Rather than chasing terrorists, or following up on leads on terrorists, the government has turned the surveillance state toward law-abiding Americans engaged in peaceful protest.
Russia twice warned about the suspects in the recent Boston Marathon bombing. Boston Police and federal intelligence agencies instead focused their resources on peaceful Wall Street protests.
Investigators spy on peaceful protestors and
ignore Russian warnings:
In the fall of 2011, a key Boston police counterterror intelligence unit --
funded with millions of dollars in U.S. homeland security grants -- was closely
monitoring anti-Wall Street demonstrations, including tracking the Facebook
pages and websites of the protesters and writing reports on the potential impact
on "commercial and financial sector assets" in downtown areas, according to
internal police documents.
The police monitoring of the activities of Occupy Boston -- an off-shoot of
the Occupy Wall Street protests that swept the country in 2011 -- came during a
period after the U.S. government received the second of two warnings from the
Russian government about the radical Islamic ties of alleged Boston Marathon
bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
... monitoring was an example of the “vast expenditure of government money” to
collect intelligence on activities unrelated to terrorism, in violation of First
Amendment rights.
FBI monitors
peaceful protestors:
[T]he FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat
even though the agency acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly
called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy
protests.
“This production, 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,” stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard... “These documents show that the FBI and the
Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and
banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.
These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto
intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”
While Occupy Wall Street was composed mostly of independent and Democratic voters, Tea Parties were typically composed of Republicans and some independent voters. Bringing equal opportunity to government spying and harassment, the
IRS targeted Tea Party groups for special investigation:
Internal Revenue Service workers between 2010 and 2012 singled out groups with
"Tea Party" and "Patriots" in their name for extra scrutiny of their
applications for tax-exempt status.
... In some instances, the workers asked for donor lists, which violated laws.
The IRS lied to attempt to
cover up the political targeting:
When the question was put to the IRS, the agency denied it. At a House Ways and
Means subcommittee hearing in March 2012, Commissioner Douglas Shulman insisted
that "There's absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that
happens to people" if they want to get tax-exempt status.
Will there be indictments for government employees breaking the law? Does anyone still believe the government is protecting Americans or protecting big government budgets?
It's not about left versus right, it's about big government versus you.
