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Showing posts with label Occupy Wall St. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Occupy Wall St. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF BEING ARRESTED FOR PROTESTING
by nicocoinicon on October 24, 2011
I was one of the people arrested on Friday for protesting against forcibly shutting down Occupy Melbourne. I have never been arrested before, and had never even considered it a possibility. I realise that I am a white middle class male, and that there are others in our society who are confronted by these realities on a regular basis. Despite this, I feel that my experience is worth sharing as it has had a huge impact on me.
Many police seemed to enjoy the opportunity to cause some violence. At one stage a girl I was next to was choked as a policeman pushed her against the people behind with his arm across her throat. As her face went bright red I grabbed his arm and said “let her go” at which point he pushed my head back instead, to which my sore neck is a testament. Afterwards, she asked him, in tears, “why did you choke me?” and he smiled. On the other hand, I did not see a single protester act violently, an aspect of the day which even Robert Doyle doesn’t seem to deny, only confuse.
I can be seen with my face to the camera and my hands in the air earlier in the day. From the Herald Sun online.
When the protesters in City Square had been arrested and the horses were brought up to Collins Street a man came up to me and started yelling in my face “those horses are going to crush your skull” and “when I see you in the back of the van I’m going to fuck you up”. My first response was to ask him why he was saying this, but then as I looked him up and down I realised he was a cop in plain clothes (the black and yellow police boots were the giveaway). I took out my phone to take a photo of him, but he quickly turned away and ran across the intersection and across the police line. It was the first, but certainly not the last time that I had failed to realise what was happening. Before Friday I considered myself to be quite cynical, but I was never ready to believe that the police would act like this.
After the horses pushed the main group of people out of the Swanston and Collins intersection (trampling a few people along the way) there was a lot of discussion among the protesters. It was clear that if we stayed put the police were going to push us again soon, so after a show of hands it was agreed that everyone would march up Swanston Street towards Burke. So at around 3pm, everyone turned to face North, with our backs to the police, and began to move forward. At this point, once the protesters were moving away from them, and perhaps because the cameras now faced away from them, the police began to push forward.
They shouted “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE” and pushed those of us at the back against the people in front of us. Ahead, protesters were blocked by the traffic stuck in the Bourke Street intersection, so the crowd had slowed to a crawl. I remember yelling “I’m moving as fast as I can”. When someone grabbed the backpack of the person to my right, I reached out towards him. Instantly, another officer grabbed my arm, twisting it behind my back. Another protester shouted “let him go you’ll break his arm” and a voice behind me shouted “I fucking hope so”.
Within half a minute, the guy on the right with the backpack, the guy to my left and a few others nearby had all been pulled behind the police line. I couldn’t see what was happening to them because I was facing the opposite direction and being constantly shoved forwards. Someone then grabbed me, lifted me up in the air and threw me on the ground behind the line. As I scrambled to get back up I was shoved back down to my hands and knees again.There were at least a dozen other people around me having the exact same thing done to them. It sounds daft now but I remember saying out loud “I haven’t done anything wrong” still completely shocked. I felt like I was ready to cry. I put my hands in the air to show that I wasn’t going to struggle, and a policewoman pulled them down behind my back. They then pushed me forwards, one on either side, to the back of a truck where they grabbed my phone from my pocket and started reaching around my clothes. I asked what I had done wrong but was met with no reply. The woman who took my phone asked “do you have any ID” and perhaps naively I told them which pocket had my wallet. She then searched all my other pockets and took my keys, some coins, a handkerchief and a mandarin peel and my shoes for good measure. I’m not sure if me raising my arms and telling them what I had on me amounted to consenting to a search, but at the time I was scared and just wanted it to be over. I asked “where will you take me” and she told me the Custody Center, which later turned out to be false. Because I was getting answers now I again asked I had done and this time the reply was “you failed to comply with a police order” a cause which on it’s own is ludicrous. As someone has put it to me since; the police could order me to shoot my own mother.
The truck was entirely metallic with no windows. One guy sitting across from me was asking “can I please go to the toilet, you can bring me right back” every time they brought another person in. Eventually there were eleven of us in our section, one was a kid of seventeen who had come to the protests from school. The majority of the time spent in the back was spent with the engine off, occasionally we would move for few minutes at a time before stopping again. We tried to guess what was happening, the two main theories being that they were either driving around and letting people out one and a time (starting with the other section) or that they weren’t sure which station to take us to. At one point we realised we were all sitting on an angle and the van must be parked on a slope. After what seemed like an eternity we drove for a bit longer, the sounds letting us know we were on a freeway and then entering a car park with roller doors, signalling that we had indeed been taken to a police station.
After another stretch of time someone opened the door and said “first one”. We chose the guy who had been denied a chance to use a bathroom by the cops in the city. Around ten minutes later police took another person (again we let a guy who needed to piss go first), and then finally told us all to get out. As we were escorted through the underground car park the police pointed out our torn and filthy clothes, ripped by their colleagues and dirtied by the horseshit covered streets we had been thrown down and laughed. We were taken to a small bathroom, and I stood out the front of the door because I didn’t need to go. It was only after a double take that I realised this was the holding cell. The room was disgusting, it stank like shit and one of the metal benches was covered in blood. Every five minutes or so they would come in and take another one of us. When it was my turn I was taken down a corridor to a desk where a policeman asked for my name, date of birth and address. Lining the corridor was a row of shoes. I peered over the desk, I could see a bank of TVs, most showed empty rooms, but one showed some of the people I was with and some others who I hadn’t seen before who must have been from the other section. I could also see our property bags behind the counter and recognised mine. This was the first time I had seen a clock since they took my phone and it was 5:30, which meant I had been in the truck for over two hours. After checking that I didn’t have a belt (I guess they thought I might hang myself). I was brought into a room with FCELL painted on the walls, which one of the others had overheard being called the “female cell”. The “male cell” was already full.
In the cell they used temperature to tire us out and break us. First they heated the cell until we were all lying on the floor in silence, exhausted. They then swapped and cooled us right down, and we suddenly all got up, pacing around the room to keep warm. Just as suddenly, they would then make it unbearably hot again, leaving us even more weaker than before. I’m sure this procedure must be common knowledge for many, but for me this was completely shocking. It left me with an unbearable mixture of fear, lethargy and boredom. At one point I tried to balance a coin on its side to keep myself from thinking about what was happening and realised that my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
After a few more hours they opened the door and asked for me specifically. I went back to the desk, where they told me I was banned from City Square and environs until Sunday evening, an area which ranged from Queen Street to Spring, from Flinders to Latrobe. At first I thought I was being told to sign an agreement, so I asked what would happen if I didn’t agree. They told me that I would have to see what the Governor said, which meant waiting in the cell until Monday. It took me a little while to realise that I was just being formally told this information, and didn’t have to agree with anything. So I took the ban notice, signed for the return of my belongings and was released without charge. I later found out they asked for me first because I had someone waiting outside. It was 8pm, five hours after I had been grabbed out of a group of peaceful protesters.
There is clearly more I could say about my own beliefs in regards to the Occupy movement, but my intention in writing this is to document what happened to me, not to further a particular agenda. However I don’t want my story dismissed through the type of stereotyping that has seen people labeled professional protesters, a term which I don’t even begin to understand. I would like to stress that I did not attend the protest in order to be arrested, and I spent most of the day refilling plastic bottles of water and passing them throughout the crowd. So briefly, for those of you who don’t know me, no I am not unemployed, drawing government benefits, a member of a union, political party or activist group – not that I think that should matter in the slightest. I was there because I believe the right to protest is one of the most important rights we have, it plays a crucial role in any democracy. A few flimsy excuses about hanging heavy items and having some tents shouldn’t be enough to clear a protest entirely with two hours notice. Most importantly, to first threaten a group with violence and to then blame them for the violence after they don’t give in to your threats is an incredibly dangerous brand of flawed logic.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
MEET THE GUY WHO SNITCHED ON OCCUPY WALL ST TO THE FBI AND NYPD
Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he's done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads "a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world." But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers' social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.
What may much more alarming to Occupy Wall Street organizers is that while Ryan was monitoring September17discuss, he was forwarding interesting email threads to contacts at the NYPD and FBI, including special agent Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the FBI's New York-based cyber security team.
On September 18th, the day after the protest's start, Ryan forwarded an email exchange between Occupy Wall Street organizers to Loyd. The email exchange is harmless: Organizers discuss how they need to increase union participation in the protest. "We need more outreach to workers. The best way to do that is by showing solidarity with them," writes organizer Jackie DiSalvo in the thread. She then lists a group of potential unions to work with.
Another organizer named Conor responds: "+1,000,000 to Jackie's proposal on working people/union struggles outreach and solidarity. Also, why not invite people to protest Troy Davis's execution date at Liberty Plaza this Monday?"
Five minutes after Conor sent his email, Ryan forwarded the thread—with no additional comment—to Loyd's FBI email address. "Thanks!" Loyd responded. He cc'd his colleague named Ilhwan Yum, a fellow cybersecurity expert at the agency, on the reply.
On September 26th, Ryan forwarded another email thread to Agent Loyd. But this time he clued in the NYPD as well, sending the email to Dennis Dragos, a detective with the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad.
The NYPD might have been very grateful he did so, since it involved a proposed demonstration outside NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. In the thread, organizers debated whether to crash an upcoming press conference planned by marijuana advocates to celebrate NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly ordering officers to halt arrests over possession of small amounts of marijuana.
"Should we bring some folks from Liberty Plaza to chant "SHAME" for the NYPD's recent brutalities on Thursday night for the Troy Davis and Saturday for the Occupy Wall Street march?" asked one person in the email thread. (That past Saturday, the video of NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying a protester had gone viral.) Ryan promptly forwarded the email thread to Loyd at the FBI and Dragos at the NYPD.
Interestingly, it was Ryan who revealed himself as a snitch. We learned of these emails from the archive Ryan leaked yesterday in the hopes of undermining the Occupy Wall Street movement. In assembling the archive of September17discuss emails, it appears he accidentally included some of his own forwarded emails indicating he was ratting out organizers.
"I don't know, I just put everything I had into one big package," Ryan said when asked how the emails ended up in the file posted to Andrew Breitbart's blog. Some security expert.
But Ryan didn't just tip off the authorities. He was also giving information to companies as well. When protesters discussed demonstrating in front of morning shows likeToday and Good Morning America, Ryan quickly forwarded the thread to Mark Farrell, the chief security officer at Comcast, the parent company of NBC Universal.
Ryan wrote:
Since you are the CSO, I am not sure of your role in NBC since COMCAST owns them.
There is a huge protest in New York call "Occupy Wall Street". Here is an email of stunts that they will try to pull on the TODAY show.We have been heavily monitoring Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.
"Thanks Tom," Farrell responded. "I'll pass this to my counterpart at NBCU."
Did the FBI and/or NYPD ask him to monitor Occupy Wall Street? Was he just forwarding the emails on out of the goodness of his heart? In a phone interview with us, Ryan denied being an informant. "I do not work with the FBI," he said.
Ryan said he knows Loyd through their mutual involvement in the Open Web Application Security Project, a non-profit computer security group of which Ryan is a board member. Ryan said he sent the emails to Loyd unsolicited simply because "everyone's curious" about Occupy Wall Street, and he had a ground-eye view. "Jordan never asked me for anything."
Was he sending every email he got to the authorities? Ryan said he couldn't remember how many he'd passed on to the FBI or NYPD, or other third parties. Later he said that he only forwarded the two emails we noticed, detailed above.
But even if he'd been sending them on regularly, they were probably of limited use to the authorities. Most of the real organizing at Occupy Wall Street happens face-to-face, according to David Graeber, who was one of the earliest organizers. "We did some practical work on [the email list] at first—I think that's where I first proposed the "we are the 99%" motto—but mainly it's just an expressive forum," he wrote in an email. "No one would seriously discuss a plan to do something covert or dangerous on such a list."
But regardless of how many emails Ryan sent—or whether Loyd ever asked Ryan to spy on Occupy Wall Street—Loyd was almost certainly interested in the emails he received. Loyd has helped hunt down members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, and he and his colleagues in the FBI's cyber security squad have been monitoring their involvement in Occupy Wall Street.
At a New York cyber security conference one day before the protest began, Loyd cited Occupy Wall Street as an example of a "newly emerging threat to U.S. information systems." (In the lead-up to Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous had issued threats against the New York Stock Exchange.) He told the assembled crowd the FBI has been "monitoring the event on cyberspace and are preparing to meet it with physical security,"according to a New York Institute of Technology press release.
We contacted Loyd to ask about his relationship with Ryan and if any of the information Ryan passed along was of any use to the agency. He declined to answer questions and referred us to the FBI's press office. We'll post an update if we hear back from them.
We asked Ryan again this morning about how closely he was working with the authorities. Again, he claimed it was only these two emails, which is unlikely given he forwarded them to the FBI and NYPD without providing any context or explaining where he'd gotten them.
And he detailed his rationale for assisting the NYPD:
My respect for FDNY & NYPD stems from them risking their lives to save mine when my house was on fire in sunset park when I was 8 yrs old. Also, for them risking their lives and saving many family and friends during 9/11.Don't you find it Ironic that out of all the NYPD involved with the protest, [protesters] have only targeted the ones with Black Ribbons, given to them for their bravery during 9/11?I am sorry if we see things differently, I try to look at everything as a whole and in patterns. Everything we do in life and happens in life, there is a pattern behind it.
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