FEDS REGULARLY MONITORED BLACK LIVES MATTER SINCE FERGUSON

The Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement since anti-police protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri last summer, according to hundreds of documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents, released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination, indicate that the department frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts, including on Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, even for events expected to be peaceful. The reports confirm social media surveillance of the protest movement and ostensibly related events in the cities of Ferguson, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and New York. Baher Azmy, a legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, however, argues that this “providing situational awareness” is just another word for surveillance and that creating this body of knowledge about perfectly legal events is a problem in and of itself. “What they call situational awareness is Orwellian speak for watching and intimidation,” said Azmy. “Over time there’s a serious harm to the associational rights of the protesters and it’s an effective way to chill protest movements. The average person would be less likely to go to a Black Lives Matter protest if the government is monitoring social media, Facebook, and their movements.” Although Lee says in his email that the department “does not provide resources to monitor any specific planned or spontaneous protest, rally or public gathering,” some of the documents show that the DHS has produced minute-by-minute reports on protesters’ movements in demonstrations. In response to The Intercept’s FOIA request, for example, last month the DHS’s Office of Operations Coordination released over 40 pages of documents (archive 1, archive 2) detailing live updates and Google Maps images of Black Lives Matter protestors’ movements during an April 29th protest in Washington, DC. The “Watch Desk” of the DHS’s National Capital Region, FEMA branch compiled this real-time information despite the fact that an FBI joint intelligence bulletin shared among several DHS officials the day before noted that there was “no information suggesting violent behavior is planned for Washington, DC” and that previous anti-police brutality protests in the wake of Ferguson “have been peaceful in nature.” The bulletin also said that for unspecified reasons “we remain concerned that unaffiliated individuals could potentially use this event to commit acts of violence in the Chinatown area.” This surveillance of the April 29th protest, which the bulletin explicitly refers to as a “First Amendment-protected event,” raises questions about the potentially compromised state of protesters’ civil liberties — a worry that also surfaced after it was revealed in 2012 that the DHS was monitoring Occupy Wall Street. “It is concerning that the government would be diverting resources towards surveilling citizens who are assembling and expressing their First Amendment rights,” says Maurice Mitchell, an organizer with Blackbird, a group that helps support activism against police violence in communities across the country. “The fact that our government is doing this — I can only assume to disrupt us — is pretty alarming… Directly after 9/11, people said, ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about.’ Well, now we’re fighting back against police brutality and extrajudicial killings, yet they are using this supposedly anti-terrorist infrastructure against us.” An April 29th email from the DHS National Operations Center also mentions planned surveillance of three seemingly innocuous events, two of which were associated with historically black neighborhoods. According to the email, the DHS-funded DC Homeland Security & Emergency Management Agency decided to conduct “a limited stand-up… to monitor a larger than expected Funk Parade and two other mass gathering events” in case “any Baltimore-related civil unrest occurs.” It appears that the only Funk Parade in DC occurs in the historically black neighborhood of U Street. The other two events, according to another report, produced by the DHS National Capital Region‘s Information Collection and Coordination Center, were a community parade in Congress Heights, a predominantly black neighborhood, and the Avon 39-Walk to End Breast Cancer. Full article: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/24/documents-show-department-...