Common Dreams staff , February 29, 2012
If there was any doubt among Occupy movement activists that the federal government was keeping close tabs on the development of their growing street protests and public encampments, a newly released Department of Homeland Security document will put those doubts to rest.
Occupy protestors during a demonstration at the UC Davis campus in November. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The DHS report is part of a trove of documents Wikileaks began publishing earlier this week under the banner, "The Global Intelligence Files". The release includes over 5 million e-mails and documents culled from the US-based private intelligence firm Stratfor, the Global Intelligence Company described by Barons as the Shadow CIA. Wikileaks has shared certain emails and documents with 25 separate media outlets from around the world. The DHS report on Occupy Wall Street was released to Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings for advanced review, but is also available on its website and is viewable below.
Michael Hastings, author of the recently published book The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan, is best know for his damning report of former US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who was forced to resign his position after Hastings reporting appeared in the magazine.
His assessment of the DHS report on the Occupy Wall Street follows:
As Occupy Wall Street spread across the nation last fall, sparking protests in more than 70 cities, the Department of Homeland Security began keeping tabs on the movement. An internal DHS report entitled “SPECIAL COVERAGE: Occupy Wall Street," dated October of last year, opens with the observation that "mass gatherings associated with public protest movements can have disruptive effects on transportation, commercial, and government services, especially when staged in major metropolitan areas." While acknowledging the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of OWS, the report notes darkly that "large scale demonstrations also carry the potential for violence, presenting a significant challenge for law enforcement."
The five-page report – contained in 5 million newly leaked documents examined by Rolling Stone in an investigative partnership with WikiLeaks – goes on to sum up the history of Occupy Wall Street and assess its "impact" on everything from financial services to government facilities. Many of the observations are benign, and appear to have been culled from publicly available sources. The report notes, for instance, that in Chicago "five women were arrested after dumping garbage taken from a foreclosed home owned by Bank of America in the lobby one of the bank's branches," and that "OWS in New York staged a 'Millionaires March,' from Zucotti Park to demonstrate outside the homes of some of the city’s richest residents."
But the DHS also appears to have scoured OWS-related Twitter feeds for much of their information. The report includes a special feature on what it calls Occupy's "social media and IT usage," and provides an interactive map of protests and gatherings nationwide – borrowed, improbably enough, from the lefty blog Daily Kos. "Social media and the organic emergence of online communities," the report notes, "have driven the rapid expansion of the OWS movement."
The most ominous aspect of the report, however, comes in its final paragraph:
"The growing support for the OWS movement has expanded the protests’ impact and increased the potential for violence. While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure (CI). The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters. As the primary target of the demonstrations, financial services stands the sector most impacted by the OWS protests. Due to the location of the protests in major metropolitan areas, heightened and continuous situational awareness for security personnel across all CI sectors is encouraged."
It’s never a good thing to see a government agency talk in secret about the need to “control protestors” – especially when that agency is charged with protecting the homeland against terrorists, not nonviolent demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceable dissent. From the notorious Cointelpro operations of the 1960s to the NYPD’s recent surveillance of Muslim Americans, the government has a long and disturbing history of justifying the curtailing of civil liberties under the cover of perceived, and often manufactured, threats ("the potential security risk to critical infrastructure). What’s more, there have been reports that Homeland Security played an active role in coordinating the nationwide crackdown on the Occupy movement last November – putting the federal government in the position of targeting its own citizens in the name of national security. There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for "continuous situational awareness" and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.
Here's the full 5 page report:
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