FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Tue Aug 27, 2013 1:42 am

see link for full story
http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/arti ... -t-overlap


Rogers, wife say careers don't overlap
They deny appearance of conflict of interest
Aug. 25, 2013 11:53 PM
Mike Rogers, Candidate for U.S. Representative, 8t
Mike Rogers

The husband has the lead role overseeing the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies.

The wife advises businesses on securing defense and security contracts with some of the same agencies, but not for intelligence operations.

The marriage of U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Howell, chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, and Kristi Rogers, who works for a powerful Washington, D.C., firm caused a technology blogger to suggest that a conflict of interest exists in the marriage.

The technology blog Techdirt specifically claimed Kristi Rogers stood to benefit from passage of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, sponsored by her husband, through potential cybersecurity contracts. Mike Rogers’ office said the measure would not create any new contracting opportunities.

Since the Techdirt blog post was posted, multiple online publications, including the widely read Huffington Post, have reposted or linked to the story.
Mike Rogers’ office and colleagues of Kristi Rogers flatly deny any such conflict, noting Mike Rogers’ prominent role in Congress and earlier as an FBI special agent, and his wife’s more than 20 years working in homeland security and defense.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Tue Aug 27, 2013 9:27 pm

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http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/ ... airplanes#

FBI Whistleblower Parkinson Claims FBI Pilots Use Government Facilities, Airplanes To Solicit Prostitutes
article image
Tue, August 27, 2013

Former U.S. Marine and FBI agent LtCol. John C Parkinson is bringing a whistleblower case to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).

Parkinson claims he was fired from his position as an FBI special agent in 2010 because he was attempting to expose the illegal sexual escapades of fellow agents Steven Broce and Andrew Marshall. He filed a 2008 motion against the men through the Office of the Inspector general. His motion led to a brief investigation which was stopped when Parkinson’s FBI superiors retaliated against Parkinson with a motion of their own.

According to Parkinson’s claim, he said that a thorough investigative probe of Broce and Marshall “will reveal a clear pattern of fraud, waste and abuse over a period of years that has cost the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars and damaged the public reputation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US Department of Justice.

“Mr. Broce has utilized his position as an FBI agent to engage in a career-long pattern of soliciting sex from prostitutes,” Parkinson wrote. “The symbols of his position as an FBI agent, specifically, his gun, badge and official identification, are utilized as part of the act of soliciting sex from prostitutes and have on at least two occasions been left behind in brothels by Mr. Broce.”

Parkinson also claims that Broce on multiple occasions brought prostitutes back to undercover FBI facilities for sex. Parkinson claims Broce would bring prostitutes to the facility “often during evening shifts that he is known for being especially eager to work.”

Parkinson claims the men also flew plains from Sacramento, California to Nevada for the sole purpose of picking up prostitutes in the state.

“As a pilot assigned to the Sacramento office of the FBI, Mr. Broce has unrestricted access to the FBI hangar, plane and aviation pool,” Parkinson’s claim reads. “Mr. Broce utilized the FBI’s plane to fly at night to Reno, Nevada for the sole purpose of engaging prostitutes in acts of illicit sex. In addition to spending thousands of tax dollars to fund his prurient interests in prostitution, Mr. Broce, who has failed multiple check rides and has vision and hearing impairments, violated FAA and FBI regulations by flying alone from California to Nevada.”

Soon after Parkinson filed his motion, several of his FBI superiors accused him of misusing $77,000 of FBI money. At the same time, Parkinson’s claim against Broce and Marshall was dropped. FBI officials pegged Parkinson with the misuse costs because he removed couches and other furniture from the FBI’s Sacramento airport hangar. Parkinson claims the furniture was becoming stained from Broce’s and Marshall’s sexual activities. Parkinson was ultimately fired over the charges.

Parkinson is being represented by attorney Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project in his case before the MSPB. Radack spoke recently on her client’s case.

“This is what happens to intelligence professionals who go through the proper channels,” she said. “Parkinson did everything by the book. He went to the Inspector General and yet he still ended up fired.”

For now, Broce and Marshall remain employed by the FBI. Neither men have received punishment or restrictions of access for the activities reported in Parkinson’s original claim.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Tue Aug 27, 2013 10:59 pm

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -fort-hood

Internal Documents Reveal How the FBI Blew Fort Hood
Nearly a year before the massacre, the bureau intercepted emails between Nidal Hasan and radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki that officials called "fairly benign." They are anything but.
Tue Aug. 27, 2013

Last Thursday, as the jury in the trial of Nidal Hasan was deliberating, outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller appeared on CBS News and discussed a string of emails between the Fort Hood shooter and Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Islamic cleric with ties to the 9/11 hijackers. The FBI had intercepted the messages starting almost a year before Hasan's 2009 shooting rampage, and Mueller was asked whether "the bureau dropped the ball" by failing to act on this information. He didn't flinch: "No, I think, given the context of the discussions and the situation that the agents and the analysts were looking at, they took appropriate steps."

In the wake of the Fort Hood attacks, the exchanges between Awlaki and Hasan—who was convicted of murder on Friday—were the subject of intense speculation. But the public was given little information about these messages. While officials claimed that they were "fairly benign," the FBI blocked then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman's efforts to make them public as part of a two-year congressional investigation into Fort Hood. The military judge in the Hasan case also barred the prosecutor from presenting them, saying they would cause "unfair prejudice" and "undue delay."

As it turns out, the FBI quietly released the emails in an unclassified report on the shooting, which was produced by an investigative commission headed by former FBI director William H. Webster last year. And, far from being "benign," they offer a chilling glimpse into the psyche of an Islamic radical. The report also shows how badly the FBI bungled its Hasan investigation and suggests that the Army psychiatrist's deadly rampage could have been prevented.

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Hasan first appeared on the bureau's radar in December of 2008—nearly a year before the Fort Hood massacre—when he emailed Awlaki to ask him whether serving in the US military was compatible with the Muslim faith. He also asked whether Awlaki considered those who died attacking their fellow soldiers "shaheeds," or martyrs.

At the time, Awlaki, who was killed by a US drone strike in 2011, was emerging as Al Qaeda's chief English-speaking propagandist. He was also known to have ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers, two of whom attended his mosque in San Diego.

The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego, which was tracking Awlaki, intercepted Hasan's December email, along with another sent in January. A search of the Pentagon's personnel database turned up a man named Nidal Hasan who was on active military duty and was listed as a "Comm Officer" at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC.
Hasan first appeared on the FBI’s radar when he emailed Anwar al-Awlaki to ask if he considered US servicemen who died attacking fellow soldiers "shaheeds," or martyrs.

Normally, when the FBI unearths this kind of raw intelligence, it issues an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), which is shared with law enforcement agencies and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (This system was designed to prevent the kind of information bottlenecks that allowed the 9/11 plot to go undetected.) But the San Diego agents misinterpreted the "Comm Officer" label in Hasan's file to mean "communications officer" (in fact, it meant "commissioned officer") and believed that a person in this role might have access to IIRs. To avoid tipping him off, they skipped the report and sent a detailed memo requesting an investigation directly to the Washington, DC, Joint Terrorism Task Force, a multiagency team overseen by the FBI that investigates terrorism cases in the capital. The message noted that Hasan's "contact with [Awlaki] would be of concern if the writer is actually the individual identified above."

The file languished for nearly two months before it was assigned to an agent for the Defense Criminal Investigative Services, who was on the task force. According to a 2011 report on the Fort Hood shootings by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, DCIS—a law enforcement agency within the Pentagon, which normally deals with fraud and cybercrime among military personnel and contractors—was ill-equipped to tackle a counterterrorism investigation.

Meanwhile, Hasan kept writing Awlaki. Between January and May 2009, he sent the radical cleric more than a dozen emails, and received two relatively benign responses. In one message, ostensibly about Palestinians firing unguided rockets into Israel, Hasan asked Awlaki whether "indiscriminately killing civilians" was acceptable. Two days later, he sent another message answering his own question: "Hamas and the Muslims hate to hurt the innocent but they have no choice if their going to have a chance to survive, flourish, and deter the zionist enemy. The recompense for an evil is an evil." (Hasan's emails contained a number of typos.)
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Tue Aug 27, 2013 11:51 pm

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http://www.pollstar.com/news_article.aspx?ID=806725
FBI Wants Insane Clown Posse Lawsuit Dismissed
Tuesday 8/27/13

Nearly a year after the Insane Clown Posse sued the Federal Bureau of Investigations over its fans being listed on the National Gang Threat Assessment, the FBI is asking a federal judge to dismiss the suit, saying the hip hop/horrorcore duo doesn’t have a case.

ICP filed a lawsuit in September 2012 after the FBI’s 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment Emerging Trends report listed its fans, famously known as Juggalos, as “a loosely-organized hybrid gang rapidly expanding into many U.S. communities.”

July 29, 2013

The assessment reported, “Most crimes committed by Juggalos are sporadic, disorganized, individualistic, and often involve simple assault, personal drug use and possession, petty theft and vandalism. However, open source reporting suggests that a small number of Juggalos are forming more organized subsets and engaging in more gang-like criminal activity, such as felony assaults, thefts, robberies and drug sales.”

ICP was absolutely shocked by the claims and wrote in a statement on its site that, “The idea of calling the Juggalos and Juggalettes a ‘gang’ is straight up bullshit. We are not a gang! We are a family!” The band said it was suing the FBI because it had failed “to produce any documentary evidence” that the Juggalos are a gang.

In the lawsuit, the band says its lawyer requested information from the FBI via the Freedom of Information Act about the investigation that landed the Juggalos on the Gang Threat Assessment, according to the Flint Journal/Mlive.com.

The FBI filed a motion for summary disposition Aug. 23, explaining that the bureau already turned in all pertinent records. The Journal reports “the FBI claims that it reviewed 63 pages of records and released 62 of them on Dec. 6, 2012, and reviewed 93 more pages of records before releasing 40 pages of them on Jan. 30.”
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Wed Aug 28, 2013 11:07 pm

see link for full story
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/ ... terrorism/


The FBI and the War on the NYPD and Counter-Terrorism
08.28.2013
This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly denounced as fiction allegations in an Associated Press article published today that the NYPD “labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations” in order to spy on imams and members without any prior proof of wrongdoing. Kelly said the piece’s purpose was to “hype a book” that the authors of the article have written. He went on to insist that the federal judiciary has specifically authorized the activities of the NYPD’s counter-terrorism unit. Moreover, Kelly hinted that the agenda the AP reporters and their book is furthering is not so much one of innocent Muslims or the ACLU but that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is still angry that the NYPD had been allowed to poach on their territory and work on counter-terrorism rather than ordinary police work.

Indeed, even a quick reading of today’s AP piece, which is more or less a summary of many previous articles on the subject, indicates that although many of the official sources remain unidentified, the FBI’s fingerprints are all over what must be viewed as a hatchet job on the NYPD. But though this sort of federal-local rivalry is the stuff of numerous Law and Order episodes, the stakes in this dispute are bigger than even the egos of the personalities involved. At the heart of the tussle is the plain fact that after the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD felt that they could no longer play by the old rules of engagement that had led to the murder of thousands of New Yorkers at the hands of Islamist terrorists. Instead, they got to work investigating not only al-Qaeda imports but also the very real threat of homegrown Islamist terror.

The NYPD has come under a steady barrage of criticism for using its resources to seek out potential terror suspects in exactly the places where they are known to congregate: religious institutions led by people who encourage support for extreme Islamist views. While the FBI has chosen to avoid flack by treating Islamists with kid gloves, the NYPD did their job. The AP’s hit pieces should be viewed in the context of a long campaign by many in the liberal mainstream media to falsely assert that there has been a post-9/11 backlash of discrimination against American Muslims. But more than that, it is also part of an effort to demonize counter-terrorism work at a time when paranoia about government spying fed by the controversy over the National Security Agency is running high. But while many in Congress and the media are feeding the spirit of complacency about terror, Kelly has rightly tried to remind us that efforts such as those of the NYPD are all that stands between the nation and new atrocities.

As Kelly said:

“We have an agreement that has been authorized by a federal judge,” Kelly answered. “We follow that stipulation to the letter, and it authorizes us to do a whole series of things. Certainly investigations are part of it. We follow leads wherever they take us. We’re not intimidated as to where that lead takes us.”

Yet that is exactly what the NYPD and the anti-anti-terror lobby led by those who claim to speak for American Muslims and civil liberties extremists want.

The point of the AP piece is to portray the police investigations as a threat to the freedom of religion and the First Amendment protections that would theoretically protect sermons or other activities at mosques from any scrutiny. But the idea that the Constitution allows people to preach violence or to create places where potential terrorists are inspired or given guidance with impunity is absurd. If some religious institutions have come under such scrutiny it is because the NYPD has had a reasonable suspicion that such activities have taken place there. To treat any such investigations as inherently prejudicial not only ignores the duty of the police to follow criminals to their source but also ignores the reality that radical Islamists have found a foothold on our shores.

While I have little doubt that the actions of Kelly and the NYPD will be upheld in the courts against suits brought by critics of their policies, what their opponents are shooting for is just as important as a legal victory: the delegitimization of counter-terrorism work that is willing to address the problem of domestic Islamist terror. That is the agenda pursued by some Arab and Muslim groups that have even counseled their members not to cooperate with the authorities when they investigate terror cases.

But it is even more troubling to see that the FBI is willing to help this cause via leaks and prejudicial anonymous quotes whose purpose is to pursue their rivalry with the NYPD. It should be remembered that such turf wars was one of the principle causes of the failure of the FBI and other authorities in the 9/11 case. To see the FBI revert to this sort of lamentable behavior now in order to settle scores with the NYPD is nothing less than a tragedy.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Thu Aug 29, 2013 11:32 pm

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http://www.pjstar.com/news/x1281953300/ ... rt-hearing



FBI agent skips court hearing

Aug 29, 2013



PEORIA - Chief U.S. District Judge James Shadid shook his head, sighed and ordered a no-bond arrest warrant for a former FBI agent who failed to appear in court Thursday for an alleged violation of his supervised release.

Jerry Nau, 47, of Peoria was supposed to appear before Shadid because he allegedly violated his supervised release earlier this year when he failed to tell his probation officer he was arrested and later convicted of drunken driving. Nau was sentenced to five months in prison and two years on supervised release in 2011 for lying to his superiors about $43,643 that came up missing during a drug investigation.

He was to appear in U.S. District Court to be formally presented the allegations. The hearing was set for Thursday morning, then moved to the afternoon.

Nau's attorney, Jeff Flanagan, called his client at about 3 p.m., 15 minutes after the scheduled time, and learned Nau wouldn't be there, even though he still lives in town. That's when Shadid issued the warrant.

The alleged violation stemmed from an incident April 5 in Creve Coeur, when police stopped Nau for failing to use his vehicle's turn signal. He failed a field sobriety test, according to court records, and was arrested.

Nau refused a breath test and a month later pleaded guilty to DUI. He received 18 months of court supervision.

One of the conditions of his federal supervised release, which began in April 2012 after he was released from prison, was to report any contact with law enforcement, including arrests or convictions.

The missing money was from the investigation of Adrian Robinson, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2010. Nau testified at trial the money was in an evidence vault. It was already missing.

The charge stemmed from a June 30, 2010, fax in which Nau told his bosses the money was in the vault, sent them a receipt and forged the signatures of two other agents.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Wed Sep 04, 2013 9:36 pm

three stories


Let god sort out the truth
Yep, funded by your tax dime.But hey don't worry. It's not your
mother,sister,girlfriend or daughter, eh?



1st read
see link for full story
http://www.theledger.com/article/201309 ... stigation-


FBI Taking Look at LPD's Traffic-Stop Investigation
September 3, 2013 at 11:56 p.m.


The Police Department began its internal investigation into the traffic stop after The Ledger published a letter to the editor in June criticizing the officer's actions. That month, the State Attorney's Office conducted its own investigation, resulting in a letter Hill wrote to Womack criticizing the search methods Fetz used.

Fetz pulled over the woman, Zoe Brugger, May 21 for driving with a broken headlight. According to the State Attorney's Office, Fetz asked Brugger to lift her shirt and shake out her bra, all without a reason to suspect she had drugs.

2nd read
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archiv ... u-violated


In Texas, Driving While Female Is Apparently a Crime That Could Get You Violated
Aug 5, 2013
On at least two separate occasions, Texas police publicly searched the body cavities of women during routine traffic stops. These stops have been recorded on police car dashboard cameras, and the victims of the searches have filed federal lawsuits in response. I learned about this story from Leslie Salzillo's post on Liberals Unite, which explains the most recent case very clearly:

What amazes me about this story, is not only is this an illegal, sexually-violating police search, but that it happened on a public road, for anyone driving by to see. These two women were pulled over, for allegedly throwing a cigarette out of the car window. They were given full body internal searches.

Gloves were not changed between probes, nor were they changed between women. Under Texas law, this is considered sexual assaults/rape.

I don't understand how anyone could make a case that the police are in the right, here. And I feel horrible for these women, who had absolutely no good options. Had they refused the search, they likely would have been arrested, whereupon authorities would have given them body cavity searches anyway.

But I also want to say that I don't think the public needs to see the videos of these searches. Both the New York Daily News and Liberals Unite posted the dash cam videos—they're on YouTube, nearly a million people have watched them—and I just don't understand the purpose of publishing a video of what appears to be a sexual assault. If the facts of the incidents written in plain English isn't enough to get the horror of what happened across to your readers, you should probably get out of the blogging business. I'm not going to post these videos on Slog; I don't recommend that you watch them. They're terrible and will make you feel bad and adding to the view-counts of the videos feels like exploitation to me.

3rd read

see link for full story
CNN exclusive: FBI misconduct reveals sex, lies and videotape

By Scott Zamost and Kyra Phillips, CNN Special Investigations Unit
January 27, 2011



Washington (CNN) -- An FBI employee shared confidential information with his girlfriend, who was a news reporter, then later threatened to release a sex tape the two had made.

A supervisor watched pornographic videos in his office during work hours while "satisfying himself."

And an employee in a "leadership position" misused a government database to check on two friends who were exotic dancers and allowed them into an FBI office after hours.

These are among confidential summaries of FBI disciplinary reports obtained by CNN, which describe misconduct by agency supervisors, agents and other employees over the last three years

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/27/siu.fb ... index.html
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Thu Sep 05, 2013 11:28 pm

see link for full story


see link for full story
http://www.pjstar.com/news/x1343096393/ ... -to-prison

Judge spares ex-FBI agent return trip to prison

Posted Sep 05, 2013


A former FBI agent was spared a return trip to prison Thursday after he admitted to violating terms of his release by being arrested for drunken driving and failing to tell his probation officer about the incident.

Jerry Nau apologized to U.S. District Judge James Shadid, asked for leniency and promised to enter counseling so that he could learn to make better decisions in the future.

"I'm an idiot for not showing up, your honor," Nau said, referring to the hearing he skipped last week that resulted in a no-bond arrest warrant and seven days in jail. "I do not want to disgrace my family because they've been through enough grief, and I keep putting them through it again."

Shadid, in pronouncing his decision not to revoke Nau's supervised release and sentence him to time served for the violations, told Nau that he needed to learn how to pick himself back up and fully comply with the terms of his release.

"Somehow, you think you can ignore matters and make things go away," Shadid said. "We all have better things to do than baby-sit you on supervised release."

Nau was convicted in November 2011 of making false statements related to more than $43,000 in missing drug money and sentenced to five months in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, followed by five months of home confinement. He was arrested for drunken driving in Tazewell County in April and pleaded guilty to that charge in May.

He pleaded guilty Thursday to violating two rules of his supervised release: being involved in criminal activity and failing to report his arrest to his probation officer in a timely manner.

U.S. Attorney James Warden, an Indiana prosecutor brought in to handle the case because of Nau's ties to the area, had argued for a six-month sentence. He said Nau had previously been informally admonished for violating terms of his home confinement, and the DUI showed a pattern of disrespect for the justice system.

Defense attorney Jeffrey Flanagan, however, countered tha
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Sep 06, 2013 10:32 pm

see link for full story
http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=633496
Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on #Occupy
Posted: 2013/09/07

New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent

Naomi Wolf

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations' knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).

As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, put it, the documents show that from the start, the FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a "terrorist threat":

"FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) … reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat … The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country."

Verheyden-Hilliard points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it "police-statism":

"This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI's surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a "Bank Fraud Working Group" met in November 2011 – during the Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its "domestic terrorism" unit. The Anchorage, Alaska "terrorism task force" was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Mississippi "joint terrorism task force" was issuing a "counterterrorism preparedness alert" about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Mississippi, the FBI and the "Bank Security Group" – multiple private banks – met to discuss the reaction to "National Bad Bank Sit-in Day" (the response was violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state's Occupy members' details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis FBI tracked OWS under its "joint terrorism task force" aegis, too. And so on, for over 100 pages.

Jason Leopold, at Truthout.org, who has sought similar documents for more than a year, reported that the FBI falsely asserted in response to his own FOIA requests that no documents related to its infiltration of Occupy Wall Street existed at all. But the release may be strategic: if you are an Occupy activist and see how your information is being sent to terrorism task forces and fusion centers, not to mention the "longterm plans" of some redacted group to shoot you, this document is quite the deterrent.

There is a new twist: the merger of the private sector, DHS and the FBI means that any of us can become WikiLeaks, a point that Julian Assange was trying to make in explaining the argument behind his recent book. The fusion of the tracking of money and the suppression of dissent means that a huge area of vulnerability in civil society – people's income streams and financial records – is now firmly in the hands of the banks, which are, in turn, now in the business of tracking your dissent.

Remember that only 10% of the money donated to WikiLeaks can be processed – because of financial sector and DHS-sponsored targeting of PayPal data. With this merger, that crushing of one's personal or business financial freedom can happen to any of us. How messy, criminalizing and prosecuting dissent. How simple, by contrast, just to label an entity a "terrorist organization" and choke off, disrupt or indict its sources of financing.

Why the huge push for counterterrorism "fusion centers", the DHS militarizing of police departments, and so on? It was never really about "the terrorists". It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens – it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Tue Sep 10, 2013 9:45 pm

Former FBI analyst sentenced to more than three years in prison in child pornography case
September 9- 2 2013


see link for full story

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/for ... story.html

A former intelligence analyst for the FBI was sentenced to more than three years in prison Monday for possessing child pornography.
Keith Dietterle, 28, was arrested in an undercover sting last November and pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington this spring. Dietterle, a District resident who was assigned to FBI headquarters, admitted sending an undercover officer pornographic images of children and links to graphic videos. Dietterle communicated through a social networking site with the officer, who he thought was the father of a young girl, according to
http://www.cbsatlanta.com/story/2339402 ... estigation
see link for full story

FBI agent who led sex crimes task force under investigation
Sep 10, 2013

Ken Hillman, an FBI special agent who operated the northwest Georgia Crimes Against Children Task Force, is under investigation for alleged misconduct, according to a bureau representative.

The task force, based in Catoosa County, caught more than 150 people from 2007 to 2013 who responded to online offers for sex with children, according to a former task force member.

CBS Atlanta News has learned that Hillman is accused of abusing his authority after being pulled over several times on suspicion of driving under the influence.

Attorney McCracken Poston, who represents several suspects arrested by the task force, said he reported Hillman to the FBI.

Poston provided dash cam video from a police car that he said showed Hillman being pulled over by local police for suspicion of driving under the influence. In the video, it appears Hillman yells to the officer, "I'm FBI. I'm going to a call. I'm sorry."

"Because of his badge and his connections he got out of at least three instances when he should have been investigated for driving under the influence. Maybe more," said Poston.

Poston also reported that Hillman allowed civilians to participate in sensitive sting operations.

Catoosa County millionaire Emerson Russell and his wife Angela Russell reportedly handcuffed suspects and held guns during arrests. Neither are certified law enforcement officers.

According to Poston, Angela Russell also communicated with suspects online to help lure them to Catoosa County. Poston alleged some of those conversations occurred without supervision.

"I think it brings into question current cases in terms of what procedures were being used. What conversations may have been had that we hadn't been given," said Poston.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Thu Sep 12, 2013 1:12 am

5 or 6 stories



see link for full story
http://rt.com/usa/fbi-lawyer-surveillance-judge-732/
Ex-FBI counsel implicated in surveillance abuses nominated to crucial federal bench
Published time: September 11, 2013 22:58
The former top lawyer at the FBI deeply implicated in surveillance abuses revealed before and by Edward Snowden’s leaks was confirmed as a federal judge in a top court for terrorism cases this week.
The US Senate voted 73-24 on Monday in approving Valerie Caproni, Federal Bureau of Investigation general counsel from 2003 to 2011, to the Southern District of New York, one of the country's most important federal courts for terrorism cases.

Caproni has received bipartisan criticism for allowing and defending surveillance abuses both found to be overbroad during her tenure and those not disclosed when she was counsel but later revealed to be inappropriate or illegal. For example, the Snowden leaks showed Caproni mischaracterized the limits of the Patriot Act during her term.

A 2010 report by the Department of Justice revealed the FBI inappropriately used non-judicial subpoenas called “exigent letters” to gather phone numbers of over 5,550 Americans until 2006.

"The FBI broke the law on telephone records privacy and the general counsel's office, headed by Valerie Caproni, sanctioned it and must face consequences," said John Conyers in April 2010 as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Conyers called for Caproni’s firing at the time over the use of the non-judicial subpoenas, according to the Guardian.

"It's not in the Patriot Act. It never has been. And its use, perhaps coincidentally, began in the same month that Ms Valerie Caproni began her work as general counsel," Conyers said in 2010.

Caproni told House lawmakers in 2008 if phone numbers -- acquired from telephone companies by the FBI via the non-judicial subpoenas evidently sanctioned in the Patriot Act -- were not related to a "currently open investigation, and there was no emergency at the time we received the records, the records are removed from our files and destroyed.”

Yet revelations found in documents supplied by Snowden outlined how the National Security Agency stores phone records on all Americans for up five years no matter if they are associated with an open investigation or not. In addition, it’s been found that the NSA has the capability to feed the FBI phone records if there is a "reasonable articulable suspicion" they are related to terrorism.

"Caproni knew that the Bush administration could use or was using the Section 215 provision in the Patriot Act to obtain Americans' phone records on a broad scale, an issue that has recently been documented by the whistleblower material first printed in the Guardian," Lisa Graves, a former deputy assistant attorney general who dealt with Caproni while working on national security issues for the ACLU, told the Guardian.

In 2007, DOJ’s Inspector General Glenn Fine found the FBI was serially abusing National Security Letters -- a demand regarding national security independent of legal subpoenas-- to obtain business records, including "unauthorized collection of telephone or internet email transactional records.” While the larger collection of phone records was still not exposed at the time, Caproni called the inappropriate collection a “colossal failure on our part.”

"Government officials that secretly approved of overbroad surveillance programs the public is only seeing now because of leaks, and whose testimony on the issue obscured rather than revealed these abuses, should be held to account for their actions in a public forum," former FBI agent Mike German told the Guardian.



"She is a woman with impeccable credentials," Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor Monday. "This country needs more women like her."




see link for full story
http://mashable.com/2013/09/11/fbi-micr ... -backdoor/

Did the FBI Lean On Microsoft for Access to Its Encryption Software?
September 11, 2013

The NSA is reportedly not the only government agency asking tech companies for help in cracking technology to access user data. Sources say the FBI has a history of requesting digital backdoors, which are generally understood as a hidden vulnerability in a program that would, in theory, let the agency peek into suspects' computers and communications.
In 2005, when Microsoft was about to launch BitLocker, its Windows software to encrypt and lock hard drives, the company approached the NSA, its British counterpart the GCHQ and the FBI, among other government and law-enforcement agencies. Microsoft's goal was twofold: get feedback from the agencies, and sell BitLocker to them.




see link for full story
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20 ... e=printart



Lawsuit asks FBI to release Sarasota 9/11 documents
September 10, 2013 at 3:45 p.m.

Twelve years after the 9/11 attacks that included three hijacker pilots trained in Venice, the terrorists' alleged interaction with a high-echelon Saudi family that lived in Sarasota remains shrouded in secrecy.

But Sunshine law and Freedom of Information Act requests filed by an independent South Florida news organization have chipped away at the FBI's position that information related to the family remain secret.

Depending on how a federal judge in Broward County rules, the FBI could, theoretically, be compelled to reveal documents and field notes in the case.

Broward Bulldog editor Dan Christensen and former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham say the documents could shed light on how the locally trained terrorists were managed and supported.

Graham, former Florida governor and a co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, a Congressional body that investigated the attacks, believes the FBI has covered up Saudi support of the terrorists.

Graham also chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee during and after 9/11. He has chimed in on the ongoing federal lawsuit by the Broward Bulldog against the FBI and the Department of Justice, filing a 15-page declaration of the facts as he knows them.

The former senator wants more disclosure about what happened in Sarasota because he feels it may add to a bigger, largely censored subject: Who financed and supported the 9/11 terror attacks?

"It is a big onion, which is being slowly peeled," Graham told the Herald-Tribune. "We are continuing with all the means that are still available to us to get this material into the hands of the public."

"And the FBI is aggressively resisting the release of any additional documents," he said. "The question is, why are they doing this? What interest does the FBI have in denying the existence of its own documents?"

"Beyond that, they have thrown a blanket of national security over virtually everything, and why are they doing that for an event that occurred, soon to be, 12 years ago?"

Larry Berberich -- a man who played a pivotal security role at Sarasota's Prestancia neighorhood, where the Saudis in question lived at the time -- has his own view of what Graham describes as a blanket.

"Some of the local departments knew a hell of a lot about what was going on and were feeding the FBI that information," said Berberich, who was then a Prestancia board member nominally in charge of security and an unpaid security consultant to the sheriff at that time, Bill Balkwill.

Shortly after local law enforcement entered the vacated home of the Saudis in Prestancia, he said, "everything went black."

Berberich told the Herald-Tribune local law enforcement personnel privy to evidence were muzzled.

He declined to elaborate.

The neighbors noticed

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush was visiting a school in Sarasota.

Then came the revelation that three of the hijackers learned to fly at Venice Airport.

The story about a family of Saudis who suddenly left their home in suburban Sarasota about two weeks before the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. -- leaving food on the counter, a dirty diaper, three vehicles and an empty safe -- went unreported.

But it did not go unnoticed by neighbors.

The house was owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a well-connected businessman whose family had a long history with Saudi Arabia's royal family.

In the year leading up to 9/11, the Ghazzawi property at 4224 Escondito Circle was home to the patriarch's daughter and son-in-law, Anoud and Abdulaziz al-Hijji. The man was a college student here, and he and his wife had small children.

The couple's Saudi nationality, the trash they left at the curb, and the cars they left in the driveway created a hubbub in the staid gated community. Acting on tips from neighbors, law enforcement swept into the home within weeks after the terror attacks and confiscated boxes of potential evidence.

The incident was forgotten until it showed up in research by authors Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, as they were collecting material for their Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, "The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11."

Summers had interviewed a still-unnamed counterterrorism officer who told him that the FBI knew much more than it was saying about Prestancia.

With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 then approaching, Summers asked Christensen, a former Miami Herald investigative reporter and Broward Bulldog's editor, to help develop the Sarasota angle of the story.

From that interview and others, Summers and Christensen described alleged connections between the terrorists who learned to fly in Venice and the residents of the 3,300-square-foot home in Prestancia.

Just 15 miles separated the neighborhood and Venice Airport, where hijackers trained before piloting two jets into the World Trade Center and a third into a Pennsylvania field after passengers overtook them.

Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi took flight lessons at the airport's former Huffman Aviation. Ziad Jarra took flight lessons at the neighboring Florida Flight Training Center.

Atta and al-Shehhi are believed to have flown jets into the twin towers. Jarra is believed to have been the pilot of United Flight 93, which went down in Pennsylvania amid a passenger uprising.

The men knew each other from Germany and were part of what is referred to in 9/11 literature as the "Hamburg cell."

"Phone records and the Prestancia gate records linked the house on Escondito Circle to the hijackers," the Broward Bulldog reported in its 10th anniversary story.

Those findings were published not just on Christensen's Bulldog website, but also in the Herald-Tribune, Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times in September 2011.

Within days, the FBI went on the defensive, stating that the agency had followed up on the "referenced Sarasota home and family" and interviewed family members and found no evidence connecting them to hijackers.

"The anonymous 'counterterrorism officer' cited in the article apparently was not an FBI agent and had no access to the facts and circumstances pertaining to the resolution of this lead, otherwise this person would know that this matter was resolved without any nexus to the 9/11 plot," wrote FBI special agent Steven E. Ibison, who was the supervisor of the Tampa field office.

FBI officials in Tampa declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing litigation.

That does not surprise Tom Julin, a Miami First Amendment attorney who is representing the Broward Bulldog.

"The FBI, I think, went out of its way to discredit the initial reporting that Dan and Tony Summers had done," Julin said.

The FBI's reaction prompted a Freedom of Information quest, which culminated in a lawsuit before federal District Court Judge William L. Zloch, a former University of Notre Dame quarterback appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan.

"Basically Dan was saying, 'If you are telling me I am wrong, show me the documents.'"

Gatekeeper's records

While the Saudi family's sudden departure was intriguing, the smoking gun in the Bulldog investigation was the allegation that agents discovered phone records and Prestancia gate records that linked the Escondito Circle house to the hijackers.

Prestancia has two gates, manned by security guards who noted license plate numbers of visitors, asked drivers their names and recorded what home they were visiting.

An FBI document released to Christensen in April suggests the agency did not hold on to the gate-keeper records.

But that seems unlikely, says Berberich, the former Prestancia Homeowners Association director.

Now a Manatee County resident, Berberich then lived in a 12,000-square-foot home overlooking Prestancia's golf course.

With a background in military electronics and top-secret clearances from years ago, it was Berberich who helped Sarasota County law enforcement officials enter the Escondito Circle home. He also instructed Prestancia employees to fully cooperate with federal officials.

On two occasions since, Berberich has gone back to the Prestancia guard shack where the visitor logs were kept, he said.

"You've got records before that time, and records after that time," said Berberich, now 75. "There is a gap at the time in question. So that substantiates that it got turned over to somebody."

In his declaration to the federal court in the Broward Bulldog suit, Berberich described what he and law enforcement officials found in the home. "There was mail on the table, dirty diapers in one of the bathrooms," he said. "All of the toiletries were still in place." "The refrigerator was full of food as if the residents had just gone shopping before leaving."

"We also found a safe in the home had been emptied and it appeared that a computer had been removed," he said.

Berberich said that he had his eyes on the home before the terror attacks.

There were six or seven young men who visited on a regular basis. Vehicles later associated with the hijackers carried them to the gates of the country club community.

Their friendship with al-Hijji got them admitted, Berberich said.

He said he knows that because license plates associated with several vehicles now connected to the terrorists were recorded on numerous occasions by gate guards. The passengers said they were were headed for 4224 Escondito Circle.

"It was common for them to come into Prestancia, two, three in a car," Berberich said. "I mean, more than a person coming in a car, and more than one car coming in."

Strong ties

The Ghazzawi family has a decades-long history of operating at the highest levels of Saudi society, the Herald-Tribune has found.

As King Saud prepared for a state visit with President Dwight Eisenhower, Abbas Ghazzawi, who appears to be Esam Ghazzawi's father, was part of the royal entourage.

In exchange for being able to keep a U.S. military base within Saudi Arabia's borders, President Eisenhower agreed to allow the Saudi government to buy up to $500 million worth of U.S.-made arms.

The deal did not come together overnight, and Abbas Ghazzawi flew to New York, from Madrid, on Jan. 25, 1957, according to passenger lists kept by U.S. officials.

The elder Ghazzawi was accompanied by three other Saudis, including a man who would later serve as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S., Faisal al-Hegelan.

The Ghazzawi family's ties to America grew stronger years later when, in 1970, 17-year-old Esam Ghazzawi married American Deborah G. Browning.

Esam Ghazzawi's family later established a presence in Southwest Florida, building a home on Longboat Key's Putter Lane.

Esam and Deborah Ghazzawi bought the Prestancia home in September 1995, records show. Five months later, their daughter Anoud married Abdulaziz al-Hijji. He was 19 and she was 17, their Sarasota County marriage license shows.

Al-Hijji attended Manatee Community College, now State College of Florida, and then the University of South Florida, where he received a bachelor's.

Friends

Abdulaziz al-Hijji knew some of the terrorists who were in training at Venice Airport, according to a former friend who provided the information to an FBI agent and a Sarasota County Sheriff's Office detective in 2004.

The informant, a Sarasota cellphone store owner named Wissam Hammoud, made the claim while awaiting trial in the Hillsborough County Jail on federal charges. He is now serving a 21-year sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty in August 2005 to charges of plotting to kill a federal agent and a confidential informant.

Through the U.S. Attorney's Office, Hammoud arranged to be interviewed by Sarasota sheriff's Detective Michael Otis and FBI agent Leo Martinez, who worked in the agency's Fort Myers field office, according to a 2004 investigative report file by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Christensen obtained that document through a Sunshine law request made in late 2011 after the FBI attempted to discredit his story.

Hammoud told investigators that he met Abdulaziz al-Hijji through his own relatives in Sarasota in 1996. Hammoud described al-Hijji as very well schooled in Islam, the FDLE report states.

Hammoud said that Abdulaziz al-Hijji told him that al-Hijji's wife, Anoud, had family that provided her with money, but that her husband received none from his wife.

Hammoud told investigators that he often exercised with Abdulaziz al-Hijji at the Shapes Fitness center near the Prestancia neighborhood, and that the two played soccer together on property surrounding a Sarasota mosque.

Al-Hijji brought a friend to the games who Hammoud claimed was Adnan El Shukrijumah, a man who was federally indicted in 2010 for his alleged role in a terrorist plot to attack New York City's subway system. The FBI is currently offering a $5 million reward for information leading to El Shukrijumah's capture, and he is listed by the FBI as being one of the "most wanted terrorists."

The plot, uncovered in September 2009, was directed by senior Al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan, and El Shukrijumah is thought to have been part of the group's external operations hierarchy, according to an FBI-issued "Wanted" poster.

In an interview with the London Telegraph in February 2012, al-Hijji emphatically denied any connection to hijackers, stating that he loved America.

Al-Hijji acknowledged knowing Hammoud, but said the name "Shukrajumah" did not ring a bell.

Hammoud told investigators that he helped Abdulaziz and Anoud al-Hijji by clearing the residence on Escondito Circle after they left Sarasota, putting their belongings in storage. He said he was asked to sell one of al-Hijji's vehicles, a Volkswagen Beetle, and send the couple the proceeds.

Hammoud told investigators al-Hijji had gone to work for the Saudi-owned oil company Aramco. After leaving the U.S. in August 2001, al-Hijji went to Saudi Arabia first, and was later transferred to an Aramco office in London, the FDLE 2004 report states.

New pages

It took much longer for the FBI to give Christensen any real information about 9/11 and its potential relationship with Sarasota family.

This spring, with no explanation, the FBI mailed Christensen 31 pages of heavily redacted documents.

One of them, dated April 2002, appears to contradict the FBI's claim that there was no connection between the Prestancia family and hijackers.

The document states, "Further investigation of the (name deleted) family revealed many connections between the (name deleted) and individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 09/11/2001. More specifically, a (name deleted) family member (name deleted) also known as (name deleted) DOB (date deleted) last known address (address deleted) Florida, was a flight student at Huffman Aviation."

The agency redacted many of the names in the 31 pages released under exemptions that protect people's names in law enforcement records. But it is clear who the subjects are because the documents specifically cite the al-Hijjis' residence on Escondito Circle.

To Christensen, the statement was a breakthrough in his quest for documents.

"It is important because it establishes that there were connections between these people and the hijackers," Christensen said. "It says it very clearly, and it is also at odds with what the FBI has said before."

Graham, the former senator and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, made his sworn declaration in Broward Bulldog's lawsuit after that document surfaced and referenced it in his own highly detailed report to the court.

"Once the FBI had found 'many connections' between the persons under investigation and individuals associated with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI should have taken statements from all persons who knew those persons, should have obtained the gatehouse records of the Prestancia subdivision where 4224 Escondito Circle is located, should have compared the license plates on vehicles that the FBI had reason to believe that the terrorists used with photographs that were taken of license tags that passed through the Prestancia gatehouse, should have obtained financial records showing how homeowners' association fees were paid, and should have created inventories of property taken from the home, at a minimum," Graham wrote the court. "I have further been advised that the request specified that the activities involve apparent visits to that address by some of the decreased 9/11 hijackers."

Graham's 15-page declaration is accompanied by the entire 9/11 Commission report and by the "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001," which is the work of the joint Congressional committee that Graham chaired.

Since the Joint Inquiry report was published in 2003, Graham has been trying within two presidential administrations to make public the chapter on how the terrorists were financed and supported.

In a guest editorial published by the Huffington Post in September 2012, Graham was more explicit about the contents of the censored chapter.

"Sadly, those 28 pages represent only a fraction of the evidence of Saudi complicity that our government continues to shield from the public, under a flawed classification program which appears to be part of a systematic effort to protect Saudi Arabia from any real accountability for its actions," Graham wrote.

The search goes on

In June, Judge Zloch denied a request by an assistant U.S. attorney representing the FBI to dismiss the Broward Bulldog's Freedom-of-Information-Act case.

Then Zloch invited Julin, Christensen's attorney, to tell the court exactly how he would recommend that the FBI proceed to do a better search for the materials that were being sought.

Julin's 15-page report asks the agency to use its "Sentinel system" to conduct searches, on top of the antiquated system that the agency used to generate the limited results turned over to the plaintiffs so far.



The Miami lawyer also asked for a manual review of the Tampa files on the case, which are voluminous.

He also asked for a series of test searches that the FBI apparently did not use previously that he said could produce results.

For example, Julin suggested trying the names of the family that owned the home -- the Ghazzawis -- and the names of the house's residents, the al-Hijjis.

He suggested the agency get a little more creative, trying searches like "Prestancia and gatehouse," "Prestancia and Mohamed Atta," "Escondito and Mohamed Atta," "Prestancia and Huffman Aviation," and so on.

The agent in charge of the Sarasota investigation, Gregory Sheffield, has since been reassigned to the FBI's Honolulu field office.

Julin asked that the FBI be compelled to ask Sheffield basic questions about his knowledge of the evidentiary files and where they are, and then to follow up on those leads.

Should Judge Zloch follow Julin's suggestions on how to proceed, there is the potential for opening up thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of new documents held in the FBI's Tampa field office, according to one of the responses filed by FBI's representative in the suit, Assistant U.S. Attorney Carole Fernandez.

In August, as part of Fernandez's reasoning for blocking the release of documents, she told the court:

"The FBI's Tampa office alone has more than 15,352 documents (serials) which together contain, potentially, hundreds of thousands of pages of records related to the 9/11 investigation," the federal attorney. "The manual review which plaintiffs are requesting is not reasonable, nor is it warranted."






see link for full story
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-1 ... wsuit.html

FBI Director James Comey Added to Revised NSA Surveillance Lawsuit


A lawsuit alleging that the National Security Agency violated the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens now includes claims against new FBI Director James Comey, Bloomberg reports.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the original lawsuit in July, alleges the NSA, with the help of the Justice Department and FBI, surreptitiously collected information about “all telephone calls transiting the networks of all major telecommunication companies.”

Comey was added to the suit as a defendant.
- See more at: http://www.ticklethewire.com/#sthash.WrkJA9zo.dpuf

see link for full story
http://www.cbsatlanta.com/story/2340676 ... ist-attack



FBI war room ready for potential terrorist attack



Sep 11, 2013

Mark Giuliano is the special agent in charge of the FBI's office in Atlanta. Giuliano said there is no specific terrorist threat, at this time, but the FBI is ready just in case.
"We can't afford to let our guard down," said Giuliano.
The walls of the FBI's office contain pictures of those who were responsible for the devastating attack on Sept. 11, 2001, that killed close to 3,000 and injured some 6,000.
Since then, on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI and other federal and local law enforcement agencies set up command centers to monitor and prepare just in case there are additional attacks.
"We are monitoring the information coming in from overseas, in our intelligence community and from our state, local and federal counterparts here to look for threats," said Giuliano.
Angela Tobon is the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's National Security team.
"We're watching what's going on social wise, social media and listening to our counterparts in other agencies," said Tobon. "We've got agents on standby. If we need to respond to something they are ready to go, SWAT teams, TAC teams, investigative teams or providing assistance to other agencies."
The FBI also assembled a team of analysts.
"Everybody knows today is a heightened alert day and everybody is prepared," said Tobon.
If something were to happen in the Metro Atlanta area, representatives from just about every agency would assemble in what the FBI calls its war room.
Scott Dutton is with the GBI.




Charles Hynes, Scandal-Plagued Brooklyn District Attorney, Faces Verdict At The Polls
09/06/2013
The year was 1990. George H.W. Bush was president. The song "Hold On" by Wilson Phillips was number one on the Billboard chart. And Charles "Joe" Hynes, celebrated for his role as a special prosecutor in a racially charged case in Howard Beach, began his first term as Brooklyn District Attorney.
Bush's presidency came and went; his son's did too. Wilson Phillips went on a 10-year hiatus; then got back together in 2004.
Hynes, all along the way, has done exactly what that top 1990 ballad instructed: He's held on. He's been Brooklyn's top law man for nearly 24 years, making him one of the longest serving district attorneys in New York City history.
But Hynes's once firm grasp on the position could be imperiled. Buffeted by controversial cases, charges of misconduct in his office, and concerns about possibly preferential treatment for Jewish residents of the borough, Hynes is seen by political strategists to be facing a serious challenge from Kenneth Thompson, an African-American former federal prosecutor. On Tuesday, Sept. 10, voters in the Brooklyn Democratic primary could deny Hynes a chance at a seventh term.
Almost all prosecutors who stay in office for lengthy terms wind up facing a familiar array of complaints – about cases lost, creeping arrogance, political gamesmanship. Robert M. Morgenthau, revered by many across his decades as Manhattan's top prosecutor, had his share of critics and embarrassments, the troubled prosecution of five teenagers for the rape of a woman in Central Park among them.
Some of the complaints about Hynes, then, fit that mold: He's been accused of hiring and firing people based on favoritism and political connections and he's been taken to task for some failed or underwhelming prosecutions. Even his once reliable base of support, the borough's Orthodox Jewish community, has seemed to split, some angered that Hynes has made a series of pedophilia cases against people in their ranks, others disappointed that he was late to the issue and overly lenient in his handling of the cases.
But Thompson, who served in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, has focused his criticism on the question of wrongful convictions and possible misconduct by prosecutors over the years in Hynes's office.
On the campaign trail Thompson, for instance, has cited withering criticism from two federal judges over the way one of Hynes's top prosecutors won a wrongful conviction in a high-profile murder case.
In the last several weeks, Thompson has gained endorsements from the Service Employees International Union, the Citizens Union, and several Brooklyn-based representatives in Congress.
Hynes has defended the work of his office, rejecting any claims that he permits or encourages misconduct. He has campaigned on what he asserts are his myriad novel and effective approaches to fighting crime.
Both the district attorney's office and Hynes's campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Little public polling has been done in the race. Turnout could play a role. And Hynes, whatever his arguable travails, has history on his side.
No incumbent district attorney has lost an election in any of New York's boroughs since 1955. A Brooklyn district attorney hasn't been unseated via the vote since 1911.
Here are some issues that may figure into the election's outcome.
Michael Vecchione
Some of Hynes's campaign woes can be traced to the conduct of Michael Vecchione, the head of Hynes's Rackets Bureau. He's a polarizing figure who has drawn heavy criticism for his conduct in and out of the courtroom.
Two federal judges have lambasted Vecchione for withholding evidence and for his handling of several witnesses in a high-profile murder case.
Now the defendant, a Brooklyn man named Jabbar Collins who spent 16 years in prison, is suing the city for millions as part of a far-reaching wrongful conviction lawsuit. His lawyer, Manhattan-based attorney Joel Rudin, is attempting to make the case that misconduct in Hynes's office is so pervasive that Hynes must have actually condoned it.
Vecchione's career in the district attorney's office spans more than two decades. In 2003, the district attorney's office was forced to vacate the conviction of a man they suspected of being involved in at least three murders when a federal court agreed to hear allegations that Vecchione had withheld evidence in the man's trial.
In 2006, Vecchione tried to prosecute former FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio for helping arrange the murders of gangsters on behalf of mob boss Greg Scarpa. Hynes called it "the most stunning example of official corruption [he] had ever seen." But the case fell apart just days into trial when it became clear that Vecchione's chief witness was unstable and had given false testimony.
More recently, The New York Post reported that Vecchione instructed staff not to preserve exculpatory evidence in sex-trafficking cases during a training session in 2012.
Vecchione has denied all charges of misconduct, and he testified under oath that he did not remember the details of what took place at the training session for sex-trafficking cases in 2012.
Hynes has staunchly defended Vecchione, who continues to be one of the highest-paid prosecutors in the office. Earlier this year, Hynes allowed Vecchione to be a featured character in a CBS television show called Brooklyn DA.
ProPublica in 2013 has published a series of articles investigating prosecutorial misconduct and the lack of consequences for prosecutors who commit serious violations of the law. Vecchione was the subject of one of those articles.
Hynes's office did not respond to ProPublica's request for comment on Vecchione's history and its possible impact on Hynes's re-election effort.
50 Possibly Troubled Cases
Last spring, Hynes asked a judge to vacate the conviction of a man his office had mistakenly prosecuted for the murder of a Brooklyn rabbi. Hynes blamed a detective in the case for the wrongful conviction, and ordered his office to review 50 cases involving the detective.
The investigation has obvious implications for the now-retired detective, Louis Scarcella, who has publicly denied he ever did anything wrong. But Hynes's prosecutors had vouched for the detective's work in the cases, using the confessions he had allegedly won or the evidence he had produced to send people to prisons. Two of the prosecutors involved in Scarcella cases have gone on to work as New York State judges; four are now senior officials in the district attorney's office.
Thompson and other critics of Hynes pounced when it became clear that a 12-member panel of lawyers and judges appointed by Hynes to oversee the review of the 50 cases included three people who had donated to Hynes's campaign.
Hynes has said he is convinced of the panel's independence, and that the investigation will go where the evidence takes it.
The New York Times reported Friday that its examination of some of Scarcella's cases showed that prosecutors either ignored warning signs or made missteps of their own.
Hynes told the Times that the investigation so far had not turned up evidence that would require revisiting the propriety of a conviction. But he did not address the paper's findings about the conduct of his prosecutors.
Detaining Witnesses
Hynes's training procedures and office policies have also come under fire.
A Brooklyn man seeking to have his murder conviction overturned has accused Hynes's office of holding a witness against his will until he agreed to testify as prosecutors wanted in the case.
That case, which is now before a federal judge, has fueled an effort by Jabbar Collins's lawyer to establish that Hynes's office routinely detained and coerced witnesses in violation of the law. The accusation, made as part of Collins's lawsuit against Hynes and the city, deals with a powerful legal tool called the material witness order. The orders are supposed to be used only under rare circumstances, usually when prosecutors fear a potential witness might flee instead of testifying in court.
New York law requires that prosecutors bring any material witness straight to court.
But Collins's lawyer, along with several other defense lawyers are seeking to hold prosecutors accountable for abusing the orders, alleging that witnesses were never brought before a judge or provided with a lawyer, as the law requires.
Hynes has denied allegations that his prosecutors failed to abide by the law in their handling of witnesses.
Favoritism
Hynes's hiring and firing decisions have also proven fodder during the campaign, and Thompson has seized on them.
The New York Post reported this summer that Mark Posner, a lawyer in the office's powerful Rackets Bureau, was caught using his office phone to call prostitutes. The Post article said Posner was found out by his own colleagues, who were investigating a local prostitution ring.
Posner is the son of a longtime ally of Hynes, Charles Posner. The elder Posner had served as Hynes's liaison to Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish community, and Hynes had later recommended him for a judgeship. Posner, who died in 2004, served as a State Supreme Court justice for nearly a decade.
Hynes did not fire Mark Posner after learning of his misconduct. Instead, he suspended him for 10 days and transferred him to the Early Case Assessment Bureau, a low-level desk where prosecutors analyze arrests and make judgments on what charges to pursue.
At the time Posner was caught, Brooklyn DA spokesman Jerry Schmetterer told the Post that Hynes acted as soon as he learned of Posner's conduct by suspending him, ordering him to seek counseling, and demoting him.
Posner didn't immediately respond to a voice message left at his home. And neither Hynes's office nor his campaign responded to questions from ProPublica.
In January 2012, Hynes hired a woman named Angel DiPietro to become an assistant district attorney. It was a hire with a backstory.
Eight years earlier, DiPietro was a witness in the murder case of Mark Fisher, a Fairfield University student-athlete in Prospect Park South. She was with Fisher and friends in Brooklyn the night he was killed. At the time, a spokesman for the police department told the New York Times that DiPietro demonstrated "a lack of full-hearted cooperation." Police Commissioner Ray Kelly himself described DiPietro and seven of her other friends as "uncooperative."
Eventually DiPietro testified at trial and two people she was with that night were found guilty of the murder.
DiPietro's father, a defense attorney in Brooklyn, had been a regular contributor to Hynes's political campaigns, and in the months after DiPietro was hired, he donated another $3,000 to Hynes's 2013 political campaign.
DiPietro, contacted by telephone, referred ProPublica to the spokesman for the district attorney's office. The spokesman did not respond to request for comment.
James DiPietro, Angel's father, did agree to an interview.
"I wish I could've given him more," DiPietro's father said of his donations to Hynes. He said that his daughter was first offered the job in 2010 and fully deserved it on her own merits. And he asserted that his daughter had in fact cooperated fully in the Fisher murder investigation.
Selective Prosecutions
In 1996 Hynes indicted a Brooklyn political gadfly named John O'Hara. The charge was modest: voting from his girlfriend's apartment, which was outside of his own election district. After three separate trials, O'Hara was found guilty, lost his law license, and was sentenced to community service.
O'Hara has always claimed that Hynes went after him because he'd run for city council and assembly seats against some of Hynes's allies.
Thirteen years later, in 2009, a grievance committee bolstered O'Hara's account. It restored his license, saying there were "grave doubts that Mr. O'Hara did anything that justified his criminal prosecution."
In 2012, The New York Times ran a stinging series of articles on how Hynes's office for years handled investigations of accused sexual predators in the Orthodox Jewish communities. The series established that Hynes had allowed many of the accusations to be handled by rabbinical courts rather than prosecuting the cases himself.
Hynes initially defended the way he handled the sex abuse cases, but eventually pledged reforms and began prosecuting them with more vigor.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Sep 13, 2013 2:19 pm

Former Head of FBI’s Boston Office Accused of Exploiting Connections to Bureau The former special agent in charge of Boston’s FBI office has been slapped with a federal ethics violation for consulting professionally with a former colleague within a year of service.
Kenneth Kaiser, 57, who became an assistant director at FBI headquarters when he left the Boston office in 2006, met with agents investigating his new company, LocatePlus Holding Corp., in July 2009, the same month he retired.
- See more at: http://www.ticklethewire.com/2013/09/13 ... uRBiY.dpuf
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Sep 13, 2013 6:33 pm

Sept 13 2013

see link for full story

http://www.wdtv.com/wdtv.cfm?func=view& ... arges11791

FIRST ON 5 NEWS: FBI Agent Arrested on Harassment Charges

An FBI agent out of Clarksburg is on the wrong side of the law. That's because on Friday, he was arrested on harassment charges in Monongalia County.

Scott Thomas Ballock is facing the charge after he supposedly continually sent multiple e-mails to a woman after she asked him to stop. State Police allege that this happened from October 2012 through this July of this year. Ballock apparently used his personal and government issued e-mail addresses.

According to some online conferences, Ballock is listed as a supervisory special agent at the FBIi's National Data Exchange Program Office in Clarksburg.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Sun Sep 15, 2013 12:20 am

see link for full story

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/jfk50/re ... by-fbi.ece

September 13, 2013

Dallas Mexican-Americans remember the JFK years, surveillance by FBI






Albert Orozco still has his American GI Forum hat. Though its members fought for the United States, the organization was spied on by the FBI in the 1960s.

In 1960, Korean War veteran Albert Orozco set out to prove himself with other Mexican-American vets on a new battlefield — politics. They embraced the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy with Viva Kennedy Clubs and strategic fundraising for poll taxes so the poor could vote.

Orozco was already a leader in a Mexican-American group that played the red, white and blue patriotism card hard — the American GI Forum.

Kennedy won their support with a social justice message, Catholic faith, a Spanish-speaking wife and a family history of fighting anti-Irish discrimination.

Yet, in a strange twist of JFK history, the Dallas chapter was under surveillance by the very government they had served in war.

Orozco is now an 84-year-old retired school principal with thinning silver hair, pole-straight posture and precise speech. He doesn’t let the surveillance eclipse the significance of the activism. By one account, 91 percent of Texas Mexican-Americans voted for JFK — giving the senator a key state in a razor-thin election.

“The clubs saw how important it was to get involved in the voting process,” Orozco said. He and his late wife, Henrietta, co-hosted the first Viva Kennedy meeting in the Old East Dallas home of his mother.

“For the first time, after the efforts of the GI Forum, they saw the results,” he said. “They saw that it does pay to vote.”

Military service filled families with pride and confidence. In Dallas, Orozco and others took on swimming pool segregation, a Catholic Church that kept Mexican-American altar boys from field trips and a downtown bar with a “No Dogs, Negroes or Mexicans” sign.

In Corpus Christi, similar scenes unreeled before Dr. Hector P. Garcia, a Corpus Christi physician and surgeon who had served in the Army during World War II. He founded the Forum after the war. The catalysts for the movement were discrimination against Latino vets, poor treatment at the Veterans Administration, school segregation and an infamous incident over a Texas funeral wake for a soldier.

“They were veterans and not too happy to be treated like second-class citizens,” said his oldest child, Daisy Wanda Garcia, a 67-year-old Austin resident.

GI Forum chapters morphed into Viva Kennedy clubs in the Southwest, California and Illinois. Membership also came from the League of United Latin American Citizens.

“Kennedy was a dark horse,” she said. “It if hadn’t been for the Viva Kennedy clubs delivering all these votes for him, he might not have been elected. It was one of the first concerted attempts by minorities to put in office someone favorable to their cause. It was a nonviolent way to change the destiny of the Mexican-American people.”

The Viva Kennedy Club harvested support in its first rally with posters, stickers and buttons at Orozco’s grocery store, a West Dallas business owned by a relative.

Enchilada dinners in the Little Mexico housing projects and door-to-door solicitations raised money for a get-out-the-vote necessity: payment of poll taxes. Poll taxes were $1.25 per voter, the equivalent of about $10 today.

Inspired to act

On Nov. 22, 1963, Henrietta Orozco left her downtown office at noon to see the Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, in their motorcade. Her husband stayed at work, content that his wife would experience the excitement surrounding a couple “she was in love with.”

When she returned to her office, she heard the news. Years later, she’d retell the story of that day to her daughter Diana Orozco-Garrett, who was a toddler in 1963. She told her that many in her office were Republicans and joyful over the shooting, clapping as if they were at a party.

In the Orozco household, admiration ran so deep “we had portraits of Jesus and the Kennedys,” the daughter said.

Soon, the family gathered at Dealey Plaza, laying a wreath near the Texas School Book Depository. For several years, on Nov. 22 they’d repeat the ritual.

JFK’s assassination inspired deep political dedication.

“For my mom, it gave her more reason to be involved and for me, too,” Orozco-Garrett said.

As a child, she watched her mother register voters. As an adult, Orozco-Garrett was a delegate to two Democratic conventions. As an attorney, she worked on voting rights cases. In 1994, she won election as a justice of the peace, serving six years.

She now lives in Santa Fe with her husband, a former Voting Rights Act litigator.

‘Good Americans’

Earlier this year, Orozco-Garrett began researching those Kennedy years. She found documents from the FBI and the Warren Commission on surveillance of the GI Forum of Dallas.

Years earlier, the Mary Ferrell Foundation had amassed material on the JFK murder using the federal Freedom of Information Act. The foundation and its online resources (at maryferrell.org) are named for the Dallas legal secretary who became prominent among assassination experts.

That’s how Orozco-Garrett found her father’s name.

A mole inside the Dallas chapter of the GI Forum had reported to the FBI on the Mexican-American vets. He was William Lowery, a shoe salesman who died in the 1990s.

“They were good Americans and this is who the government was spying on,” Orozco-Garrett said. “They were thought to be subversive groups.”

As Orozco-Garrett pieced together those years, she enlisted help from an old friend and a fellow attorney, Sol Villasana. Up popped the name of his cousin Edmund Villasana, who is now 85. He’d been an early officer of the Dallas GI Forum chapter.

Edmund Villasana, a World War II vet, fumed when denied service at Dallas restaurants.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Sun Sep 15, 2013 9:21 pm

see link for full story

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?st ... 5124956941


Convicted Sex Offender and Police Informant Attempts to Infiltrate Seattle's Activist Community
Sunday, September 15 2013 @ 06:49 PM CDT
Contributed by: Collin Sick
Views: 39
Spying on You
Robert Childs is a level-three sex offender—convicted of child molestation, rape (twice), and failure to register as a sex offender—who has worked as an FBI and SPD informant. A few days ago, local activists began circulating emails claiming he'd been prowling around the anarchist scene, including community barbecues in the Central District. "He was there to gather information," one activist wrote in an email to The Stranger, "and is famously remembered for asking about the 'leaders' of the black bloc." (The "black bloc" is a tactic, not an organization, and does not have leaders.) Back in March, the Seattle Times mentioned Childs's history as an informant, noting that he was paid over $90,000 to work with the FBI and SPD on investigating 35 year-old Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif.

From
The Stranger

by Brendan Kiley on Tue, Sep 10, 2013
The criminal informant. When he was snooping around the activist scene, he had stubble and long hair.
Robert Childs is a level-three sex offender—convicted of child molestation, rape (twice), and failure to register as a sex offender—who has worked as an FBI and SPD informant. A few days ago, local activists began circulating emails claiming he'd been prowling around the anarchist scene, including community barbecues in the Central District. "He was there to gather information," one activist wrote in an email to The Stranger, "and is famously remembered for asking about the 'leaders' of theblack bloc." (The "black bloc" is a tactic, not an organization, and does not have leaders.)
Back in March, the Seattle Times mentioned Childs's history as an informant, noting that he was paid over $90,000 to work with the FBI and SPD on investigating 35 year-old Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif. (Childs approached them about the project, not vice versa.) Abdul-Latif got 18 years after Childs introduced him to an FBI agent posing as a weapons dealer.
But the investigation was fishy, not just because the suspects had mental-health issues, and not only because they claimed the "terror" plot was really the informant's idea (the prosecution argued the opposite), but because Childs and his SPD handler destroyed hundreds of relevant text messages after they were specifically told not to:

Robart [the US district judge presiding over the case] criticized what he called the “at-best sloppy” destruction of potential evidence by an informant — identified as Robert Childs, a five-time convicted sex offender — and Seattle police Detective Samuel DeJesus, who deleted more than 400 text messages from Childs from his cellphone after he’d been told to preserve them.
As for the use of Childs, who was paid more than $90,000 for his services, Durkan [the US attorney] said, “It’s not the saints who can bring us the sinners.”

Activists say Childs popped up shortly after May Day 2012. "He wanted to do a lot of work to get 'inside,'" one activist wrote in an email to The Stranger, "like he helped fold chairs, offered his car, was real open to helping with anything." He also creeped some people out (here is one example, another account is below), was confronted about it, and then disappeared.
At this point, Childs has not been available for comment. ("Robert Vincent" is the name he was using most recently, and that Facebook page has been taken down. Activists say the email and phone number he originally gave are no longer working.) Whether or not he was specifically assigned by the FBI or SPD to attend the barbecues, the idea that one of their paid informants who had been convicted of rape and child molestation showed up at family-oriented events on false pretenses to fish around for information about political activists is appalling.
But FBI interest in activist communities seems to be the going concern these days—earlier this summer, several climate-change and anti-coal train activists were visited at home by FBI agents. They weren't asked about any crimes, they say, but were asked to identify other activists.
Lizzi Duff, one of those activists visited by the FBI in July, says they (Duff's preferred pronoun) got another visit last Friday after speaking about surveillance at a public forum the night before.
On Thursday, Duff gave a brief talk as part of a larger presentation on state surveillance in the Northwest. During that talk, Duff called the FBI "terrorists," saying their agents are "goons with guns" who pay these home visits specifically to intimidate people and scare them away from getting involved with protests. (Attorneys representing activists who were surveilled by the US Army in Tacoma and Olympia say undercover work and police harassment of known activists "did a great job" of disrupting protest in those cities. "People fled," said attorney Larry Hildes, "people got arrested so many times they gave up activism, people have fought an endless parade of criminal charges when they did not, in fact, do anything illegal.")
The next day (Friday), as Duff was getting off a bus to do some volunteer work at a local health organization, agents showed up again. The agents said they'd heard that Duff had been "saying things" and that they would "continue to investigate." Duff strongly suspects someone at the talk the night before had reported on Duff's criticism of the FBI.
Duff emphasized that that criticism had nothing to do with threats or violence, and was merely a statement of opinion about why the FBI has been prowling around activists communities lately—namely, intimidation.
You might say that standing up in a public forum and saying "the FBI are terrorists" when you know you're on their radar is not a terribly shrewd thing to do. On the other hand, it's perfectly legal. Conservatives (and Lupe Fiasco) have gone so far as to call President Obama a "terrorist."
Did that merit a visit from the FBI? Or an investigation?
Another activist emailed a profile of Robert Childs's arc in the activist scene to The Stranger. The behavior this activist alleges has many of the classic marks of undercover police/informants—they're ostentatiously helpful and kind of clueless, they propose escalating things from normal to criminal (or from a little criminal, such as marching without a permit, to a lot criminal), they have vague explanations about their incomes and personal histories, they use supposed jail time and/or loathing for police to earn cred, and so on. From the activist's email:

Robert Childs first appeared in Seattle organizing spaces at Food For Everyone, a weekly family-friendly community meal and free grocery store in the CD that was organized by some anarchists during spring/summer of 2012. He showed up at some point in June 2012. There had been a fair amount of publicity for this program so it wasn't exactly a secret (but he did show up prior to the article that was published on the Capitol Hill Times blog). Since it was shortly after the infamous events of May Day 2012, we were naturally curious (but not overly hostile at first). This is the story he gave about how he found FFE (to the best of our recollection):
He stated that while he was in prison someone told him about the website Puget Sound Anarchists. He claimed that he saw an event invite for a benefit show for the Wildcat and attended this show (a show like this did take place on May 23rd and he gave a lot of details about it that could have been found on the PSA website). He then claims that people at the show told him about FFE and he decided to check it out.
Honestly, this was all in the first hour we met the guy and we really thought this was hella suspicious. It was too intricate and memorized and frankly pretty convoluted. We filed that away as red flag #1 (didn't take long).
At the time we were doing some organizing for the No New Juvie campaign and that was a common topic of conversation at FFE. He really used his time in prison as a wedge to get himself involved with folks. He admitted to us that he was a registered sex offender after we spotted his ankle monitor. We tried to remain neutral as he told us the stories behind his convictions (underage girls, statutory rape, unfairly incarcerated repeatedly for violations of parole, yada yada yada). We were sympathetic to this part of his story for obvious reasons, namely being a community dedicated to prison abolition. Even so, we knew he was sketchy as hell.
He continued coming to FFE, and ingratiated himself with some of the organizing partners to the point that he showed up for a couple of planning meetings at a personal residence. During one of the meetings he confessed to us that he wasn't allowed to be near schools or parks due to his ankle monitor and he wouldn't be able to do certain things or go certain places without getting into trouble. At this point we just decided to limit his involvement in any organizing projects but we didn't feel we could tell him he was not welcome at any public events.
A couple of days later he placed a really weird and random call to one of the organizers of FFE, asking where and when he should show up for the next meeting. The organizer was confused by this question, and then Childs proceeded to attempt to get the organizer to say their full legal name (first, middle, and last) while on the phone. The organizer hung up and called another organizer immediately. At this point we were completely sketched out but unclear on what to do.
He showed up to the next FFE (this was early in July 2012) and people were discussing the upcoming No New Juvie march that was to take place on July 9th. One of the main organizers for this campaign was there and talking about it to everyone. About an hour into the event this organizer took one of us aside and said "I don't know what is up with new guy but he just asked me if there is going to be a black bloc at the No New Juvie march." At this point the organizers were exasperated and uncomfortable. He was taken aside and challenged on his behavior, including the fact that he was acting like a cop and/or snitch and making people uncomfortable. He was told his presence was not welcomed any longer.
He did attend the No New Juvie march a few days later. (Here is a photo.)
We never saw him or heard from him again until he showed up in the Salish CIRCA clown group. We did not catch on to the fact that he was back in the scene until very recently due to the fact that he gave a fake name the second time around ["Robert Vincent"] and, duh, clown makeup is the perfect disguise.
Other details he told us about his life:
He said he was going to scuba-diving school.
He said no one would rent to him due to his sex-offender status so he purchased a boat.
He said he "made some money" with some guy prior to his last incarceration and that is how he bought the boat.
He explained the holes in his life story as recurring jail sentences due to multiple violations of his parole.

"It's not the saints who can bring us the sinners," US attorney Jenny Durkan said about Childs's previous work as an informant.
What kinds of sinners was "Robert Vincent" trying to find?
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