FBI Monitored Anti-War Website in Error for Six Years (Antiwar.com)
Source: The Guardian
FBI monitored anti-war website in error for six years, documents show
Monitoring began after antiwar.com editor passed along to the bureau a threat he received against his own website
Spencer Ackerman in Washington
theguardian.com, Wednesday 6 November 2013 13.02 EST
The FBI monitored a prominent anti-war website for years, in part because agents mistakenly believed it had threatened to hack the bureau’s own site.
Internal documents show that the FBI’s monitoring of antiwar.com, a news and commentary website critical of US foreign policy, was sparked in significant measure by a judgment that it had threatened to “hack the FBI website” and involved a formal assessment of the “threat” the site posed to US national security.
But antiwar.com never threatened to hack the FBI website. Heavily redacted FBI documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with the Guardian, show that Eric Garris, the site’s managing editor, passed along to the bureau a threat he received against his own website.
Months later, the bureau characterized antiwar.com as a potential perpetrator of a cyberattack against the bureau’s website – a rudimentary error that persisted for years in an FBI file on the website. The mistake appears to have been a pillar of the FBI’s reasoning for monitoring a site that is protected by the first amendment’s free-speech guarantees.
“The improper investigation led to Garris and Raimondo being flagged in other documents, and is based on inappropriate targeting and sloppy intelligence work the FBI relied on in its initial memo,” said Julia Mass, an attorney with the ACLU of northern California, which filed the Freedom of Information Act request, and shared the documents with the Guardian.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/fbi-monitored-anti-war-website-in-error-documents
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They have zero credibility.
must be monitored if not crushed: speech, unlike guns, will be controlled 'cause people, not guns, kill people. 
