FBI spy planes flew 10 times over Freddie Gray protests: documents

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

US | Fri Oct 30, 2015 8:06am EDT

FBI spy planes flew 10 times over Freddie Gray protests: documents

WASHINGTON | BY DUSTIN VOLZ

The FBI deployed at least 10 flights of surveillance planes equipped with advanced aerial surveillance technology, including infrared and night-vision cameras, to monitor the Baltimore riots earlier this year, according to government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The flights, totaling more than 36 hours and involving at least two planes, occurred over Baltimore from April 29 to May 3, showed the flight logs provided to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act. The ACLU, a civil rights group, released the logs to Reuters and other news organizations on Friday.

Half of the flights carried Baltimore police, in addition to FBI officials, and a majority of them occurred at night over Baltimore during several days of civil disorder that followed the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.

The FBI has previously acknowledged that surveillance flights occurred.

In congressional testimony last week, FBI Director James Comey did not elaborate in detail on how surveillance flights are conducted or approved.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/30/us-usa-cybersecurity-surveillance-planes-idUSKCN0SO1H220151030

[JackInGreen]

1. COINTELPRO

never died, it was napping.

[randys1]

2. Surely they do the same when white people protest?

[geek tragedy]

10. this was during the period of riots when the national guard was deployed in Baltimore

The headline editors switched out "riots" for "protests" in the headline

[Rex]

3. 'We are the enemy', the FBI was built on that premise.

Their sick founder made sure of it. That way they would never have to worry about not getting a paycheck. Perverse, but that happens in capitalist societies.

[Kelvin Mace]

4. Do they do the same

at the annual Super Bowl riots?

[TipTok]

5. Do they go on for days and weeks?

[Kelvin Mace]

7. What riots have gone on for

weeks? Days is a stretch, unless you count protesting as "riots".

[TipTok]

8. There is a spectrum with no hard lines between riot and protest...

... But the conflict in Ferguson went on for quite a while.

[Kelvin Mace]

11. Actually, no

A protests is a protest. A riot is violence and/or damage to property. Generally, things start out as protests, then the police arrive and escalate the situation until it becomes a riot.

[Octafish]

6. What police state? And why should I worry if I've done nothing wrong shit?

Well.

The Last Gasp of American Democracy

By Chris Hedges
TruthDig.org, Posted on Jan 5, 2014

EXCERPT...

The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.

I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation.

The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the population—one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in America’s black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.

[font color="green"]The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant. [/font green]

The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105

We won't even know what happened to Twitter.

[geek tragedy]

9. says "protests" in the headline, says "riots" in the text

Riots are not protests. They are not first amendment protected activities. They're crimes of violence.