Do you want to maintain your constitutional rights to engage in unhindered social protest against Keystone XL, the destruction of our climate, our overwhelming surveillance state, the veritable dissolution of the Voting Rights Act by the judicial and legislative branches of our government, our unbridled corporatocracy, LGBT rights, or virtually any other issue, now and going forward?
12 days ago, on June 27th, one of the most important articles published in the past few years, concerning our government’s ongoing efforts via its intelligence and law enforcement arms to comprehensively crush citizen political activism and social protest, appeared here, on the Daily Kos website. It received five Rec’s. IMHO, it deserves much more notice and readership than that. Here’s an excerpt from that post, with the link to the full piece, immediately below.
Todd Gitlin, Are "Intelligence" and Instigation Running Riot?
TomDispatch
Daily Kos
Thu Jun 27, 2013 at 10:54 AM EDT
…Recently, as Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency revelations about the high-tech gathering of global (and domestic) communications of every imaginable sort began unspooling, Gitlin’s work came to mind again. I had certainly been aware of how many post-9/11 “terror” cases against American Muslims rested on the acts and testimony of government informers, who sometimes even provided (fake) weaponry to hapless plotters and the spark to begin plotting in the first place. I began to wonder, however, what we didn’t know about the low-tech side of America’s massive intelligence overreach. So I picked up the phone and called Gitlin. The answer, as his piece today indicates, is one hell of a horrifying lot. Among the few outfits to pay significant attention to spies and informers in the ranks of groups opposed to some aspect of Washington’s policies, the ACLU stands out. In fact, in a map that organization created, “Spying on First Amendment Activity -- State by State,” you can take a Mr. Toad’s wild ride through what’s known of the universe of the twenty-first century American informer. TomDispatch is pleased to follow up with a Mr. Todd’s wild ride through the thickets of American intelligence clearly on the march domestically. Tom
The Wonderful American World of Informers and Agents Provocateurs
Close Encounters of the Lower-Tech Kind
By Todd Gitlin
Only Martians, by now, are unaware of the phone and online data scooped up by the National Security Agency (though if it turns out that they are aware, the NSA has surely picked up their signals and crunched their metadata). American high-tech surveillance is not, however, the only kind around. There’s also the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers and sometimes government-instigated violence.
Just how much of this is going on and in how coordinated a way no one out here in the spied-upon world knows. The lower-tech stuff gets reported, if at all, only one singular, isolated event at a time -- look over here, look over there, now you see it, now you don’t. What is known about such surveillance as well as the suborning of illegal acts by government agencies, including the FBI, in the name of counterterrorism has not been put together by major news organizations in a way that would give us an overview of the phenomenon. (The ACLU has done by far the best job of compiling reports on spying on Americans of this sort.)
Some intriguing bits about informers and agents provocateurs briefly made it into the public spotlight when Occupy Wall Street was riding high. But as always, dots need connecting. Here is a preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation in America.
Two Stories from Occupy Wall Street
The first is about surveillance. The second is about provocation…
PLEASE read Gitlin’s entire piece. If you’re at all interested in freedom of speech and the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution—or just social activism, in general--I can pretty much guarantee you that this will be one of the most important articles you’ll read this year! (Link’s available, above, and once again,
HERE.)
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