BANK EMAIL REVEALS OFFER TO SPY ON OCCUPY ANONYMOUS PROTESTERS FOR POLICE
Kerry-anneClass Warfare Exists
Last year, Bank of America offered the services of its “social media trolling” team to police in order to monitor the social media activity of people affiliated with the Occupy movement, boasting that it could gather intelligence and on activists ahead of planned demonstrations.
The information comes from emails written by Kim Triplett-Kolerich, Vice President for Global Security at the Bank, offering to provide Washington State Police with surveillance of activists ahead of the Million Mask March on November 5th 2013. The emails were published thanks to a Washington State public records request.
In his email, Triplett-Kolerich, himself an ex-Washington State Patrol sergeant, writes:
“I will most likely find it first as Social Media trolling is not what the WSP does best–Bank of America has a team of 20 people and that’s all they do all day and then pass it to us around the country!!”
(Million Mask Marchers head toward Capitol building Nov 5th 2013, image by twitter user @BatmanWI)
With its Million Mask March on 5th November, hacktivist group Anonymous succeeded in mobilising hundreds of thousands of people in 477 locations in over 150 countries around the world. Protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks hit the streets of in Indonesia, North America, Asia, Europe and South America, calling time on our current political and economic system.
In Olympia, 100 protesters gathered and the protest was non-violent from start to finish. Despite this, local activist Andrew Hendricks (who helped publicise the emails) days authorities spent 600 hours of response time and $28,000 on policing it.
This is not the first time Bank of America have been caught surveilling Occupy or Anonymous activists. Last February, an Anonymous-affiliated group leaked hacked emails containing internal reports from the Bank that confirmed one of its sub-contractors was spying on activists. Bank of America also cut off donations to whistle blowing site Wikileaks, after they claimed to be in possession of sensitive documents of the Bank’s. Anonymous responded with cyber attacks that saw a panicked Bank of America hastily buy up a tranche of abusive web domains for its senior executives.
It has been revealed previously that Corporate America joined with security agencies and the police, to spy in Occupy protesters in 2011.
A Freedom of Information request by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed the Occupy Movement had been heavily surveilled by a specially established Domestic Security Alliance Council, which saw all the major security agencies coordinating a crackdown with Banks and Corporations.
Writing on the issue in The Guardian, Naomi Klein states:
“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 documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.”
This is a proven collaboration of corporate interests and the state to suppress a political movement challenging their power. The purpose of the infiltration was to pass information on the composition and the plans of the Occupy Movement to the financial services industry they were demonstrating. The tax payer funded security agencies were effectively spying on tax payers, for banks. They were passing information to The Federal Reserve, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan to name but a few.
Perhaps the most sinister revelation in the documents, is the outline plans for assassination of ‘prominent’ activists by sniper fire, whilst the heavily redacted documents mean we do not know by who, when, how or under what conditions.
“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.”
These latest revelations confirm that corporate America is partaking in continued and pervasive surveillance of American citizens, in collusion with and occasionally on behalf of, police and security agencies. Will US citizens really stand for this level of intrusion into their basic freedoms to associate, assemble and protest? For democracy’s sake, we must hope not.
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