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Infiltration

Inside Southern Sons Active Club

In January, we began infiltrating the Southern Sons Active Club (SSAC), a racist group operating in the Carolinas and in Georgia that is part of the broader “Active Club” network. With this two-part report, we identify twelve SSAC members and two former members. We also discuss a Georgia participant in the “Revolutionary White Brotherhood” (formerly “Blood and Soil Crew”), a regional neo-Nazi youth group with close ties to SSAC. We document SSAC’s ties to a white supremacist now facing charges for his part in a bank robbery conspiracy. In another instance of the club attracting violence-prone neo-Nazis, we discuss an underground cell in North Carolina dedicated to “direct action” whose members were previously in SSAC.

After Infiltrating Standing Rock, TigerSwan Pitched Its Playbook

A new business model for breaking down environmental movements was being hatched in real time. On Labor Day weekend of 2016, private security dogs in North Dakota attacked pipeline opponents led by members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe as they approached earth-moving equipment. The tribal members considered the land sacred, and the heavy equipment was breaking ground to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. With a major public relations crisis on its hands, the pipeline’s parent company, Energy Transfer, hired the firm TigerSwan to revamp its security strategy.  By October, TigerSwan, founded by James Reese, a retired commander of the elite special operations Army unit Delta Force, had established a military-style pipeline security strategy. 

The FBI Used An Undercover Cop With Pink Hair To Spy On Activists

The young woman with long pink hair claimed to be from Washington state. One day during the summer of 2020, she walked into the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and offered to volunteer. “She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community. The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.

How An Israel Lobby Group Infiltrated US Education

Richmond, Virginia - In 2018, the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights (VCHR) successfully stopped the state from adopting textbook edits made by the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS), a pro-Israel “educational” institution. The ICS promotes itself as improving the accuracy of K-12 instruction on Judaism and Jewish history in the United States. Yet, backed by the Israel lobby, its strategy appears more in line with advocating a Zionist narrative than enhancing education. Today, ICS boasts that it has helped better public education in all 50 states and impacted 11 million students across the country. With this in mind, MintPress News uncovered how ICS is twisting the truth about Israel in U.S. schools. The Fight In Virginia In January 2018, Virginia activist Jeanne Trabulsi attended a Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) webinar featuring ICS.

The Same FBI

Many Americans were shocked last year when the FBI released a statement saying that a group of 13 Michigan men had plotted to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer from her vacation home.  The group, which called itself the Michigan Wolverines, allegedly planned to storm the state capitol and Whitmer’s vacation home as part of an effort to instigate a civil war. Several of them made Molotov cocktails, which they allegedly intended to throw at responding police officers, and several others had weapons.  They had spent months conducting surveillance training and practicing with their weapons.  As many as 200 people were involved in the planning, either in meetings or in conversations over Facebook.

The CIA Used To Infiltrate The Media

Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all. Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called  “Bountygate” story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan. “One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,” Greenwald tweeted.

Guatemala’s Congress Burns Amid Mass Protest

Guatemalans have taken to the streets for a national protest in rejection of President Alejandro Giammattei, and to demand that he veto the controversial general budget for 2021, approved by lawmakers on November 18. A fire broke out at the Congress in the capital city, though the main protest groups maintain that the people have continued to demonstrate peacefully in the central square which is surrounded by riot police. They warn that infiltrated groups have burned down the Congress, serving as a distraction from the popular calls in rejection of corruption.

Infiltrating Antifa: The Feds And Their Long History Of Subversion

Antifa is a leaderless, direct action platform, making it unusually easy for police, intelligence groups, and rival organizations to infiltrate and frame for violence. For example, on the same day that Trump tweeted his wish to see Antifa banned, a livestreamer was forced to run away after he incited a New York BLM group to “flip” over a truck before the crowd called him out. So, let’s see how the federal authorities infiltrate, provoke, and subvert. As usual, the state is the most violent of all the institutions involved. It subverts and oppresses as methods of its survival. The state typically directs its energy against left-wing groups while allying with far-right and fascist elements as proxies against progressives. None of this can be uttered in mainstream media, lest one is accused of conspiracy theorizing. Grassroots activists, on the other hand, are all-too-aware of these tactics.

The Police Have Been Spying On Black Reporters And Activists for Years

On Aug. 20, 2018, the first day of a federal police surveillance trial, I discovered that the Memphis Police Department was spying on me. The ACLU of Tennessee had sued the MPD, alleging that the department was in violation of a 1978 consent decree barring surveillance of residents for political purposes. One of the first witnesses called to the stand: Sgt. Timothy Reynolds, who is white. To get intel on activists and organizers, including those in the Black Lives Matter movement, he’d posed on Facebook as a “man of color,” befriending people and trying to infiltrate closed circles.

White Supremacist Infiltration Of US Police Forces

The term “systemic racism” does not mean that individuals who operate within the system are generally racists. Instead, it means the institutions we have in place produce racially disparate effects on minority populations. And, in that regard, there are well-documented empirical studies of systemic racism in law enforcement agencies—including the use of policies like stop and frisk and disparate rates of policing activities including traffic stops, searches of motorists during traffic stops, levels of respect shown during stops, misdemeanor arrests, marijuana arrests, use of SWAT teams, individuals jailed for inability to pay petty fines for moving violations, militarized policing of different neighborhoods, resolution of murders of white versus black victims, sustained complaints against police officers, and unarmed victims of police shootings.

Nothing Is Certain But Death, Taxes, And Police Infiltration Of US Protests

Local outlet KHOU 11 News was told by the Houston police department that protests over George Floyd’s murder would be attended by both “uniformed officers and plain-clothed officers”. This admission cannot be found in KHOU’s reporting any longer, but it has been screenshotted and still shows up on Google searches as of this writing. In New York, protesters have conclusively worked out that cops posing as demonstrators are currently wearing white armbands to identify each other. Ways of identifying plain-clothes cops are being circulated by protesters on social media. None of these people are paranoid or irrational. For generations it has been a well-established fact that police will reliably infiltrate protests and political movements, and it remains so to this day.

Stopping The FBI From Spying On Social Movements

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has a long history of monitoring, infiltrating and entrapping activists and social movements engaged in First Amendment activity. A new report by Rights and Dissent's legal counsel Chip Gibbons details some of these activities over the past decade. The report covers FBI surveillance from Occupy to racial justice movements, and from those who work to abolish ICE to peace activists. We speak with Gibbons about the history of the FBI, why it is not structured to be held accountable and how it fits into the whole practice of state surveillance. We also discuss how the FBI interferes with protected First Amendment rights and what people can do to stop these repressive practices. 

Infiltration And Intense Law Enforcement At Standing Rock Camp

AS LAW ENFORCEMENT officers advanced in a U-shaped sweep line down North Dakota Highway 1806 last October, pushing back Dakota Access opponents from a camp in the pipeline’s path, two sheriff’s deputies broke formation to tackle a 37-year-old Oglala Sioux woman named Red Fawn Fallis. As Fallis struggled under the weight of her arresting officers, who were attempting to put her in handcuffs, three gunshots allegedly went off alongside her. According to the arrest affidavit, deputies lunged toward her left hand and wrested a gun away from her. Well before that moment, Fallis had been caught in a sprawling intelligence operation that sought to disrupt and discredit opponents of the pipeline.

Groups Demand Answers About Police Tactics In Inauguration Protests

By Rights and Dissent. DC National Lawyers Guild (DC NLG) and Defending Rights and Dissent, two groups who defend the right to protest, are demanding answers about the Metropolitan Police Department’s conduct during anti-Trump inauguration protests. Earlier today, the two groups filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking for records pertaining to police use of force against protesters, including the deployment of chemical and projectile weapons, and the use of police infiltrators leading up to the January 20 protests. “The police assault on the right to protest on January 20 is part of a broader trend of cracking down on dissent taking place across the nation,” said Maggie Ellinger-Locke, co-chair of the DC NLG Demonstration Support Committee.

D.C. Police Infiltrated Inauguration Protest Group, Court Papers Show

By Perry Stein and Keith L. Alexander for The Washington Post - D.C. police this month searched the home of a local activist they say helped spearhead Inauguration Day protests that injured six police officers and resulted in extensive damage in downtown Washington. Dylan Petrohilos, a 28-year-old graphic designer, said officers broke through the door of his Petworth home early April 3. Police were led to the house after an undercover police officer secretly attended protest-planning meetings in the weeks before the Jan. 20 inauguration, court documents show. Authorities seized cellphones, computers and a black “anti-capitalist, anti-fascist” flag from Petrohilos’s front lawn, according to the court documents. Petrohilos has not been charged with any crimes. He says he did nothing illegal as he helped plan the protests and participated in them. The search was part of an effort by authorities to build a legal case against hundreds of activists accused of conspiring to riot and incite violence on the day President Trump was sworn in. But it also has reignited concerns from activists and others who question whether police went too far in making mass arrests Jan. 20 or in investigating demonstrators exercising their right to free speech.
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