UNDER SURVEILLANCE

[Kelvin Mace]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by Rhiannon12866 (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: Yes! Weekly (NC Triad)

Anyone who has ever been involved in grassroots organizing, a social movement or activism has probably wondered at least once, if not frequently, about if they are being watched. Though police surveillance is no secret — uniformed officers regularly videotape legal protests, for example — what happens with the intelligence is usually a mystery to the public.

Eventually the curiosity got to me, and I filed a request with the city for e-mail records with my name as the keyword. I’ve never been arrested, but I knew assumptions of surveillance weren’t just paranoia.

The results were disappointing — there was almost no information about police surveillance — so I kept digging. The department’s criminal intelligence work is shrouded in mystery, and the lack of transparency made me determined to see what else I could find.

In some cases, the documents were jarring — police infiltration of Occupy Greensboro, a council member reporting on activist meetings and a list of the surveillance successes at an anarchist conference in town.

Read more: http://www.yesweekly.com/triad/article-15466-un-der-su-rvei-llance.html

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This is a local story, but with national implications since it seems all our local police departments have their own little STASI wannabes wasting taxpayer resources looking for fake criminals while ignoring real crime.

I was involved in the Occupy movement in my area and am now quite sure I have a "file" with these idiots and will be subject to "scrutiny" in the future. The most aggravating aspect of this story is that a local politician used the Occupy movement to help get herself elected to the city council by sucking up to them, all the while she was ratting us out to the police.

[slackmaster]

1. I think uninformed police officers are generally a danger to society

[Kelvin Mace]

3. Yeah

I had a run in with either an undercover USSS agent or a GPD cop during Obama's visit to Greensboro at the beginning of the OGSO actions.

They were desperately trying to provoke me into something they could arrest me for.

Assholes.

[slackmaster]

4. I hope you educated them about how real Americans who aren't afraid of authority think

[Kelvin Mace]

6. To quote a noted winger

"You can't fix stupid."

[aptal]

2. This is scary!

Welcome to the police state.

[Kelvin Mace]

5. We have been a police state since the Patriot Act

but when I point that out, I am set upon by folks calling me provocative and/or alarmist. They get especially upset when I say it has gotten worse under Obama.

[aptal]

8. I don't disagree.

I sure hasn't gotten any better.

[forestpath]

11. I agree with you.

[rwsanders]

18. When I hear about things like this I always think back to the movie "A Few Good Men"

Nicholson's character, to the end, believed he was protecting the country without realizing that he was destroying the principles it was founded on.
I think there needs to be an internet campaign to educate the police, the CIA, the NSA, etc. that not only to we not want them, we don't need them. That they are the danger to the constitution. If they want to monitor something, give them something to monitor. a website that states what they are doing and how it is wrong in terms a 5 year old could understand.

[leveymg]

7. Google: Counterterrorism Taskforce, Fusion Center

See what come up. Create your own NSA file, if you don't have one already!

[patrice]

9. I have been marching down the streets & helping with anti-nuke meetings in parks for about 30 years.

(and going to DOE hearings, and tracking weapons trains, and standing shouting on street corners, and yelling at candidates at meets-&-greets, and . . . )

I don't give a crap what the government knows about me and I decided whatever they do know is worth what I do.

What I resent is employers right to discriminate against me; it's called "at will" employment and I know I'm not the only one who has ever lost employment over my religious and/or political views.

[leveymg]

14. I had two Naval Investigative Service guys come into my workplace and talk to my boss

after DU front paged an installment of my 9/11 series, "How U.S. Counterterrorism Failed on 9/11" in September 2002. http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/02/09/26_failed.html I didn't work there very long thereafter. At my next job it was an FBI Counterterrorism Task Force agent who bumped his sidearm on my desk, just to make some sort of point. That job also quickly ended.

I guess I'm in pretty good company when it comes to that sort of thing, patrice.

[patrice]

15. Wow, no one in the government has ever considered me that! much of a threat. Glad to

be keeping good company!

Out now to go help out with a women's international event scheduled for Valentine's Day.

Talk to you later, leveymg.

[formercia]

19. Welcome to the Club

The 'Boys' like to do that.
Wherever I go, there's always an entourage not far behind, ready to 'brief' anyone I make any substantial contact with. This has been going on for decades at who knows how much expense. It quit bothering me a long time ago.
I enjoy dragging them along on snipe hunts, just to know how miserable it is for them.

[leveymg]

20. Goes back to college for me.

When I was a student of Howard Zinn's at a Boston area university I organized busloads of demonstrators to attend Reagan's First Inauguration. Actually, a really nice day was had by all, including George Bush Sr. who poked his head out the sunroof of the armored limo as he passed the designated protest area they placed right in the shadow of the Hoover FBI Bldg. Anyway, Bush gave us all jabbing thumbs sideways as he rolled past. The crowd gave him stiff armed salutes in response.

My step-father who was federal agency mucky-muck got a courtesy call from the Boston FBI Office trying to wave me off my school assignment.

And, then, there was the anti-nuclear protest at the Seabrook, NH power plant and my Op-ed that got published in The Boston Globe about my adventures being chased around the woods by State Troopers and National Guardsmen during the occupation. That was back in the days when protestors could actually get onto a nuclear plant property without getting machine-gunned. That was in my Sophomore year studying with Zinn.

I got an A+ from Howard.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

16. We attended different schools together.

Been an activist since the early sixties and have often looked directly into the eyes of the watchers, even knew some of them, with their assumed names.
Always wondered why peace upset and threatened them so much.

[patrice]

17. I graduated high school in ''67, in the Midwest, so I married, then raised kids in the early '70s

and became more active when I returned to university once the kids were big enough to go to school.

I was sensitized on the issues anyway by the '60s and by debating in highschool on an NFL topic having to do with controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world, so when I met Plow Shares in college, I was ready to go!!!

It was also a natural progression from nuclear weapons to environmental issues; though I knew of John Kennedy, I didn't become specifically political, as in identifying with a political party, until Bobby Kennedy.

I think if I'm going to be so obnoxious about a change that I want to see in the world, a BIG change that will affect EVERYTHING about everyone, present and future, I don't think it unreasonable that those whose ear I demand should know as much about me as possible.

I understand the privacy issues and don't disagree; I just don't personally care about it, for myself, except as it can affect my employment.

[awoke_in_2003]

21. No profit in peace. nt

[patrice]

10. Personally, I'm having a LITTLE trouble understanding/trusting a resistance that does NOT want to be

identified.

[Kelvin Mace]

24. I have no problem being "identified"

I have a MAJOR problem with police wasting taxpayer dollars spying on people who pose little to no threat to society.

[loudsue]

12. Sweetheart, if you don't think they've been watching folks on DU since the bush mafia administration

then you haven't been fully informed about how subversive we are considered to be. Anyone on DU who is consistently liberal in their views has a file.

On edit: Not you, personally, Dave. I know full and well you are informed.

[Kelvin Mace]

22. Hey Sue!

Good to see you again.

I am pretty sure I know have a file with the USSS since I tried to present a bundle of letters from OGSO to Obama last year while he was in Greensboro.

[ErikJ]

13. Mini Surveillance cams out next year

[Kelvin Mace]

23. You know, paintball guns are just the kind of gun I would buy

along with long-handled tennis rackets.

[Demo_Chris]

25. If you are posting here you have a file

[snot]

26. I wonder how much it's because we're simply more pleasant, even fun, to surveille.

We're certainly less dangerous than actual criminals, at least to the individual surveillers (though not less dangerous to their masters' megalomaniacal goals).

[Rhiannon12866]

27. Locking, sorry, but this is an analysis piece rather than breaking news

Interesting article, though, so please consider reposting in GD or Good Reads. Thanks!