DHS vs OWS

From Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone comes confirmation of what we already took for granted: the Department of Homeland Security has kept a close watch on Occupy Wall Street. Hastings just got hold of a secret five-page DHS report culled from the five million newly-released WikiLeaks documents.

Three things are screaming out:

1). Homeland Security was created to guard against terrorism. Why is it even interested in a peaceful domestic protest movement?

2). Homeland Security is a Huffington Post copycat. It got all the info for its report from Internet news items, and simply republished them in aggregate form, links and all. I picture a 20-something, low-level DHS hack/wannabe blogger sitting in a cubicle, trolling the Web in a frenzy of copying and pasting. He/she/they even went to the Daily Kos to get a copy of a protest march route! Among other sources were Reuters, CNN, The Huffington Post(!), major metropolitan newspapers and TV outlets. There is no indication in the report that actual DHS personnel ever visited the camps.

3). This report was in the possession of Stratfor, the Austin, TX company that was the subject of a mass email hacking by the Anonymous hacktivist group. What is the relationship between DHS and a private intelligence firm whose clients are multinational corporations?  The Surveillance State is beholden to the Corporate State, it appears. Or they're in cahoots. Or they are really one big entity, each faction feeding off the other. Isn't there a word for that?

As Hastings notes, the DHS report is fairly innocuous on the surface, although slanted toward concerns about the safety of the target of the protests -- the financial services industry -- and the "potential for violence". There is no smoking gun, no direct evidence in writing of a conspiracy to destroy the movement. But it ever so subtly hints that law enforcement should be on guard against the mobs in the camps and in the streets. There is just the hint of a dog-whistle within its five pages. There is a whiff of an "us against them" mentality. The last paragraph reads:

The growing support for the OWS movement has expanded the protests’ impact and increased the potential for violence. While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure (CI). The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters. As the primary target of the demonstrations, financial services stands the sector most impacted by the OWS protests. Due to the location of the protests in major metropolitan areas, heightened and continuous situational awareness for security personnel across all CI sectors is encouraged.

In retrospect, it should be noted that the DHS report was written in October, at the very beginning of the Occupy movement. It was not until the following month that coordinated police crackdowns on the camps got underway, reportedly in the wake of a conference call among the mayors and DHS. This must have come after the Terror State urged the mayors to become paranoid and "situationally aware."

 One more sordid chapter in the History of American Government Overreach. One more smidgen of proof that we are under the control of an oligarchy. One more small step toward complete oppression, one giant leap backward for civil rights. Happy Leap Day, everybody! 

NYPD Guards at Zuccotti Park (post-eviction)

Update: Hastings was on The Young Turks last night to talk about the leaked DHS report. Watch him here.