatives planted in protest groups over the past 45 years.

Earlier on Monday, David Cameron said he was “deeply concerned by revelations from Francis, a former undercover police officer who said he was asked to gather intelligence that could be used to “smear” the campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence, who was stabbed to death in a racist attack in 1993.

The prospect that police officers could be prosecuted will alarm senior officers, who have struggled to manage the fallout from the revelations

On Monday morning, the prime minister’s spokesman hinted that the government may order an independent inquiry into Francis’s revelations. Any inquiry would have to “command the family’s confidence as well as that of the public”, he said.

Creedon is already investigating two top-secret Met units: the SDS, which was disbanded in 2008, and another squad – the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) – which still operates.

He said his review was particularly focused on the role of commanding officers: “It’s looking right up the chain of command,” he said. “We have mapped, putting it bluntly, every senior officer, every commander, every deputy citizen commissioner, right up to and including home secretaries.”

The chief constable refused to be drawn on the specifics of Francis’s allegations, but he said that, if proved, they would be “not something that would sit comfortably with any police officer”.

Creedon was asked to take over the inquiry, Operation Herne, in February after it was revealed that operatives working for the two spy units had used the identities of dead children. Weeks later, he conceded that the use of dead children’s identities had been “common practice” in the SDS, and had continued in the NPOIU until around 2001.

In the interview, parts of which are being broadcast on Channel 4 on Monday night, he told the Guardian and the Dispatches programme that he was getting advice on whether dozens of undercover police who used the identities had committed criminal acts. “That is a consideration. We are getting legal advice on that,” he said.

“I am looking to operatives to explain why they did it and why they were trained to do it and how they did it.”

Keith Vaz, the MP and chair of the home affairs select committee, has already called on Scotland Yard to inform parents whose children’s identities were used.

But Creedon said it was highly unlikely he would contact the parents, because to do so would require confirming the false identities used by former operatives.

“The way the world is now, that will fizz around the internet networks instantly,” he said, adding that he saw little benefit in “raking up” the issue with parents who would otherwise remain oblivious.

He also declined to apologise to women who had been duped into relationships with police spies. But he added: “This is completely abhorrent. I use that term carefully. It should not have happened and I’ve always been clear about that. Was it routine? Was it actually part of the tactics? Was it quite deliberate and was it a way of infiltrating, or was it an occasional consequence? I don’t know the answer to that question right now.”

Creedon said prosecutors would also decide whether operatives who had sexual relationships were breaking the law.

“Well, we need to get advice from the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] about whether an undercover officer having a sexual relationship would be a criminal offence,” he said. “We’re waiting for that advice from the CPS, and it will be wrong for me to speculate.”

Asked if the officers may end up in court, he replied: “It’s a possibility, yes.”

However, he said the use by police of deception in sexual relationships needed to be understood in a wider context. “Around the country there are many people involved in sexual relationships who lie about their status,” he said. “There are many people who say they’re not married when they are married. It happens.”

Operation Herne, which is costing the Met £1.6m a year, was launched in 2011. A staff of around 30 officers – almost all of them Met employees – have been sifting through 55,000 documents and interviewing former undercover police officers and their supervisors. Four specific cases are being separately supervised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.Creedon refused to be drawn on when the inquiry would be complete but Craig Mackey, the deputy commissioner of the Met, has previously indicated it may not conclude until 2016, meaning the five-year inquiry would have cost over £7.5m.

Creedon said he did not know if the findings of his inquiry would ever be made public.

He said he was determined to “keep some balance” in his investigation: “Herne is not about castigating the 100 or so SDS officers that served over 40 years, some of whom were incredibly brave.”

The chief constable rejected the suggestion that it would be more appropriate for the inquiry to be conducted by an independent figure or regulator.

“There has always been public concern about police investigating the police, but I’ll be brutally honest: there is no one as good at doing it as the police,” he said. “We don’t seek to hide things. We do actually seek to get the truth and we do it properly and I frankly find it almost insulting that people suggest that in some way, because I’m a police officer, I’m not going to search the truth.”

Paul Lewis and Rob Evans
The Guardian, Monday 24 June 2013 14.08 BST

Find this story at 24 June 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

How police spies ’tried to smear the family of Stephen Lawrence’: Undercover officer reveals how superiors wanted him to find ‘dirt’

Peter Francis claims officers told him to dig into murdered teenager’s family
He posed as an anti-racist activist following the death
Victim’s mother said: ‘Nothing can justify… trying to discredit the family’
Raises further questions about police surveillance of activist groups
David Cameron demands that Scotland Yard investigates the damaging claim

An undercover policeman revealed last night that he took part in an operation to smear the family of Stephen Lawrence.

Peter Francis said his superiors wanted him to find ‘dirt’ that could be used against members of the murdered teenager’s family.

The spy said he was also tasked with discrediting Stephen’s friend who witnessed the stabbing and campaigners angry at the failure to bring his killers to justice.

Spy: Peter Francis said he was asked by senior officers in the Met Police to find information to smear the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence

Worried: The Prime Minister said today that Scotland Yard must investigate the damaging claims

He added that senior officers deliberately withheld his role from Sir William Macpherson, who led a public inquiry into the bungled police investigation.
‘They wanted any intelligence’ Peter Francis on ‘spying’

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Francis said senior officers were afraid that anger at the failure to investigate the teenager’s racist killing would spiral into disorder on the streets. They had ‘visions of Rodney King’, whose beating at the hands of police led to the 1992 LA riots, he said.

David Cameron has this morning urged Scotland Yard to launch a probe into what happened.

‘The Prime Minister is deeply concerned by reports that the police wanted to smear Stephen Lawrence’s family and would like the Metropolitan police to investigate immediately,’ A No10 spokesperson said.

The revelations mark the most extraordinary chapter so far in the sorry history of Scotland Yard’s jaw-dropping undercover operations.

Stephen Lawrence was the victim of a racist murder in 1993. It was one of the highest profile racial killings in UK history

The whistleblower is one of several to come forward to reveal deeply suspect practices by those ordered to infiltrate political protest groups from the 1980s onwards.

Yesterday Stephen’s mother Doreen said being targeted by an undercover officer was the most surprising thing she had learned about the marathon inquiry. She said: ‘Out of all the things I’ve found out over the years, this certainly has topped it.

‘Nothing can justify the whole thing about trying to discredit the family and people around us.’

The news will further inflame critics of covert policing of activist groups and raises questions over whether a police review will flush out all malpractice.’

The 20-year-old operation was revealed in a joint investigation by The Guardian and Channel 4’s Dispatches being broadcast tonight.

Francis posed as an anti-racist activist during four years he spent living undercover among protest groups following Stephen’s murder in April 1993.

The former officer said he came under ‘huge and constant pressure’ to ‘hunt for disinformation’ that might be used to undermine those arguing for a better investigation into the murder.

He now wants a full public inquiry into the undercover policing of protest groups, which he labelled ‘morally reprehensible’ in the past.

He said: ‘I had to get any information on what was happening in the Stephen Lawrence campaign.

‘They wanted the campaign to stop. It was felt it was going to turn into an elephant. Throughout my deployment there was almost constant pressure on me personally to find out anything I could that would discredit these campaigns.’

Mr Francis joins a number of whistle blowers who infiltrated protest groups for the Met Police

Francis was also involved in an ultimately failed effort to discredit Duwayne Brooks, a close friend of Lawrence who was with him on the night he was murdered.

The former spy trawled through hours of CCTV from a demonstration to find evidence that led to Mr Brooks being arrested and charged with violent disorder in October 1993. However, the case was thrown out by a judge as an abuse of the legal process.

Family: Stephen Lawrence’s mother Doreen and ex-husband Neville, Stephen’s father

The spy monitored a number of ‘black justice’ campaigns, involving relatives of mostly black men who had died in suspicious circumstances in police custody.

But he said his handlers were most interested in any information he could gather about the several groups campaigning over the death of Stephen.

Although Francis did not meet the Lawrence family, he passed back ‘hearsay’ about them to his superiors.

Mrs Lawrence said she was always baffled why family liaison officers were recording the identities of everyone entering and leaving their household following her son’s murder.

She said the family had always suspected police had been gathering evidence about her visitors to discredit them but had no ‘concrete evidence’.

In 1997, Francis argued that the Met should ‘come clean’ over the existence of its undercover operation to Sir William and his inquiry.

But commanders opted for secrecy and claimed it was for the public good as there would be ‘battling on the streets’ if the public ever found out.
‘It just makes me really angry’: Doreen Lawrence

Francis was a member of a covert unit known as the Special Demonstration Squad. Set up to combat protests against the Vietnam war in 1968, the SDS was funded by the Home Office to operate under the radar for four decades.

Using the undercover alias Pete Black, he worked between 1993 and 1997 infiltrating a group named Youth Against Racism in Europe.

He said he was one of four undercover officers who were also required to feed back intelligence about the campaigns for justice over the death of Stephen. The now disbanded unit has already been struck by controversy after its spies fathered children with their targets.

An external investigation of past undercover deployments is being undertaken by a team of officers led by Derbyshire chief constable Mick Creedon.

Pete Francis monitored a number of ‘black justice’ campaigns, involving relatives of mostly black men who had died in suspicious circumstances in police custody

Mr Brooks always suspected he was a victim of a dirty tricks campaign by police. In an interview six years after the murder he said he felt the police ‘investigated us more thoroughly than they investigated the boys’ – referring to those behind the killing.

Jack Straw, the former home secretary who in 1997 ordered the inquiry that led to the Macpherson report, said he was stunned.

He said: ‘I should have been told of anything that was current, post the election of Tony Blair’s government in early May 1997. But much more importantly, [the] Macpherson inquiry should have been told.’

Lord Condon, Met Commissioner between 1993 and 2000, said he was not aware any information had been withheld from Sir William.

A Met spokesman said: ‘The claims in relation to Stephen Lawrence’s family will bring particular upset to them and we share their concerns.’

These revelations and others about undercover police officers are contained in the book Undercover by Paul Lewis and Rob Evans.

UNDERCOVER: THE TRUE STORY OF BRITAIN’S SECRET POLICE by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis is published by Guardian Faber at £12.99. Please follow this link to order a copy.

By Chris Greenwood

PUBLISHED: 21:50 GMT, 23 June 2013 | UPDATED: 11:12 GMT, 25 June 2013

Find this story at 23 June 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Police ‘smear’ campaign targeted Stephen Lawrence’s friends and family

Exclusive: former undercover officer Peter Francis says superiors wanted him to find ‘dirt’ shortly after 1993 murder

Stephen Lawrence who was murdered in 1993 and whose death has been the subject of a long-running police investigation. Photograph: Rex Features

A police officer who spent four years living undercover in protest groups has revealed how he participated in an operation to spy on and attempt to “smear” the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, the friend who witnessed his fatal stabbing and campaigners angry at the failure to bring his killers to justice.

Peter Francis, a former undercover police officer turned whistleblower, said his superiors wanted him to find “dirt” that could be used against members of the Lawrence family, in the period shortly after Lawrence’s racist murder in April 1993.

He also said senior officers deliberately chose to withhold his role spying on the Lawrence campaign from Sir William Macpherson, who headed a public inquiry to examine the police investigation into the death.

Francis said he had come under “huge and constant pressure” from superiors to “hunt for disinformation” that might be used to undermine those arguing for a better investigation into the murder. He posed as an anti-racist activist in the mid-1990s in his search for intelligence.

“I had to get any information on what was happening in the Stephen Lawrence campaign,” Francis said. “They wanted the campaign to stop. It was felt it was going to turn into an elephant.

“Throughout my deployment there was almost constant pressure on me personally to find out anything I could that would discredit these campaigns.”

Francis also describes being involved in an ultimately failed effort to discredit Duwayne Brooks, a close friend of Lawrence who was with him on the night he was killed and the main witness to his murder. The former spy found evidence that led to Brooks being arrested and charged in October 1993, before the case was thrown out by a judge.
Peter Francis, the former undercover police officer turned whistleblower. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

The disclosures, revealed in a book about undercover policing published this week, and in a joint investigation by the Guardian and Channel 4’s Dispatches being broadcast on Monday, will reignite the controversy over covert policing of activist groups.

Lawrence’s mother, Doreen, said the revelations were the most surprising thing she had learned about the long-running police investigation into her son’s murder: “Out of all the things I’ve found out over the years, this certainly has topped it.”

She added: “Nothing can justify the whole thing about trying to discredit the family and people around us.”

In a statement, the Metropolitan police said it recognised the seriousness of the allegations – and acknowledged their impact. A spokesman said the claims would “bring particular upset” to the Lawrence family and added: “We share their concerns.”

Jack Straw, the former home secretary who in 1997 ordered the inquiry that led to the 1999 Macpherson report, said: “I’m profoundly shocked by this and by what amounts to a misuse of police time and money and entirely the wrong priorities.” Straw is considering personally referring the case to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

Francis was a member of a controversial covert unit known as the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). A two-year investigation by the Guardian has already revealed how undercover operatives routinely adopted the identities of dead children and formed long-term sexual relationships with people they were spying on.

The past practices of undercover police officers are the subject of what the Met described as “a thorough review and investigation” called Operation Herne, which is being overseen by Derbyshire’s chief constable, Mick Creedon.

A spokesman said: “Operation Herne is a live investigation, four strands of which are being supervised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, and it would be inappropriate to pre-judge its findings.”

Francis has decided to reveal his true identity so he can openly call for a public inquiry into undercover policing of protest. “There are many things that I’ve seen that have been morally wrong, morally reprehensible,” he said. “Should we, as police officers, have the power to basically undermine political campaigns? I think that the clear answer to that is no.”

Francis has been co-operating with the Guardian as a confidential source since 2011, using his undercover alias Pete Black. He assumed the undercover persona between 1993 and 1997, infiltrating a group named Youth Against Racism in Europe. He said he was one of four undercover officers who were also required to feed back intelligence about the campaigns for justice over the death of Lawrence.

Francis said senior officers were afraid that anger at the failure to investigate the teenager’s racist killing would spiral into disorder on the streets, and had “visions of Rodney King”, whose beating at the hands of police led to the 1992 LA riots.

Francis monitored a number of “black justice” campaigns, involving relatives of mostly black men who had died in suspicious circumstances in police custody.

However, he said that his supervising officers were most interested in whatever information he could gather about the large number of groups campaigning over the death of Lawrence.

Although Francis never met the Lawrence family, who distanced themselves from political groups, he said he passed back “hearsay” about them to his superiors. He said they wanted information that could be used to undermine the campaign.

One operation Francis participated in involved coming up with evidence purporting to show Brooks involved in violent disorder. Francis said he and another undercover police officer trawled through hours of footage from a May 1993 demonstration, searching for evidence that would incriminate Brooks.

Police succeeded in having Brooks arrested and charged with criminal damage, but the case was thrown out by a judge as an abuse of the legal process. Francis said the prosecution of Brooks was part of a wider drive to damage the growing movement around Lawrence’s death: “We were trying to stop the campaign in its tracks.”

Doreen Lawrence said that in 1993 she was always baffled about why family liaison officers were recording the identities of everyone entering and leaving their household. She said the family had always suspected police had been gathering evidence about her visitors to discredit the family.

“We’ve talked about that several times but we never had any concrete [evidence],” she said.

There is no suggestion that the family liaison officers knew the purpose of the information they collected.

Francis claims that the purpose of monitoring people visiting the Lawrence family home was in order “to be able to formulate intelligence on who was going into the house with regards to which part of the political spectrum, if any, they were actually in”. The former policeman added: “It would determine maybe which way the campaign’s likely to go.”

In 1997, Francis argued that his undercover operation should be disclosed to Macpherson, who was overseeing the public inquiry into the Met’s handling of the murder. “I was convinced the SDS should come clean,” he said.

However his superiors decided not to pass the information on to the inquiry, he said. He said he was told there would be “battling on the streets” if the public ever found out about his undercover operation.

Straw said that neither he nor Macpherson were informed about the undercover operations. “I should have been told of anything that was current, post the election of Tony Blair’s government in early May 1997,” he said.

“But much more importantly, [the] Macpherson inquiry should have been told, and also should have been given access to the results of this long-running and rather expensive undercover operation.”

Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
The Guardian, Monday 24 June 2013

Find this story at 24 June 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

The Police’s Dirty Secret: Channel 4 Dispatches

Paul Lewis reports on allegations that members of a clandestine Metropolitan unit employed ethically dubious tactics, including inappropriate sexual relationships and deceit, to spy on people – claims apparently substantiated by the personal testimony of a whistleblower who operated undercover for four years. The programme investigates the actions of those tasked with infiltrating political campaigns and protest groups, and speaks to the women who say they were duped into intimate relationships with men they didn’t know were serving police officers.

Find this story at july 2013

McLibel leaflet was co-written by undercover police officer Bob Lambert

Exclusive: McDonald’s sued green activists in long-running David v Goliath legal battle, but police role only now exposed

Bob Lambert posed as a radical activist named Bob Robinson.

An undercover police officer posing for years as an environmental activist co-wrote a libellous leaflet that was highly critical of McDonald’s, and which led to the longest civil trial in English history, costing the fast-food chain millions of pounds in fees.

The true identity of one of the authors of the “McLibel leaflet” is Bob Lambert, a police officer who used the alias Bob Robinson in his five years infiltrating the London Greenpeace group, is revealed in a new book about undercover policing of protest, published next week.

McDonald’s famously sued green campaigners over the roughly typed leaflet, in a landmark three-year high court case, that was widely believed to have been a public relations disaster for the corporation. Ultimately the company won a libel battle in which it spent millions on lawyers.

Lambert was deployed by the special demonstration squad (SDS) – a top-secret Metropolitan police unit that targeted political activists between 1968 until 2008, when it was disbanded. He co-wrote the defamatory six-page leaflet in 1986 – and his role in its production has been the subject of an internal Scotland Yard investigation for several months.

At no stage during the civil legal proceedings brought by McDonald’s in the 1990s was it disclosed that a police infiltrator helped author the leaflet.
The McLibel two: Helen Steel and David Morris, outside a branch of McDonald’s in London in 2005 after winning their case in the European court of human rights. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

A spokesman for the Met said the force “recognises the seriousness of the allegations of inappropriate behaviour and practices involving past undercover deployments”. He added that a number of allegations surrounding the undercover officers were currently being investigated by a team overseen by the chief constable of Derbyshire police, Mick Creedon.

And in remarks that come closest to acknowledging the scale of the scandal surrounding police spies, the spokesman said: “At some point it will fall upon this generation of police leaders to account for the activities of our predecessors, but for the moment we must focus on getting to the truth.”

Lambert declined to comment about his role in the production of the McLibel leaflet. However, he previously offered a general apology for deceiving “law abiding members of London Greenpeace”, which he said was a peaceful campaign group.

Lambert, who rose through the ranks to become a spymaster in the SDS, is also under investigation for sexual relationships he had with four women while undercover, one of whom he fathered a child with before vanishing from their lives. The woman and her son only discovered that Lambert was a police spy last year.

The internal police inquiry is also investigating claims raised in parliament that Lambert ignited an incendiary device at a branch of Debenhams when infiltrating animal rights campaigners. The incident occurred in 1987 and the explosion inflicted £300,000 worth of damage to the branch in Harrow, north London. Lambert has previously strongly denied he planted the incendiary device in the Debenhams store.
While McDonald’s won the initial legal battle, at great expense, it was seen as a PR disaster. Photograph: Image Broker/Rex Features

Lambert’s role in helping compose the McLibel leaflet is revealed in ‘Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police’, which is published next week. An extract from the book will be published in the Guardian Weekend magazine. A joint Guardian/Channel 4 investigation into undercover policing will be broadcast on Dispatches on Monday evening.

Lambert was one of two SDS officers who infiltrated London Greenpeace; the second, John Dines, had a two-year relationship with Helen Steel, who later became the co-defendant in the McLibel case. The book reveals how Steel became the focus of police surveillance operations. She had a sexual relationship with Dines, before he also disappeared without a trace.

Dines gained access to the confidential legal advice given to Steel and her co-defendant that was written by Keir Starmer, then a barrister known for championing radical causes. The lawyer was advising the activists on how to defend themselves against McDonald’s. He is now the director of public prosecutions in England and Wales.

Lambert was lauded by colleagues in the covert unit for his skilful infiltration of animal rights campaigners and environmentalists in the 1980s. He succeeded in transforming himself from a special branch detective into a long-haired radical activist who worked as a cash-in-hand gardener. He became a prominent member of London Greenpeace, around the time it began campaigning against McDonald’s in 1985. The leaflet he helped write made wide-ranging criticisms of the company, accusing it of destroying the environment, exploiting workers and selling junk food.

Four sources who were either close to Lambert at the time, or involved in the production of the leaflet, have confirmed his role in composing the libellous text. Lambert confided in one of his girlfriends from the era, although he appeared keen to keep his participation hidden. “He did not want people to know he had co-written it,” Belinda Harvey said.

Paul Gravett, a London Greenpeace campaigner, said the spy was one of a small group of around five activists who drew up the leaflet over several months. Another close friend from the time recalls Lambert was really proud of the leaflet. “It was like his baby, he carried it around with him,” the friend said.

When Lambert’s undercover deployment ended in 1989, he vanished, claiming that he had to flee abroad because he was being pursued by special branch. None of his friends or girlfriends suspected that special branch was his employer.

It was only later that the leaflet Lambert helped to produce became the centre of the huge trial. Even though the activists could only afford to distribute a few hundred copies of the leaflet, McDonald’s decided to throw all of its legal might at the case, suing two London Greenpeace activists for libel.

Two campaigners – Steel, who was then a part-time bartender, and an unemployed postal worker, Dave Morris – unexpectedly stood their ground and refused to apologise.
Steel and Morris outside the high court at the start of the first proceedings in the McLibel trial in 1990. Photograph: Photofusion/UIG/ Getty Images

Over 313 days in the high court, the pair defended themselves, with pro bono assistance from Starmer, as they could not afford to hire any solicitors or barristers. In contrast, McDonald’s hired some of the best legal minds at an estimated cost of £10m. During the trial, legal argument largely ignored the question of who wrote the McLibel leaflet, focusing instead on its distribution to members of the public.

In 1997, a high court judge ruled that much of the leaflet was libellous and ordered the two activists to pay McDonald’s £60,000 in damages. This sum was reduced on appeal to £40,000 – but McDonald’s never enforced payment.

It was a hollow victory for the company; the long-running trial had exposed damaging stories about its business and the quality of the food it was selling to millions of customers around the world. The legal action, taking advantage of Britain’s much-criticised libel laws, was seen as a heavy handed and intimidating way of crushing criticism. However, the role of undercover police in the story remained, until now, largely unknown.

On Friday, Morris said the campaign against the burger chain was successful “despite the odds overwhelmingly stacked against us in the legal system and up against McDonald’s massive and relentless advertising and propaganda machine.

“We now know that other shadowy forces were also trying to undermine our efforts in the most disgusting, but ultimately futile ways. All over the world police and secret agents infiltrate opposition movements in order to protect the rich and powerful but as we have seen in so many countries recently people power and the pursuit of truth and justice is unstoppable, even faced with the most repressive and unacceptable Stasi-like tactics.”

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© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Second police spy says Home Office knew of theft of children’s identities

Former undercover officer Peter Francis says department helped spies by providing false passports in dead children’s names

Peter Francis, the former undercover police officer turned whistleblower. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

A second police spy has said the Home Office was aware that undercover police officers stole the identities of dead children to infiltrate political groups.

Peter Francis, a former undercover officer turned whistleblower, said the Home Office helped the spies by providing false passports in the names of the dead children.

His claim comes as Britain’s most senior police officer, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, is due to publish a report on Tuesday about the secret use of dead children’s identities.

It will be released on the same day that MPs on the home affairs select committee are due to question Mick Creedon, the chief constable who is leading the police investigation into the deployment of undercover officers in protest groups over a 40-year period.

Creedon has already conceded that the theft of the children’s identities was “common practice” within a covert special branch unit which operated between 1968 and 2008.

Earlier this month, Bob Lambert, one of the leading spies of the unit, claimed that the technique was “well known at the highest levels of the Home Office”.

In a practice criticised by MPs as “ghoulish” and “heartless”, undercover spies in the unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), searched through birth and death certificates to find children who had died at an early age. They then assumed the identity of the child and developed a persona based on that identity when they went undercover for five years or longer.

The spies were issued with fake documents such as passports, driving licences and national insurance numbers in the child’s name to further bolster their credibility.

Francis, who infiltrated anti-racist groups from 1993 to 1997, discussed the technique with the head of the SDS because he had reservations about stealing the identity of a four-year-old boy who had died. He did not disclose the name of the SDS head.

“We bounced it around – what were his thoughts, what were my thoughts. It was evident that it was standard practice,” Francis said.

The head of the SDS told him the Home Office knew the undercover spies “were using the children”, he said, as it gave fake passports to the spies knowing that they were in the names of the dead children.

The SDS was directly funded by the government, which received an annual report on its work for much of its existence.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We expect the highest standards of professionalism in all aspects of policing. That is why Chief Constable Mick Creedon is leading an IPCC-supervised investigation which will ensure any criminality or misconduct is properly dealt with.”

Francis was an important source for the Guardian when the newspaper detailed the technique, dubbed the “jackal run” after Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal, in February.

Speaking then as Pete Black, one of his undercover identities, Francis said he felt he was “stomping on the grave” of the boy whose identity he stole. “A part of me was thinking about how I would feel if someone was taking the names and details of my dead son for something like this,” he said at the time.

Last month, he said his superiors had asked him to find “dirt” that could be used to smear the family of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager who was stabbed to death in a racist attack in 1993.

Lambert went undercover for four years in the 1980s to infiltrate environmental and animal rights groups. He adopted the persona of Bob Robinson, a seven-year-old boy who had died of a congenital heart defect.

Interviewed by Channel Four News this month, Lambert said that at the time he did not “really give pause for thought on the ethical considerations. It was, that’s what was done. Let’s be under no illusions about the extent to which that was an accepted practice that was well known at the highest levels of the Home Office.” Lambert fathered a child with a campaigner while he was undercover.

On Tuesday, Creedon is expected to be questioned by the select committee about whether the police will apologise to the parents whose children’s identities were taken. Creedon has said he has taken legal advice on whether the spies who stole the children’s identities could be put on trial.

Rob Evans
The Guardian, Monday 15 July 2013 18.35 BST

Find this story at 15 July 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Operation Herne Report 1 Use of covert identities

Executive Summary

History
The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was an undercover unit formed by the
Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch. It operated between 1968 and 2008, during
which time it infiltrated and reported on groups concerned in violent protest.

Operation Herne
Operation Herne (formerly Soisson) was formed in October 2011 in response to
allegations made by the Guardian newspaper about alleged misconduct and criminality
engaged in by members of the SDS. Similar matters had been previously aired as early
as 2002 in a BBC documentary.

Operation Riverwood
On 4th February 2013 the Metropolitan Police received a public complaint from the
family of Rod Richardson, a young boy who had died in the 1970s. It is alleged that an
undercover officer working for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) had
used this child’s details as his covert identity. This matter was referred to the IPCC. The
matter was returned to the force and is currently subject of a ‘local investigation’.

National Public Order Intelligence Unit
The NPOIU was formed within the MPS in 1999 to gather and coordinate intelligence.
In 2006 the governance responsibility for NPOIU was moved to the Association of
Chief Police Officers, after a decision was taken that the forces where the majority of
activity was taking place should be responsible for authorising future deployments. In
January 2011 the NPOIU was subsumed within other units under the National Domestic
Extremism Units within the MPS.
In January 1995 large numbers of police from London, Kent and Hampshire were
drafted to the West Sussex harbour of Shoreham in response to protests surrounding
the export of live animals to Europe. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and another
animal extremist group named ‘Justice Department’ had a strong base in the
community there. This led to a number of protests and in October 1995 there was a
further demonstration in Brightlingsea, Essex. This resulted in a record number of police
being deployed to prevent widespread public disorder. Ad-hoc protest groups emerged
and the need for first hand high quality intelligence was evident. This led to undercover
operatives being required to infiltrate these animal extremist organisations.

The purpose of the NPOIU was:
1 To provide the police service with the ability to develop a national threat assessment
and profile for domestic extremism.
2 Support the police service to reduce crime and disorder from domestic extremism.
3 Support a proportionate police response to protest activity.
4 Help the police service manage concerns of communities and businesses to
minimise conflict and disorder.

Control of the NPOIU moved to ACPO in 2006 under the direction of the ACPO National
Co-ordinator for Domestic Extremism, Assistant Chief Constable Anton Setchell. He
was replaced by Detective Chief Superintendent Adrian Tudway in 2010. The NPOIU
worked with the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU) and the
National Domestic Extremism Team (NDET).
The NPOIU now exists as part of the National Domestic Extremism Unit (NDEU) under
the Metropolitan Police Service Specialist Operations and is run by Detective Chief
Superintendent Chris Greaney.

Deceased identities
On 5th February 2013 the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) questioned Deputy
Assistant Commissioner Gallan about the alleged practice that SDS officers had used
the details of dead children, as part of a cover identity for undercover police officers. At
the time DAC Gallan was based in the MPS Directorate of Professional Standards and
was in overall command of Operation Herne. Her appearance before the HASC led to
considerable media coverage and some negative commentary. As a result of the media
coverage, Operation Herne has now received enquiries from fourteen (14) families
regarding seventeen (17) children.

Operation Herne review
One hundred and forty-seven (147) named individuals are believed to have served as
police officers within the SDS at all ranks from Chief Superintendent down. This covers
the forty (40) years that the unit was in existence and not all the police officers were
deployed in undercover roles.
At this stage one hundred and six (106) covert identities have been identified as having
been used by the SDS between 1968 and 2008.
Forty-two (42) of these identities are either confirmed or highly likely to have used the
details of a deceased child.
Forty-five (45) of these identities have been established as fictitious. Work continues to
identify the provenance of the remaining identities.

Neither Confirm Nor Deny (NCND)
The policy of ‘neither confirming nor denying’ the use of or identity of an undercover
police officer is a long established one used by UK policing. It is essential so as to
provide for the necessary operational security and to ensure undercover officers are
clear that their identity will never be disclosed by the organisation that asked them to
carry out the covert activity. The duty of care owed to such officers is an absolute one
and applies during their deployments, throughout their service and continues when they
are retired.
Please note that this is an interim report specifically about the use of the identities of
deceased children and infants. It does not seek to cover either all of the activities of
the SDS nor has it been able to completely provide all the answers regarding the use
of covert identities. The report clearly explains the use of the tactic and is submitted
early given the need to deal with the public concerns and is provided in agreement with
the Home Office who sought to have this matter concluded before the parliamentary
summer recess.

Find this report at July 2013

Dead children’s IDs used by undercover police to be kept from families

The identities of 42 dead children whose names were assumed by undercover police officers will not be revealed to their relatives, according to a report.

The Metropolitan Police offered a general apology for the “shock and offence” the practice had caused.

But Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said revealing the identities used would endanger the officers concerned.

The senior officer who wrote the report on the 1980s practice told MPs it would not be used as a tactic today.

The report’s author, Derbyshire Chief Constable Mick Creedon, was asked to investigate in 2011 after the Guardian newspaper published allegations about the conduct of undercover officers.

He told the Home Affairs Select Committee ministers did not authorise the practice but refused to condemn the officers’ actions.

“It’s irrelevant what I think,” he said. “It is not a tactic we would use these days.

“It would feel very strange for me to criticise the actions of people 20, 30, 40-years-ago without knowing what they faced at the time.”

Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that officers had stolen the identities of about 80 children who died at an early age.
Anonymity ‘vital’

Mr Creedon’s report concluded that at least 42 children’s identities had, either definitely or very probably, been used by the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and its National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).

The earliest known use of the tactic occurred between 1976 and 1981 and it was phased out from 1994 in the SDS, the report added.

But it also found that the practice might have been used by the NPOIU as recently as 2003, and that it was “highly possible” that its use was more widespread than currently understood.

The report said: “A range of officers at different ranks and roles have been interviewed by the investigation team. The information provided corroborates totally the belief that, for the majority of the existence of the SDS, the use of deceased children’s identities was accepted as standard practice.”

Sir Bernard said 14 families had contacted the Met to ask whether the identities of their relatives had been used by undercover officers.

The Met had apologised to them, and to another family that had heard separately that it might be affected by the revelations, he said.

“Undercover officers are brave men and women” and maintaining their anonymity is “vital”, Sir Bernard said.

He explained: “There are criminals behind bars and at large today who would have no qualms in doing serious harm if they discovered a former close confidant had been working for the police.

“That’s why undercover officers spent so much time building up their ‘legend’ or false identity, and why that identity must be protected forever.”
‘Rot’

Sir Bernard added: “I believe the public do understand the necessity for police and others to do things like this to protect against a much greater harm. It was never intended or foreseen that any of the identities used would become public, or that any family would suffer hurt as a result.

“At the time this method of creating identities was in use, officers felt this was the safest option.”

But Jules Carey, a solicitor acting for Barbara Shaw, who is concerned that her son Rod Richardson’s identity was used, said: “What we heard this morning was not an apology but a PR exercise.

“The families of the dead children whose identities have been stolen by the undercover officers deserve better than this.

“They deserve an explanation, a personal apology and, if appropriate, a warning of the potential risk they face, in the exceptional circumstances, that their dead child’s identity was used to infiltrate serious criminal organisations.

“The harvesting of dead children’s identities was only one manifestation of the rot at the heart of these undercover units which had officers lie on oath, conduct smear campaigns and use sexual relationships as an evidence-gathering tool.”

He added: “Ms Shaw has told me that she feels her complaint has been ‘swept under the carpet” and she has instructed me to appeal this outcome.”

UK
16 July 2013 Last updated at 16:29 GMT

Find this story at 16 July 2013

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Met chief sorry for police spies using dead children’s identities

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe releases report on surveillance used since 1970s but refuses to inform any affected families

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said families of dead children whose identities were used would not be approached, as that could put undercover officers in danger. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA

Britain’s most senior police officer has offered a general apology for the “morally repugnant” theft of dead children’s identities by undercover spies who infiltrated political groups.

But Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has refused to tell any families if the identities of their children were stolen by the undercover officers. He said he wanted to protect the spies from being exposed.

In a report published on Tuesday, he admitted that at least 42 police spies stole the identity of children who had died before they were 14 years old.

But the total number of such spies could be far higher as he conceded that the technique could have been more widespread than initially believed.

Hogan-Howe said he “should apologise for the shock and offence the use of this tactic has caused” among the public, after the Guardian revealed details of the policing method in February.

The commissioner argued that the families could not be informed as it could lead to the exposure of the undercover officers sent to infiltrate the political groups.

“It was never intended or foreseen that any of the identities used would become public, or that any family would suffer hurt as a result. At the time this method of creating identities was in use, officers felt this was the safest option” he added.

His decision drew immediate criticism. Jenny Jones, a Green party member of the London Assembly, said: “This falls short of coming clean to all the families whose children’s identities were harvested. In giving a blanket apology they have avoided the difficult task of apologising to real people.”

The Met has sent letters of apology to 15 families whose children died young, but has neither confirmed nor denied whether identities were stolen.

One case concerned a suspected spy, deployed between 1999 and 2003, who allegedly stole the identity of Rod Richardson, who died two days after being born in 1973.

The family’s lawyer, Jules Carey, said that Barbara Shaw, the mother of the dead boy, was taking legal action as she felt her complaint had been “swept under the carpet”.

Carey said Hogan-Howe’s apology was a PR exercise. He added: “The families of the dead children whose identities have been stolen by the undercover officers deserve better than this. They deserve an explanation, a personal apology. The harvesting of dead children’s identities was only one manifestation of the rot at the heart of these undercover units.”

Peter Francis, one of the spies who originally blew the whistle on the tactic, said the police should offer a personal apology to the families in the cases of spies whose identity had already been exposed. He agreed that the spies whose work remained secret should be protected.

The report, on Tuesday, was produced by Mick Creedon, the Derbyshire chief constable who is conducting an investigation into the activities of the undercover spies over 40 years.

Creedon revealed that the technique was used extensively as far back as 1976 and was authorised by senior police. He reported that the tactic became “an established practice that new officers were taught” within a covert special branch unit known as the special demonstration squad (SDS), which spied on political groups.

“This was not done by the officers in any underhand or salacious manner – it was what they were told to do,” Creedon added.

One senior spy is quoted as saying the undercover officers “spent hours and hours … leafing through death registers in search of a name [they] could call his own”.

“The genuine identities of the deceased children were blended with the officer’s own biographical details,” Creedon said.

The spies were issued with fake documents, such as passports and driving licences, to make their alter egos appear genuine in case suspicious activists started to investigate them.

The last time the tactic was used, according to Creedon, was 2003, by a spy working for a second covert unit – the national public order intelligence unit (NPOIU) – which infiltrated political campaigns.

Creedon said it was highly possible that the tactic was used by undercover officers in other units which infiltrated serious criminal gangs. “It would be a mistake to assume that the use of identities of dead children was solely within the SDS and the NPOIU.”

He said that the use of the technique “however morally repugnant, should not detract from the [spies’] bravery”.

Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 July 2013 12.22 BST

Find this story at 16 July 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Home Office ‘knew police stole children’s identities’

Bob Lambert admits to adopting the identity of a seven-year-old boy and has conceded to having four affairs while undercover

Bob Lambert was deployed as an animal rights activist named Bob Robinson in the 1980s.

A former police spymaster has claimed the practice of resurrecting the identities of dead children so they could be used by undercover officers was “well known at the highest levels of the Home Office”.

Bob Lambert, who is facing a potential criminal investigation over his work for a secret unit of undercover officers, admitted that when he was deployed as a spy himself, he adopted the identity of a seven-year-old boy who died of a congenital heart defect.

He also admitted to using his false identity in court and co-writing the “McLibel” leaflet that defamed the burger chain McDonald’s, resulting in the longest civil trial in English legal history.

Conceding publicly for the first time that he had four relationships with women while undercover, one of which resulted in him secretly fathering a child, he said: “With hindsight I can only say that I genuinely regret my actions, and I apologise to the women affected in my case.”

Lambert was deployed as an animal rights activist named “Bob Robinson” in the 1980s for a covert Metropolitan Police unit called the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) which deployed undercover officers in political campaign groups. In the 1990s, he was promoted to manage other undercover operatives.

Over the last two years the Guardian has detailed the covert work of Lambert, one of the most controversial spies to have worked for the SDS and its sister squad, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit.

Until now, Lambert has either declined to comment in detail or said the Guardian’s reports amounted to “a misleading combination of truth, distortions, exaggerations and outright lies”.

However, in a Channel 4 News interview broadcast on Friday, Lambert admitted that many of the allegations made against him were true. “My reputation is never going to be redeemed for many people, and I don’t think it should be,” he told the programme. “I think I made serious mistakes that I should regret, and I always will do.”

Lambert said he was arrested “four or five” times while undercover and in 1986 he appeared in a magistrates court charged with a “minor public order offence”. He said he had to appear in court using his alter ego – rather than his real name – in order to “maintain cover”.

He also admitted to co-writing the McLibel leaflet. “I was certainly a contributing author to the McLibel leaflet,” he told the programme. “Well, I think, the one that I remember, the one that I remember making a contribution to, was called What’s Wrong With McDonald’s?”

Asked if that was ever disclosed to the court during the long-running civil trial, he replied: “I don’t know the answer to that question.”

Although he admitted having relationships with women, Lambert denied it was a deliberate tactic in the SDS to use relationships to gain access, saying “probably I became too immersed” in his alter ego. “I’d always been a faithful husband,” he said. “I only ever became an unfaithful husband when I became an undercover police officer.”

Harriet Wistrich, a lawyer representing eight women involved in relationships with Lambert and other undercover police said that there was a systematic pattern in which operatives repeatedly used long-term relationships to build their cover.

Almost all of the undercover officers identified so far – including those known to have worked under Lambert – had sexual relationships while operating covertly.

An SDS spy who has become a whistleblower, Peter Francis, has said that when he was deployed as an anti-racist campaigner, his superiors asked him to find “dirt” that could be used to smear the family of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager who was stabbed to death in a racist attack in 1993.

His revelation has since triggered further investigations into alleged covert tactics used against the Lawrence family, their supporters and Duwayne Brooks, a friend of Stephen and the main witness to the murder.

On Friday, police chiefs admitted bugging a meeting with Brooks and his lawyer, Jane Deighton. Deighton said that Brooks, who is now a Lib Dem councillor, conveyed his concern in a meeting with the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.

In a previous Channel 4 News broadcast, Lambert denied the unit was involved in seeking to smear the Lawrence family during his tenure as deputy head of the unit.

He had a supervisory role when other spies, such as Jim Boyling and Mark Jenner, formed long-term relationships with people they were spying on. All are now under investigation.

The deployments of Francis, Lambert, Boyling and Jenner are detailed in a new book: Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police.

Lambert has also been accused in parliament of igniting an incendiary device in a branch of Debenhams as part of a fire-bombing campaign by the Animal Liberation Front. Repeating earlier denials, he told Channel 4 News that the claim was “false”.

The home secretary, Theresa May, is coming under mounting pressure to announce an independent public inquiry into the affair. So far she has indicated that two pre-existing inquiries – one run by a barrister, the other an internal Met police review – are capable of investigating the allegations surrounding the Lawrences and Brooks.

Paul Lewis and Rob Evans
The Guardian, Saturday 6 July 2013

Find this story 6 July 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Undercover policeman who impregnated one of his targets and impersonated a dead child apologises for ‘serious mistakes’

Bob Lambert had a five-year covert career using the alias Bob Robinson
The married office slept with four women and fathered a child with one
Lambert claims that being undercover led to his bad behaviour

Back in the day: During a covert career in which he infiltrated various groups, Bob Lambert has spoke of his disgust at some of his actions

A former Scotland Yard police officer who fathered a child with one of several targets he had relationships with while working undercover has apologised to the women.

Bob Lambert said he would always regret the ‘serious mistakes’ he made during a covert career which saw him use the identities of dead children, give evidence in court under his false name and co-author a libellous leaflet.

Mr Lambert used the alias Bob Robinson during his five years infiltrating environmentalist groups, when he was with the special demonstration squad (SDS), the Metropolitan Police unit that targeted political activists.

The revelation that the married officer slept with four women – fathering a child with one – sparked outrage.

In an interview with Channel 4 News, he said he accepts his behaviour was morally reprehensible and a gross invasion of privacy.

‘With hindsight, I can only say that I genuinely regret my actions, and I apologise to the women affected,’ he said.

‘I’d always been a faithful husband. I only ever became an unfaithful husband when I became an undercover police officer.’

The ex-officer declined to reveal whether his superiors were aware of the child – insisting he would only discuss that with an investigation into the activities of undercover police activities being led by the chief constable of Derbyshire.

Mr Lambert said he ‘didn’t really give pause for thought on the ethical considerations’ of adopting the identity of a dead child in 1984 as it was standard practice at the time.

‘That’s what was done. Let’s be under no illusions about the extent to which that was an accepted practice that was well known at the highest levels of the Home Office,’ he told the programme.

More…
Baby snatched from its pram and thrown to the floor outside a hospital by teenager who was on a legal high called Salvia

He confirmed that he had appeared in court as Bob Robinson but could not say whether the judiciary was made aware by the police that he was doing so.

‘On occasions I was arrested as Bob Robinson and to maintain cover I went through the process of arrest, detention, and on occasions, appearing in court,’ he said.
Lambert insists he was unaware of any campaign to smear family and friends of Stephen Lawrence

He denied it amounted to perjury as ’the position was that I was maintaining cover as Bob Robinson’.
But asked if the court was ‘made aware’, he added: ‘Well, that’s what needs to be established.’

Mr Lambert also confirmed that he helped write a libellous leaflet that attacked fast food giant McDonald’s and triggered the longest civil trial in English history.

McDonald’s famously sued two green campaigners over the leaflet in a landmark three-year high court case.

It was not disclosed during the costly civil legal proceedings brought by McDonalds in the 1990s that an undercover police officer helped write the leaflet.

‘I was certainly a contributing author to the McLibel leaflet. Well, I think, the one that I remember, the one that I remember making a contribution to, was called What’s Wrong With McDonalds?’, he told Channel 4.

Over the line: Bob Lambert in a more recent picture, fathered a child with one of his targets

Asked if that fact was disclosed during the proceedings, he said: ‘I don’t know.’

He repeated his rejection though of claims that he planted an incendiary device in a Debenhams store in Harrow in 1987, calling that a ‘false allegation’.

Mr Lambert, who was an SDS manager for five years, earlier this week insisted he had not been aware of any campaign against the family of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence.

Those claims were made by another veteran of the unit, Peter Francis, who alleges he was told to find information to use to smear the Lawrence family – who are calling for a public inquiry to examine the issue.

Home Secretary Theresa May has said they would be looked at by the Derbyshire probe and a separate inquiry led by barrister Mark Ellison QC into alleged corruption in the original Lawrence murder investigation, but has left open the possibility of other action.

‘My reputation is never going to be redeemed for many people, and I don’t think it should be,’ Mr Lambert said.

‘I think I made serious mistakes that I should regret, and I always will do. I think the only real comfort I can take from my police career is that the Muslim Contact Unit was about learning from mistakes.’

Belinda Harvey, one of eight women who are suing the Metropolitan Police over relationships with men who turned out to be undercover officers, rejected his apology.

‘Almost everything he said to me was a lie; why would I possibly believe what he says to me know.’ she told Channel 4.

‘If it hadn’t been for the case we’re bringing against the police, he would never have apologised and I would have lived the rest of my days not finding out the truth.’

Former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald of River Glaven said the latest evidence strengthened the case for a judge-led public inquiry.

‘It is as bad as I think we thought it was,’ he said.

‘He seems to have admitted a great deal of the conduct that people feared had been taking place.

‘It now sounds as though not only senior police officers but senior civil servants may have known what was going on.

‘It’s no good having this multitude of inquiries that are going on at the moment, one of them conducted by the police themselves which is pretty hopeless in my view.

‘We need a single public inquiry under a senior judicial figure to examine what happened, what went wrong, who authorised it and most of all to reassure us that its not going on still.’

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 00:37 GMT, 6 July 2013 | UPDATED: 01:06 GMT, 6 July 2013

Find this story at 6 July 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Police to apologise for using dead children’s identities

Investigation into covert policing has found widespread use of the practice.

Senior police leaders are set to make an unprecedented national apology after hundreds of names of dead children were used to create false identities for undercover officers.

An investigation into covert policing has found widespread use of the practice.

Undercover officers told The Times that they were trained to use names of the dead and it had become “standard practice”.

Special branch units used the names while infiltrating criminal gangs, animal rights activists and football hooligan firms, it is claimed.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, will be questioned about the method after it was revealed that officers were told to gather “dirt” on the family of Stephen Lawrence.

Sources say that the practice may have been used in MI5 and MI6 and that several thousand identities of dead infants, children and teenagers may have been assumed by undercover officers.

An apology will be made senior police in the coming days.

Tom Foot
Friday, 5 July 2013

Find this story at 5 July 2013

© independent.co.uk

Scotland Yard to apologise for stealing dead children’s identities and giving them to undercover officers

Police chiefs are expected to formally apologise for using the names of dead children to create fake identities for undercover officers.

It had been thought that only officers in secret police units such as the Met Police’s Special Demonstration Squad, which was closed in 2008, had adopted dead children’s names as a new identity.

But Operation Herne, an ongoing investigation into the conduct of undercover police, has revealed that the practice was more widespread than originally thought and used by forces across the country.

Standard practice: It had been thought that the practice of using dead children’s names as identities for undercover officers was restricted to Scotland Yard’s Special Demonstrations Squad, but the practice is now said to have been more widespread

According to sources, undercover police officers infiltrating criminal networks and violent gangs were given dead people’s identities as ‘standard practice’, reported The Times.

The technique, which was regularly used in the 1960s and 1990s, is thought to have been last used in 2002.

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Revealed: BBC boss who landed £866k payoff and walked straight into another public-sector job

But it is thought that the technique was not restricted to police forces with other agencies such as HM Revenue & Customs said to have adopted the practice.

The apology could come as early as this month but police are not expected to contact families of the dead people whose names were used through fear that it could put officers who have taken part in undercover operations in the past in danger.

A way in: Dead children’s identities were used by undercover offices to infiltrate violent gangs and demonstration groups

A source told The Times: ‘This wasn’t an anomaly, it wasn’t something that was used in isolation by just one unit.

‘If you are infiltrating a sophisticated crime group they are going to check who you are, so you need a backstop, a cover story that has real depth and won’t fall over at the first hurdle.

Disapproving: Policing minister Damien Green has expressed his disappointment at the use of dead children’s names by police units

‘The way to do that was to build an identity that was based on a real person.’

It was reported earlier this year that around 80 names were used by officers over a 30 year period.

Set up in 2011, Operation Herne, which is expected to cost around £1.66million a year, will examine the conduct of all ranks of officers and even look at the actions of former Home Secretaries.

Both The Home Affairs Committee and Police minister Damian Green have spoken of their ‘disappointment’ that dead children’s names were used in investigations.

Back in may, Derbyshire Chief Constable Mick Creedon admitted that the practice had been widespread

A raft of allegations have been made since former PC Mark Kennedy was unmasked in 2011 as an undercover officer who spied on environmental protesters as Mark ‘Flash’ Stone – and had at least one sexual relationship with a female activist.

The revelation comes before Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan Howe appears before MPs to answer questions over a number of controversies including claims last month that the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence were targeted by undercover officers who were assigned to ‘get dirt’ on them.

Quiz: Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe will face questions from MPs over a number of controversies

It also emerged that police admitted bugging meetings involving Duwayne Brooks, the friend who was with Stephen the night he was attacked.

The claims affecting Mr Brooks came after former undercover officer Peter Francis alleged that he had been told to find information to use to smear the Lawrence family.

Mr Francis, who worked with Scotland Yard’s former Special Demonstration Squad, spoke out about tactics that he said were used by the secretive unit in the 1980s and 1990s.

Investigation: A raft of allegations have been made since former PC Mark Kennedy was unmasked in 2011 as an undercover officer who spied on environmental protesters as Mark ¿Flash¿ Stone ¿ and had at least one sexual relationship with a female activist

By Steve Nolan

PUBLISHED: 11:07 GMT, 6 July 2013 | UPDATED: 11:13 GMT, 6 July 2013

Find this story at 6 July 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Anti-War Activists Targeted as ‘Domestic Terrorists’; Shocking new revelations come as activists prepare to sue the U.S. military for unlawful spying

Anti-war activists who were infiltrated and spied on by the military for years have now been placed on the domestic terrorist list, they announced Monday. The shocking revelation comes as the activists prepare to sue the U.S. military for unlawful spying.

“The fact that a peaceful activist such as myself is on this domestic terrorist list should be cause for concern for other people in the US,” declared Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, plaintiff in the lawsuit. “We’ve seen an increase in the buildup of a mass surveillance state under the Obama and Bush Administrations.”

The discovery is the latest development in a stunning saga that exposes vast post-9/11 spying networks in which military, police, and federal agencies appear to be in cahoots.

Documents declassified in 2009 reveal that military informant John Towery, going by the name ‘John Jacob,’ spent over two years infiltrating and spying on Olympia, Washington anti-war and social justice groups, including Port Militarization Resistance, Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Towery admitted to the spying and revealed that he shared information with not only the military, but also the police and federal agencies. He claimed that he was not the only spy.

The activists, who blast the snooping as a violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights, levied a lawsuit against the military in 2009.

“The spying resulted in plaintiffs and others being targeted for repeated harassment, preemptive and false arrest, excessive use of force, and malicious prosecution,” reads a statement by the plaintiffs.

The Obama Administration attempted to throw out the litigation, but in December 2012 the 9th Circuit Court ruled that the case could continue.

When the plaintiffs were preparing their deposition for the courts two weeks ago, they were shocked to discover that several Olympia anti-war activists were listed on the domestic terrorist list, including at least two plaintiffs in the case.

The revelations prompted them to amend their lawsuit to include charges that the nonviolent activists were unlawfully targeted as domestic terrorists.

“The breadth and intensity of the spying by U.S. Army officials and other law enforcement agents is staggering,” said Larry Hildes, National Lawyers Guild attorney who filed the lawsuit in 2009. “If nonviolent protest is now labeled and treated as terrorism, then democracy and the First Amendment are in critical danger.”

Plaintiffs say this case takes on a new revelevance as vast NSA dragnet spying sparks widespread outrage.

“I think that there is a huge potential for the case to set precedent,” declared plaintiff Julianne Panagacos. “This could have a big impact on how the U.S. military and police are able to work together.”

She added, “I am hopeful we will win.”

Published on Monday, June 24, 2013 by Common Dreams
– Sarah Lazare, staff writer

Find this story at 24 June 2013

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Revealed: The Story Behind the “NATO 3” Domestic Terrorism Arrests

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Accused of domestic terrorism in the course of the Chicago NATO summit,
Brian Church, Brent Betterly and Jared Chase were arguably victims of police entrapment and the use of “Red Squad” tactics the Chicago police were formerly enjoined from employing.

When local and federal police conducted a no-knock, midnight search warrant raid in May 2012 at an apartment in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood, it looked at first like a failed mission.

Yes, police seized a group of 11 political activists in Chicago to protest an international summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But most of the arrestees were released without charge, and rumors soon began to swirl.

Police chained protesters to benches for 18 hours, one television station reported. Chicago Police Department (CPD) sources told Truthout the raid would unearth Molotov cocktails – homemade firebombs made of breakable glass bottles and gasoline. But they found beer brewing equipment instead.

“If anybody would like some,” one Bridgeport tenant told Truthout, “I would like to offer them a sip of my beer.”

Then things turned.

Of the 11 Bridgeport arrestees, it turned out, two were undercover cops. And beer-brewing equipment wasn’t the only thing the authorities found.

Mo and Nadia at Woodlawn (Photo Courtesy of Occupy Chicago)

They found four dark beer bottles “containing a clear liquid” implied to be gasoline. They found a pint can containing four presumably gas-soaked cloths. They found another pint can containing four glass vials each containing saturated cotton, along with four gas-soaked pieces of cloth, an empty gas can, a black tactical vest and a black gas mask. They found a compound bow and nine arrows.

They found two knives in sheaths, two swords in sheaths, and a set of handcuffs. They found a metal throwing star (a sharp, hand-held blade). They found a PVC pipe with a black flag attached. Authorities also found a printed photo of the female undercover officer who led SWAT teams to Bridgeport in the first place.

This litany of materials, police told Truthout, belonged to three men visiting Chicago from Florida to protest the NATO Summit – and, allegedly, to set parts of the Windy City aflame.

Dubbed the “NATO 3” in media reports, they face maximum sentences of 85 years in prison apiece if convicted, under a decade-old Illinois law that had never been used before. And that was without ever carrying out an attack.

Mug shots taken of the “NATO 3” after their arrests (From Left to Right: Brian Church, Brent Betterly, Jared Chase)

Their arrests may paint a picture of what federal authorities wish they had done to stop the bombings in Boston, or the Fort Hood shootings, or any actual terrorist attack carried out by suspects who had aroused suspicion from authorities.

Unlike the Boston bombers, the NATO 3 hadn’t set off any bombs prior to their arrests. Unlike the Fort Hood shooter, they hadn’t shot anyone. They hadn’t thrown molotov cocktails. They hadn’t even pressed dummy detonators, as was the case with five Cleveland activists in a similar domestic terrorism investigation last year.

They just ran their mouths. They just talked about revolution. And they went far enough into a conspiracy to elicit major charges.

To this day, more than a year after their arrest in Bridgeport, the NATO 3 are still sitting in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, awaiting their trial, which is set to begin on September 16, one day before the two-year anniversary of the Sept. 17, 2011, launch of Occupy Wall Street.

Their case is a big one. It’s the new face of US counterterrorism investigations – a template for pre-crime arrests, performed through entrapment by police – to stop supposedly dangerous political acts before they happen.

And if the “3” are convicted in September, it could set a troubling precedent far beyond the borders of Illinois.

Who are the NATO 3?

While Occupy Wall Street helped to ramp up the possibility for major protest action in cities such as Chicago, it also brought together young activists who would’ve never met otherwise. Case in point: Chase and Betterly.

The duo met in Washington DC at an Occupy protest. They were arrested, arm in arm, in front of the White House, while protesting the National Defense Authorization Act.

It wasn’t the first arrest for either man.

Years ago, when Chase was 18 and living with his folks in Keene, N.H., he was charged with “attempt to commit an assault and reckless endangerment after allegedly pulling a knife on another man,” according to the New Hampshire Union-Leader.

A month later, Chase received more charges, this time for first-degree assault and conduct after an accident, which earned him nine months in jail.

“In that incident, Chase was found guilty of hitting a man with a car after the two had a fist fight,” said the Union-Leader article. “The victim’s impact with the car damaged the windshield, but the man was not seriously injured. . . .The conduct after an accident charge was added because Chase drove off after striking the man.”

He spent six months in jail. He had trouble with drugs when he got out. He violated his probation three times and then eventually moved to Boston, where he stayed for years and worked as a cook at a P.F. Chang’s.

A photo from Jared Chase’s Facebook

Late last year, Chase left his life in Boston. A drifter, he headed to Rhode Island briefly and then to Washington, D.C.

After Chase and Betterly were arrested outside the White House, they headed toward Oakland Park, Florida, just north of Fort Lauderdale, where Betterly’s from, before heading to Miami.

Chase was arrested again as part of a group during Occupy Miami before heading off to Chicago. That group was found with bolt cutters, a baseball bat and a sledgehammer, but they were not charged.

The Miami New Times described Betterly, “with his good looks and dreadlocks,” as “a hippie who attended rainbow gatherings.” He had a criminal record in Florida, but nothing violent: Last September, he and a friend were drunk when they broke into a high school, did some after-hours swimming and broke a cafeteria window. Police picked them up. Betterly was released, but he still faces a pending burglary charge.

A photo from Brent Bettery’s Facebook

New Times reported that Betterly was known among those at Occupy Miami “for his creativity and commitment to fighting foreclosures,” while Chase was seen as more “enigmatic”: “The chain-smoker was a computer whiz who . . . spent days wandering around downtown and talking to homeless people.”

On March 14, 2012, Occupy Miami was raided by police, and Chase was there when it happened. It was depicted on Chase’s Facebook page, in fact, underneath a picture of a SWAT team outside an apartment complex housing members of Occupy Miami.

Church (aka “Sum Wun”) joked – ominously with the benefit of hindsight – that the raid was the result of a “terrorist meeting.”

Occupy’s Open Door for Infiltration: Enter “Mo” and “Nadia”

When it comes to protecting itself from prosecution, one of the Occupy movement’s truest merits – the inclusion of “the 99 percent” and acceptance of anyone willing to lend a hand – is also its fatal flaw.

CPD undercover officers began their investigation in February 2012 as part of a temporary 90-day assignment to monitor NATO protests. Undercover officers soon entered Occupy Chicago posing as activists and did so with ease.

Occupy Chicago organizer Matthew McLoughlin explained the hectic nature of preparations in the months leading up to the NATO Summit protests.

“Every day of the week . . . we had an action going on. So we were making sure that went off without a hitch,” he told us. “And then we had out-of-towners pouring in, so we had to take care of that

“We weren’t really prepared” to deal with undercover police officers, he continued.

That’s how two undercover officers, going by the names “Mo” and “Nadia,” would soon become the NATO 3’s downfall.

In early March, an undercover officer – a big man, a little over 6 feet tall, bearded and dark-featured, in his mid-30s with broad shoulders, wearing jeans, a black hoodie and a black winter cap – was first spotted by central organizers of the NATO Summit protests at a planning meeting.

He went by “Mo.”

A photo of “Mo,” the pseudonym for the undercover informant agent responsible for the entrapment-created arrests of the “NATO 3” and now two others taken by an activist and submitted to the National Lawyer’s Guild Chicago. (Photo Courtesy: National Lawyers Guild)

During small group introductions, Mo said he became an activist because he had been laid off from a job. “Shit blew up,” he said, and Occupy Chicago started. No further explanation was needed.

Mo would show up at a public Occupy event later in March with a woman who would always be by his side: a young woman who went by “Nadia Youkhana.”

Nadia was tall, with tanned skin. Some Occupy sources told Truthout she claimed to be Syrian. Many activists said she was charming and bubbly. They were attracted to her seeming genuine excitement to get involved with activism. If “Mo” was the brawn of the two-person team, “Nadia” was the brains.

Photo of “Nadia” released by Occupy Chicago

Nadia showed up alongside Mo at an Occupy General Assembly – a completely open meeting for anyone new to the movement – to introduce themselves, saying they were cousins. She talked with an Occupy Chicago organizer who oversaw a number of list-serves and who generally passed information about meetings to anyone who needed it.

Nadia seemingly saw this organizer as un-dangerous and useful; she kept in touch with him to monitor when various meetings were taking place and rallies were being planned, as well as to get email addresses of everyone involved in Occupy Chicago.

Mo and Nadia were on a 90-day temporary duty undercover assignment as part of CPD Field Intelligence Team 7150 (FIT 7150). The team was tasked with “attend[ing] Occupy Chicago and anarchist movement events for the purpose of observing and listening to reports of any planned criminal activity” in the run-up to the NATO Summit, according to pre-trial court documents.

Truthout visited the apartments of both Mo and Gloves, but both denied comment.

Woodlawn

The Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic on Chicago’s south side was one of six city-operated facilities scheduled for closure in April 2012. Occupy Chicago activists planned to protest on a daily basis.

Occupy Chicago activists link arms to form a human chain outside the occupied Woodlawn Clinic on the night of Thursday, April 12 2012. (Photo: Marcus Demery / Flickr)

At one of these protests in early April, 23 were arrested. Mo and Nadia thought a second protest – and an inevitable series of arrests – might cause some protesters to plan something violent, according to sources.

So when 10 protesters were arrested on April 23, Mo and Nadia were there.

“At the time, I couldn’t figure out why we were under such close surveillance this particular night,” recalled Rachel Unterman, press liaison for Occupy Chicago. “I thought they were overreacting to a few tents and a handful of expected arrests. Now I know that they had undercover officers in the field, which raised the stakes.”

The 10 spent the night in a Cook County Jail facility together. Some of them found “Mo” and “Nadia” to be a bit odd.

“When she walked into the police van was the first time I had ever seen her,” Christina Pillsbury told Truthout, a University of Chicago student who was arrested with Nadia that day. “It didn’t really make sense because I had seen everyone else arrested with me that day before, but I didn’t really have time to think about it at the time, either.”

Pillsbury recalls her being “really funny” and “really liking her at first.” Nadia also told Pillsbury and her fellow arrested activists “really intense stories about her sister’s mental illness.”

But she also recalls Nadia trying to rile up her and the other women arrested that day in jail. Pillsbury says Nadia started to “freak out” when the police were giving her stuff back to her and they only gave her one of her two cell phones – in hindsight, the two phones being another telltale sign that something was off, she noted.

“It seemed as if she was trying to get us in the whole ‘fuck the police’ mentality, but she was barking up the wrong tree,” noted Pillsbury. “We didn’t even do anything violent to be in jail in the first place; we just stood our ground across the street from Woodlawn in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience.”

Mo had told a story paralleling Nadia’s at Woodlawn Clinic prayer vigil earlier that day, shared by Mental Health Clinic activist Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle. Mo said he had a “cousin struggling with mental health issues” and that was why he felt strongly about the events unfolding at Woodlawn, compelling him to take part in them.

Mo also played the violence game. While in lockup, he approached one of the arrested activists. “What’s our next step?” he asked Ginsberg-Jaeckle. “We need to step this up a notch.”

Another Woodlawn activist, James Arentz, locked up with Mo, recalled him saying he was once arrested for “violence,” as if to gauge if his compatriots in jail were also interested in participating in illegal violent acts.

Arentz said he showed little interest in taking this route, and it was a route he had never gone down before as a veteran, middle-aged activist and father. Mo soon lost interest in him after a round of intrusive questioning.

Roger Shuy, an emeritus professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, refers to tactics utilized in jail by Mo and Nadia as the “hit-and-run” strategy for undercover cops.

“If the target does not say anything that seems to point to his guilt, many undercover operators begin to ‘drop in’ hints about illegality, sometimes clear and sometimes not,” he writes in his book Creating Language Crimes: How Law Enforcement Uses (and Misuses) Language. “It is commonplace that when they drop these hints into the conversation and are unsure how their targets might react, they often quickly change the subject to something benign before they give up their turn.”

May Day, May Day

If anyone at the Chicago NATO Summit was going to “step this up a notch,” it was Jared Chase, Brent Betterly and Brian Church – the NATO 3.

In south Florida, Betterly and Church – court records reveal – made plans over Facebook, in private messages, to visit Chicago for NATO. That was April 19, the date the “conspiracy to commit an act of domestic terrorism” began, according to Illinois state prosecutors.

In those messages, Church said he wanted to “get on the front lines” of the protests. Betterly agreed, writing that the Chicago NATO “protests are gonna get ugly.” During that same interaction, Betterly asked if Chase would also make the trip to Chicago.

On April 24, Betterly discussed molotov cocktails with a female acquaintance on Facebook after asking that acquaintance to come to Chicago and then typing, “riot!!” Betterly responded: “u cant apologize after throwing a molotov cocktail.” Betterly wrote that he might “catch some charges” in Chicago.

Official accounts suggest the “NATO 3” domestic terrorism plot began on May 1, known by leftist activists as “May Day.” Chase, Betterly and Church were part of the “black bloc” for a large march planned for that day.

Betterly in blue jeans and blonde hair with bandana over his face, Chase on far right in all black and black bandana over face (Photo Courtesy of Occupy Chicago)

Black bloc is a protest tactic in which activists dress in all black, often wearing bandanas, ski masks and other clothing to conceal their faces and identities and to appear as one group in solidarity. On May Day, Nadia and Mo were there, posing as members of the bloc.

Photo obtained from video of May Day rally shot by member of Occupy Chicago. “Nadia” in white shoes, Church in red bandana, Chase to his right and Betterly to far right.

Occupy sources said Nadia was pushing for militant violence within the black bloc, which can be seen on a YouTube video, as well.

Church in red bandana, Nadia in white shoes and Mo to the right with anarchist black flag (Photo Courtesy of Occupy Chicago)

Later that night, Church told “Mo” and “Nadia” that he wanted to find “targets” for the NATO Summit. Occupy sources said Nadia actively attempted to provoke violence that night, asking people if they wanted to go out into the streets and light dumpsters on fire. That never panned out.

On May 2, Church met up with Mo and Nadia in Chicago’s financial district. According to court records, “Church immediately told the undercover officers to remove the batteries from their [cellphones] so that the conversations could not be subject to government eavesdropping.”

Church had come there with an assault vest he told Mo and Nadia he would like to fill with foam for more cushioning. On that day, he also allegedly asked Mo and Nadia where he could purchase a filter from an Army Plus store (aka a gas mask) and where he could buy three assault rifles, plus a long rifle.

Mo and Nadia said Church told them, “If a cop is going to be pointing an AR at me, I’ll be pointing one back at them.” He also said he wanted to make smoke bombs to throw during the NATO Summit and that he owned a bow and arrow that could shatter a window.

Church allegedly formulated a grand plan that day with Mo and Nadia to attack four police districts and destroy as many police vehicles as possible. He’d do the latter by bringing together groups to destroy police vehicles days before the NATO Summit. Church also said he wanted to “hit” a Chase Bank and shoot an arrow through Mayor Emanuel’s window.

“If everything goes according to plans, I am leaving right after NATO,” he allegedly told Mo and Nadia during this meeting. “The city doesn’t know what it’s in for, and after NATO, the city will never be the same,” he reportedly told Mo and Nadia.

On May 4, Brian Church and Jared Chase met with Mo and Nadia at a park in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. At this meeting, according CPD search warrant documents, they discussed destroying police vehicles parked in police parking lots during the NATO Summit to damage and disrupt their response to protesters.

Two days later, Mo and Nadia met with Chase and Church again to discuss using sling shots to destroy the windows of President Obama’s campaign headquarters. Church allegedly asked the two undercover officers where he could go to buy metal pipes to break windows.

On May 8, Mo and Nadia were invited into the Bridgeport apartment for the very first time.

While there, CPD search warrant documents allege, Brian Church invited them into a bedroom and showed them a bow and arrow with 10 arrows, two metal swords, one silver Chinese throwing star, two knives with brass knuckle handles, a black gas mask, knee/shin pads and arm pads. He also told Mo and Nadia he had a homemade mortar.

Chase allegedly asked the two undercover officers where he could buy cocaine or heroin.

On May 14, the use of molotov cocktails during the NATO Summit was first mentioned by Church to Mo and Nadia. According to CPD search warrant documents, Church also said at the May 14 meeting that he had built a mortar gun with PVC pipe and a piece of wood and that he had filled the mortar gun with bottle rockets, further noting that it was operational.

Church also told Mo and Nadia that they seemed like two “anarchists in a pod,” and he would like for them to travel with him to other states during his activist journey. Church allegedly offered them the opportunity to travel with him if they were willing to shoot a rifle, point it, and shoot someone with it.

On May 16, the day of the raid, Mo and Nadia met the “NATO 3” for a protest and convened at the Bridgeport apartment later that night, according to CPD search warrant documents.

Once inside, they discussed how to make and then constructed four molotov cocktails for use at the NATO Summit. Mo and Jared left for BP to buy the gasoline for the molotovs, the last necessary ingredient for the cocktails.

Truthout has obtained the video of Jared Chase purchasing the gasoline from the BP Station, published here from multiple angles for the first time.

“Church handed one of the officers a knife and advised him to cut a bandana in strips for use as fuses for the molotov cocktails,” a Feb. 15, 2013, court document states. “Betterly cautioned that gasoline should not be poured directly on the cloth; the cloth should be soaked in the bottles. Chase poured the gasoline into the bottles and then turned the bottles over so the strips could be soaked.”

While making the cocktails, Church allegedly asked Nadia if she were “ready to see a police officer on fire.” That’s when the police decided to act. That night, officers from the CPD and the FBI raided the Bridgeport apartment.

Nowhere in the search warrant – or in any of the hundreds of pages of discovery documents later made public – does the prosecution mention one pivotal point: Two aggressive undercover cops helped along – and possibly even incited – the plot.

Mapping the Chicago Activist Community’s “Human Terrain”

It should go without saying that the NATO 3 are not being represented by high-priced attorneys. They are, however, being represented at no charge by attorneys at the People’s Law Office of Chicago (PLO), which specializes in high-profile civil rights cases involving law enforcement.

On April 30, the office filed court papers arguing that under a recent consent decree – an agreement dissolved in 2009 that limited undercover police activities by the City’s notorious Red Squad, a unit that spied on the political and social activities of Chicagoans during the 1950s and 1960s – CPD’s undercover operation in the NATO 3 case would have been illegal.

“At its heart, the consent decree prohibited precisely the type of undercover activities that CPD engaged in here,” PLO argued. “[It] appears to be the broadest foray into undercover activities implicating the First Amendment.”

PLO also argued that the spying and entrapment attempts were motivated by the ideology of the activists, not an imminent threat to public safety.

“The state has acknowledged a . . . broader investigation of Occupy Chicago . . . and political organizing surrounding the NATO Summit,” the PLO stated in a court motion. “This large, overarching operation began by March 2012 and was . . . based in part by political affiliations and beliefs.”

The Booz Allen Hamilton Connection

Court records also show that members of the FBI’s Chicago Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory (RCFL) may be called to testify if the case goes to trial.

A domain name search for Chicago RCFL’s web site shows that it was registered by military and intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH).

BAH is a major US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor abroad. Former CIA Director R. James Woosley once served as BAH Vice President, while Director of National Intelligence James Clapper once served as a BAH executive and current BAH Vice Chairman John “Mike” McConnell held Clapper’s position under former President George W. Bush.

Edward Snowden – the NSA whistleblower who revealed classified NSA spy program to The Guardian and The Washington Post – was a contractor for BAH at the time of the leak.

Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA and CIA, as well as the deputy director of National Intelligence has referred to BAH as a “Digital Blackwater,” a reference to Blackwater USA – now known as Academi – the “world’s most powerful mercenary army.”

“[BAH] is one of the NSA’s most important and trusted contractors. It’s involved in virtually every aspect of intelligence and surveillance,” writes investigative journalist Tim Shorrock in a recent article. “Among other secret projects, Booz was deeply involved in ‘Total Information Awareness,’ the controversial data-mining project run for the Bush administration.”

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Missed in Shorrock’s analysis: BAH also provides IT and logistical support for the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System and its Human Terrain Teams, which “map the human terrain” of communities abroad for the military and CIA.

A career New York cop, Chicago Police Department (CPD) superintendent Garry McCarthy is no stranger to the Human Terrain System.

It wasn’t long he after formally assumed the mantle of CPD superintendent in 2011 that McCarthy drew fire for having allowed a spy ring tasked to “map the human terrain” of Newark, N.J.,’s Islamic community to operate there, where he served as police chief before taking the position as CPD’s top dog.

McCarthy also served as an NYPD commander when the police set up spy rings before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City and during “CIA on the Hudson,” the joint NYPD/CIA project that was set up and run by former CIA Deputy Director for Operations David Cohen to “map the human terrain” of New York City’s Islamic community.

Shortcomings of “Mapping Human Terrain”

The problem with “mapping the human terrain”: It relies on overly-simplistic stereotypes. Case in point: FBI Special Agent Maureen Mazzola.

Mazzola is designated in court records as one of the people the state of Illinois may call to testify if the “NATO 3” case goes to trial. She’s also infamous for an incident based on stereotypes that unfolded before the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC).

In a nutshell, Mazzola attempted to recruit a University of Minnesota (U of M) student in spring 2008 to join the FBI’s ranks as an informant. Conned into the meeting by U of M’s police sergeant, the student was displeased and came to the press to tell his story.

“She told me that I had the perfect ‘look,'” recalled the student after the incident. “And that I had the perfect personality – they kept saying I was friendly and personable – for what they were looking for.”

Stereotypes were the name of the game for the FBI and Mazzola, as an account in the Minneapolis/St. Paul’s City Pages said.

“What they were looking for [was] someone to show up at ‘vegan potlucks’ throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protesters, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement,” reads City Pages’ rare inside look into the recruitment of an informant.

The days leading up to the 2008 RNC saw the arrest of Scott DeMuth, an animal rights activist and member of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). His charges: an “animal enterprise terrorism” plot that took place in a University of Iowa lab dating back to 2004.

This fishing expedition was lead by Mazzola and ended with DeMuth pleading guilty and serving six months in jail.

“As Special Agent Maureen Mazzola testified to on the stand in Scott’s pre-trial hearing, the FBI used the pretext of this raid as a fishing expedition, searching Scott’s room for anything linking him to ‘criminal activities’ that fell well outside of the scope of the search warrant being executed,” his support committee explained. “In this process, Mazzola came across a journal that she mistakenly believed linked him to the 2004 ALF raid at the University of Iowa.”

Court documents for that case show that Mazzola – unsurprisingly, given the backdrop – was working with an informant leading up to DeMuth’s eventual arrest. Mazzola was one of the people the US government called to testify as a witness during the DeMuth trial.

One Man’s Terrorist, Another Man’s Language Criminal

Digging deeper, there’s also the question of “Why ’terrorism’?” Why not just leave the NATO 3’s charges at the several felony counts?

PLO tackled the issue of terrorism head-on.

PLO made the legal argument in Jan. 2013 that the language in Illinois’ terrorism statute may be overly broad and unconstitutional. Judge Wilson, though, denied this constitutional challenge two months later, saying the law under which the three were charged is constitutional on its face and as applied.

It all boils down to politics, and a May 2012 Chicago Tribune story demonstrates the political nature of the charges, which were decided on at the proverbial 11th hour the night before the May 19, 2012, bail bond proffer hearing.

“[Cook County Attorney General Anita] Alvarez and seven of her prosecutors spent Friday evening analyzing the statute and weighing whether their case rose to the level of domestic terrorism,” reported the Tribune. “It was a marathon meeting with lawyers reading the statute out loud at times. Others ran in and out of the room to look up case law on other potential charges, such as conspiracy to commit arson. After four hours of debate, Alvarez polled those in the room and had a clear consensus that the terrorism statutes offered the toughest penalties and sent the strongest message.”

As an important parallel, a 2009 Neo-Nazi and right-wing terrorism threat report done by the US Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) went unpublished and censored, showing the truly political nature of “terrorism” charges. The author of the report, a former DHS analyst, has asserted that he warned of the right-wing “terrorist” elements that fueled the 2012 attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin – and that his warnings were ignored.

Another example: In Boston, local police in conjunction with federal law enforcement, focused attention on the political activism of local Occupy activists at the same time they missed the actual threat posed by the Boston Marathon bombers.

Contentious political events are, in many ways, a trap set to capture those who even insinuate the wrong kind of political language – “creating language crimes” – as Shuy put it in his eponymous book.

“The persons wearing the undercover mike . . . begin their work with a distinct power advantage over those they talk with,” Shuy writes in his book. “In undercover conversations, when the targets think they are simply engaged in everyday conversations, they are less on alert and are frequently less careful about how they say things. The persons doing the taping, in contrast, have the power to decide when to tape, who to tape, when to start the taping, when to stop, and even how to slant the conversation to serve their own ends.”

Shuy refers to this as “manipulative seduction.”

“When being seduced,” Shuy adds, “the listener does not understand the hidden intent of the seducer.”

The overall message is clear: Whatever your political stripe in the United States, the authorities are watching. That’s no longer a conspiracy theory. It’s policy and now just a question of what the authorities do with that intelligence.

And that decision is by-and-large a political one.

If any case in the last decade has shown that reality, it’s the case of the NATO 3.

Their case revealed authorities watching anarchists and the Occupy movement – specifically designated as the reason for the creation of Field Intelligence Team 7150 – with an all-seeing eye.

These young men fit the stereotypical profile of what a homegrown terrorist is “supposed” to look like. They’re politically active and angry with their country’s direction, burdened with nothing to lose but their freedom, and maybe, their lives.

The CPD and state of Illinois would like you to believe that makes them dangerous – unhinged and ready to strike out and hurt people with impunity, at any moment.

But perhaps they weren’t. The burden of proof falls on the prosecutors to make the case that they were.

Steve Horn

Steve Horn is a freelance investigative journalist, and a researcher and writer at DeSmogBlog.
Matt Stroud

Matt Stroud is a contributing writer at tech website TheVerge.com, where he writes about policy and law. Follow him on Twitter@ssttrroouudd.

Friday, 21 June 2013 00:00
By Matt Stroud and Steve Horn, Truthout | Report

Find this story at 21 June 2013

© 2013 Truthout

‘NATO 3’ Near Trial: South Florida Men To Face Terrorism Charges In Chicago

After Brian Church completed a course in emergency medicine at Broward College, he told his mother he was headed to Chicago for hands-on experience he hoped would boost his chances of becoming a paramedic.

“He was very proud of the fact that he was helping set up the first-aid tents,” said Elizabeth Ennis of her son’s participation in the NATO summit protest movement.

It has been a year since Church and two others from South Florida arrived in the Windy City and were arrested in a raid of an apartment just before the May 2012 summit.

Prosecutors allege the trio — now known by a cadre of supporters as the “Nato 3” — planned to use Molotov cocktails to blow up political targets, including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home and President Barack Obama’s downtown re-election campaign headquarters last year.

Yet, with the terrorism trial set to begin Sept. 16, defense attorneys for the men, along with Church’s mother, are calling the charges absurd.

“The whole terrorism thing just blows my mind,” said Ennis, a physician’s assistant and former Pembroke Pines resident who now lives in Central Florida. “This is a kid who made sandwiches to hand out to the homeless.”

Church, 21, Brent Betterly, 25, of Oakland Park, and Jared Chase, 29, a New Hampshire man who had been living in Miami, each are charged in an 11-count indictment with conspiracy to commit terrorism, possession of explosives and attempted arson.

In Illinois, they remain in custody on $1.5 million bond.

Church’s lawyer, Michael Deutsch, tried to get the charges thrown out, arguing that the law passed by the Illinois Legislature in the wake of 911 and used only once before is unconstitutional and being used politically.

“This is an attempt to take the acts of young people who are talking about criminal vandalism and convert it into terrorism in order to chill all militant activity in protest,” Deutsch said.

In a March 27 ruling, County Judge Thaddeus Wilson upheld the statute, saying, “The concept of domestic terrorism is not any more remote in contemporary society than the ‘international terrorism’ U.S. citizens were exposed to in September 2001.”

Church, Betterly and Chase were active in South Florida’s Occupy movement. Betterly was a familiar face around Fort Lauderdale City Hall during a brief encampment that took place there in late 2011 and early 2012.

But when the local Occupy movement began to sputter, all three looked for action elsewhere, friends said.

“He had specifically gone up there [to Chicago] to be a participant,” Ennis said of her son. “He wanted to be part of a bigger cause. At 20 years old, we all want to be part of a bigger cause.”

In the months before he left for Chicago, Church dated Danielle Hiller, then a West Park High School senior. “He always told me he wanted to peacefully protest,” said Hiller, 19. “He never seemed violent. He was really into helping people.”

The government case relies on two informants, undercover police officers nicknamed Mo and Nadia, who infiltrated the group and recorded the men talking about the plots and making four Molotov cocktails that were recovered inside the apartment during the raid. According to prosecutors, police also found swords, a bow and arrows, a slingshot and knives.

In a filing in March, prosecutors said the three allegedly obtained or planned to obtain “other improvised explosive devices, napalm, instructions for producing a pipe bomb, instructions for making potassium nitrate, a mortar … assault rifles and a long rifle.”

The three also constructed a wooden shield with sharp metal screws protruding from its front and hid it in an alley, “where they intended to violently confront police officers” during the summit protests, the filing alleged.

Deutsch acknowledges that Molotov cocktails were found in the apartment. But, he said, they were made at the urging of the police agents.

“When [police] didn’t get them to do anything, they got them to make these Molotov cocktails, with their money and expertise, and created a crime that never would have occurred,” he said.

Ellis said she has visited her son in jail, and talks to him regularly.

“It is starting to sink in, the magnitude of this,” she said. “He wants to be a flight medic, but the FAA has revoked his student’s pilot’s license. Even if these charges get thrown out, he has fears of never getting a job as an EMT.”

Ennis said her son, who is housed apart from the general jail population in semi-isolation, spends his time reading.

“He has his good days and bad,” she said. “He tries not to let the gloom set in.”

Sun Sentinel | By Mike Clary Posted: 06/16/2013 10:11 am EDT | Updated: 06/17/2013 9:11 am EDT

Find this story at 17 June 2013

© 2013 the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)

The Strange Case of Barrett Brown

In early 2010, journalist and satirist Barrett Brown was working on a book on political pundits, when the hacktivist collective Anonymous caught his attention. He soon began writing about its activities and potential. In a defense [2] of the group’s anti-censorship operations in Australia published on February 10, Brown declared, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the world’s most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.”

By then, Brown was already considered by his fans to be the Hunter S. Thompson of his generation. In point of fact he wasn’t like Hunter S. Thompson, but was more of a throwback—a sharp-witted, irreverent journalist and satirist in the mold of Ambrose Bierce or Dorothy Parker. His acid tongue was on display in his co-authored 2007 book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny, in which he declared: “This will not be a polite book. Politeness is wasted on the dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession.”

But it wasn’t Brown’s acid tongue so much as his love of minutia (and ability to organize and explain minutia) that would ultimately land him in trouble. Abandoning his book on pundits in favor of a book on Anonymous, he could not have known that delving into the territory of hackers and leaks would ultimately lead to his facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. In light of the bombshell revelations published by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman about government and corporate spying, Brown’s case is a good—and underreported—reminder of the considerable risk faced by reporters who report on leaks.

In February 2011, a year after Brown penned his defense of Anonymous, and against the background of its actions during the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr, CEO of the private intelligence company HBGary, claimed to have identified the leadership of the hacktivist colletive. (In fact he only had screen names of a few members). Barr’s boasting provoked a brutal hack of HBGary by a related group called Internet Feds (it would soon change its name to “LulzSec”). Splashy enough to attract the attention of The Colbert Report [3], the hack defaced and destroyed servers and websites belonging to HBGary. Some 70,000 company emails were downloaded and posted online. As a final insult to injury, even the contents of Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely wiped.

The HBGary hack may have been designed to humiliate the company, but it had the collateral effect of dropping a gold mine of information into Brown’s lap. One of the first things he discovered was a plan to neutralize Glenn Greenwald’s defense of Wikileaks by undermining them both. (“Without the support of people like Glenn, wikileaks would fold,” read one slide.) The plan called for “disinformation,” exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries—“creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,” as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.” Greenwald, it was argued, “if pushed,” would “choose professional preservation over cause.”

Other plans targeted social organizations and advocacy groups. Separate from the plan to target Greenwald and WikiLeaks, HBGary was part of a consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona management [4]” system for the United States Air Force, that would allow one user to control multiple online identities for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grassroots support or opposition to certain policies.

The data dump from the HBGary hack was so vast that no one person could sort through it alone. So Brown decided to crowdsource the effort. He created a wiki page, called it ProjectPM [5], and invited other investigative journalists to join in. Under Brown’s leadership, the initiative began to slowly untangle a web of connections between the US government, corporations, lobbyists, and a shadowy group of private military and information security consultants.

One connection was between Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce. WikiLeaks had claimed to possess a large cache of documents belonging to Bank of America. Concerned about this, Bank of America approached the United States Department of Justice. The DOJ directed it to the law and lobbying firm Hunton and Williams [6], which does legal work for Wells Fargo and General Dynamics and also lobbies for Koch Industries, Americans for Affordable Climate Policy, Gas Processors Association, Entergy among many other firms. The DoJ recommended that Bank of America hire Hunton and Williams, explicitly suggesting Richard Wyatt [7] as the person to work with. Wyatt, famously, was the lead attorney in the Chamber of Commerce’s lawsuit against the Yes Men.

In November 2010, Hunton and Williams organized a number of private intelligence, technology development and security contractors—HBGary, plus Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies, and, according to Brown, a secretive corporation with the ominous name Endgame Systems—to form “Team Themis” —‘themis’ being a Greek word meaning “divine law.” Its main objective was to discredit critics of the Chamber of Commerce, like Chamber Watch [8] using such tactics as creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that US Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.” In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.” The leaked emails showed that similar disinformation campaigns were being planned against WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald.

It was clear to Brown that these were actions of questionable legality, but beyond that, government contractors were attempting to undermine Americans’ free speech—with the apparent blessing of the DOJ. A group of Democratic Congressmen asked for an investigation [9] into this arrangement, to no avail.

By June 2011, the plot had thickened further. The FBI had the goods on the leader of LulzSec, one Hector Xavier Monsegur, who went under the nom de guerre Sabu. The FBI arrested him on June 7, 2011 and (according to court documents) turned him into an informant the following day. Just three days before his arrest, Sabu had been central to the formation of a new group called AntiSec, which comprised his former LulzSec crew members, as well as members as Anonymous. In early December AntiSec hacked the website of a private security company called Stratfor Global Intelligence. On Christmas Eve, it released a trove of some five million internal compnay emails. AntiSec member and Chicago activist Jeremy Hammond [10], has pled guilty to the attack and is currently facing ten years in prison for it.

The contents of the Stratfor leak were even more outrageous than those of the HBGary hack. They included discussion of opportunities for renditions and assassinations. For example, in one video, Statfor’s Vice President of Intelligence, Fred Burton, suggested taking advantage of the chaos in Libya to render Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who had been released from prison on compassionate grounds due to his terminal illness. Burton said that the case “was personal.” When someone pointed out in an email that such a move would almost certainly be illegal—“This man has already been tried, found guilty, sentenced…and served time”—another Stratfor employee responded that this was just an argument for a more efficient solution: “One more reason to just bugzap him with a hellfire. :-)”

(Stratfor employees also seemed to take a keen interest in Jeremy Scahill’s writings about Blackwater in The Nation, copying and circulating entire articles, with comments suggesting a principle interest was in the question of whether Blackwater was setting up a competing intelligence operation. Emails also showed grudging respect for Scahill: “Like or dislike Scahill’s position (or what comes of his work), he does an amazing job outing [Blackwater].”)

When the contents of the Stratfor leak became available, Brown decided to put ProjectPM on it. A link to the Stratfor dump appeared in an Anonymous chat channel; Brown copied it and pasted it into the private chat channel for ProjectPM, bringing the dump to the attention of the editors.

Brown began looking into Endgame Systems [11], an information security firm that seemed particularly concerned about staying in the shadows. “Please let HBGary know we don’t ever want to see our name in a press release,” one leaked email read. One of its products, available for a $2.5 million annual subscription, gave customers access to “zero-day exploits”—security vulnerabilities unknown to software companies—for computer systems all over the world. Business Week [12] published a story on Endgame in 2011, reporting that “Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.” For Brown, this raised the question of whether Endgame was selling these exploits to foreign actors and whether they would be used against computer systems in the United States. Shortly thereafter, the hammer came down.

The FBI acquired a warrant [13] for Brown’s laptop, gaining the authority to seize any information related to HBGary, Endgame Systems, Anonymous, and, most ominously, “email, email contacts, ‘chat’, instant messaging logs, photographs, and correspondence.” In other words, the FBI wanted his sources.

When the FBI went to serve Brown he was at his mother’s house. Agents returned with a warrant to search his mother’s house, retrieving his laptop. To turn up the heat on Brown, the FBI initiated charges against his mother for obstruction of justice for concealing his laptop computer in her house. (Facing criminal charges, on March 22, 2013, his mother, Karen McCutchin, pled guilty to one count of obstructing the execution of a search warrant. She faces up to twelve months in jail. Brown maintains that she did not know the laptop was in her home.)

By his own admission, the FBI’s targeting of his mother made Brown snap. In September 2012, he uploaded an incoherent YouTube video [14], in which he explained that he had been in treatment for an addiction to heroin, taking the medication Suboxone, but had gone off his meds and now was in withdrawal. He threatened the FBI agent that was harassing his mother, by name, warming:

“I know what’s legal, I know what’s been done to me… And if it’s legal when it’s done to me, it’s going to be legal when it’s done to FBI Agent Robert Smith—who is a criminal.”

“That’s why [FBI special agent] Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I say his life is over, I’m not saying I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids… How do you like them apples?”

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50! [15]

The media narrative was immediately derailed. No longer would this be a story about the secretive information-military-industrial complex; now it was the sordid tale of a crazy drug addict threatening an FBI agent and his (grown) children. Actual death threats against agents are often punishable by a few years in jail. But Brown’s actions made it easier for the FBI to sell some other pretext to put him away for life.

The Stratfor data included a number of unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes. On this basis, the DOJ accused Brown of credit card fraud for having shared that link with the editorial board of ProjectPM. Specifically, the FBI charged him with Traffic in Stolen Authentication Features, Access Device Fraud, Aggravated Identity Theft, as well as an Obstruction of Justice charge (for being at his mother’s when the initial warrant was served) and charges stemming from his threats against the FBI agent. All told, Brown is looking at century of jail time: 105 years in federal prison if served sequentially. He has been denied bail.

Considering that the person who carried out the actual Stratfor hack had several priors and is facing a maximum of ten years, the inescapable conclusion is that the problem is not with the hack itself, but with Brown’s journalism. As Glenn Greenwald remarked in the Guardian: “it is virtually impossible to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.”

Today, Brown is in prison and ProjectPM is under increased scrutiny by the DOJ, even as its work has ground to a halt. In March, the DOJ served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena [16] for all records on the ProjectPM website, and in particular asked for the IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to ProjectPM, describing it as a “forum” through which Brown and others would “engage in, encourage, or facilitate the commission of criminal conduct online.” The message was clear: Anyone else who looks into this matter does so at their grave peril.

Some journalists are now understandably afraid to go near the Stratfor files. The broader implications of this go beyond Brown; one might think that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0—an outsourced surveillance state—but in fact it’s worse. One can’t help but infer that the US Department of Justice has become just another security contractor, working alongside the HBGarys and Stratfors on behalf of corporate bidders, with no sense at all for the justness of their actions; they are working to protect corporations and private security contractors and give them license to engage in disinformation campaigns against ordinary citizens and their advocacy groups. The mere fact that the FBI’s senior cybersecurity advisor has recently moved to Hunton and Williams shows just how incestuous this relationship has become. Meanwhile the Department of Justice is also using its power and force to trample on the rights of citizens like Barrett Brown who are trying to shed light on these nefarious relationships. In order to neutralize those who question or investigate the system, laws are being reinterpreted or extended or otherwise misappropriated in ways that are laughable—or would be if the consequences weren’t so dire.

While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by the revelation of the NSA’s spying programs, Barrett Brown’s work was pointing to a much deeper problem. It isn’t the sort of problem that can be fixed by trying to tweak a few laws or by removing a few prosecutors. The problem is not with bad laws or bad prosecutors. What the case of Barrett Brown has exposed is that we confronting a different problem altogether. It is a systemic problem. It is the failure of the rule of law.

Links:
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOW7GOrXNZI
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barrett-brown/anonymous-australia-and-t_b_457776.html
[3] http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/426198/may-09-2013/colbert-s-book-club—learning–the-great-gatsby-
[4] http://boingboing.net/2011/02/18/hbgarys-high-volume.html
[5] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page
[6] http://www.hunton.com/
[7] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/19/chamber-of-commerce-still_n_768076.html
[8] http://images2.americanprogress.org/ThinkProgress/ProposalForTheChamber.pdf
[9] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/28/AR2011022805810.html
[10] http://www.dailydot.com/news/lulzsec-jeremy-hammond-bail-denied-hacker/
[11] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems
[12] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/cyber-weapons-the-new-arms-race-07212011.html
[13] http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/exclusive-fbi-escalates-war-on-anonymous
[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOW7GOrXNZI
[15] https://subscribe.thenation.com/servlet/OrdersGateway?cds_mag_code=NAN&cds_page_id=122425&cds_response_key=I12SART1
[16] http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/doj-issues-subpoena-for-info-on-barrett-browns-project-pm-site/

Peter Ludlow | June 18, 2013

Find this story at 18 June 2013

© 2012 The Nation

Jeremy Hammond Pleads Guilty to Stratfor Hack Cyber-activist faces up to 10 years in federal prison

Jeremy Hammond pleaded guilty today to the infamous Stratfor hack, as well as taking responsibility for eight additional hacks of law enforcement and defense contractor websites in 2011 and 2012. As a condition of the plea, the radical hacker will face a maximum of 10 years in federal prison, and restitution costs of up to $2.5 million. After Hammond entered his plea, his legal team framed his prosecution as part of the government’s larger attempt to control the flow of information and punish those who seek to distribute it to journalists and the public.

“There’s a war going on about corporate spying and access to information,” said defense attorney Sarah Kunstler at a press conference immediately following the hearing. “Jeremy is someone who worked toward making information public.”

In a statement posted online after the plea deal, Hammond echoed this point. “I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors,” Hammond wrote. “I did what I believe is right.”

The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond: Enemy of the State

Hammond entered his plea – admitting to one count of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking – in a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan, surrounded by observers and supporters. One of those in attendance was his twin brother, Jason, who had just flown in from Chicago. When Hammond initially addressed the judge, he raised his right hand to be sworn in, and clenched his fist in a symbol of defiance.

The hack Hammond pleaded guilty to involved accessing information from the servers of Stratfor, a private intelligence company, and providing it to Wikileaks, who then published some of the information. Hammond was charged under the controversial 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law used to charge the late Aaron Swartz and other cyber-activists. “Included among the leaked internal documents were millions of emails that exposed Stratfor’s wide-ranging spying activities, including surveillance of Bhopal activists at the behest of Dow Chemical, of PETA on behalf of Coca-Cola, and of Occupy Wall Street under contract to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” supporters said in a statement.

Beyond Stratfor, Hammond took responsibility for eight other hacks, all of which involved either law enforcement, intelligence firms or defense contractor websites. From June 2011 to February 2012, Hammond obtained unauthorized information from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the FBI virtual academy, a marketing firm that builds websites for law enforcement called Brooks Jeffreys, Special Forces Gear, Vanguard Defense Industries, the Jefferson County sheriffs department, the Boston Police Patrolman’s Institute and a Pennsylvania firm called Combined Systems that makes tear gas. Hammond was granted immunity from federal prosecution for any of those hacks in exchange for taking responsibility for them. Kunstler said he could potentially face charges at the state level, though she said there may be some double jeopardy protection.

The New Political Prisoners: Leakers, Hackers and Whistleblowers

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center For Constitutional Rights and lawyer for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, said that journalists should stand up for Hammond. “He should be looked at as a source, as a whistle-blower,” Ratner said after the plea deal. “He, like other whistle-blowers in this country, ought to be protected, because they’re the only thing that let us know what our government and our private security companies are doing and they’re the only things that can keep this government even close to honest.”

Earlier in the case, Hammond’s legal team made a motion for Judge Loretta Preska to recuse herself because her husband was a victim of the Stratfor leak. That motion was denied. (Full disclosure: This reporter previously spoke at a rally that called for Preska to recuse herself.)

Other hackers in the Anonymous-affiliated group called Lulzsec who were charged in similar leaks – but were tried in the U.K. – have received much lighter sentences, from 20 to 32 months. Jason Hammond has asked supporters to sign a Change.org petition on his brother’s behalf calling for Judge Preska to sentence Hammond to time served. Jeremy Hammond’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for September 6th.

by John Knefel
MAY 28, 2013

Find this story at 28 May 2013

©2013 Rolling Stone

The Global Intelligence Files

LONDON—Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods, for example :

“[Y]ou have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control… This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase” – CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla on 6 December 2011, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on the medical condition of the President of Venezuala, Hugo Chavez.

The material contains privileged information about the US government’s attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor’s own attempts to subvert WikiLeaks. There are more than 4,000 emails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. The emails also expose the revolving door that operates in private intelligence companies in the United States. Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money. The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.

The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how they target individuals for their corporate and government clients. For example, Stratfor monitored and analysed the online activities of Bhopal activists, including the “Yes Men”, for the US chemical giant Dow Chemical. The activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. The disaster led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.

Stratfor has realised that its routine use of secret cash bribes to get information from insiders is risky. In August 2011, Stratfor CEO George Friedman confidentially told his employees : “We are retaining a law firm to create a policy for Stratfor on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. I don’t plan to do the perp walk and I don’t want anyone here doing it either.”

Stratfor’s use of insiders for intelligence soon turned into a money-making scheme of questionable legality. The emails show that in 2009 then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman hatched an idea to “utilise the intelligence” it was pulling in from its insider network to start up a captive strategic investment fund. CEO George Friedman explained in a confidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS : “What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor’s intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like”. The emails show that in 2011 Goldman Sach’s Morenz invested “substantially” more than $4million and joined Stratfor’s board of directors. Throughout 2011, a complex offshore share structure extending as far as South Africa was erected, designed to make StratCap appear to be legally independent. But, confidentially, Friedman told StratFor staff : “Do not think of StratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral… It will be useful to you if, for the sake of convenience, you think of it as another aspect of Stratfor and Shea as another executive in Stratfor… we are already working on mock portfolios and trades”. StratCap is due to launch in 2012.

The Stratfor emails reveal a company that cultivates close ties with US government agencies and employs former US government staff. It is preparing the 3-year Forecast for the Commandant of the US Marine Corps, and it trains US marines and “other government intelligence agencies” in “becoming government Stratfors”. Stratfor’s Vice-President for Intelligence, Fred Burton, was formerly a special agent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and was their Deputy Chief of the counterterrorism division. Despite the governmental ties, Stratfor and similar companies operate in complete secrecy with no political oversight or accountability. Stratfor claims that it operates “without ideology, agenda or national bias”, yet the emails reveal private intelligence staff who align themselves closely with US government policies and channel tips to the Mossad – including through an information mule in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Yossi Melman, who conspired with Guardian journalist David Leigh to secretly, and in violation of WikiLeaks’ contract with the Guardian, move WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables to Israel.

Ironically, considering the present circumstances, Stratfor was trying to get into what it called the leak-focused “gravy train” that sprung up after WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan disclosures :

“[Is it] possible for us to get some of that ’leak-focused’ gravy train ? This is an obvious fear sale, so that’s a good thing. And we have something to offer that the IT security companies don’t, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred and Stick know better than anyone on the planet… Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of ´leak-focused’ network security that focuses on preventing one’s own employees from leaking sensitive information… In fact, I’m not so sure this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution.”

Like WikiLeaks’ diplomatic cables, much of the significance of the emails will be revealed over the coming weeks, as our coalition and the public search through them and discover connections. Readers will find that whereas large numbers of Stratfor’s subscribers and clients work in the US military and intelligence agencies, Stratfor gave a complimentary membership to the controversial Pakistan general Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, who, according to US diplomatic cables, planned an IED attack on international forces in Afghanistan in 2006. Readers will discover Stratfor’s internal email classification system that codes correspondence according to categories such as ’alpha’, ’tactical’ and ’secure’. The correspondence also contains code names for people of particular interest such as ’Hizzies’ (members of Hezbollah), or ’Adogg’ (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad).

Stratfor did secret deals with dozens of media organisations and journalists – from Reuters to the Kiev Post. The list of Stratfor’s “Confederation Partners”, whom Stratfor internally referred to as its “Confed Fuck House” are included in the release. While it is acceptable for journalists to swap information or be paid by other media organisations, because Stratfor is a private intelligence organisation that services governments and private clients these relationships are corrupt or corrupting.

WikiLeaks has also obtained Stratfor’s list of informants and, in many cases, records of its payoffs, including $1,200 a month paid to the informant “Geronimo” , handled by Stratfor’s Former State Department agent Fred Burton.

WikiLeaks has built an investigative partnership with more than 25 media organisations and activists to inform the public about this huge body of documents. The organisations were provided access to a sophisticated investigative database developed by WikiLeaks and together with WikiLeaks are conducting journalistic evaluations of these emails. Important revelations discovered using this system will appear in the media in the coming weeks, together with the gradual release of the source documents.

END

Public partners in the investigation
Comment
Current WikiLeaks status
How to read the data
Public partners in the investigation:

More than 25 media partners (others will be disclosed after their first publication) :

Al Akhbar – Lebanon – http://english.al-akhbar.com
Al Masry Al Youm – Egypt – http://www.almasry-alyoum.com
Bivol – Bulgaria – http://bivol.bg
CIPER – Chile – http://ciperchile.cl
Dawn Media – Pakistan – http://www.dawn.com
L’Espresso – Italy – http://espresso.repubblica.it
La Repubblica – Italy – http://www.repubblica.it
La Jornada – Mexico – www.jornada.unam.mx/
La Nacion – Costa Rica – http://www.nacion.com
Malaysia Today – Malaysia – www.malaysia-today.net
McClatchy – United States – http://www.mcclatchydc.com
Nawaat – Tunisia – http://nawaat.org
NDR/ARD – Germany – http://www.ndr.de
Owni – France – http://owni.fr
Pagina 12 – Argentina – www.pagina12.com.ar
Plaza Publica – Guatemala – http://plazapublica.com.gt
Publico.es – Spain – www.publico.es
Rolling Stone – United States – http://www.rollingstone.com
Russian Reporter – Russia – http://rusrep.ru
Sunday Star-Times – New Zealand – www.star-times.co.nz
Ta Nea – Greece –- http://www.tanea.gr
Taraf – Turkey – http://www.taraf.com.tr
The Hindu – India – www.thehindu.com
The Yes Men – Bhopal Activists – Global http://theyesmen.org
Comment:

WikiLeaks – Kristinn Hrafnsson, Official WikiLeaks representative, +35 4821 7121

Other comment :
Bhopal Medical Appeal (in UK) – Colin Toogood : colintoogood@bhopal.org / +44 (0) 1273 603278/ +44 (0) 7798 845074
International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (in India) – Rachna Dhingra : rachnya@gmail.com, +91 98 261 67369
Yes Men – mike@theyesmen.org / +44 (0) 7578 682321 – andy@theyesmen.org, +1-718-208-0684
Privacy International – +44 (0) 20 7242 2836

Twitter tag : #gifiles
CURRENT WIKILEAKS STATUS:

An extrajudicial blockade imposed by VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America, and Western Union that is designed to destroy WikiLeaks has been in place since December 2010. The EU Commission is considering whether it will open a formal investigation, but two lawsuits have been filed (http://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blocka…). There are also other ways to donate (https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate). It is legal to donate, including in the United States. The US Treasury has publicly stated that that there are no grounds to place WikiLeaks on a US government blacklist.

WikiLeaks Founder and Publisher Julian Assange has not been charged with any crime in any country. Four prosecutors are currently trying to charge him under the Espionage Act of 1917 before a closed Grand Jury in Virginia, in the United States. Julian Assange has been detained for 447 days (10,728 hours) since Dec 7, 2010, without charge, and he is currently awaiting a decision from the UK Supreme Court on extradition to Sweden (http://www.justiceforassange.com/Su…). The decision is expected in March. The decision on whether he will be onwardly extradited to the US lies in the hands of the Swedish Executive, but Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has refused to state whether he will protect Assange from a politically motivated extradition to the United States (http://justice4assange.com/US-Extra… ).

The Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has repeatedly attacked WikiLeaks this week in a bizarre manner (http://ferrada-noli.blogspot.com/20… ).

An alleged WikiLeaks US military source, Bradley Manning, has been in pre-trial detention for 639 days (http://bradleymanning.org/ ). His arraignment took place on 24 February 2012. In December 2011, Manning’s attorney revealed in the preliminary hearing that the US government is attempting to enter a plea deal with Manning in order to “go after” Assange. Manning has 22 charges against him, including violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and aiding the enemy. Manning has deferred entering a plea. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are legally represented in the Manning hearings by the US Centre for Constitutional Rights (http://ccrjustice.org/ ). WikiLeaks was denied full access to Manning’s hearing after appeal (http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/pres… ). WikiLeaks put out a statement relating to Manning’s trial ahead of the Article 32 Hearing : (http://www.wikileaks.org/Statement-… ).

The alleged WikiLeaks-supporting hacktivists known as the “PayPal 14” were arrested in 2011 following co-ordinated online demonstrations against the financial services companies that are carrying out the unlawful financial blockade on WikiLeaks (VISA, MasterCard, Paypal, Western Union, Bank of America). They are represented by attorney Stanley Cohen and will go before court in May 2012 (http://www.cyberguerrilla.org/?p=4644 ).

WikiLeaks is about to launch a distributed, encrypted “Facebook for revolutionaries” (https://wlfriends.org/ ).

Julian Assange is currently directing interviews, from house arrest, for a programme on the future of the world that is syndicated to various broadcasters. The first show will be broadcast in March (http://www.wikileaks.org/New-Assang… )
HOW TO READ THE DATA

This is a glossary and information on how to understand the internal terms and codes used by Stratfor in their emails. It is not a complete list. We call on the public to add to this list by tweeting #gifind

To see a list of the terms George Friedman considers useful for his staff to know please download this PDF : The Stratfor Glossary of Useful, Baffling and Strange Intelligence Terms.

OPEN SOURCE VS. “COVERT”

As you browse through the content, you will notice that a large set of it is what is classified as “open source” (subject lines which include [OS]). These are basically email threads that start with someone posting a published and accessible source, such as news sites, and follow with commentary by the staff. In one of the emails, Joseph Nye is referenced saying :

“Open source intelligence is the outer pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, without which one can neither begin nor complete the puzzle”

CODES IN SUBJECT LINES

Many of the emails have codes in the subject lines as well as in the body, to make it easier for the staff to “quickly identify when we need to go back and have a look-see.” [*] :

Examples : INSIGHT – COUNTRY – Subject – SOURCE CODE INSIGHT – CHINA – Trains and planes – CN1000

Please refer to the glossary for the code names of subject and country tags, as well as mailing list names.

SOURCE CODES

A lot of interesting stuff comes from “sources”. Sources are either informal contacts or people they have a formal relationship with. The IDs for sources have the format of CN120 or ME001. In terms of the character part, it refers to a region or a country :

A) Regions ME – Middle East region EU – European Union EE – Eastern Europe LA- South America SA- South Asia

B) Countries or Orgs CN – China PK – Pakistan IN- India ML – Malaysia VN – Vietnam NP- Nepal

US – United States VZ – Venezuela CO- Colombia BR-Brazil NC- Nicaragua MX- Mexico CL/CH- Chile AR- Argentina PY- Paraguay BOL- Bolivia

RU – Russia UA – Ukraine GE – Georgia TJ – Tajikstan MD – Moldova BG -Bulgaria CR/CZ- Czech Republic PT- Portugal

ZA – South Africa AO – Angola SO – Somalia NG- Nigeria CD- DR Congo CI- Cote D’Ivoire ZW- Zimbabwe ZM- Zambia RW- Rwanda KE- Kenya ET- Ethiopia SD -Sudan MA- Morocco SN- Senegal GN- Guinea SL- Sierra Leone

IR – Iran IQ- Iraq IL or IS- Israel SA- Saudi Arabia SY- Syria KU- Kuwait Y or YN – Yemen HZ – Hizbollah TK – Turkey LN- Lebanon LY- Libya UAE- UAE EG- Egypt (etc.)

C) Odd codes OCH – Old China hand, a finance insider. Stick – Scott Stewart, high level employee Z’s – Zetas, Mexican drug gang

INSIGHTS FORMAT

When “insights” are sent, they usually have the following header information :

SOURCE : The ID of the source, say CN123. Sometimes this is left “no source ID” when it’s a new source.

ATTRIBUTION : How the source is to be attributed, i.e. “Source in the pharma distribution industry in China”, Stratfor source, etc.

SOURCE DESCRIPTION : Describes the source, for example : “Source works with Mercator Pharmaceutical Solutions, distributing pharma to developing countries.” These include concrete details on the source for internal consumption so that there’s a better understanding on the source’s background and ability to make assessments on the ground.

PUBLICATION : Yes or No. If the option is yes it doesn’t mean that it would be published, but rather that it _can_ be published.

SOURCE RELIABILITY : A/B

SOURCE RELIABILITY : A-F, A being the best and F being the worst. This grades the turnaround time of this source in responding to requests.

ITEM CREDIBILITY : 1-10, 1 being the best and 10 being the worst (we may change the range here in the future). this changes a lot based on the info provided. 1 is “you can take this to the bank” and 10 would be an example of maybe – “this is a totally ridiculous rumor but something that is spreading on the ground”

SPECIAL HANDLING : often this is “none” but it may be something like, “if you use this we need to be sure not to mention the part about XXX in the publication” or any other special notes

SOURCE HANDLER : the person who can take follow-up questions and communicate with the source.

MAILING LISTS

alpha@stratfor.com Discussions circulated exclusively among analysts, writers and higher-ups, including ’insights’ and discussions about sources and source meetings. secure@stratfor.com Discussions circulated exclusively among analysts and higher-ups, and only for use within continental US (analysts traveling ’overseas’ are removed from the list for the duration of their journey). analysts@stratfor.com – Discussion among analysts only, who manage sources, gather and analyze intelligence. ct@stratfor.com Ongoing discussions to collect and analyze counterterrorism intelligence, circulated among select group of analysts. tactical@statfor.com Non-time sensitive discussions for internal training on technical and tactical matters within field of counterterrorism. intelligence@stratfor.com gvalerts@stratfor.com – Related to Gas ventures clients military@stratfor.com Military list for pre-approved staff africa@stratfor.com eastasia@stratfor.com mesa@stratfor.com Middle East/South Asia list for pre-approved staff. eurasia@stratfor.com os@stratfor.com List with information from the public domain circulated and discussed among all employees. adp@stratfor.com List for ADPs. See Glossary. translations@stratfor.com alerts@stratfor.com responses@stratfor.com dialog-list@stratfor.com

GLOSSARY

a) Industry and other misc. tags :

HUMINT – Human intelligence OSINT- Open source intelligence DATA FLU BIRDFLU ECON TECH ENERGY MINING GV – Gas Venture CT – Counterterrorism G1-G4 B2-B4 S1-S4 MILITARY or MIL PENTAGON AQ- Al Qaeda AQAP – Al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula SF- Special Forces CONUS- Continental US

b) Special internal codewords :

Hizzies or HZ – Hizbollah Izzies or IZ – Israel A-dogg – Mahmoud Ahmadinajad, Iranian President Baby bashar – Bashar Al-Assad, Syrian President Uncle Mo – Moammar Gaddhafi ADP- Analyst Development Program. Four-month program at STRATFOR from which candidates— mostly recent college graduates— are selected for hire. Strictly protect and protect – Often mentioned in the ’subject’, means that the source is protected. Played- A term used for procuring sensitive information from sources. E.g. from one of the secure list messages circulating the ’complete scenario for the Israeli team in Centcom’s war game,’ the analyst who procured the data wrote : “I played the head of the Mossad which was great fun.” Excomm- Appears to be ’executive committee’ of STRATFOR.

c) Regions and Orgs

AFRICOM – African countries LATAM – Latin American MERCOSUR NATFA ASEAN APEC FSU – Former Soviet Union countries MESA or MIDDLEEAST – Middle East EASTASIA OPEC EURASIA SA – South Asia FSB- Federal Security Service (Russia)

ATTACHED DOCUMENTS

Attached documents can be searched by Filename or part of the file name. Preliminary searches for filenames using the terms ’lists’, ’source lists’ or ’insight lists’, coupled with the names of source handlers (e.g. Reva for Turkey, Brazil or Venezuela) produced Excel lists of the source names, contact info and source descriptions which correspond to the source codes (e.g. ME1315).

Sourcing Criteria

The following are the proposed criteria for analyzing both sources and insight.

1. Source Timeliness 2. Source Accessibility/Position 3. Source Availability 4. Insight Credibility 5. Insight Uniqueness

Source Timeliness : This is the average grade on how long this particular source turns around tasks and replies to inquiries. It may change but is more of a static indicator.

Source Accessibility : Accessibility weighs the source’s position to have certain knowledge in a particular field. So, for example, if we are looking for energy insight and the source is an official in an energy agency, his or her Accessibility would be ranked higher than if s/he was a banker giving insight on energy. While we would welcome a banker giving his/her insight, a good source may not have a high accessibility ranking if they aren’t in a position to offer reliable insight on a certain topic. The source’s access to decision makers, specific training or education in the desired topic area, specific knowledge of events/situations/incidents can also be considered.

Source Availability : How often can we go to this source ? Are they someone we can tap daily, weekly, monthly, yearly ?

Insight Credibility : This is our assessment of the veracity of the insight offered. Here we need to consider whether or not this is disinformation, speculation, correct data or knowledgeable interpretation. Any bias that the source is displaying or any specific viewpoints or personal background the source is using in the assessment provided should also be considered.

Insight Uniqueness : Is this insight something that could be found in OS ? If it is but the analysis of the information is unique, it would still have a high uniqueness ranking. Or, if it is concrete data, but is something that is only offered to industry insiders, i.e. stats that aren’t published but that aren’t secret, it would still have a high uniqueness score.

Scoring

All of the above factors will be scored on an A-F scale, with A being exemplary and F being useless.

Source Timeliness : A = turnaround within 24 hours B = turnaround within 48 hours C = turnaround within a week D = turnaround within a month F = lucky to receive a reply at all

Source Accessibility : A = Someone with intimate knowledge of the particular insight B = Someone within the industry but whose knowledge of the topic is not exact (e.g. if we were asking someone in the oil industry about natural gas) C = Someone working close to the industry who doesn’t have intimate knowledge of a particular topic but can speak to it intelligently (e.g. a financial consultant asked to gauge the movement of the stock market) D = Someone who may know a country but doesn’t have any concrete insight into a particular topic but can offer rumors and discussions heard on the topic F = Someone who has no knowledge of a particular industry at all

Source Availability : A = Available pretty much whenever B = Can tap around once a week C = Can tap about once a month D = Can tap only several times a year F = Very limited availability

Insight Credibility : A = We can take this information to the bank B = Good insight but maybe not entirely precise C = Insight is only partially true D = There may be some interest in the insight, but it is mostly false or just pure speculation. F = Likely to be disinformation

Insight Uniqueness : A = Can’t be found anywhere else B = Can only be found in limited circles C = Insight can be found in OS, but the source has an interesting take/analysis D = Insight can be found in OS, but still may not be common knowledge F = Insight is accessible in numerous locations

Daily Insight Scoring

SOURCE : code ATTRIBUTION : this is what we should say if we use this info in a publication, e.g. STRATFOR source/source in the medical industry/source on the ground, etc SOURCE DESCRIPTION : this is where we put the more concrete details of the source for our internal consumption so we can better understand the source’s background and ability to make the assessments in the insight. PUBLICATION : Yes or no. If you put yes it doesn’t mean that we will publish it, but only that we can publish it. SOURCE RELIABILITY : A-F. A being the best and F being the worst. This grades the source overall – access to information, timeliness, availability, etc. In short, how good is this source ? ITEM CREDIBILITY : A-F. A = we can take this info to the bank ; B = Good insight but maybe not entirely precise ; C = Insight is only partially true ; D = There may be some interest in the insight, but it is mostly false or just pure speculation ; F = Likely to be disinformation. SPECIAL HANDLING : often this is “none” but it may be something like, “if you use this we need to be sure not to mention the part about XXX in thepublication” or any other special notes SOURCE HANDLER : the person who can take follow-up questions and communicate with the source.

Find this story at 27 February 2012

Undercover: Police Officer Connected to “NATO 5” Case Still Spying on Protest in Chicago

The first time “Danny” (far right) officially ran as a CAM medic: March 18, 2012 at a protest to mark the anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war.
On March 27, Chicago teachers and their supporters – including parents, students and community residents – rallied against the largest mass public school closure in US history. News of the mobilization sparked huge public interest before the demonstration – including from an undercover police officer calling himself “Danny Edwards.”

The day before the big rally, “Danny” reached out in individual emails to fellow volunteer street medics he had met a year earlier after he took a 20-hour training with Chicago’s local street medic collective, Chicago Action Medical (CAM). CAM’s volunteer emergency medical technicians (EMTs), nurses, doctors and trained street medics provide emergency medical treatment at local protests.

His aim in reaching out: to learn more about the next day’s plans.

“Danny” – who admitted to us on May 6 that he is, in fact, a Chicago police officer – could have saved himself the trouble and his department the expense. After all, organizers had already coordinated directly with top CPD brass about their plans for the next day and widely promoted their intent to stage nonviolent civil disobedience.

After the CTU rally, “Danny” also tried to recruit at least one CAM volunteer street medic via email on April 30, the day before a May 1, 2013, immigrants’ rights march, to pair up with him as a partner. There were no takers, so he showed up alone at the rally sporting marked medic regalia.

His latest undercover sortie as a fake volunteer street medic bookends a hectic year for him.

The Paper Trail

“Danny” was a fixture at CAM events beginning in early March 2012, when he participated in a 20-hour introductory training for new street medics – a training he described in an email to CAM volunteer street medic Scott Mechanic as “great.”

May 1, 2012: “Danny Edwards” – posing with fellow Chicago Action Medical volunteers at their health care booth in Union Park, where street medics were volunteering to provide first aid and emergency health care for participants at the annual May Day rally and march. “Danny” – the only medic not smiling – is standing in front of the CAM banner.

The email address “Danny” used in that correspondence, which he did not sign by name, was pegged to the name of a Chicago police officer cited months later in court documents involved in undercover work around the NATO protests.

Less than half an hour after sending that initial email, “Danny” sent the first in a flurry of emails to Mechanic from a different email address, writing “let me know what going on so i can get involved (sic).”

“Danny’s” March 2012 foray into spying on CAM aligns with the date prosecutors say the Chicago Police Department (CPD) posted two other undercover agents who went by the street names “Mo” and “Nadia” on a 90-day temporary duty undercover assignment to Field Intelligence Team 7150. That team was tasked with infiltrating Occupy and anarchist groups in the run-up to the NATO Summit, according to court documents filed by Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez in April 2013.

Those two officers, “Mo” and “Nadia,” are also purported linchpins in the criminal cases against five activists known as the “NATO 5,” three of whom are scheduled to go to trial on NATO-related domestic terrorism charges this September.

The NATO prosecutors’ October 2012 Answer to Discovery lists this same police officer among the CPD officers, detectives and other police officials who may be called to testify in this fall’s upcoming trial. He is also mentioned in the NATO defendants’ February 25, 2013, Motion to Compel Discovery as “a CPD undercover officer related to this investigation.”

Busy Year for “Danny” – and Early Red Flags

Five days after he inadvertently emailed Scott Mechanic under his given name and scrambled to cover his tracks, “Danny” acted for the first time as a CAM street medic at a small permitted peace march on Chicago’s north side. The March 18, 2012 event was organized to mark the anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War in March 2003.

May 1, 2013: “Danny Edwards,” undercover Chicago police officer, at a May Day rally for immigrant rights in Chicago’s Union Park.
“Danny” ran again as a marked CAM street medic on April 7, 2012 at Occupy Chicago’s “Occupy Spring” event, also emailing Mechanic on April 26, 2012 about bringing a “friend” to an upcoming health workshop. On May 1, 2012, he volunteered as a marked CAM street medic at a May Day rally and march, where his refusal to follow CAM operational guidelines – reportedly abandoning his street medic partner to make a b-line for a group of young protesters wearing black clothes – began to raise real alarms with fellow street medics.

After “Danny’s” behavior on May Day, a number of veteran CAM volunteers – including Mechanic – moved immediately to isolate him from new and less experienced street medics, to monitor his behavior closely and to broadly urge the practice of good security culture.

But without a smoking gun, they were unwilling to expose him publicly. The chill from veteran street medics didn’t discourage “Danny” from continuing to reach out and show up to actions.

On May 11, a week and a half later and as local organizers were scrambling to find housing for out-of-town protesters traveling in for the demonstrations, he emailed Mechanic directly for information about housing that other groups or collectives might be offering. “I have a group of friends in need and I wanted some direction,” he wrote.

On May 20, 2012, at a large protest against the NATO Summit, CAM street medics demanded that he remove his medic markings after he again ignored CAM street operations protocols by deserting his partner to sprint after a group of protesters clad in black clothes.

“Danny” sent emails to individual members of CAM’s listserv – but almost never to the larger listserv – strategically for the next year, seeking information about upcoming demonstrations and meetings. The off-list queries continued to raise red flags with CAM members he contacted, some of whom had never met him and did not know who he was.

When we asked “Danny” at the 2013 May Day rally to confirm his name and identity as a CPD officer, he insisted he was “Danny Edwards” and claimed to be a friend of a local activist.

That’s not how the activist described “Danny” to CAM volunteers at a street medic training before the NATO protests last spring. At that training, he told CAM members that “Danny” had recently befriended him, and he raised concerns there about “Danny’s” interest in topics ranging from Molotov cocktails to property damage.

“NATO 5” Connection

According to court documents released in the months after the NATO Summit protests, “Danny”is one of the undercover officers at the heart of the “NATO 5” criminal cases. He’s mentioned in the pre-NATO Summit pre-emptive raid search warrant documents as “Undercover Officer C,” and is also cited by his given name in court documents for one of the NATO defendants, Sebastian “Sabi” Senakiewicz, as a potential trial witness.

We tried to question “Danny” about his undercover activities on May 6 at a house that had a sheet of paper with his given name and phone number taped to the front door. While he admitted he was, in fact, the named police officer he’d denied being just five days earlier, he declined to answer our questions.

“Danny’s” post-NATO activities raise a key question: Why keep an undercover officer in play as a volunteer street medic in a nonviolent health-care project almost a year after the NATO protests that ostensibly put him into motion as a police spy in the first place?

It’s virtually impossible to say from the official record. That’s because the CPD and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez have fought tooth and nail in court for almost a year to prevent defense attorneys in the remaining NATO cases from learning more about the scope and character of police spying on political activity leading up to last year’s NATO Summit.

At a “NATO 3” status hearing on May 14, 2013, prosecutors again opposed disclosing information about the wider scope of police spying on Chicago’s activist groups (as they have before in official court filings) in the months leading up to the NATO Summit. Defense attorneys rebutted in open court – as they did in writing earlier in their April 30, 2013, “Reply to the State’s Response to Defendants’ Motion to Compel” – that this information remains directly relevant to the NATO cases because it would broaden the context of the arrests of the NATO 3 and the CPD’s pre-NATO spying efforts targeting the activist community.

Broader Context

Police spying in recent years has targeted peace groups, environmentalists and the Occupy movement, a focus on protest as a potential flashpoint of “terrorism” that sometimes has disastrous consequences. By way of example, in Boston, local police focused their attention on the political activism of local residents at the same time they missed the threat posed by the Boston Marathon bombers.

And law enforcement has also demonstrated a disturbing pattern of working undercover to create crime to prosecute crime. Notable cases like the “Cleveland 4” fit into a pattern that journalist Arun Gupta has described as law enforcement’s “war of entrapment against the Occupy movement.”

Law enforcement infiltration in Chicago in the run-up to the 2012 NATO Summit unfolded most publicly with the use of at least two undercover cops who went by the names “Mo” and “Nadia.”

Both were regular fixtures at a spring 2012 encampment to try to prevent the closure of the Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic on Chicago’s south side, one of six public mental health clinics slated for closure by city officials and hardly a flashpoint of “potential terrorist activity.” They also showed up at one point at an independent media center organized to cover the NATO protests and at numerous other documented locales in the two and a half months before the NATO Summit.

“Red Squad” 2.0 Rolling Back into Town?

Ongoing police spying a year after the NATO meeting by “Danny” – and potentially others – raises a real alarm among activists, including CAM street medics, whose national community traces its origins to the Medical Presence Project of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR).

MCHR was first formed in 1964 to provide medical assistance to the civil rights movement. Its Chicago-based volunteers, who also provided medical aid at protests organized by peace projects and student groups opposed to the Vietnam War, were among thousands of civilians spied on by the CPD’s notorious Red Squad.

“The CPD’s decision to plant an undercover police spy in Chicago Action Medical is outrageous, but sadly, comes as no surprise,” said CAM street medic Dick Reilly in an interview. “The CPD has a long and sordid history of surveillance and infiltration of labor, peace and social justice groups dating back to the 1886 railroading of the Haymarket defendants – efforts that led to the creation of Chicago’s infamous Red Squad. Over a hundred years later, the cops are clearly still at it.”

For Reilly, CAM’s ongoing infiltration threatens core freedoms that range from the privacy rights of the people they treat to police officials’ ongoing assault on dissent in the city.

“When the CPD targets a volunteer medical project like CAM – which seeks to provide basic first aid to people exercising their democratic rights and whose primary principle is to ‘do no harm’ – it underscores the lengths to which they’ll go to criminalize dissent, suppress resistance and pander to the agenda of the political and economic elites they actually serve and protect,” Reilly said.

The Chicago Red Squad’s abuses of basic constitutional rights were so egregious – targets included the Parent-Teachers’ Association and the League of Women Voters – that a federal court slapped the city with a consent decree in 1982 that expressly barred politically motivated police spying unless police could show at least some evidence of criminal intent on the part of the targets of their spying.

The city was finally able to win relief from the consent decree in January 2001, after arguing for years constitutional protections thwarted its ability to investigate gangs and “terrorism.”

The consent decree’s demise hasn’t kept the CPD out of hot water for spying on political projects, either, beginning as early as 2002. Were the old consent decree still in place, CAM members believe “Danny’s” undercover spying on their work over the past year would have been illegal.

McCarthy’s Spy-Ops Background at NYPD, Newark PD

Just before he was sworn in as Chicago’s new mayor in May of 2011, Rahm Emanuel – a former US Congressman and chief of staff for President Obama – announced the appointment of new police superintendent Garry McCarthy. Three months later, McCarthy created an intelligence-gathering unit tasked to perform “counter-terrorism” work in preparation for the May 2012 NATO meetings.

A career New York cop, McCarthy is no stranger to the use of systematic police spying.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has a contentious track record in this arena, prompting the implementation of New York’s own version of Chicago’s Red Squad consent decree – the Handschu Decree – while McCarthy was climbing up the NYPD’s ranks to a senior command position.

It wasn’t long after he formally assumed the mantle of CPD superintendent in 2011 that McCarthy drew fire for allowing the latest iteration of New York’s police spy ring to operate in Newark, NJ, where he had served as police chief before taking the position as CPD’s top dog.

McCarthy also served as an NYPD commander when the police set up spy rings before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City and during “CIA on the Hudson,” the joint NYPD/CIA project that was set up and run by former CIA Deputy Director for Operations David Cohen to “map the human terrain” of New York City’s Islamic community.

Targeting Street Medics

Volunteer street medics have historically been an attractive target for undercovers.

CAM street medic Scott Mechanic met “Anna,” before she was outed as a police infiltrator, an FBI informant who used her position as a street medic to befriend and entrap environmental activists. One of those activists, Eric McDavid, is serving a 20-year sentence in a case built around Anna’s testimony and her reported entrapment activities.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Mechanic was also a street medic volunteer at New Orleans’ Common Ground Collective, where he and dozens of other volunteer health-care providers ran into Brandon Darby, an agent provocateur and FBI informant at the heart of another entrapment case, this one against David McKay and Bradley Crowder.

“These kinds of informants and undercover police represent a real threat to activists, in no small part because they’re committed to manufacturing crime where none exists to terrorize the public and justify their abuses of our right to dissent,” said Mechanic. “This Chicago cop’s infiltration of our group raises real questions about police intrusion into protesters’ medical histories – and it’s a truly despicable example of exploiting people’s caregivers as part of the national campaign to criminalize dissent.”

Convergence of the War on Drugs, War on Terrorism

As a Chicago cop, the CPD officer who infiltrated CAM has worked on narcotics and gang cases, including as an undercover officer.

Given the growing conflation of the “War on Drugs” with the “War on Terrorism,” which is increasingly married to a War on Dissent, it’s not surprising that the Chicago police officer who infiltrated CAM would segue into COINTELPRO-style undercover work. By the 1990’s, the CPD was listing dissidents by alleged political affiliation in their gang database, in tandem with then-Mayor Richard M. Daley’s claim that the Red Squad Consent Decree shackled cops’ ability to investigate both gangs and “terrorism.”

Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, points to the delayed notice search warrants enabled by Section 213 of the USA PATRIOT Act – presented to the public as a counter-terrorism tool – as a key example of the War on Drugs’ convergence with the War on Terrorism.

“Both the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism have long represented cash cows for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, from the FBI all the way down to local police departments,” Buttar said in an interview. “Beyond the serial corruption of agencies pimping public fears to inflate their budgets, many particular powers claimed as necessary for one ‘war’ are actually used more in the other.”

The Chicago Police Department did not respond to our phone calls or emails about this story.

Tuesday, 21 May 2013 09:55
By Steve Horn and Chris Geovanis, Truthout | Report

Find this story at 21 May 2013

© 2012 Truthout

The NATO 5: Manufactured Crimes Used to Paint Political Dissidents as Terrorists

A high-stakes game is being played in the United States today called, “To Catch a Terrorist.” The public need not worry, though, as the risks are surprisingly low. In this game, the police claim to prevent nefarious terrorist plots, while in reality they’re taking credit for foiling the same victimless crimes they themselves manufacture. This deceitful strategy is used primarily on Muslims and Arab-Americans, but a string of recent cases shows how political dissidents are also being entrapped, both figuratively and literally.

Last year, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez dusted off a rarely used 11-year-old Illinois State terrorism statute and, with great fanfare, charged several dissidents with crimes of terrorism on the eve of a national political protest. The NATO 5, as they became known, have since garnered widespread support in Chicago, across the country, and around the world.

This week marks a dramatic shift in their lengthy prosecution. Attorneys for three of the defendants, most of whom are members of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), will be filing briefs today, January 25th in order to challenge the constitutionality of the state terrorism statute under which four of the activists were originally charged. If the court finds the law to be unconstitutional, the three highest profile cases could go to trial in September with no terrorism charges, fewer felonies to defend against, and facing a far less ominous sentence than the current 40 years in prison.

* * *

Wednesday, May 16th wasn’t particularly memorable, except that it fell three days prior to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit, a National Special Security Event (NSSE) held in Chicago from May 19th-21st. It was the first time in 13 years that NATO member states had met on U.S. soil, well before the 9/11 attacks, and the Obama administration funneled millions of federal taxpayer dollars into a massive “security” apparatus to ensure a seamless summit.

Ever since the NSSE designation was established by President Clinton in 1998, it has been synonymous with heavy surveillance and infiltration of political groups, police brutality, preemptive raids and mass arrests. The NATO summit in Chicago last spring would be no exception.

In the dark of night with guns drawn, the police used “no-knock” search warrants to break down the doors of an apartment building in the Bridgeport district of Chicago at approximately 11:30 pm that Wednesday. Unbeknownst to the thousands of anti-NATO activists in the city at the time, and members of the local NLG chapter which was providing legal support for the demonstrations, the police arrested nine activists, seizing computers, cell phones, political literature and other personal belongings from the building. Police also searched neighboring apartments and questioned residents, allegedly repeatedly calling one of the tenants a “Commie faggot.”

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) refused to acknowledge they had arrested anyone in Bridgeport that night, let alone divulge where they were being held. It wasn’t until the following afternoon that NLG attorneys determined nine activists had been taken to the Organized Crime Division of the CPD. Within 72 hours, six of the nine were released without charges.

On Saturday, the first day of the NATO summit, the three remaining activists were brought before Cook County Judge Edward Harmening on charges of possessing an incendiary device, material support for terrorism, and conspiracy to commit terrorism. The prosecutor wasted no time in labeling the defendants as “self-proclaimed anarchists,” as if to inherently equate thought crime and political ideology with criminal activity or terrorism, though Assistant State’s Attorney Matthew Thrun provided no evidence to substantiate his hyperbole. Thrun accused the three defendants — Brian Jacob Church, who was 20 at the time, and Jared Chase and Brent Betterly, who were both 24 — with preparing to commit “terrorist acts of violence and destruction directed against different targets in protest to the NATO summit”:

Specifically, plans were made to destroy police cars and attack four CPD stations with destructive devices, in an effort to undermine the police response to the conspirators’ other planned action for the NATO summit. Some of the proposed targets included the Campaign Headquarters of U.S. President Barack Obama, the personal residence of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel (sic), and certain downtown financial institutions.

Although no evidence of the allegations was provided, Assistant State’s Attorney Thrun asked the court to impose a bond of $5 million for each defendant. Judge Harmening rejected his request, but was apparently convinced enough by the State’s proffer to impose an equally unreasonable amount of $1.5 million bond each. The prosecutor and judge likely reasoned that such a prohibitively high bond would keep the three defendants imprisoned until trial. They were right. Church, Chase, and Betterly have been held in Cook County Jail for more than eight months now, with their trial currently scheduled to begin on September 16, 2013, more than a year after they were arrested.

Shortly after tracking down Church, Chase, and Betterly, the Guild’s legal team discovered two more activists — Sebastian Senakiewicz and Mark Neiweem — who were also surreptitiously arrested on terrorism-related charges. Senakiewicz, 24, was arrested at his Chicago home the day after the Bridgeport raid and charged with falsely making a terrorist threat, another felony under the State’s 2001 terrorism statute. Neiweem, a 28-year-old local activist, was arrested the same day, but in a far more sensationalized way. In broad daylight, he was snatched by numerous undercover police officers from Michigan Avenue, one of the busiest streets in the city, undoubtedly aimed at inducing fear in those witnessing the aggressive apprehension. Neiweem was slapped with felony solicitation and attempted possession of an incendiary device, but was not charged under the State’s terrorism statute as the others were.

NLG attorneys representing Senakiewicz and Neiweem argued at their bond hearing that they were denied their Constitutional due process rights by being refused a hearing within 48 hours. Senakiewicz was allegedly held for 68 hours without seeing a judge or being able to access a phone or his attorney, who finally got to visit Senakiewicz only minutes before his bond hearing. Neiweem was allegedly held for 66 hours before getting a hearing, and was denied medical treatment in detention. According to the NLG, on several occasions Neiweem was forced to choose between seeing his attorney and going to the hospital.

Once before a judge, the State’s Attorney painted Senakiewicz and Neiweem as violent criminals and convinced the court to impose similarly high bonds of $750,000 and $500,000 respectively. Unable to raise sufficient funds, Senakiewicz and Neiweem also remain incarcerated at Cook County Jail.

But the terrorism-related charges weren’t the only threads connecting the NATO 5 cases together. At least two undercover Chicago police officers are also believed to have been integral to each defendant’s arrest and prosecution. Shortly after the Bridgeport raid, Occupy Chicago activists began piecing together a CPD spying operation that had lasted for months before the NATO summit. As early as March, two assumed activists who went by the names “Mo” and “Gloves” began working with the Occupy Chicago movement. On April 13th, at least one of them was arrested with a small group of Occupy Chicago activists, who had held a demonstration with STOP (Southside Together Organizing for Power) in order to keep open the Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic, which had been scheduled for closure by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

By the time Church, Chase and Betterly arrived in Chicago around May Day, Mo and Gloves had fully ingratiated themselves in the ranks of the Occupy movement and were supposedly involved in helping plan the NATO demonstrations. By contrast, the three activists from Florida were unfamiliar with the political terrain in Chicago and, more than most, were vulnerable to manipulation by two unsuspected undercover cops.

While little is publicly known about the interactions between Church, Chase, and Betterly and the infiltrators, we do know that Mo and Gloves were arrested with the nine activists the night of the Bridgeport raid. For the past six months, defense attorneys have been poring over trillions of bytes of recorded and written information, an overwhelming amount of data that was dumped on them by the prosecution, thereby significantly complicating and hampering the discovery process.

Of course, that’s part of the game… hiding the ball in plain sight, especially if the ingredients of entrapment are present. The defense wants to know how instructive Mo and Gloves might have been in getting the three to engage in the alleged criminal behavior. Did the undercover cops or their federal counterparts instigate the idea to use Molotov cocktails? How dependent were the three activists on Mo and Gloves to execute the plan? Answers to these questions would better enable the attorneys for Church, Chase, and Betterly to mount an entrapment defense, but by contrast the lack of answers will make that effort much more difficult.

To successfully assert an entrapment defense, the accused must show by a preponderance of the evidence that they were induced or coerced to commit the crime. By no means is this easy to do in a court of law. In fact, no terrorism charges since 9/11 have been beaten based on an entrapment defense, though there have been numerous cases involving undercover police and paid informants.

Three activists were charged with federal terrorism-related crimes during the 2008 Republican convention protests in St. Paul for possession of unused Molotov cocktails. And, in advance of May Day protests last year, five Occupy Cleveland activists were arrested and charged with attempting to blow up a bridge with fake explosives, supplied by the FBI. In each of these cases, paid FBI informants cultivated relationships with activists in order to carry out plans that would never have been hatched or developed without law enforcement participation.

The entrapment defense, however, opens the door for prosecutors to argue that Church, Chase, and Betterly had the propensity to commit the crime. And, while the State’s Attorney must show beyond a reasonable doubt that the three were predisposed, that open door is still a serious concern for the defense.

With the discovery process scheduled to wrap up by February 25th, the defense is continuing to push for more information, especially related to the federal government. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is mentioned in the State’s Attorney’s proffer and the defense wants to know the extent of the agency’s involvement. The FBI is commonly integral to these types of criminal investigations, as the lead counter-intelligence agency for NSSEs. However, the FBI chose not to bring federal charges and has tried to downplay its involvement in the case.

Right now, though, the focus for the defense is challenging the IL State terrorism statute, 720 ILCS 5/29D. Indicating early on that it intended to question the basis of the charges being brought by the State’s Attorney, the defense is now preparing to file its initial brief today, January 25th. Attorneys will argue that the terrorism statute is so vague as to be unconstitutional on its face and as applied against their clients. The goal of the legal challenge is not only to dismiss terrorism charges against the NATO defendants, but also to prevent the State’s Attorney from using a flawed criminal statute against others in the future.

“The State’s Attorney is using sensational terrorism charges to justify the extensive investigation against Occupy Chicago, including months of infiltration as well as this expensive and ongoing prosecution,” said Sarah Gelsomino, who is representing Church as an attorney with the People’s Law Office. “We intend to show that the State’s terrorism statute is bad law that should be stricken.”

The State’s Attorney will have until February 15th to reply to the defendants’ challenge. Cook County Judge Thaddeus L. Wilson, who is presiding over the case, is expected to rule some time after February 25th, when the defense files its final brief in the pre-trial challenge. If the IL State terrorism statute is found to be unconstitutional, either facially or as applied, the defendants’ highest-level felonies could be thrown out. However, that would not necessarily mean their cases would be dismissed entirely. When Church, Chase, and Betterly were finally indicted by grand jury on June 12th, the State’s Attorney had tacked on eight more felonies, including additional counts of possession of an incendiary device, attempted arson, solicitation to commit arson, conspiracy to commit arson and two counts of unlawful use of a weapon, for a total of eleven charges each. Prosecutors have been known to overcharge in criminal cases as a means of getting at least some of the charges to stick. It’s difficult to deny that such a strategy is being used in this case.

Though their cases and situations are different than the three most seriously charged, Senakiewicz and Neiweem are getting the same level of support from activists in Chicago and elsewhere around the country. Neiweem is a local activist who has been targeted before by police for his lawful political activity. On at least one occasion since his incarceration, Neiweem allegedly has been badly beaten and hospitalized by Cook County Sheriff jail guards, and allegedly has been repeatedly held in isolation. Senakiewicz, an activist and Polish immigrant living in Chicago who was facing up to 15 years in prison, accepted a plea bargain in November, in which he agreed to a single terrorism-related felony, and a 4-year prison sentence. Although the prosecution led Senakiewicz to believe he would only have to serve a 120-day sentence in an out-of-county “boot camp” for non-violent offenders, he was ultimately ineligible for the program and will be forced to serve the entire sentence. Supporters also fear his immediate deportation upon release.

“Honestly, how serious was this case?” asked Guild attorney Jeff Frank, who represented Senakiewicz (also known as “Sabi”) with fellow NLG attorney Melinda Power. “Sabi is guilty of imprudent language,” said Frank. “That’s hardly grounds to extract a guilty plea for a serious felony, but that’s how Ms. Alvarez has chosen to spend the taxpayers’ resources.”

So, why were the NATO 5 arrested in such a spectacular way, just days before a controversial summit in Chicago? And, why are they being used as pawns in a high-stakes game of “To Catch a Terrorist?” Maybe the answers partly lie in the questions.

The motivations are actually just beneath the surface. The State’s Attorney’s aforementioned need to justify the investigation, infiltration and prosecution of the NATO 5 is likely a primary impulse. The tactic of preemptive police raids, a common trademark of NSSE law enforcement operations used to chill imminent protest activity, cannot be discounted. But, there is also a coordinated effort by local and federal officials to perpetuate a billion-dollar “protection racket,” in which law enforcement uses an aggressive counter-terrorism approach to both instill fear in the public and then, after solving the “crime,” induce the perception of safety. It’s also reasonable to assume that the NATO terrorism cases are an extension of the ongoing efforts to monitor and undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement. Perhaps there are elements of each in the effort to prosecute the NATO 5.

Regardless of the motivations, the NATO 5 case is indicative of a growing trend in law enforcement strategies used during political demonstrations: entrapping dissidents in manufactured terrorism crimes. As Glenn Greenwald recently wrote in the Guardian:

The most significant civil liberties trend of the last decade, in my view, is the importation of War on Terror tactics onto U.S. soil, applied to U.S. citizens… 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.

Disclosure: Kris Hermes is a member of the National Lawyers Guild.

May 24, 2013
Posted: 01/25/2013 4:01 pm

Find this story at 25 May 2013

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

‘Common practice’ for cops to use dead kids IDs; Shocking … cops used dead children’s identities

POLICE have admitted it was “common practice” for undercover officers to adopt the identities of dead children for aliases in the 1980s – but said they had no idea exactly how many times the sick tactic was used.

Despite a number of requests from relatives of dead children, Chief Constable Mick Creedon said none of the people affected had been told yet.

He also admitted no arrests had been made and no officers faced disciplinary proceedings.

The Derbyshire police boss said: “No families of children whose identities have been used have been contacted and informed.

“No answer either positive or negative has yet been given in relation to these inquiries from families.”

Commenting on the continuing Operation Herne investigation, he said the issue is “very complicated and mistakes could put lives in jeopardy”.

Keith Vaz MP, Home Affairs Select Committee chairman, has demanded all affected families be contacted immediately.

Operation Herne – a probe into undercover policing by the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstrations Squad – was set up after PC Mark Kennedy posed as an environmental protestor and had a sexual relationship with an activist.

A number of men and women are suing the Met over alleged intimate relationships with undercover cops.

The investigation, which has 23 officers and ten police staff working on it, has so far cost £1.25million and is expected to cost a further £1.66million over the next year.

By KAREN MORRISON
Published: 17th May 2013

Find this story at 17 May 201

© News Group Newspapers Limited

 

 

Editor of The Progressive Calls for Eric Holder to Resign over Spying on Press, Occupy Protesters

As the Obama administration faces criticism for the Justice Department’s spying on journalists and the IRS targeting of right-wing organizations, newly released documents show how the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and local police forces partnered with corporations to spy on Occupy protesters in 2011 and 2012. Detailed in thousands of pages of records from counter terrorism and law enforcement agencies, the spying monitored the activists’ online usage and led to infiltration of their meetings. One document shows an undercover officer was dispatched in Arizona to infiltrate activists organizing protests around the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive group that helps corporate America propose and draft legislation for states across the country. We’re joined by Matt Rothschild of The Progressive, who tackles the surveillance in his latest article, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street.”

Watch Part Two of interview here
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end our show with a look at newly revealed documents showing how police partnered with corporations to monitor the Occupy Wall Street movement. DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy have obtained thousands of pages of records from counterterrorism and law enforcement agencies that detail how so-called “fusion centers” monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012. These fusion centers are comprised of employees from municipal, county and federal counterterrorism and homeland security entities, as well as local police departments, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

The documents show how fusion center personnel spied on Occupy protesters, monitored their Facebook accounts, and infiltrated their meetings. One document showed how the Arizona fusion center dispatched an undercover officer to infiltrate activist groups organizing protests around the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, the secretive group that helps corporate America propose and draft legislation for states across the country. The undercover officer apparently worked for the benefit of the private entity ALEC despite being on the public payroll.

AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! reached out to the Phoenix Police Department to join us on the show, but they declined our request. Sergeant Trent Crump in the media relations department said in an email, quote, “Occupy Phoenix presented itself with a great deal of civil unrest over a long period of time. We monitored available Intel all the time, as it is used for Intel-driven policing. Intel dictated resources and response tactics to address, mitigate, and manage this ongoing activity which was very fluid and changing day-to-day. This approach ensured that citizens can exercise their civil rights, while we protect the community at the same time,” they said.

Well, for more, we go to Matt Rothschild, editor and publisher of The Progressive magazine, wrote the cover story for the June issue of the magazine, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street,” the piece drawing heavily on the documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press. Matt Rothschild is also the author of You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression.

Matt, welcome to Democracy Now! Just lay out what you have found.

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Hey, Amy. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, I mean, these documents from the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press show that law enforcement and Homeland Security have equated protesters, left-wing protesters, as terrorists. They have diverted enormous amounts of resources from counterterrorism efforts to spy on these local protesters, and then they’ve collaborated with the private sector, some of the very institutions—banks—that these protesters were aiming at. And as you read in that statement from the Phoenix Police Department, the effort was to mitigate these protests. I mean, why is law enforcement, why is Homeland Security, in the business of mitigating protests?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to go to a response that we received from the Phoenix Police Department when we reached them for comment. And they said that they were not treating Occupy protesters as potential terrorists. They said, “[W]e are an all hazards incident management team, we have gathered information at all types of events [such as] Superbowl, World Series, SB 1070 protest etc.” So can you say how it is that their monitoring of Occupy protesters differed qualitatively from the other events that the Phoenix Police Department named?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Sure. Well, they’re using resources from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, the Arizona fusion center, and they’re using Homeland Defense personnel in the Phoenix Police Department to track Occupy activists. So, it’s a little disingenuous of them to say they’re not treating these protesters as terrorists when they’re using their own anti-terrorist personnel to spend a lot of time simply tracking these activists. One of the police officers who was on the Homeland Defense Bureau of the Phoenix Police Department said she was primarily spending her time tracking Occupy activists on social media.

AMY GOODMAN: We also asked the Phoenix police if law enforcement is infiltrating Occupy meetings. And he replied, quote, “Infiltrate? No. Attend open meetings? Yes.” Democracy Now! also asked Trent Crump if law enforcement tracked Occupy activists online. He replied, “Yes, we gather intel on a number of social media sites regularly.” So, what about this? And also, this issue of law enforcement monitoring the protests against ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, when we asked him this, he said, “Yes, public safety.” Your response?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, they not only monitored the ALEC protests in late November 2011, but they also sent a face sheet to the security personnel for ALEC, a face sheet of the faces and names and identities of Occupy protesters who have been doing some activism in the Phoenix area, to make the ALEC security personnel aware of who may be coming to their protests. They were also tracking—

AMY GOODMAN: So the police are working with the companies and the organizations.

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Absolutely. Yeah, they were working with security for the American Legislative Exchange Council. They were also letting security know when Jesse Jackson was going to be in town to join an Occupy protest and an ALEC protest. Is that really their job to be passing information on to these private entities?

And then, with some of the bank protests that Occupy Phoenix was planning, they were giving downtown banks all sorts of information. “Give downtown banks everything they need.” That was one internal memo from the Phoenix Police Department, when it was a day of protest against these banks and Occupy was urging the bank customers to cut up their credit cards from these banks. And which banks are we talking about? We’re talking about Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase—some of the very targets that Occupy had been protesting against. So, the question is: Who are the police department working for? Are they working for citizens? Are they working for the private sector? Are they working for the banks?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Can you put—Matt Rothschild, can you put this in a wider historical context? Is this kind of surveillance unprecedented in the U.S.? And what accounts for its occurrence during Occupy in the way that you describe?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, unfortunately, it’s not unprecedented. There’s a terrible history of law enforcement and the FBI spying on left-wing activists, going back to the COINTELPRO program of the FBI in the ’60s and ’70s, where they infiltrated the Black Panther movement and the American Indian Movement. But interestingly, after those revelations came out, there were guidelines imposed by the Justice Department itself, the so-called Levi guidelines. Edward Levi was the attorney general under the Ford administration who said you can’t go spying on and infiltrating activist groups in this country unless there’s a predicate of criminal activity. Well, after 9/11, the Bush administration and Ashcroft, his attorney general, completely destroyed the Levi guidelines and let law enforcement do any kind of infiltration they want, without any necessity for any hint of criminal activity on the part of the activists.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Rothschild, you’ve called for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder. Why?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, for a number of reasons, Amy, first of all, for this scandal about investigating reporters. I think that’s outrageous. We had more than a hundred AP reporters and editors that the Justice Department was gathering information on, and now we have the revelation about the Fox News reporter James Rosen, who was being accused of being a co-conspirator under the Espionage Act of 1917 simply for doing his reporting job. Also, the attorney general has been essentially waging war on whistleblowers under the Espionage Act.

And on top of that, let’s remember, this attorney general, Eric Holder, has been rationalizing the assassination program that the Obama administration has been engaging in, saying that a drone can drop a bomb on a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world, and that U.S. citizen will already have had due process simply because the Obama administration itself or the president or the secretary of defense calls that person a terrorist. Now, that’s not due process, and that’s not what the Justice Department should be doing. Certainly the attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of this country, should know better than that.

AMY GOODMAN: Matthew Rothschild, isn’t he just carrying out President Obama’s policies?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, he very well might be, and then we have a more serious problem. We have a serious problem at the very top with a president of the United States, again, like George W. Bush, engaging in illegal activity.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you for being with us. We’re going to do part two of the interview and post it at democracynow.org. Matt Rothschild, editor and publisher of The Progressive magazine, wrote the cover story for the June issue, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street.”

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Find this story at 22 May 2013

Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper on Paramilitary Policing From WTO to Occupy Wall Street

We host a discussion on policing and the Occupy Wall Street movement with Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which helped organize calls among police chiefs on how to respond to the Occupy protests, and with Norm Stamper, the former police chief of Seattle, who recently wrote an article for The Nation magazine titled “Paramilitary Policing from Seattle to Occupy Wall Street.” “Trust me, the police do not want to be put in this position. And cities really need to ask themselves, is there another way to handle this kind of conflict?” Wexler says. Stamper notes, “There are many compassionate, decent, competent police officers who do a terrific job day in and day out. There are others who are, quote, ‘bad apples.’ What both of them have in common is that they ‘occupy,’ as it were, a system, a structure that itself is rotten. And I am talking about the paramilitary bureaucracy.” We are also joined by Stephen Graham, author of “Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism,” and by retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, who worked as a legal observer Tuesday morning in New York after the police raided the Occupy Wall Street encampment. “I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, ‘I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, ‘Move on, lady.’ And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head,” says Smith. “I walk over, and I say, ‘Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, ‘Lady, do you want to get arrested?’ And I said, ‘Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.’ He said, ‘You want to get arrested?’ And he pushed me up against the wall.” [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, a number of questions have been raised about how much cities across the country have coordinated their actions against Occupy Wall Street. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan recently admitted in an interview with the BBC that she and leaders participated in a conference call.

MAYOR JEAN QUAN: I was recently on a conference call of 18 cities across the country who had the same situation, where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them. And what I think you’re starting to see is that the Occupy movement is looking for more stability. I spent a lot of last week talking to peaceful demonstrators, ones who wanted to separate themselves in my city away from the anarchist groups who had been looking for a confrontation with the police.

AMY GOODMAN: The conference calls were organized by the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group. For a discussion on policing and the Occupy Wall Street movement around the country, we’re joined by two people. Chuck Wexler is the director of the Police Executive Research Forum. And Norm Stamper is with us, the former police chief of Seattle, who recently wrote an article for The Nation magazine, titled “Paramilitary Policing from Seattle to Occupy Wall Street.”

I want to start with Norm Stamper, because you just may have heard Dorli say, “Thank you, Norm Stamper,” as she got pepper-sprayed, today, remembering what it was like in 1999, as well, at the Battle of Seattle, at the time when you were presiding over the police actions. Your thoughts today?

NORM STAMPER: Well, we made huge mistakes back in 1999, and I’m afraid they’re being repeated today across the country, in Seattle, in Oakland, and in all other cities where there have been confrontations between the police and members of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Norm Stamper, in your article you mention that you think that there are institutional problems, structural problems in policing, that no matter who the political leaders are or what the top brass are, that these problems continue to crop up and appear to be getting worse.

NORM STAMPER: I certainly do believe that. I think the drug war, which has put police officers against young people and poor people and people of color, the war on terrorism, the domestic dimensions of that war, have all served to increase the militarization of America’s police forces. And this is particularly tragic because, prior to these developments, we were on a path to create what I would call authentic partnerships with the community. That means no more unilateral decision making. It means, for example, today, police officers and Occupy movement leaders understanding the diffusion of that leadership, getting together and carving out rules of engagement, if you will, that will help protect public safety, public health, and also assure civil liberties, human rights and some degree of social justice.

AMY GOODMAN: As I said, we’re also joined on the phone by Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum that coordinated the conference call with mayors and police officials around the country. Can you talk about what’s happening today—the Occupy Oakland, the massive police response, the kind of police response we saw in Seattle with the pepper-spraying of not only Dorli Rainey, but many other people directly in the face—the conversation that took place, and why you coordinated this call, Chuck?

CHUCK WEXLER: Well, yeah. Good morning.

But first of all, a correction: we did not coordinate the call with the mayors. It was simply with police chiefs. And it originated from Boston and Portland. The police chiefs in those cities asked to just compare notes.

You know, I think, you know, this movement has evolved since it started. It was very—you know, relatively peaceful. And quite frankly, I think a lot of the police officers had a lot in common with, you know, the demonstrators, in terms of the concerns about the economy and working-class people and so forth. But I think, you know, over time, in some cities, the nature of the demonstration has changed. But it’s hard to talk about it, you know, all over the United States, because I think you probably have—you know, it’s very idiosyncratic depending upon the city, depending upon the nature of who’s involved. But in some cities, it has—that the hand of the police has been forced by, you know, either violence or the changing nature of what’s been happening on the ground.

I’m not—you know, I don’t have the details about Oakland and Seattle and so forth. I can just tell you—and I know Norm Stamper would agree, at least insofar as we learned a lot from what happened in Seattle, when he was chief up there, about handling demonstrators. And I think the police are far more careful about not wanting to be drawn into something that really has nothing to do with them, and really trying as much as they can to exercise restraint, to use intermediaries, to reach out to the leaders of these Occupy movements. The challenge is, there aren’t really any leaders, or if there are leaders, they don’t want to be leaders. So it’s difficult to know who’s responsible, who’s in charge. But I think, you know, the police today are far more careful about exercising restraint—I mean, by and large. I mean, you have 17,000 police agencies in the country, so, you know, it’s hard to make generalizations. But I do think that—you know, when the first Occupy Wall Street movement started, and police saw what happened on the bridge and so forth, and the police sort of getting drawn into that, there’s been really a reluctance on the part of the police, you know, to want to move, unless absolutely necessary. And so, I think the political structure within these cities has played a big role in determining what kind of action the police are going to take.

AMY GOODMAN: Norm Stamper, your response?

NORM STAMPER: Well, I have great respect for Chuck, and I do believe that since 1999 and the Battle in Seattle there have been many changes. My concern is, many of those changes have been for the worse. The officers, for example, in Oakland were dressed as my police officers were in Seattle, which is, in effect, for full—in full battle gear. We were using military tactics. I authorized the use of chemical agents on nonviolent offenders. I thought I had good justification at that time. I did not. The police officer in me was thinking about emergency vehicles, fire trucks, aid cars being able to get through a key intersection. The police chief in me should have said, “This is wrong,” and vetoed that decision. I will regret that decision for the rest of my life. We took a military response to a situation that was fundamentally nonviolent, in which Americans were expressing their views and their values, and used tear gas on them. And that was just plain wrong.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Chuck Wexler, I’d like to ask you about that, not only about this issue of the increased militarization, also that there have been other cities where law enforcement has taken a very different approach. In Philadelphia and Albany, the district attorney is refusing to—declining to prosecute cases of arrests of people who are being arrested for being in a park. But also, the way that the—some of the police forces are dealing with the press, and of the—because the press are supposed to be there to be able to be the eyes and ears of the public in these events, but increasingly you’re getting reporters arrested, removed, not allowed to be at the biggest flash points or to be able to take photos or to take camera shots of them.

CHUCK WEXLER: Yeah. No, I mean, you know, it’s—the police response is going to vary from city to city. But let me just kind of back up a little bit and respond to what Norm said. You know, we—you know, I have a lot of respect for Norm Stamper, too. We learned a lot. He’s very forthcoming with what went right and what went wrong with the Battle for Seattle, if you will. But, you know, in fairness, you know, you were faced, Norm, in a very difficult situation, and in fact, there really hadn’t been many demonstrations up ’til Seattle. I mean, prior to the Vietnam era, there was a big lag time. But what was—what does happen in some of these events is you can have 90 percent of the people are there peacefully, and you have this small contingent—and I think, Norm, what you had in Seattle is you had this group of anarchists that somehow was able to cause such disturbances that it forced a reaction, that perhaps was an overreaction, but I don’t think the police were prepared for it. And today, you know, the police struggle between these two extremes, between people who go to exercise their First Amendment rights and then people who are there to cause, you know, damage and destruction.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Norm Stamper, respond to that issue, why you still think you were wrong, that you’re taking issue with Chuck Wexler here, that given the situation in 1999 you now say you did the absolutely wrong thing.

NORM STAMPER: Well, for five years after I retired, I remember being on book tour and having people come up to me and say, “I was on the streets, and I’ve got to tell you, I was shocked at the behavior of the police.” And I asked them about what was particularly shocking about the behavior, and it all came back to me. It came back to my authorization of the use of chemical agents, a euphemism for tear gas or pepper spray, and the effect that that had from that moment on and throughout the week.

There is no question about what anarchists, by definition, or for that matter, even recreational rioters, who are simply sitting in a bar and see the action and get attracted to the downtown area—we had some of that—can help distract attention away from the cause itself and create major public safety issues for the police. Here’s my point: if the police and the community in a democratic society are really working hard—and it is hard work—to forge authentic partnerships rather than this unilateral, paramilitary response to these demonstrations, that the relationship itself serves as a shock absorber. Picture police officers helping to protect the demonstrators. Picture demonstrators saying, “We see people on the fringes, for example, who are essentially undemocratic in their tactics. And so, we need to work together to resolve that issue.” These resolutions are clearly not easy. One of the things that complicates the picture enormously is when a woman like Ms. Rainey is pepper-sprayed. When innocent people who are there to protest what I consider to be very legitimate grievances against corporate America, against a government that has, in many respects, been bought off by corporations, the police have a responsibility to be neutral. It should be apparent that I’m not neutral, but I’m no longer a cop. And police officers on the streets really do need to be neutral referees, and they need the help of their civilian, if I may use that term, partners.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of neutral referees, I wanted to bring a judge into this discussion, retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, who worked as a legal observer early Tuesday morning here in New York. I saw her right on the corner of Wall Street shortly after police raided the Occupy Wall Street encampment. Judge Smith, what did you see?

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): Well, I arrived about 1:30, 1:40 in the morning, got out and walked to Dey and Broadway. And the police were in full riot gear. I mean, it was a paramilitary operation if there ever was one, I mean, which sets off—here it is, 1:30 in the morning, what we call a stealth eviction, 1:30 in the morning, and they were just lined up two blocks from—on either side from the park, so that nobody could get near, this solid wall of police.

I was wearing—and I brought this—a hat, which says the “National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer.” And as you can see, in color, it’s quite bright. And at night—

AMY GOODMAN: It’s fluorescent green.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): It’s fluorescent green. And then I was wearing it, and I had a pad and a pen, and I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested so we could follow them through the system and just observe what was going on. And as I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, “I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.” And he said, “Move on, lady.” And he kept pushing—they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she said—and she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head. And I walk over, and I say, “Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.” And he said, “Lady, do you want to get arrested?” And I said, “Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.” He said, “You want to get arrested?” And he pushed me up against the wall.

And, you know, it was late at night. There was a lot going on. People were—all of a sudden, there was like a cordon of police pushing everybody into Dey Street between Broadway and Church. And it seemed like they were setting everybody up to get arrested. And then they started—some people broke away, some of the police, and started running after people. I moved away and then decided that I needed to get on the other side. I received a call that there were things developing on Pine and Broadway, and so I moved all the way east to go around the police and then ended up on Pine and Broadway, which is really where I ran into you.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, you had a personal interest, as well. Your son was also one of the participants in Occupy Wall Street.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): Yes, my son was a—he’s a staff person for SEIU 1199. And they were there in support. They were not going to get arrested, but they wanted to show the demonstrators and the occupiers that—and they’ve been supportive all along as one of the unions. And he was there. And I was watching carefully to make sure that he did not get hurt, as well. I was very concerned.

At Pine and Broadway, it was sort of a standoff. People were—there was a lot of confusion. People didn’t know what was going on. There were some people that may have sat on some police cars just in comfort, but nobody was—I heard later on reports—talk about objectivity of the press—you know, that they were jumping up and down and they were taunting the police. The only time I ever saw on—when I first got there on Dey and Broadway, they were just saying, “Shame on you,” you know, to the police, and—but that was it. And down on Pine and Broadway, at least until about 4:30 in the morning, I didn’t see any provocation whatsoever.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to lose the satellite for Dorli—for Dorli Rainey in Seattle. But I wanted to ask you, Dorli, what did it feel like to be pepper-sprayed in the face? This dramatic photograph of you being helped by two people right afterwards.

DORLI RAINEY: Well, first of all, it’s very painful. And when they say there are no after effects, I still have a pain in my lungs, and my voice is kind of raspy. I don’t know how long that will last. But the thing really is not about me getting pepper-sprayed. It is a much bigger issue than that, and I would like everybody to keep that in mind, that while we’re getting pepper-sprayed, other issues are not being heard. And that’s my problem. I feel issues become a major focus to the detriment of the real issues that cause this whole problem.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And I’d like to ask Chuck Wexler, this whole issue of the police chiefs trying to exchange information, was there any involvement of the Department of Homeland Security or the federal officials in the discussions with the various police chiefs?

CHUCK WEXLER: Not on our conference call at all.

But, you know, if I can just say a few things just in response to the last conversations. You know, this is really the struggle that the police have. This is why, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I think what Norm was saying about the partnerships and intermediaries and communication is so important, because this is a no-win situation for the police, that, you know—and one of the things we’ve learned out of the ’60s and out of the, you know, Chicago Democratic convention, and all the ways in—from the South, and all of the ways the police have had to handle these kind of situations is, you know, a minimum amount—a use of restraint. And I think that’s the real challenge here. The police don’t want to be in this situation. And whatever you can do to have intermediaries, like the judge, whatever, be the people that are intervening rather than the police, I think it’s a real—it’s a no-win situation for most police departments. They have worked really hard to develop partnerships with the community, the community policing all of those things. And sometimes you have one officer that does something—forgive me—stupid, and it characterizes the entire police force. But I think, you know, if you look at the restraint that police use today versus what they used 10, 20, 30 years ago, it’s substantially less use of force. But there are still mistakes, and there are still officers that are going to act inappropriately. And I think—

AMY GOODMAN: Chuck Wexler, in New York, I mean, we saw a massive phalanx of police moving in. In the area where the judge was just describing, the police forced everyone out of the street onto the sidewalk and said, “Just get on the sidewalk!” They were screaming to everyone, “Get on the sidewalk!” As soon as people got on the sidewalk, they rushed them on the sidewalk up against the—up against the rails along the sidewalk. But I did want to ask you, how involved is FBI and Homeland Security in these discussions, Chuck Wexler?

CHUCK WEXLER: We haven’t had—they haven’t been involved—maybe they’re involved at the local level, but nationally, at least on our conference calls, I don’t think—they didn’t have a role.

JUAN GONZALEZ: There were some press reports that there were Homeland Security presentations urging that these arrests be conducted late at night.

CHUCK WEXLER: That may have been done at the city level. It wasn’t on our conference calls. We had that—no one from, you know, Homeland Security made that kind of presentation, nor—you know, we were really—we were just comparing notes. We were like, how are different cities trying to deal with this in the most civil way possible? You know, what are some of the strategies? In some cities, for example, they didn’t have the police directly involved. They had, you know, the sanitation people and Health and Human Services and folks like that on the front end. And that was interesting, because why—I mean, at the end of the day, why are the police the ones that own this issue? I mean, because the police really don’t want to be the ones dismantling these encampments. But, you know, why is it, if you ask—you should ask cities, why do we put the police in these areas? Because, you know, at the end of the day, people feel as though you need some kind of legal authority or someone who’s going to come in. But trust me, the police do not want to be put in this position. And cities really need to ask themselves, is there another way to handle this—you know, this kind of conflict?

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Karen Smith, you retired in 2010 as a Supreme Court judge, so you obviously have dealt, over many years, with the police department and police officials. Your sense—when we spoke a couple of days ago, you also talked about your sense that there was a really hostile or tense situation from the very beginning with how the police were responding to the protesters. Could you talk about that?

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): Yes, well, I don’t know if Mr. Stamper was the one who said this, but I think it was structural. You—at night, 1:00 in the morning, people dressed in riot gear. There were trucks, remember, lined up for the sanitation to just throw people’s things in—computers and everything. And now people, I’m told, they can’t get their stuff. There was a them and us. I, I mean, worked with police officers for years. There are very—I agree that there are very good ones. It’s not individuals. It’s a system that’s being set up of us and them.

And the other thing that needs to be brought out—and I think it was in the court case in front of Judge Stallman, who was a colleague of mine—is how often do you get the police and the state enforcing private property rights? The contradictions are tremendous, just that. I mean, as you pointed out in your article I read in some—and also even David Letterman last night, you know, points out, you know, it’s OK for prostitutes, drug dealers, and now we’re having our Christmas fair, where they’re putting up tents. You know, but that’s for profit. So that’s OK.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait, explain that, because maybe people in other parts of the country don’t understand.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): Oh, at Christmas time in New York, and I think around the country, there are these little craft things that are set up for private businesses, and they put up tents, and they’re there—they have to leave by 11:00, but they’re—

AMY GOODMAN: Tents all over, for example, Union Square.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): All over Union Square.

JUAN GONZALEZ: In the parks, yes.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): In the parks, Columbus Circle. So that’s OK. But—and I don’t know what evidence was presented, because I wasn’t in court the other day, about the so-called sanitation violations that were the basis of the state using its authority to come in. But in the end, they were enforcing private property interests. And that’s really what—the message, I think, from the whole Occupy Wall Street’s about.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. And hopefully Ydanis Rodriguez will also be joining us, the New York City Council member who was arrested by police on Tuesday night, when they evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment. And right now, down at Wall Street, arrests have already started. We will also get a report from there. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Devereaux is on the phone with us right now, Democracy Now! reporter on the scene outside the New York Stock Exchange. Ryan, what’s happening at this point?

RYAN DEVEREAUX: I’ve made my way around the Financial District, and it looks like Occupy Wall Street protesters have blocked a number of intersections, sort of with the help of the NYPD and their barricades. Protesters have sat down in intersections. And right now, I’ve returned to the intersection of Wall Street and Hannover, about two blocks or so east of the New York Stock Exchange. About two dozen protesters or so had linked arms across the street, forming a line across [inaudible] the police blockade. They started chanting, “This is a nonviolent protest.” And then the police started shoving into them from behind as hard as they could and eventually broke through the line, knocking a number of protesters to the ground. The police then leaped onto the backs of the protesters. About three were arrested. And the blockade—the protesters’ line was cleared out of the streets and has now been replaced by scores of police officers in riot helmets. This is directly in front of the Deutsche Bank on Wall Street.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Ryan Devereaux right near Wall Street. And the plans for today, Karen Smith, a former New York State Supreme Court judge, you have felt that the media has mischaracterized what the plans are for the protest, the mass protest today.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): Yes, particularly the statement that there were plans to take over the subways. There’s never been plans to take over the subways. What the plan was for the afternoon session, I’ve been told and been—and had meetings about so that I’m aware of it, is that they are planning to just have people give stories outside of subways, what they call soapboxes, on how the economics have affected them, and then to go into the subways and try to talk to the public on the subway trains on the way down to Foley Square later on, as to how this economy has affected them personally, to broaden the struggle on all—and they have what they call hubs throughout the city. There is no plan, and never has been, to take over any subway.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Stephen Graham into the discussion right now. We started speaking to him yesterday. He wrote the book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. Just in from Britain, in Philadelphia. Can you talk about—as we were just speaking with the former police chief, Norm Stamper, of Seattle, and he oversaw the Battle of Seattle, how the police dealt with that—the militarization that we are seeing of police forces around our country?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Yes, well, it’s a longstanding process that has its roots in policies against drug use. It has its roots in the development of SWAT teams, Special Weapons and Tactics teams, and it has its use in some of the responses to the 1960s disturbances across the West, as well. And really, the effects of this, as we see in New York and elsewhere, is an increasing use of full-on riot squads, increasing use of non-lethal weapons, including things like acoustic systems that make it impossible for people to remain in spaces, including the pepper spray, including the tasers. And we have to remember, this is a really big growth industry that military and security corporations are investing heavily in terms of new research and development.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Stephen Graham, what’s the market? You’re talking about a growth industry. What are we talking about here in terms of investment of dollars by—because there are so many, obviously, municipalities in the United States with their own police forces?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Well, I mean, globally speaking, the so-called homeland security market is a real—is in real boom town—boom time, excuse me. I mean, in a world where actual defense contracts are often being reduced, a lot of the big companies are moving into civilian applications. They’re moving into these non-lethal weapons, moving into all of the technologies of crowd control and civilian disturbance control. And that has to be added to, of course, the much bigger markets that are growing in terms of broader questions of surveillance and security for buildings, for cities, for special events, as we see these systems established more and more in terms of everyday spaces and everyday bits of cities. So, I haven’t got figures at hand, I’m afraid, but it’s multibillion-dollar markets that are projected to grow globally at very, very high rates over the next 15 years, according to some of the recent market research reports.

AMY GOODMAN: Norm Stamper, if you’re still on the line with us, former police chief of Seattle, does what Stephen Graham is saying ring a bell for you? Does it resonate with your experience?

NORM STAMPER: Well, it certainly does. I might even add to that mix the increased privatization of the prison industry in the United States, where people are in fact making huge sums of money on the backs of those arrested for nonviolent drug offenses. And we’re talking really in the millions in this country. So I think there’s that that needs to be considered, as well.

About the non-lethal tools at the disposal of local law enforcement, many of those were developed in the wake of a controversial shooting. We understand that cops got a dangerous job. It’s delicate. It’s demanding. There are situations that call for life-and-death decision making, oftentimes with no real time to contemplate options and possibilities. Let’s find non-lethal alternatives to that firearm. So, the motive is good. The question is, to what extent are those non-lethal weapons being abused today? We have seen far too many examples of tasers, for example, used in situations where no force was necessary. It’s just simply a way to get somebody to move faster or to get out of a car when they’re passively resistant.

So, it’s important, I think, to understand the complexities of everything that we’re talking about. For example, there are many compassionate, decent, competent police officers who do a terrific job day in and day out. There are others who are, quote, “bad apples.” What both of them have in common is that they occupy, as it were, a system, a structure that itself is rotten. And I am talking about the paramilitary bureaucracy.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Norm Stamper, but I thank you so much for being with us, as well as Stephen Graham and Chuck Wexler and Dorli Rainey and Karen Smith.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Find this story at 17 November 2011

Bank of America intelligence analyst shared Occupy DC info with police ‘They seemed pretty excited’

Emails released by Washington D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department about the Occupy Our Homes movement reveal frustration from one Bank of America intelligence analyst.

Occupy our Homes, a part of the Occupy movement that began in fall 2011, gained headlines as protesters fought back against home foreclosures across the country. Bank of America Senior U.S. Crime and Intelligence Analyst Amanda Velazquez offered weary commentary in an Occupy email she shared with MPD in September 2012.

“With all the Occupy DC leaders back home, it appears some concrete plans have materialized for the one-year anniversary. Our day for action is Tuesday, 2 October. I think there should be more participation that [sic] the last attempt against us; they seemed pretty excited …”

The anniversary plans included two days of “plays, music, art, political discussions and general assemblies” in Freedom Plaza, according to the email Velazquez forwarded. The occupiers had been forcibly evicted by police in February 2012.

…

The emails were requested as a part of the File for Aaron project.

by Tom Nash on May 1, 2013, 1 p.m.

Find this story at 1 May 2013

© 2013 MuckRock

The U.S. counter terrorism apparatus was used to monitor the Occupy Movement nationwide.

On May 20, 2013, DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy released the results of a year-long investigation: “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.” The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details how state/regional “fusion center” personnel monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012.

The report also examines how fusion centers and other counter terrorism entities that have emerged since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have worked to benefit numerous corporations engaged in public-private intelligence sharing partnerships. While the report examines many instances of fusion center monitoring of Occupy activists nationwide, the bulk of the report details how counter terrorism personnel engaged in the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC, commonly known as the “Arizona fusion center”) monitored and otherwise surveilled citizens active in Occupy Phoenix, and how this surveillance benefited a number of corporations and banks that were subjects of Occupy Phoenix protest activity.

While small glimpses into the governmental monitoring of the Occupy Wall Street movement have emerged in the past, there has not been any reporting — until now — that details the breadth and depth with which the nation’s post-September 11, 2001 counter terrorism apparatus has been applied to politically engaged citizens exercising their Constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights.

REPORT Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s ‘Counter Terrorism’ Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street

REPORT APPENDIX open records materials cited in report.

PRESS RELEASE “New Report Details How Counter Terrorism Apparatus Was Used to Monitor Occupy Movement Nationwide”(PDF)

SOURCE MATERIALS almost 10,000 pages of open records materials are archived on DBA Press.

PRWATCH ARTICLE “Dissent or Terror: How Arizona’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate Interests, Turned on Occupy Phoenix”
Key Findings

Key findings of this report include:
How law enforcement agencies active in the Arizona fusion center dispatched an undercover officer to infiltrate activist groups organizing both protests of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the launch of Occupy Phoenix and how the work of this undercover officer benefited ALEC and the private corporations that were the subjects of these demonstrations.
How fusion centers, funded in large part by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, expended countless hours and tax dollars in the monitoring of Occupy Wall Street and other activist groups.
How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has financed social media “data mining” programs at local law enforcement agencies engaged in fusion centers.
How counter terrorism government employees applied facial recognition technology, drawing from a state database of driver’s license photos, to photographs found on Facebook in the effort to profile citizens believed to be associated with activist groups.
How corporations have become part of the homeland security “information sharing environment” with law enforcement/intelligence agencies through various public-private intelligence sharing partnerships. The report examines multiple instances in which the counter terrorism/homeland security apparatus was used to gather intelligence relating to activists for the benefit of corporate interests that were the subject of protests.
How private groups and individuals, such as Charles Koch, Chase Koch (Charles’ son and a Koch Industries executive), Koch Industries, and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council have hired off-duty police officers — sometimes still armed and in police uniforms — to perform the private security functions of keeping undesirables (reporters and activists) at bay.
How counter terrorism personnel monitored the protest activities of citizens opposed to the indefinite detention language contained in National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.
How the FBI applied “Operation Tripwire,” an initiative originally intended to apprehend domestic terrorists through the use of private sector informants, in their monitoring of Occupy Wall Street groups. [Note: this issue was reported on exclusively by DBA/CMD in December, 2012.]

Government Surveillance of Occupy Movement
– by Beau Hodai, CMD/DBA

Find this story at 22 May 2013

Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s ‘Counter Terrorism’ Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street

How America’s National Security Apparatus — in Partnership With Big Corporations — Cracked Down on Dissent A new report is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement.

Counter-terror police officers collaborated with corporate entities to combat protests. Undercover police officers monitored and tracked the Occupy movement. A right-wing corporate-backed group hired a police officer to help protect a conference. These are some of the details revealed in a new report published by the Center for Media and Democracy’s Beau Hodai, along with DBA Press. The revelations are based on government documents the group obtained.

The report, titled “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement in 2011 and 2012 and also help protect the business entities targeted by the movement. The report specifically looks at the activities of “fusion centers,” or law enforcement entities created after 9/11 that transform local police forces into counter-terror units in partnership with federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. The fusion centers devoted a lot of time–to the point of “obsession,” the report notes–to monitoring the Occupy movement, particularly for any “threats” to public safety or health and to whether there were “extremists” involved in the movement.

The documents obtained for the report from government agencies reveal “a grim mosaic of ‘counter-terrorism’ agency operations and attitudes toward activists and other socially/politically-engaged citizens over the course of 2011 and 2012,” writes Hodai. He adds that these heavily-funded agencies indisputably view Occupy activists as “terrorist” threats. Additionally, Hodai writes that “this view of activists, and attendant activist monitoring/suppression, has been carried out on behalf of, and in cooperation with, some of the nation’s largest financial and corporate interests.”

Much of the report hones in on the Occupy Phoenix branch of the movement and Arizona counter-terrorism agents monitoring, tracking and cracking down on the protests.

For instance, when JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was planning on coming to Phoenix in October 2011, a “counter-terrorism” detective employed by the Phoenix Police Department’s Homeland Security Bureau exchanged information on potential protests with a JP Morgan Chase security manager. The detective, Jennifer O’Neill, received information on Dimon’s travel plans, and then shared information about Occupy Phoenix. O’Neill said that she and another officer had tracked the online activities of Occupy protesters to find out if they were planning to protest Dimon. No plans for protest were discovered by O’Neill, who also works with the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, otherwise known as the Arizona fusion center.

Another similar example of how corporate entities were helped by counter-terrorism units of police forces also occurred in October 2011. Then, businesses–including banks–received alerts authored by the Arizona fusion center about planned protest activities. Similar alerts to banks were given in the run-up to the November 5 day of action labeled “Bank Transfer Day,” which encouraged people to move their money from corporate banks to more local financial institutions. The Federal Bureau of Investigation also engaged in similar activity, according to the report. “The bureau had been in the business of alerting banks (and related entities) tothe planned protest activity of OWS groups as early as August of 2011.”

The extent of law enforcement-corporate cooperation has also been taken a step further by the practice of corporations or right-wing corporate backed groups hiring officers for pay to police protests.

In late November-early December 2011, the largest Occupy Phoenix action took place outside of a conference held by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded group that brings together right-wing lobbyist groups and conservative politicians to push model legislation in state legislatures. The protest was marred by police violence, with officers deploying pepper spray and pepper ball projectiles on activists and arresting 5. While the police portrayed the action as the work of violent anarchists, Hodai writes that this narrative of events had little grounding in reality.

Hodai reveals that the “tactical response unit” of officers working at the action was under the direction of Phoenix Police Department Sgt. Eric Harkins. What makes this noteworthy is that Harkins was “actually off-duty, earning $35 per hour as a private security guard employed by ALEC.” ALEC also “hired 49 active duty and 9 retired PPD officers to act as private security during the conference.” ALEC also employed off-duty police officers from Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department during another ALEC summit in May 2012.

The Center for Media and Democracy report also provides details on how police officers tracked and went undercover to monitor the Occupy movement. The report focuses on an undercover police officer who went by the name of “Saul DeLara,” who presented himself as a homeless Mexican activist. “DeLara” went to Occupy meetings and then reported back on their contents to the police.

The revelations are confirmation that, as the Center for Media and Democracy noted in a press release,”the nation’s post-September 11, 2001 counter terrorism apparatus has been applied to politically engaged citizens exercising their Constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights.”

May 21, 2013
AlterNet / By Alex Kane

Find this story at 21 May 2013

 

Nestlé has nothing to fear from Swiss legal system; No investigation into the murder of Colombian trade unionist

10 May 2013 – Fourteen months after receiving a criminal complaint, the office of public prosecution in the Swiss Canton of Waadt decided on 1 May 2013 not to investigate whether Nestlé and its managers were liable for negligently contributing to the death of Colombian Nestlé trade unionist Luciano Romero. In March 2012 the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) together with Colombian partner organizations lodged a complaint with the prosecution in the German speaking Canton of Zug, who failed to initiate an investigation and instead handed the proceedings over to the Canton of Waadt. Rather than promptly beginning an investigation, the prosecution in Waadt made use of various formalities to delay the proceedings until they could declare that the matter had become time-barred. The victim’s widow, who had lodged her own criminal complaint and who is represented by Zurich lawyers Marcel Bosonnet and Florian Wick, will appeal the decision.

Overall, the proceedings demonstrate that the Swiss judiciary is unwilling to pursue substantiated allegations against corporations. Swiss law makes it effectively impossible for non-European victims of Swiss firms, in particular, to enforce their rights before the courts. The criminal complaint accused senior managers as well as the Nestlé firm itself of negligently contributing to the murder by paramilitaries of Luciano Romero on 10 September 2005 in Vallepudar, Colombia. Despite being informed about the threats made against Romero, they failed to use the resources available to them to prevent the murder. The direct perpetrators of the crime – those who actually carried out the murder – were convicted in Colombia in 2006 and 2007, a rare occurrence in the country with the world’s highest rate of murder and intimidation of trade unionists. At the close of these proceedings in 2007, the Colombian court called for a criminal investigation into the role of Nestlé subsidiary Cicolac as well as the parent company, yet no such investigation was carried out. Despite ample indications of criminal liability, no prosecutor in Switzerland or in Colombia has initiated an investigation. It was left to Colombian lawyers and trade unionists together with the ECCHR to investigate the circumstances of the case and work on behalf of the family of Luciano Romero, work which evidently came too late.

ECCHR General Secretary had the following comment on the prosecution’s decision:

“Even our lowest expectations of the Swiss judiciary have been let down in the Nestlé case. But regardless of how this case proceeds, the problem is clear: Swiss companies have a liability – including a legal liability – for human rights violations committed outside Europe. If current Swiss law prevents the victims of such crimes from enforcing their rights then it – along with the laws of other European countries – must be reformed.”

For further information please contact:

ECCHR, Wolfgang Kaleck, info@ecchr.eu, Tel: ++49 (030) 400 485 90

European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights e.V. (ECCHR)

Zossener Str. 55-58, Aufgang D

D-10961 BERLIN

Phone: + 49 (0)30 – 40 04 85 90

Fax: + 49 (0)30 – 40 04 85 92

E-Mail: info@ECCHR.eu

Nestle under fire over Colombian murder

A Nestle employee and union member in Colombia was murdered by paramilitary forces seven years ago. Human rights organizations say Nestle shares the blame, but investigations have stalled for years.

Over three months ago, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin (ECCHR) and Sinaltrainal, the Colombian trade union for the food industry, teamed up to press charges against food giant Nestle with the public prosecutor in the Swiss canton of Zug.

The groups accused Nestle of responsibility for the murder of Luciano Romero in 2005, due to neglect of safety precautions. However, investigation into the case has yet to begin.

It looks like the complaint is a hot one for the Swiss prosecution to handle. The case would set a new precedent. It would be the first time that a Swiss business had been held legally responsible for a breach of law abroad.

Nestle, which is the biggest food company and one of the most multinational companies in the world, is also the biggest taxpayer in Switzerland. The company has 328,000 employees in more than 150 countries, with revenue last year of 70 billion euros ($87.6 billion) and a net profit of eight billion euros.

Union members threatened
Columbians protest ties between president and paramilitaries

Nestle has been active in Colombia since 1944, where it has grown to be one of the biggest purchasers of milk. The town of Valledupar is home to the Cicolac factory, a subsidiary which buys up most of the milk in the region and is an important economic force.

In the 1990s, Romero was one of 191 employees at Cicolac. Nestle planned a joint venture with another company, and Romero became an active opponent of the move.

“Romero became one of the most important union activists in the region,” said legal expert Claudia Müller-Hoff, who is working on the case for the ECCHR. “Because of his active involvement, local paramilitaries often threatened to kill him.”

Romero was unable to stop Nestle’s plans.

“During the process of restructuring, all employees were let go and replaced by new staff with worse contracts,” said Michel Egger of Alliance Sud, one of the biggest development aid organizations in Switzerland.

Tortured to death
Müller-Hoff says Nestle did not do enough to protect its employee

In the face of serious threats, Romero temporarily went into exile in Spain through an organized protection program. Once that expired, he returned to Colombia in 2005 and filed a complaint against the termination of his contract.

“At the same time, he prepared for a public witness hearing in Switzerland regarding working conditions at Nestle’s Colombian subsidiary,” Müller-Hoff said.

But he was never able to testify. Shortly before the hearing, Romero was abducted by members of a paramilitary death squad and tortured to death.

The paramilitaries were caught and sentenced by a Colombian court. In his verdict, the judge concluded it was impossible that the group acted on its own.

The judge ordered the state prosecutor to “investigate leading managers of Nestle-Cicolac to clarify their likely involvement and/or planning of the murder of union leader Luciano Enrique Romero Molina.”

The Colombian prosecution has drawn out the investigation up to today.

Dangerous terrain for unions

Colombiais “one of the most dangerous countries for union activities,” the International Trade Union Confederation said in a 2010 report. Since 2000, 60 percent of all murders of union members have happened there. Most remain unsolved to this day. More than 20 members of Sinatrainal have been murdered since 1986. Thirteen of them had, like Romero, worked for Nestle.

After Romero’s murder, Alliance Sud initiated a process of dialogue with Nestle to discuss the conflicts in Valledupar, sending people to Colombia to speak with locals involved in the case. The results left much to be desired.

“The corporate culture is very technocratic and profit-oriented,” Egger said. “That’s something we strongly criticized.”

In its final report, Alliance Sud said Nestle is lacking in conflict sensitivity, including when it comes to dealing with past events that left the union traumatized.

No comment from Nestle

In the eyes of ECCHR, Nestle and its managers share considerable responsibility for Romero’s death.

“After all, despite being well-informed about continuing threats against the Cicolac employee’s life, they failed to do anything to protect him,” Mueller-Hoff said.
Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe: the company won’t talk

So far, Nestle has rejected all allegations of responsibility and fails to answer requests for an interview. Allegations about the company’s operations up to 2005 evidently do not jibe with positions Nestle has taken since then.

An example is Nestle’s 2008 sustainability report, which claims that every employee should have the opportunity “to develop his potential in a safe and fair work environment where he is listened to, respected and appreciated.” The report describes employee safety as “non-negotiable.”

A company brochure from 2006 states, “especially in a war-torn country like Colombia, after consultations with both authorities and the unions, we have undertaken great efforts to protect our union leaders, workers and managers.”

Delays after unclear jurisdiction

The complaint against Nestle is also backed by the German-based Catholic relief agency Misereor.

…

Date 27.08.2012
Author Andreas Zumach / ag, srs
Editor Michael Lawton

Find this story at 27 August 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle

Undercover Activist Details Secret Filming of Animal Abuse & Why “Ag-Gag” Laws May Force Him to Stop

An animal rights investigator details how he has spent over a decade secretly filming animal abuse and why that work is now imperiled by a wave of laws sweeping the country. Speaking on the condition we conceal his identity, “Pete” has secretly captured animal abuse on farms and slaughterhouses after applying to work at the location. He has released video footage to law enforcement and activist groups such as Mercy for Animals, helping spark national outcry and charges against the abusers. His investigations and footage have led to at least 15 criminal cases and have been used in several documentaries. But now Pete’s work is under threat. A dozen or so state legislatures have introduced bills that target people who covertly expose farm animal abuse. Nicknamed “ag-gag” laws, they would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms or apply for a job at one without disclosing affiliations with animal rights groups. They also require activists to hand over undercover videos within 24 hours, preventing them from amassing a trove of material and publicizing their findings on their own. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: In recent years, activists and investigators have gone undercover to reveal shocking cases of animal cruelty at some of the nation’s largest plants and farms. In many cases, they have made secret videos of the abuses, leading to prosecutions, closures, recalls and vows from the offenders to change their practices. In 2008, this undercover investigation by the Humane Society exposed wrongdoing by a California meat processor. A warning to our viewers, some of the images are very graphic.

HUMANE SOCIETY INVESTIGATION: An investigation by the Humane Society of the United States uncovers abuse of downed dairy cows, cows too sick or too injured to stand, at a California slaughterhouse. What’s more, the meat is being served to children through the National School Lunch Program.

AARON MATÉ: That undercover investigation by the Humane Society resulted in the largest meat recall in U.S. history. In the last two years, activists have also caught on camera employees of a Tyson Foods supplier in Wyoming flinging piglets into the air, workers at Bettencourt Dairies in Idaho shocking cows, and the searing of beaks off of young chicks at Sparboe Farms in Iowa. In the case of Tyson and Bettencourt, the employees were charged with cruelty to animals. In the case of Sparboe Farms, the company lost one of its biggest customers: the fast food giant McDonald’s.

AMY GOODMAN: But the videos have also sparked a reaction in the oppose direction: criminalizing those who blow the whistle. A front-page article in The New York Times this weekend noted that a dozen or so state legislatures have introduced bills that target people who covertly expose farm animal abuse. These so-called “ag-gag” bills, as they’re known, make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms or apply for a job at one without disclosing affiliations with animal rights groups. They also require activists to hand over undercover videos immediately, preventing them from publicizing findings and sparking public outcry or documenting trends.

Five states already have ag-gag laws in place. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining a list that includes Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont. Many of these bills have been introduced with the backing of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a mechanism for corporate lobbyists to help write state laws.

In a moment, we’ll host a debate on the so-called “ag-gag” laws, but first we’re joined by one of the activists whose undercover work has sparked their passage. The activist agreed to join us today on the condition he could use a pseudonym and conceal his identity. He asked us to refer to him simply as “Pete.” Pete is an undercover animal rights investigator who has secretly captured animal abuse on farms and slaughterhouses for the past 11 years. He has released footage to groups such as Mercy for Animals, helping spark national outcry and charges against the abusers. His investigations have led to at least 15 criminal cases, and his videos have been used in a number of documentaries.

Pete, we welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what it is that you do?

PETE: Sure. Thank you for having me.

What I do is go undercover to work for an extended period of time, maybe two weeks, maybe longer, maybe six weeks or so, at farms, ranches and slaughterhouses. And the main thing that I do is focus on any and all criminal activity that exists at a facility. So, an undercover investigator’s job is to show everything that occurs, whether it’s legal or illegal. There’s a lot of standard practices that may look cruel, but they’re legal. And that is up to a campaigns department and lobbyists and the public to decide if they want to change that.

For an investigator, the main objective is to document all illegal activity and get that information to the authorities. And every single facility, whether it is a corporate facility or a family farm, whether it has a couple hundred animals or whether it has a million chickens on it, every one that I’ve worked at has been breaking the law. And because we keep finding illegal activity, and because we’re getting more cooperation from law enforcement now, I believe that has fueled some of these ag-gag laws in an attempt to try to stop us.

AARON MATÉ: And Pete, how do you go about doing it? Obviously, here we’re calling you Pete, not your real name. Do you give your real name when you’re applying for these jobs?

PETE: Yes, I do. I give—you know, because I have to fill out a W-2, and so I’m obligated to put my real name. You know, these investigations are done legally, so we don’t use fake IDs. You know, we don’t use fake names. And the most critical point is that when we’re hired, we do everything how they tell us to do it, so, you know, we try to fit in. We generally—you know, an investigator’s—part of the job is to always make sure that if you’re doing a good job, you get them to note that and let you know you are in fact doing your job: They can’t blame any problems on you.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about your time working at the Ohio hog farm in 2006. You captured this footage showing hundreds of impregnated pigs crammed into gestation crates that restrict their movement. They’re held in these crates, standing up or collapsed on the floor, for up to 116 days. The investigation was featured in the HBO documentary Death on a Factory Farm. Let’s go to a clip.

PETE: It’s a large farm. Basically, their operation is to birth and raise the pigs, then send them off to become hogs ready for slaughter. They use gestation crates and farrowing crates, just like most other hog farms in America. Gestation crates are where sows are impregnated in those crates, and they’re waiting while they’re pregnant.

How do they know which ones are pregnant? How do you know on a pig?

HOG FARMER: Huh?

PETE: You just see on the belly?

HOG FARMER: All these are pregnant.

PETE: You can just tell on the belly?

HOG FARMER: Yeah.

PETE: They are totally confined, shoulder to shoulder so they can’t move, for about 113 to 116 days. If they lie down, they have to plop straight down.

AMY GOODMAN: That is an excerpt of the HBO documentary. Pete, what happened here? How did you document it? And what resulted from your findings?

PETE: So, in that investigation, that was a little bit different. And in that, we actually had a whistleblower complaint that they were hanging crippled sows to death. They would—they would wait until they had too many sows, the female hogs, that were downed, and they started to become a nuisance. And so then they would be dragged out. They’d put a chain around their necks, then hang them from a front loader. And it would take about four to five minutes for them to be hanged to death.

Normally in an investigation, the targets are actually chosen randomly, and we consistently find violations of the law, regardless. But in this case, I went in because there was a whistleblower who complained about that specific act. However, a judge determined that hanging hogs to death was a legal means of euthanasia, and so they were not prosecuted for that act.

AARON MATÉ: Pete, I just want to clarify, you said earlier that you find cruelty 100 percent of the time?

PETE: One hundred percent of the time. You know, I mean, it would stand to reason that there has to be a farm out there, at least one, that’s not breaking the law. That would stand to reason. The only thing I can tell you is that I have not found it yet.

So, I have worked at a—for example, just with the dairies alone, I’ve worked at Bettencourt Dairy in Idaho, which at the one site that I was at, one of their numerous sites, there were about 6,000 cows, and, you know, people were breaking the law every day there. I’ve worked at the Conklin Dairy Farm in Ohio. It was a family-owned farm, had about 200 cows, the most sadistic animal abuse that I’ve ever seen. And I’ve worked at the E6 Cattle Ranch in Texas, also family-owned, and the owner was convicted for cruelty to animals. Another MFA investigator worked at a large dairy in New York, and he worked alongside a mechanic. And it just so happened that the one worker that he was working alongside was also convicted for breaking the law for cruelty to animals.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about one of the dairies, Pete. You recently infiltrated Bettencourt Dairies in Idaho and released some shocking footage. The video shows a cow being dragged on the floor by a chain attached from her neck to a moving tractor. It also shows dairy workers viciously beating and shocking cows and violently twisting their tails. Additionally, your hidden camera captured unsafe and unsanitary conditions, including feces-covered floors that cause cows to regularly slip, fall and injure themselves. There were also sick and injured cows suffering from open wounds, broken bones and infected udders left to suffer without veterinary care. Now, Bettencourt Dairies is Idaho’s largest dairy operation and cheese supplier for Kraft and Burger King. Three of the dairy workers were charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty due to your investigation. Tell us exactly what happened, how you got the video out, how you made it public, and who these people were who were convicted.

PETE: Absolutely. So, the entire purpose behind the Bettencourt investigation was that—I guess I should start by saying that my identity has been made public by the Animal Agriculture Alliance, and they’ve been trying to prevent me from getting undercover at farms and slaughterhouses. So the whole reason that I went to Idaho is specifically because Mercy for Animals hired me to just work at any facility that I could. And so I went to Idaho because I’ve never been there, and I chose the dairy industry because I hadn’t worked at a dairy in over two years. On that alone, I decided to go apply at Bettencourt. They were the first place to hire me.

And within 45 minutes of arriving on my first day, there was the—I filmed the incident that you discussed of someone putting a chain around a downed cow’s neck and dragging her out of a stall. The manager, Felipe, of that site, the Dry Creek Dairy site, he shocked the downed cow about 50 times with a hand-held device. He was the one who put the chain around her neck. I still don’t understand why he was not charged for that crime. But there it was, on my first day, that management was involved in the most hideous act of abuse that I saw while I was there.

The investigation lasted three weeks, and there were acts of unnecessary cruelty, of people beating and punching cows in the face and punching them in the eyes, and so forth, throughout that time. Once we felt that we had established a pattern of abuse and showed everyone who was involved in it, though no cow during that time had an imminent threat to their so that we felt we needed to cut the case immediately, we then went to law enforcement.

AMY GOODMAN: And what happened to these people? Are they still working in the plant, though they were charged with misdemeanor? And the companies that use Bettencourt, the largest plant in the state?

PETE: Right. So, I guess first I should say Felipe, to my knowledge, is still running that site. He was not charged. There were three workers that were charged. Two fled. One was convicted. And the company itself was not charged.

So, the Bettencourts said that, you know, they’re going to put up cameras and that they’re going to have people sign a policy saying, “Don’t abuse animals.” I want to make this very clear: Most facilities that I’ve worked at, you have to sign a form that says you will not abuse animals. I have worked at more than one facility that has cameras that are operating there. I don’t know who’s behind the camera, but certainly they’ve never uncovered anything that I’ve been able to find with my hidden cameras. So I don’t believe that that’s going to actually do anything to minimize the amount of illegal cruelty at Bettencourt.

AARON MATÉ: Pete, I also want to ask you about what you uncovered at the Martin Creek Kennel in Arkansas. Your investigation was featured in the 2006 HBO documentary called Dealing Dogs. Let’s go to a clip. And again, a warning to our viewers: These images are very graphic.

PETE: Up at the trench, there’s a table sitting right next to the trench with a bloody knife on top. And the whole table is just covered in dried blood. The area around the table is just littered with dog organs.

These are lines of trenches. Started out here, and he keeps digging new trenches as he fills them up. More dogs, whole dogs. OK, this dog here had been cut open.

AARON MATÉ: That’s a clip from the 2006 HBO documentary Dealing Dogs. Pete, talk about what you found there.

PETE: Sure. So, that facility, they had been suspected for a long time of abusing animals. And it was a place that was licensed by the USDA to sell random-source dogs and cats to research labs. That’s called a Class B license. A few of those still exist, and most of them now buy their dogs and cats from pounds. So they go to the local shelter and then—or animal control facility, and then they’ll resell them to research. That facility was the largest in operation, having over 600 dogs at a time, over 100 cats at a time. And they would sell to universities for research all over the country. Not only were they abusing the dogs on a daily basis, but they were also getting a lot of stolen pets.

That facility was eventually shut down. The U.S. attorney’s office got involved, because they were also involved in a felony fraud. They had a veterinarian pre-signing their interstate health certificates without checking the dogs. And so, for every one of those that crossed state lines, it was a felony. It’s kind of like hitting Al Capone for tax evasion. But anyway, all of the animals were rescued once the U.S. attorney’s office raided the facility, and they were permanently shut down.

That said, there’s an interesting point about that case, which is that, you know, you look at—you look at a facility like that, it’s licensed by the government, and you wonder how can they be doing these things. Like, how can all of these farms and slaughterhouses be breaking the law, and no one but undercover activists finds out about it? Well, at Martin Creek Kennel, I watched a USDA inspection. I watched two federal inspectors walk through the facility, and they did not find a single dog that was dying of open wounds that I was able to document that day at that facility. I’ve seen federal inspections at several facilities that I’ve worked at, and they don’t find any of the crimes that I’ve uncovered while I’m there. So, I applaud the USDA for all of the action that they take, and I’m not trying to—I’m not trying to come down on them. But what I’m trying to say is that an inspection alone or third-party verification does not find the kind of criminal activity that an undercover investigation will find. And there is no law enforcement agency that exists in this country to do undercover work of puppy mills, factory farms and slaughterhouses.

AMY GOODMAN: Pete—

PETE: It’s up to nonprofit groups.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the so-called ag-gag bills that would criminalize the undercover work you do? Republican State Senator David Hinkins of Utah told his local station, KSL-TV, he doesn’t understand opposition to the so-called ag-gag bills. Hinkins said, quote, “If a wife were abusing her husband, we wouldn’t sneak into their living room and set up a hidden camera. We don’t want people mistreating animals. … There are authorities they can contact. They don’t need to be detectives or the Pink Panther sneaking around.” Your response?

PETE: Two things. Number one, animals cannot speak for themselves. So, of course, domestic violence is a complicated issue, but ultimately, you can question a battered spouse and try to get the truth from them. You cannot ask an animal, “Who kicked you?” or “Who’s neglecting you?”

The second thing—and I hesitate to say this because I have so much respect for law enforcement, and we’ve seen so much cooperation from law enforcement especially in the last few years, but corruption and apathy from law enforcement still is a big problem that we find when we’re dealing with animal cases. And if you’re a cop, and if you hear that, and that shocks you, it’s because you’re a good cop. But I can’t tell you how many times it is that we find clear violations of the law, and the local authorities won’t do anything. And it’s tough. You know, it’s very hard, if you’re a police officer in a rural county, you go to church with, and you live alongside, or you’re involved in the same business as the people who some activist comes in and starts showing conditions that, you know, they point out are illegal, but that you may—you may do yourself, or your friends may do themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Pete, how would the ag-gag bills—

PETE: So that makes it a very complicated issue.

AMY GOODMAN: —affect you and your work?

PETE: They would make it illegal for me to do my job.

AMY GOODMAN: How?

PETE: It’s pure and simple. Well, so, the ag-gag laws generally say that if you document conditions at a facility, if you take a photograph or video of an animal agriculture facility, you’re breaking the law.

What they’ll also say—and this is the most clever—is they’ll say that if you see an act of illegal abuse, you have to report it within 24 hours. That’s misleading. It’s misleading because if you just show illegal activity from one individual, you can’t then show who else is involved in that illegal activity. And when one person is busted—and I absolutely swear to this—they’re not going to—it’s not going to stop other people from breaking the law. It’s going to let everyone else know they need to be more careful about how they do it, or they just need to make sure that they’re more careful about who they hire.

The second thing is that it’s not always clear what is illegal. The first dairy that I worked at, I saw someone kick a cow right in the side of her head to try and get her to stand. I documented it, thought it was illegal. Turns out, it’s perfectly normal to try to do to a cow to make her stand, that the first thing you should do is kick her right in the side of the head or the neck. When I saw people hanging crippled sows to death in Ohio, I assumed that surely that’s illegal. In fact, it looked sadistic. Turns out that’s perfectly legal. So you don’t always know.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what happens when you get to continue to record? What is your point that when you turn it in after 24 hours, it hurts what you do?

PETE: Well, so let’s say that you go to a facility, and you believe that someone has—in fact, let’s set it up as best we can. Let’s say you see an act that you believe is illegal, someone admits that it’s illegal, and you have an attorney standing by within 24 hours to tell you it’s illegal. You’re very unlikely to meet all three of those conditions. You are then missing out on any pattern of abuse to determine if this is a one-off incident. You’re then missing out on an opportunity to determine if anyone else is involved in breaking the law. And you’re missing out on an opportunity to find out if management at that facility is aware of this, to see if it’s more of a systemic problem, like we found at Bettencourt and like we found at multiple facilities when we do these investigations. So it really hinders—it prevents you from working a criminal case.

AMY GOODMAN: Pete, you wanted to be a police officer when you were young?

PETE: Yes, absolutely. That’s the reason that I started doing this. I wanted to go into law enforcement, but, you know, I realized there’s a lot of people that are going into law enforcement, and there’s very few people doing this. And there is just no such thing as a cop whose sole job is to go undercover to look out for farmed animals or for dogs in puppy mills. So I decided to combine my two passions, since I was an animal rights activist and I wanted to be a cop, and try and do this job.

AARON MATÉ: And, Pete, since these ag-gag laws have been passed, have you stopped your work in any of the states where they have gone into effect?

PETE: Yes, I have. The main group that I work for is Mercy for Animals. They are an extremely gutsy group. They are extremely professional. And they are very, very focused on not only campaigning for animal welfare, but for finding illegal activity on farms and slaughterhouses. It’s why I love working for them. And they do everything completely legally. So, any states where the ag-gag laws have passed, it’s a no-go to work there.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you for being with us. Pete is the name he asked us to use; it’s not his real name, though he does use his real name when he goes undercover; is an undercover animal rights investigator who has secretly captured animal abuse on farms and slaughterhouses. He has released the footage to groups such as Mercy for Animals, helping spark national outcry and charges against abusers. He’s using the pseudonym to conceal his identity, not disclosing his whereabouts, so he can continue to get hired by unknowing slaughterhouses, farms and other facilities suspected of animal abuse. HBO and others have used his video in their documentaries.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll have a debate on the so-called ag-gag bills. Stay with us.

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Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Find this story at 9 April 2013

Debate: After Activists Covertly Expose Animal Cruelty, Should They Be Targeted With “Ag-Gag” Laws?

So-called “ag-gag” bills that criminalize undercover filming on farms and at slaughterhouses to document criminal animal abuse are sweeping the country. Five states, including Missouri, Utah and Iowa, already have such laws in place. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining a list that includes Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont. Many of these bills have been introduced with the backing of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a mechanism for corporate lobbyists to help write state laws. We host a debate on the ag-gag laws with two guests: independent journalist Will Potter, and Emily Meredith, communications director for the Animal Agriculture Alliance. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: We turn now to a debate on the so-called ag-gag bills that would criminalize undercover filming on farms and at slaughterhouses. Five states have already passed ag-gag laws. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont.

AMY GOODMAN: For a discussion on these so-called ag-gag laws, we’re joined by two guests. Will Potter, freelance reporter who’s been covering the bills and ALEC for years, the American Legislative Exchange Council, he runs the blog GreenIsTheNewRed.com. He’s also the author of Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege. And we’re joined by Emily Meredith, the communications director for the Animal Agriculture Alliance. The group’s annual summit will be held next month with a heavy focus on the undercover animal cruelty videos and the ag-gag laws trying to block them. The summit’s theme is “Activists at the Door: Protecting Animals, Farms, Food & Consumer Confidence.” Both guests are joining us from Washington, D.C.

Let us begin with Emily Meredith. Can you talk about the—

EMILY MEREDITH: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Morning. It’s good to have you with us—the Animal Agriculture Alliance and what these laws are that are being often successfully passed around the country?

EMILY MEREDITH: Sure. Well, the Animal Agriculture Alliance is the largest national coalition of individual farmers and ranchers, veterinarians, processing facilities and a host of national organizations representing basically every protein group. And we work to make sure that there’s a unified voice communicating and engaging with consumers and helping them understand where their food comes from.

And this farm protection legislation, which has been termed ag-gag legislation by the activist community, is extremely important because these undercover videos are harmful to the farm owners where these videos are taped, the farm families that work those farms day in and day out, and the animal agriculture industry truly as a whole. And these videos damage their reputations. They bring harsh criticism. And many of these videos have found no legitimate instances of abuse, but rather use manipulated footage. They show false narrative of the images that are being shown. And they’re meant to shock and awe consumers and to really highlight conduct that the animal activist groups want to put an end to the entire industry. They want to end the animal agriculture industry. And that’s what these videos are about. And that’s why legislation like this is so important. It is because this legislation is meant to protect the right of these people to continue to operate their farms and ranches and to continue to provide food to this hungry country and the world.

AARON MATÉ: Will Potter, you’ve covered this issue extensively. Your thoughts on what are called the ag-gag laws or farm protection laws?

WILL POTTER: Well, there is certainly a lot of truth to what you just said. I mean, these undercover investigations have created a lot of distrust with the industry and really questioned where people are getting their meat and animal products from. It’s important to point out, though, that these investigations have also led to criminal charges across the country. They’ve led to the largest meat recall in U.S. history. They’ve led to ballot initiatives across the country in which consumers are speaking out.

And to frame this as something by animal welfare groups who are seeking to abolish animal agriculture is just disingenuous. The people that are opposed to these bills are people like the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Press Photographers Association. These are not radical extremist animal rights activists; these are everyone who cares about where their food comes from and whether or not they have a right to know about what they’re buying.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Meredith, your response?

EMILY MEREDITH: Well, I would say that these videos are—they’re showing families, they’re showing farms and slaughterhouses, and they’re basically making them guilty without ever giving them the opportunity to address the allegations that are levied in those videos. They’re not giving them the opportunity to take corrective action. I know that Pete mentioned that they often turn the videos over to the authorities. That is completely—I think that’s disingenuous, when in fact they actually release these videos direct to the media. They send them direct to companies. One of the farms where—that Pete mentioned, they sent the video direct to CNN and to Burger King. And it was in fact the farm owners that turned that footage over to the state prosecutor and took responsibility, fired five of his employees, at least five of his employees, and turned that footage over. And I think that’s—that’s disingenuous.

If you truly care about animal welfare, you’re not going to wait even a minute to report animal abuse. You’re going to see it, you’re going to stop it, and you’re going to say something. And I think that’s very important to note. This footage is taken for weeks or months. It’s held, and it’s released at a politically opportune or strategically conceived time. And it’s used—these videos are used for these groups’ fundraising purposes. I know Pete mentioned Mercy for Animals. Yes, they release these videos, and they release them under a big “donate now” button. And I think that’s really and truly disingenuous. And that’s why this legislation is so crucial.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Potter, your response?

WILL POTTER: I think it’s interesting to say something like the activists are making people who abuse animals and are facing felony animal cruelty charges, in many cases, making them guilty. I mean, it completely restructures the debate away from the people who are actually committing the abuses.

And I think it’s important to point out also that we can’t limit this discussion to what’s being described as criminal activity. Although these investigations have certainly led to criminal charges across the country, much of what these investigators are documenting are actually standard industry practices. I think most people would be shocked to learn that there is not one federal law that protects farm animals during their lives. There are some legislation that protects animals as they’re being transported and some legislation that protects animals as they’re being slaughtered, but that exempts poultry, which are about 90 to 95 percent of animals that are killed. So, to put this in another way, there’s about nine billion animals killed every year for food in this country by an industry with virtually no government oversight and no accountability. These undercover investigators are really the only meaningful way that American consumers have a right to know how their food is produced and to have a check and balance on a multibillion-dollar industry.

AARON MATÉ: Emily, does the industry have safeguards in place that you think counter what Will is saying is needed, which is people investigating and doing monitoring of these farms?

EMILY MEREDITH: Oh, for sure. I mean, I think the last thing that the industry needs is activist groups that really wish to see a vegan world, quote-unquote, “policing” them. Some of the measures that are in place are every employee that is hired on a farm or ranch is required to sign a document saying if they see abuse, they will report it to managers, to farm owners, and even to local authorities. There are a lot of farms, ranches, processing facilities, that have video cameras in place that run every day, that a quality assurance manager or some sort of manager is reviewing that footage. There’s trainings in place. A lot of these facilities train in multiple languages to make sure that their employees understand how to properly handle animals and care for them.

And I think the bottom line to really note here is that these—98.2 percent of farms and ranches in this country are family-owned. I think that the term “factory farm” gets thrown around a lot, and that’s a completely—again, a term made up by—a very catchy term made up by the activist community, whereas, in reality, the majority of farms and ranches in this country are family-owned. And these farm families, they truly care about their animals. And they want—it’s not in their best interest to have abuse allegations levied against them. They want to make sure that every one of their employees is doing the right thing, that they’re doing the right thing, and that they can continue to do what they love to do and what has been in their families for generations. Some of these farms and ranches have been in operation for a hundred years. They don’t want to have any allegations against them that would allege animal cruelty, because that is—A, it’s bad for business, but, B, it goes against what they were raised to do. And I think that that’s really important to note. And we need to remember that these people are producing our food every day.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Potter, what about Emily Meredith’s points that the vast majority of farms are family farms and that they successfully monitor themselves?

WILL POTTER: It’s completely nonexistent. Old MacDonald’s farm just does not exist anymore. We’re talking about nine to 10 billion animals raised for food every year. These are not little red barns dotting the countryside. These are industrial operations, in some cases with a million birds on a single farm. To say that this is a family business is just misrepresenting how the entire animal agriculture industry functions. This is a multibillion-dollar industry that, as I said, has virtually no safeguards, no oversight from the government. And a handful of activists and whistleblowers have really rattled the industry to its core.

And I think what that really represents is that as these investigations are exposed, they not only lead to criminal charges, but they’ve really changed the nature of the public debate. Most people have been led to believe exactly what Ms. Meredith said, that there are these little red barns and Old MacDonald raising animals for American consumption. But that just doesn’t happen. So people, when they see this footage, when they become aware of how this industry operates, they’re appalled. And I think that really reflects the sea change in the national dialogue right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Potter, I want to ask you about how journalists will be impacted by these bills, but first let’s turn to this 2011 report by ABC’s Brian Ross on McDonald’s dropping a large McMuffin egg supplier. The fast food chain fired Sparboe Farms following allegations of animal cruelty.

BRIAN ROSS: In the wake of an ABC News investigation, McDonald’s has fired Sparboe Farms, citing undercover video made by an animal rights group, Mercy for Animals, showing mindless animal cruelty, most of which is too graphic to broadcast.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Potter, can you comment on this?

WILL POTTER: I mean, particularly what concerns me as a journalist is exactly what you just described. I mean, these bills are so broad that they wrap up, in some cases, photography and video documentation. They wrap up anyone who distributes or possesses that footage. And even the reformed bills, as they’ve been presented, which focus on misrepresenting yourself in job application or the mandatory reporting provisions, those still put reporters at risk.

I think people need to understand that there’s a long history of investigative journalism in this country, I mean, dating back to Nellie Bly, who pretended to be insane in order to expose systemic abuses in insane asylums across the country, for reporters to document these types of abuses in this way. In addition to that, not everyone who is exposing and making the news has congressional press credentials. We’re in a climate right now where some of the national headlines are made not by investigative journalists, but by people that are taking it upon themselves to document this kind of corruption.

AMY GOODMAN: Give us examples of what has been exposed that has led to the closing of factories, changes in policy.

WILL POTTER: I think it’s really reflective of this national climate to see what happened in North Carolina this last week. A fifth person, a fifth employee of Butterball pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges. And on that same day, the North Carolina Legislature introduced a new bill that criminalizes the very investigation that led to those criminal charges, and also led to the ousting of a top Ag official in North Carolina on obstruction of justice. I think that really wraps up, you know, the totality of what we’re talking about, that the mechanisms in place that are meant to be safeguards in many ways themselves are corrupt. And it’s taken undercover investigators to expose that and to allow for this dialogue of what needs to happen to reform.

AMY GOODMAN: And a point that Emily Meredith made about if you see abuse, if you do get in there and you do film it, you should have to turn the film over within 24 hours, what is your response to that, Will Potter?

WILL POTTER: I think there are a couple things to point out. One is that this doesn’t allow for a systemic or a multi-abuse pattern to be exposed. For instance, no one would go to the FBI or to the police and say that they should bust the mob after catching one illegal activity. And I think that’s really the same situation here. Do we want to see one aberrant behavior, or do we want to see what is happening every single day on these farms to get a complete picture of what’s happening and how our food is being processed?

I think the second thing to think about is that many of the people who work on these facilities are some of the most vulnerable populations in the country. These are people that in many cases are not native English speakers, that are not familiar and don’t have access to an attorney within 24 hours. So for them to make the decision to report this information and put their livelihood on the line cannot be forced on them in such a short amount of time. That really places an unfair burden on the workers. And that’s why groups like the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO have opposed this, as well.

AARON MATÉ: Emily Meredith, many points to respond to here. Will Potter’s point that forcing this quick disclosure puts an unfair burden on workers?

EMILY MEREDITH: I think that’s blatantly untrue. I think that it’s easy for the activist community to sit there and say it puts an unfair burden on workers, when, in reality, I think it puts an equal burden when they cut and run after obtaining the footage that they want and release it to the mainstream media. I mean, you’re showing workers there that are most—in most cases, not doing anything wrong, are complying with standard industry practices, and you’re releasing that footage direct to the public. So, where are the activists in doing what Mr. Potter just suggested, in helping those workers get attorneys and making sure that they’re represented? They’re not doing that.

And I think it’s easy for them to sit there and say that—you know, make all these excuses why their videos are necessary; however, I think we need to remember that these videos play a huge part in their bottom lines. They’re a huge part to their fundraising campaigns, and it’s how these organizations, like Mercy for Animals, like the Humane Society, like PETA—that’s how these organizations stay in business and continue to operate.

And I would also say that there’s nothing in the Constitution that would give you a right to videotape on private property. In fact, there’s many states that have—that prohibit videotaping in any sort of business, not just on farms and ranches, not just in agriculture. And I think that that—that’s a very crucial point, because just because you’re an undercover activist doesn’t give you the right to go onto someone’s private property. And in many cases, these are family farms, as I’ve mentioned before. Animals are 100 feet from the family home. It doesn’t give you a right, just because you want to—you think you want to expose something, to go onto that private property and to videotape.

And these farms and ranches, they do need protection. In fact, I will say one more thing, if I may, which is that the first of these bills which—the first of these recent bills was actually written at the kitchen table of former Iowa Representative Annette Sweeney. This bill, she had farm—she’s a farmer herself. She raises animals. And she had other farm families coming to her, saying, “What’s our recourse? You know, these videos are spreading misinformation. They’re using false footage. They’re using footage that wasn’t even obtained in our facility. And we don’t have a recourse, and we need to do something about it.” And so, she sat down with other legislators at her kitchen table and drafted the first one of these bills to protect families like hers. And I think that that’s what we really need to remember, is that—

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go—let’s go to who is writing the legislation. And here I want to ask you about the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, in pushing these state bills. ALEC spokesperson Bill Meierling told the Associated Press, quote, “At the end of the day it’s about personal property rights or the individual right to privacy. You wouldn’t want me coming into your home with a hidden camera.” Let’s put this question to Will Potter, because Emily Meredith raised it, as well, that people don’t have a right to go onto private property and film.

WILL POTTER: Well, if I were keeping pigs in my home their entire lives and not allowing them to turn around, keeping chickens in battery cages and debeaking them, or docking pigs’ tails without anesthesia, I probably wouldn’t want anyone coming into my home and documenting that, either.

I think what is missing the point here is that the American Legislative Exchange Council is behind a coordinated effort, dating back to about 2003, in which they’ve drafted model legislation criminalizing a wide range of activity, from nonviolent civil disobedience to the undercover investigations of animal welfare groups as terrorism. And over the next 10 years, they’ve used that legislation around the country. And in—the recent attempts of ag-gag bills are really an extension of that. This is a concerted effort by corporations to silence their opposition, and it’s bankrolled by some of the most powerful industries on the planet.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does ALEC fit into this picture, this organization where corporate heads and legislators get together and write legislation?

WILL POTTER: So, I think most of your listeners are familiar with ALEC, because Democracy Now! has reported on it quite a bit. But the way the group functions is by taking thousands of dollars of donations from corporations, and in exchange for that money, these corporations are allowed to draft model legislation. And these model bills are introduced around the country without any fingerprints tying them to the industries that crafted or are attempting to craft the law, so most people have no idea where these bills are actually coming from. Meanwhile, ALEC mobilizes lawmakers around the country. For instance, in Utah, my reporting on the ag-gag bill there showed that the Senate, as it—the Utah Senate that passed the bill, over half of the supporting votes came from ALEC members. I mean, we really have no idea of the true scope of this organization, but it’s clear, especially with this wave of ag-gag bills, that ALEC bills has been a driving force behind these attempts to criminalize activists.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Meredith, how involved is ALEC in the legislation that’s passing in state after state, most recently this week introduced in North Carolina?

EMILY MEREDITH: Well, I’ll go back to what I said earlier, which was the first recent one of these bills was really written around the kitchen table by someone who is a farmer herself, who has a vested interest in this, and who was approached by other farm families, and looking for a recourse for these videos, looking for someone to help them protect themselves, really. And I think that it doesn’t matter where the impetus is coming from, and I would—I would strive to say that the impetus is coming from farm families themselves.

But the true point is that, you know, as Will Potter pointed out, well, I—you know, I don’t think you would want me videotaping that. Well, you know, I think that that is—that is untrue. I think that there’s a lot of farmers’ and ranchers’ organizations, like the Animal Agriculture Alliance, who are striving to be transparent and to help consumers understand where their food comes from. However, we’re running up against staunch opposition and activist organizations, like Mercy for Animals, activists, journalists, who are going in and who are really mistreating this video footage, who are taking footage for weeks and months, they’re holding it, then they’re releasing it, as I said before, at a politically opportune time. And this video footage is often spliced together from footage from 10, 20 years ago that they use in these videos. They’re running a false narrative with a lot of these images. And even—

AMY GOODMAN: Will Potter, that’s a serious charge that Emily Meredith is making, that most of it is false, the videotape.

WILL POTTER: Yeah, it is a serious charge, and I would love to see any evidence of that. I’m sure prosecutors would, as well, as they’ve brought criminal charges in these cases, not from footage from 10 or 20 years ago, but of things that happened months ago, that have immediately led to criminal investigations. If there are allegations of any of this footage being manipulated or staged or doctored in any way, I would love to see it, from anyone in the industry. But they continue to make these claims without any evidence as to what is actually happening.

To talk about transparency in this way is really interesting to me, because this industry is behind attempts to keep consumers in the dark, and then the Animal Agriculture Alliance, for example, is holding a conference about those attempts, and then, at the same time, denying access to reporters such as myself—my credentials were refused—who are trying to attend and learn about their efforts. So at every step of the way, they’re trying to keep the public in the dark, they’re trying to keep consumers in the dark, and they’re trying to make all of us unaware of what’s actually happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Meredith, your response? And the significance of the meeting that you’ll be having in Virginia, coming up on May 1st to 2nd at the Westin Arlington Gateway, “Activists at the Door: Protecting Animals, Farms, Food & Consumer Confidence”?

EMILY MEREDITH: Well, I want to say first that the industry is not trying to keep consumers in the dark. They have made a lot of efforts to be more transparent, to communicate about things. And in fact, these bills—I want to emphasize this point—mandate reporting. They want you to see it, they want you to stop it, and they want you to say something. They don’t want you to hold the footage. As I said before, a lot of this footage is never even turned over to prosecuting authorities, until the farm families and the owners of these facilities turn it over themselves. And that has happened in numerous cases.

The second thing I want to make a point about is that after a lot of these videos are released, these farms themselves are going to independent review panels—excuse me—and having these videos reviewed by known humane handling experts, like, for instance, Dr. Temple Grandin. And I want to make this point very clear. When that review panel asks for the full footage—let’s say that the activist organization was in a facility for three weeks or three months—when that review panel, which—

AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.

EMILY MEREDITH: —which includes experts, they ask for the full footage, they’re not turned that full footage over. The activist community does not want that review panel to see the full footage. And in my mind, that’s because there really is—

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. Emily Meredith, I want to thank you for being with us, of the Animal Agriculture Alliance, and Will Potter, freelance reporter, author of Green is the New Red. We will look at the case of Daniel McGowan after our show, and we’ll post it at democracynow.org.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Find this story at 9 April 2013