[governance] Mass use of encryption? Banks deeply involved in FBI-coordinated suppression of Occupy Wall Steet

[Riaz K Tayob]

Is mass use of encryption a good idea?

Riaz


      Banks Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of
      "Terrorist" Occupy Wall Street
      <http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/banks-deeply-involved-in-fbi-coordinated-suppression-of-terrorist-occupy-wall-street.html>


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 Partnership for Civil Justice 
<http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html> and Naomi 
Wolf at the Guardian 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy> 
(hat tip Scott A) provide good overviews. The PCJ also published the FBI 
documents it obtained 
<http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html#documents>.

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:

    *The FBI deemed OWS to be a terrorist organization and went into
    "guilty until proven innocent" mode*. 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.

    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:

        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.

    *The banks were deeply involved in the effort to put down OWS*. 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:

        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).

    More details from the PCJ summary:

        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...

        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."...

        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)."...

        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.

    *As a result, many of the perceptions of threats were paranoid*. The
    FBI's search for Communists in woodpiles 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.

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).

Wolf draws the ugly conclusion:

    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.

    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.

Assange has suggested a partial solution: the widespread use of 
encryption <http://cryptome.org/2012/12/assange-crypto-arms.htm>. 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.

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.

Topics: Banana republic 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/category/banana-republic>, Banking 
industry <http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/category/banking-industry>, 
Income disparity 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/category/income-disparity>, Legal 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/category/legal>, Politics 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/category/politics>, Social policy 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/category/social-policy>, Social values 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/category/social-values>, The destruction 
of the middle class 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/category/the-destruction-of-the-middle-class> 


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