Homeland Security Coordinated 18-City Police Crackdown on Occupy Protest

Homeland Security Coordinated 18-City Police Crackdown on Occupy Protest 1. Washington’s Blog Wednesday, November 16, 2011 National Coordination Goes Against Protection of Local Accountability According to Oakland Mayor Jean said that 1. 18 cities coordinated police crack downs on Occupy protests.

Wonkette reports that Homeland Security likely organized the crack downs: Remember when people were freaking out over the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and all this other conveniently ready-togo post-9/11 police state stuff, because it would obviously be just a matter of time before the whole apparatus was turned against non-Muslim Americans when they started getting complain-y about the social injustice and economic injustice and income inequality and endless recession and permanent unemployment? That day is now, and has been for some time. But it’s also now confirmedthat it’s now, as some Justice Department official screwed up and admitted that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated the riotcop raids on a dozen major #Occupy Wall Street demonstration camps nationwide yesterday and today. (Oh, and tonight, too: Seattle is being busted up by the riot cops right now, so be careful out there.)

Rick Ellis of the Minneapolis edition of Examiner.com has this, based on a “background conversation” he had with a Justice Department official on Monday night: Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict “Occupy” protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night’s move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear.

In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

(And for those who are understandably doubtful about Examiner.com as a news source,here’s an AP story from a couple hours ago that verifies everything except the specific mention of DHS coordination.)

Yves Smith notes: The 18 police action was a national, coordinated effort. This is a more serious development that one might imagine. Reader Richard Kline has pointed out that one of the de facto protections of American freedoms is that policing is local, accountable to elected officials at a level of government where voters matter. National coordination vitiates the notion that policing is responsive to and accountable to the governed.

Eviction @ #Occupy Wall Street, LRAD used Journalists kicked out as police beat sitting protestors http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDj7ErnZTC4

Here's the risk: Occupy ends up doing the bidding of the global elite Patrick Henningsen Tuesday 15 November 2011 13.56 EST A 21st-century grassroots movement faces many pitfalls. This was as true back in 1968 as it is today. It could be infiltrated by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, or co-opted by a major party. As the state continues to creep further into our lives, activists can expect that it will use all its resources – not just the 1. violent reaction seen in New York overnight, but also its agents, informants and surveillance packages – in its effort to monitor both sides of any serious social debate. Even bleaker, however, is the possibility that the movement was actually planned and launched by the very establishment activists thought they were waging a battle against in the first place. The larger the movement, the more interested a major party becomes in absorbing it into either the left or the right side of the current two-party paradigm.

The sudden emergence of America's Tea Party movement in 2007 is a good example.

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, its inventor, used it as a springboard to highlight libertarian and constitutional issues during his 2008 campaign. Soon after, it was co-opted by key political and media influencers from the US right wing, associating itself less with a libertarian manifesto, and more with emerging figures within the Republican establishment. Now it is has morphed into nothing more than a block of voters whom the Republican party can rely to strike a deal with during an election cycle.

Arguably, the Occupy Wall Street movement has already drifted into the shadow of the Democratic party – with a number of Democratic establishment figures from the top down endorsing it. The Democrats' own media fundraising and media machine, Move On, has visibly adopted the cause. Like the Tea Party before it, the Occupy block would swing a close election during a national two-party race, functioning as a pressure-release valve for any issue too radical for the traditional platform.

Alongside this is the threat of being infiltrated. Scores of declassified documents, along with accounts from veteran activists, will reveal many stories of members who were actually undercover police, FBI or M15. In the worst cases of infiltration, undercover agents have acted as provocateurs. Such incidents normally serve to radicalise a movement, thus demonising it in the eyes of society and effectively lessening its wider political appeal.

Although the global Occupy movement has branched out in an open-source way, many of its participants and spectators might be completely unaware of who actually launched it.

Upon investigation, what one finds is a daisy chain of non-profit foundations, all tied together by hundreds of millions per year in operational funding. The original call for Occupy Wall Street came from non-profit international media foundation Adbusters.

Like many non-profits, Adbusters receives its funding and operating capital from other behind-the-scenes organisations. According to research conducted by watchdog Activistcash, Adbusters takes a significant portion of its money from the Tides Foundation, an organisation partnered with one of Wall Street billionaire oligarch George Soros's foundations, the Open Society Institute.

Although mostly hidden from the public eye, all major foundations and professional thinktanks undertake research and host training seminars, which are used to influence certain public and foreign policies, and thus, must have a political agenda. Theirs is the venue of choice for activities that cannot officially be conducted on the government clock.

Freedom House is another of Soros's Open Society partners. It supports the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (Canvas), an organisation started by Serbians Ivan Marovic and Srdja Popovic. After playing a pivotal role in the CIA-backed deposing of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, the western media hailed Marovic as a democratic genius, but it came out later that his programme came out of an elite Boston thinktank's "regime change" manual, From Dictatorship to Democracy, written by Harvard professor Gene Sharp. Sharp's book is a bible of the colour revolutions – a "regime change for dummies". His Albert Einstein Institution has received funds from the

National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Foundations, and his work serves as a template for western-backed opposition leaders in soft coups all around the world.

There are also reports of Canvas activity during the early days of Occupy Wall Street, including a video of Marovic himself addressing the general assembly. Currently, Canvas are touting their recent role in working with Egyptian and Tunisian protesters from as early as 2009, teaching skills that helped bring down their presidents and spark regional revolt.

When the dust settles and it's all said and done, millions of Occupy participants may very well be given a sober lesson under the heading of "controlled opposition". In the end, the Occupy movement could easily end up doing the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they were demonstrating against to begin with. To avoid such an outcome, it's important for a movement to have a good knowledge of history and the levers of power in the 21st century.

DOJ: Make It a Federal Crime to “Lie” on the Internet Kurt Nimmo Infowars.com November 16, 2011 Obama’s Department of Justice will tell Congress today it should have the ability to prosecute people who lie on the internet. It wants to do this by making it illegal to breach the terms of service of websites.

The DOJ’s deputy computer crime chief, Richard Downing, will argue that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — an amendment to the Counterfeit Access Device and Abuse Act generally used to prosecute hacking and other serious cyber-crime — must give prosecutors the ability to charge people “based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider,” according to Andrew Couts, writing for Digital Trends.

Downing said law enforcement needs the revision in order to prosecute individuals for identity theft, privacy invasion or the misuse of government databases, and other violations of the law.

Orin S. Kerr, professor of George Washington University Law School, told Digital Trends that if implemented the law would criminalize people under the age of 18 who use the Google Search engine. Under its terms of service, minors are not allowed to use Google or its services.

“The same goes for someone who uses a fake name in their Facebook profile, or sheds a few pounds in their Match.com description — both of which are forbidden by those sites’ terms of service,” Couts notes.

If implemented, the government will not use the law to prosecute people who use fake names on Facebook, although it may use it selectively to prosecute “cyber-criminals.”

It is designed to attack alternative media. According to the government, the internet is a wasteland of lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.

In 2009, the government was so concerned about “conspiracy theories” it created a web page to debunk information challenging the official explanation of the September 11, 2001, attacks. ”The existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be,” Obama’s administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, wrote in a paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures.” Sunstein proposed infiltrating “extremist groups” – the alternative media – that deviate from the official narrative on 9/11 and other government-spun fairy tales.

Modifying the CFAA appears to be an attempt silence government critics and journalists who “lie” about 9/11 and other official narratives.

The government may not actually prosecute people for challenging official disinformation and propaganda, but it will may use the law to intimidate journalists and editors.