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Is mass use of encryption a good idea?<br>
<br>
Riaz<br>
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<h3 class="post-title entry-title"> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/banks-deeply-involved-in-fbi-coordinated-suppression-of-terrorist-occupy-wall-street.html">Banks
Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of “Terrorist”
Occupy Wall Street</a> </h3>
<div class="entry">
<p>If you had any doubts of the veracity of former IMF chief
economist Simon Johnson’s depiction of the financial crisis as
a “quiet coup,” a pre-Christmas release of FBI documents
should put them to rest. While I linked to a discussion of the
results of the Partnership for Civil Justice’s FOIA of FBI
materials on Occupy Wall Street, I was remiss in not writing
them up earlier. Both the <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html">Partnership
for Civil Justice</a> and Naomi Wolf <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy">at
the Guardian</a> (hat tip Scott A) provide good overviews.
The PCJ also <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html#documents">published
the FBI documents it obtained</a>. </p>
<p>If you’ve been following the story of the official response
to Occupy Wall Street, it was apparent that the 17 city
paramilitary crackdown was coordinated; it came out later that
the Department of Homeland Security was the nexus of that
operation. The deep FBI involvement is a new and ugly addition
to this picture. Several impressions emerge from reading the
summaries and dipping into the FBI documents:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>The FBI deemed OWS to be a terrorist organization
and went into “guilty until proven innocent” mode</strong>.
Many of the FBI descriptions of possible OWS actions or
those of affiliated organizations like Adbusters
consistently look to have taken the most inflammatory
snippets and presented them out of context. </p>
<p>The FBI also seems to believe that there is no such thing
as peaceful protest, that any non-violent activity has the
potential to turn violent and therefore should be treated as
violent. One document to corporate “clients” warned:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even seemingly peaceful rallies can spur violent activity
or be met with resistance by security forces. Bystanders
may be arrested or harmed by security forces using water
cannons, tear gas or other measures to control crowds.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>The banks were deeply involved in the effort to put
down OWS</strong>. The executive director of the PCJ
stated, “These documents also show these federal agencies
functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street
and Corporate America.” Naomi Wolf adds:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The documents, released after long delay in the week
between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide
meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian
world: six American universities are sites where campus
police funneled information about students involved with
OWS to the FBI, with the administrations’ knowledge (p51);
banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information
about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans
to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road,
were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives
of the same organizations that the protests would target;
and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by
sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and
undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary
to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned
when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>More details from the PCJ summary:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was
meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the
Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for
another month. By September, prior to the start of the
OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be
the focus of an OWS protest…</p>
<p>Documents released show coordination between the FBI,
Department of Homeland Security and corporate America.
They include a report by the Domestic Security Alliance
Council (DSAC), described by the federal government as “a
strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of
Homeland Security and the private sector.” The DSAC report
shows the nature of secret collaboration between American
intelligence agencies and their corporate clients – the
document contains a “handling notice” that the information
is “meant for use primarily within the corporate security
community. Such messages shall not be released in either
written or oral form to the media, the general public or
other personnel…”….DSAC issued several tips to its
corporate clients on “civil unrest” which it defines as
ranging from “small, organized rallies to large-scale
demonstrations and rioting.”…</p>
<p>The Federal Reserve in Richmond appears to have had
personnel surveilling OWS planning. They were in contact
with the FBI in Richmond to “pass on information regarding
the movement known as occupy Wall Street.” There were
repeated communications “to pass on updates of the events
and decisions made during the small rallies and the
following information received from the Capital Police
Intelligence Unit through JTTF (Joint Terrorism Task
Force).”…</p>
<p>The Jackson, Mississippi division of the FBI attended a
meeting of the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with
multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department,
in which they discussed an announced protest for “National
Bad Bank Sit-In-Day” on December 7, 2011.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>As a result, many of the perceptions of threats
were paranoid</strong>. The FBI’s search for <strike>
Communists in woodpiles</strike> Occupiers in midsized and
small cities is obvious ovekill. And mind you, this is the
same FBI that is nowhere to be found in investigating
crisis-related big bank fraud. An individual “leading”
Occupy Tampa was tracked when he went to Gainesville.
Anchorage, Alaska, Denver, Colorado, Birmingham, Alabama,
Jackson, Mississippi, Memphis, Tennessee, and Green Bay,
Wisconsin all had Occupy-related briefings and FBI activity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The rationale for this overkill was that OWS was a terrorist
threat. That’s a striking contrast with the media depiction of
the movement when it was in its encampment phase as a bunch of
directionless hippies with no message. But the FBI response
highlights how anything other than corporate or otherwise
officially sanctioned assembly is no longer permitted in
America. The main objection to OWS really isn’t violence, even
though that serves as the excuse for the official crackdown.
It was that it would be inconvenient and embarrassing to
Important Organizations and People. Now I have to tell you as
a resident of New York City, we are subject to inconvenient
things on a regular basis. I’d have a lot less reason to take
exception to the eviction of OWS if the officialdom was
evenhanded about making the city efficient and keeping the
streets clear by getting rid of (for starters) all parades,
all street fairs, the marathon, and all Presidential visits
(well maybe he can make a minimally invasive stop, say by
going down the FDR to the UN and staying in those environs). </p>
<p>Wolf draws the ugly conclusion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Jason Leopold, at Truthout.org, who has sought similar
documents for more than a year, reported that the FBI
falsely asserted in response to his own FOIA requests that
no documents related to its infiltration of Occupy Wall
Street existed at all. But the release may be strategic: if
you are an Occupy activist and see how your information is
being sent to terrorism task forces and fusion centers, not
to mention the “longterm plans” of some redacted group to
shoot you, this document is quite the deterrent.</p>
<p>There is a new twist: the merger of the private sector, DHS
and the FBI means that any of us can become WikiLeaks, a
point that Julian Assange was trying to make in explaining
the argument behind his recent book. The fusion of the
tracking of money and the suppression of dissent means that
a huge area of vulnerability in civil society – people’s
income streams and financial records – is now firmly in the
hands of the banks, which are, in turn, now in the business
of tracking your dissent.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Assange has suggested a partial solution: <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://cryptome.org/2012/12/assange-crypto-arms.htm">the
widespread use of encryption</a>. The problem with using
encryption now is that it’s like waving a red flag in front of
the NSA and asking them to take interest in you. But if a
meaningful percentage of the population, say as many as 3%,
were to start using it for most of their communications as
part of a large-scale plan, it would throw a wrench into the
system. The officialdom would be presented with an unduly
large list of parties of interest, most of whom by design
would be uninteresting from a threat/intelligence perspective.
And if this sort of thing were to take place, anyone who
thought they might be objects of interest for the wrong
reasons, as in they were members of Occupy, could also take up
encrypting their messages for fun and sport. </p>
<p>The peculiar part of this overreaction is it says that banks
and government officials see peaceful protests as a threat to
their hold on power. It’s odd that they see their position as
precarious, unless they have convinced themselves of their
vulnerability as an excuse for clamping down even harder on
the rest of us. </p>
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</span> <span class="item-control blog-admin
pid-1740881503"> </span> </span> <span
class="post-author vcard"> Posted by <span class="fn">Yves
Smith</span> </span> <span class="post-timestamp"> at <a
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href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/banks-deeply-involved-in-fbi-coordinated-suppression-of-terrorist-occupy-wall-street.html"
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class="published" title="2012-12-30T03:24:06+00:00">3:24
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