Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Washington, DC Police Pose Next to High Tech Equipment Provided by the U.S. Navy's Naval Research Laboratory to Monitor Protestors on September 27, 2002.
Last week, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) released a trove of some 4,000 documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showing that the movements of the mostly peaceful participants in the Occupy Wall Street protests were subjected to an “enormous spying and monitoring apparatus” that included coordination between the Pentagon, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, local police, private security contractors and corporate interests.
Increasingly, Americans’ time-honored First Amendment rights to peacefully assemble and dissent are playing out as open-season on protesters and mass arrests, followed by years of evidence destruction or tampering in court cases.
As Wall Street On Parade perused the new documents from PCJF, one in particular raised red flags. Its subject line referred to the Occupy Wall Street movement as “Friggin Occupy” and it came from a veteran police officer.
The PCJF is currently representing plaintiffs in a class action on behalf of some 700 peaceful marchers who were herded like cattle on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011 during the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests and subjected to mass arrest by the New York City Police Department.
On June 7, 2012, Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that New York Police Department officers are not entitled to qualified immunity from the mass arrests and ordered the lawsuit to proceed. The NYPD filed an appeal. A decision from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals is expected at any time.
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