Domestic spying corporate/government partnership
by digby
I wrote a piece in Salon today about the fact that the government seems to be working with corporations to spy on protesters. Yep, they are:
The Pentagon ended the appropriately dystopian sounding program Talon, although it’s hard to know exactly what any of the agencies charged with keeping the terrorist threat at bay are really doing because they are secret. Edward Snowden’s revelations only involved the most sophisticated of high tech government surveillance activities. It was shocking because of the sweeping nature of the programs and the fact that the NSA said outright that the mission was to ”collect it all.”
But perhaps the more prosaic forms of domestic surveillance activity should concern us as well. For instance, Lee Fang reported this story at The Intercept:
Members of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force tracked the time and location of a Black Lives Matter protest last December at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, email obtained by The Intercept shows.
The email from David S. Langfellow, a St. Paul police officer and member of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, informs a fellow task force member from the Bloomington police that “CHS just confirmed the MOA protest I was taking to you about today, for the 20th of DEC @ 1400 hours.” CHS is a law enforcement acronym for “confidential human source.”
Jeffrey VanNest, an FBI special agent and Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisor at the FBI’s Minneapolis office, was CC’d on the email. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces are based in 104 U.S. cities and are made up of approximately 4,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officials. The FBI characterizes them as “our nation’s front line on terrorism.”
It should be noted that this so-called threat happened months before the al-Shabab video vaguely implying a threat to the Mall was released in late February. In this earlier incident, a confidential informant told the police that someone was preparing to vandalize the mall as part of the Black Lives Matter protest. An FBI spokesman told The Intercept they have absolutely no interest in that campaign and that they make certain not to interfere with people exercising their rights under the First Amendment. They also noted that vandalism is not a “crime” that the Joint Terrorism Task Force is authorized to track and had no idea why it would have been informed of this information. Unfortunately, considering the federal government’s history of illegally spying on Americans for any number of reasons, the burden to explain such activity belongs to them.
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