Feds Helped Coordinate Occupy X Crackdowns

Lawrence_Bird writes "The Feds helped break up the Occupy protests by providing advice and assistance from the FBI and DHS. From the article: 'Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said on Monday that her city and others across the country coordinated their crackdowns of Occupy Wall Street camps. Rick Ellis, a Minneapolis-based journalist for Examiner.com, reports that these cities also had the help of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation." In related conspiracy news, apcullen wrote in with a story by Time Magazine guest columnist Naomi Wolf who claims: "Instead of imminent safety issues, the timing of the crackdown was far more likely to do with the fact that the Occupy movement was planning something media-savvy at last: a 'carnival' on Wall Street on Thursday in which protesters would telegenically tell their individual stories of hardship, job loss and disenfranchisement. It is that event that posed a 'safety risk' — to the efforts of Wall Street and the Bloomberg administration to manage the narrative."

Comments

Mayor Quan Denies This

[ryants]

Denial reported here.:

Update: A spokesperson for Oakland Mayor Jean Quan has emailed to deny that Quan "coordinated" Oakland's response to Occupy protesters with other mayors. "Mayor Quan never said that cities with occupy encampments were coordinating their removal efforts," Susan Piper wrote in an email. "The mayor has talked with other mayors to share experiences." In a subsequent email, I asked Piper if Quan received advice from either the DHS or the FBI on how to respond to protesters, as reported was by Rick Ellis of Examiner.com. Piper's response: "Not true."

The question practically answers itself.

[overshoot]

How could crime have "ramped up" when there were so many cops standing around watching them?

Watch the videos from Oakland. The protesters viciously assaulted the police nightsticks, shields, tear-gas cannisters, etc. with military-grade abdominal muscles, heads, and faces.

I'd tell you to watch the New York videos, but the media blackout was quite effective.

Re:Go with the simple over complex theory

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who works on Wall St (in financial services, but not for a bank/hedgefund/trading desk of any kind), I can tell you definitively that they have not disrupted "Wall St" in any way, other than vaguely disrupting foot traffic on the street that is named Wall. The fundamental thing people seem to not understand is that Wall St is really just a tourist attraction these days. Only a handful of guys still work on the stock exchange floor and almost no trading is done there. And the banks all moved their offices to midtown, Jersey City or Connecticut years ago. If they go through with their Wall St Carnival or whatever the hell they plan, it will accomplish nothing but getting a bunch of people arrested, as they've been told repeatedly that will happen if they do anything on Wall St itself without a proper permit.

Re:Suprised they went on as long as they did

[LateArthurDent]

No, but just because you are protesting doesn't allow you to violate the law. If there are laws in place restricting the ability to set up a camp in a park, bring in generators, create health code violations etc., it must apply equally to all citizens.

I see your point, and I concede. I approve of civil disobedience, but the disobedience in question should apply to laws you disagree with. Unless they're protesting against laws that restrict the ability to camp in a park, they shouldn't camp in the park.

Here's a few examples...Granted, these idiots are the 1% of the 99% that really give the well meaning protesters a bad name

Yeah, I agree with you completely. People start with the reasonable intent of trying to make themselves heard and then cross the line by wanting to drown out the voices of the opposition.

Re:Go with the simple over complex theory

[wierd_w]

It sounds like they need to disrupt wallstreet digitally.

this would actually be something good for anonymous's army of script kiddies to apply themselves to.

Essentially, you flood the automatic trade daemons with false quote data. You don't do this the way your typical con-man does, which is to selectively quote false prices to change the aggregate stock prices in such a way as to sweeten his own investment opportunities; instead, you selectively quote false prices to initiate a bear market, and drive down trading, if not encourage wholesale shorting of major stocks. Banks create money from thin air, this would return that conjured money back to the void whence it came.

Alternatively, if you don't want to have a hand in destroying the world economy on such a drastic scale, you could instead work from the standpoint of simply creating congestion. Remember those stories of new fiber runs being laid for wallstreet traffic, because a few ms of latency can translate to millions of dollars of lost trades? Bingo. Latency would injure wallstreet.

Both approaches lend themselves well to scriptkiddies. Anonymous is missing an epic opportunity.

Re:This was a good thing

[WillDraven]

I'm really getting tired of all these "ZOMG, Poop!" comments. The protesters tried to bring in porta-potties but were denied. If you want to bitch at anybody about the terrible health conditions, bitch at the city for not allowing the protesters to provide the sensible sanitation arrangements that they tried to.