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Leaked 'Standing Rock' Documents Reveal Invasive Counterterrorism Measures (theintercept.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
"A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures," reports The Intercept, decrying "the fusion of public and private intelligence operations." Saying the private firm started as a war-on-terror contractor for the U.S. military and State Department, the site details "sweeping and invasive" surveillance of protesters, citing over 100 documents leaked by one of the firm's contractors.
The documents show TigerSwan even havested information about the protesters from social media, and "provide extensive evidence of aerial surveillance and radio eavesdropping, as well as infiltration of camps and activist circles... The leaked materials not only highlight TigerSwan's militaristic approach to protecting its client's interests but also the company's profit-driven imperative to portray the nonviolent water protector movement as unpredictable and menacing enough to justify the continued need for extraordinary security measures... Internal TigerSwan communications describe the movement as 'an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component' and compare the anti-pipeline water protectors to jihadist fighters."
The Intercept reports that recently "the company's role has expanded to include the surveillance of activist networks marginally related to the pipeline, with TigerSwan agents monitoring 'anti-Trump' protests from Chicago to Washington, D.C., as well as warning its client of growing dissent around other pipelines across the country." They also report that TigerSwan "has operated without a license in North Dakota for the entirety of the pipeline security operation."
The documents show TigerSwan even havested information about the protesters from social media, and "provide extensive evidence of aerial surveillance and radio eavesdropping, as well as infiltration of camps and activist circles... The leaked materials not only highlight TigerSwan's militaristic approach to protecting its client's interests but also the company's profit-driven imperative to portray the nonviolent water protector movement as unpredictable and menacing enough to justify the continued need for extraordinary security measures... Internal TigerSwan communications describe the movement as 'an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component' and compare the anti-pipeline water protectors to jihadist fighters."
The Intercept reports that recently "the company's role has expanded to include the surveillance of activist networks marginally related to the pipeline, with TigerSwan agents monitoring 'anti-Trump' protests from Chicago to Washington, D.C., as well as warning its client of growing dissent around other pipelines across the country." They also report that TigerSwan "has operated without a license in North Dakota for the entirety of the pipeline security operation."
And this is legal how? Yet, don't copy that floppy or you'll get 10 years in a FPMITA prison.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
The definition of "terrorist" is "anyone you don't like". And private contractors will turn people into proven terrorists, for a fee. Gotta love the free market.
Learn to love Alaska
Considering activists as jihadists is the first step. Then you consider jihadists have been considered illegal fighters (a term invented to spare international laws on war), and you can send an activist straight to Guantanamo. Brilliant.
They are comparing murderers who kill in the name of God to peaceful people who want to save their history, and more importantly, their watershed. What a bunch of follow-the-money bullshit.
I forgot to include the link about Standing Rock protestors leaving literal tons of pollution behind.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
involves anticipation of this possibility.
"havested" should be "harvested".
The pipeline people were paid by the corporations anyway. None of the oil goes to America anyway, it's being refined and sent to China. Whining about paid protesters while ignoring the paid mercenaries hired by corporations seems like a stretch.
Do we need counter terrorism invasive measures? Are invasive measures vital to counter terrorism? Maybe, but that's not the problem. The real problem is who controls the huge data linked to most people in the country, since 99.999% is not related to terrorism at all. We need an independent and trustworthy organism that controls data extraction, storage, usage and destruction. Until then, the invasive measures will always be looked at suspiciously.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I wish the builders of other infrastructure could afford a counter protest force like this one. We could get that telescope built on Maunakea, get some new-generation nuclear plants started if we wished to get serious about carbon, and California could finally finish its bullet train.
That's kinda one of those 'woah' posts, not for the content of its narrative, but for the existence of the narrative. If this security firm was collaborating with law enforcement/intelligence, and trying to induce the arrest or investigation of protestors as a deterrent to protest, that's playing with fire: if the result of extensive investigations of these people by the world's best intel agencies was that they are Native Americans trying to protect their land not Russians, and furthermore they wasted lots of time and resources to discover that, and their work was only intended to intimidate people excercising constitutional rights, that's chutzpah, that's going to get some pushback.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
That is shocking and would not be expected.
Who would of thought that a group tracking the actions of another group would stoop to harvesting information about them from social media.
Then to follow that up they used the term "militaristic" to describe them collecting data. So they started to attack them?
Overall rather bias article to describe one group that was tracking the actions of another group.
They left their tents and gear behind (and yes some trash)
That is totally wrong. They left over 200 cars, with all of the leaking fluids you'd expect from cars too worn to take away. They did not leave "some trash", they left 48 million pounds of trash. That is not a typo, that is from the The North Dakota Department of Emergency Services who hand to pay for carting that off (over $1 million taxpayers had to pay).
But frankly what I thought was even worse (even though destroying hundreds of acres of grass and deeply polluting the watershed was bad enough), they also abandoned dogs - remember this was in winter, in sub-zero temperatures. That is the kind of SCUM you are supporting. Between fields of leaking cars and abandoned animals (may of which died BTW), How can you claim those are environmentalists of any form?
At the time I left a large donation to the local animal shelter that had to handle the nonsense, you may want to consider doing the same as an act on contrition.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Take care of the poor. Outside of the occasional loon organized terror only works because we've got millions (billions?) that lack food security. Said it before, will probably say it again: you abandon your poor at your peril.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
All hush-hush top secret shadow organizations have a web site.
http://www.tigerswan.com/
And twitter feed.
https://twitter.com/TigerSwan
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Not to mention the sixty million gallons of contaminated water you dumped into the river.
Sorry but these days the only people contaminating the water that badly are with the EPA.
But you'll be happy to know none of them will ever be punished because hey, government employees so no consequences for even the most horrific failures!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
beee-causeeee....
*sticks tongue out and thinks hard* ....it's his job to lead by example / set the tone for the whole country?
Did I win?
Requiem for the American Dream
Let's say that all of that were true, what's your argument? That they don't deserve clean water because they litter? Help me understand that position.
Let's say that all of that were true, what's your argument? That they don't deserve clean water because they litter? Help me understand that position.
It's pretty clear, but I'll spell it out: The protesters are not adults to be taken seriously. They can't even manage the environmental stewardship issues that are well within their control. We're certainly not going to let them impose mob rule on infrastructure projects that have passed all the required regulatory approvals.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Whining about paid protesters while ignoring the paid mercenaries hired by corporations seems like a stretch.
Good to see everybody's employed!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Let's say that all of that were true, what's your argument? That they don't deserve clean water
First of all, I guess not because the PROTESTORS have polluted the water far more than the pipeline ever would have. If you are supporting the protestors you are supporting the POLLUTION of the local watershed.
But the main point is this - they were not REAL protestors in that they did not care about that which they were supposedly protesting for. They were just another group backed by some large corporate slush fund and/or government entity trying to slow down pipeline expansion so some foreign oil money could hold on a little while longer to the profits they enjoy.
SOME of the people there probably even believed in what they were protesting for. But the group that ran the protest sure did not, and the end result went DIRECTLY against the stated goal of the protest - to protect the water supply of the reservation. Instead they befouled it and killed of vast acreage of grasslands in the area (which is still polluted BTW, they only carted the surface layer of trash off, not whatever sank deep into the soil). The poor people that did believe were simply tools, as so many are these days *cough*like you*cough*.
Had they ACTUALLY cared they would have had a smaller protest with more limited people which would have been just as effective. Had they ACTUALLY cared they would have followed the "leave no trace" principle which those of us who care for the environment know by heart, and rotated the site along with removing all waste and vehicles. Instead they did none of those things and left a scar on the land that will linger for centuries. You go and cheer that scar, you go ahead and cheer the befouling of the planet, I cannot.
I'll let you have the last word since you are plainly set on ignoring the obvious truth (corroborated by many sources who live in the area) and instead supporting some remote oil baron while telling yourself a lie so you can feel good about it. Disgusting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just hope you feel the same way when it's your water at stake.
Boy this is Deja Vu. It's exactly what happened with the Unions, the Pinkerton Detective agency and the tacit support of the US government in the early part of last century. Look up Eugene Debs in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... He helped form the first nation wide trade union in the US (for the trains). And when they struck the Pullman company arranged with the complicity of the US govt to acquire the US mail contract making it a federal crime not to couple pulman cars to trains. Along the way someone set off a bomb (probably the pinkertons to frame the union strikers) and the entire union leadership was imprisoned. there's a nice picture of them all in their sunday best taken together in jail on the wikipedia site. (ironically in Woodstock, a place more known for 60s rock concerts now) . While in prison together Debs started reading various socialist literature and when they were release formed the Socialist party in the USA. He ran for president several times getting millions of votes (6% of the popular vote). He became famous for a stump speech saying no working class person should be going to fight in World War II because it's just a richmans war making the munitions makers richer and killing the poor. He was arrested for treason and sedition, sentenced to 10 years in prison, stripped of his own right to vote, and still ran for president (getting 3.4% of the popular vote while in his jail cell). In the court room when asked to recant he said
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
While in prison he started the Prison Reform movement, and President Harding pardoned him partly hoping to quash that. He was nominated for the Nobel peace prize for his astute portrayl of World War I as the Capitalist war.
Nearly every use of the Sedition act has been against political prisoners and frequently for union busting.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Let's say that all of that were true, what's your argument? That they don't deserve clean water because they litter? Help me understand that position.
It's pretty clear, but I'll spell it out: The protesters are not adults to be taken seriously. They can't even manage the environmental stewardship issues that are well within their control. We're certainly not going to let them impose mob rule on infrastructure projects that have passed all the required regulatory approvals.
One more time... what's your argument? That because they are [insert literally anything here], that in a first world democratic nation they do not deserve a basic survival commodity of clean water?
So what else don't they deserve? Protection of the law? Freedom of speech?
Land of the free, home of the [people I approve of]
Make it leak where the rivers aren't.
You didn't do the math, did you. The tribal council accepted $375,000. Assuming they passed 100% on to the protesters, that comes to the lordly sum of $125 each. Wow, they must be living large now in their new Lambos.
Hey, we had a pipeline going across Alaska since the late 70's. With drunken idiots with guns trying to shoot holes in it and the occasional maintenance mishap leading to spills, Alaska has somehow not turned into a barren oil-soaked wasteland yet.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
When people protested in East Germany, people who risked at lot by using a television camera did not get caught.
Dont use your own equipment. If your wealthy enough to be able to afford to protest all day, buy an older weather sealed dslr camera and lens. No need for in camera wifi. Use the card to get your files to a computer of editing and upload later.
Ensure the serial number in the camera is not linked to your name with every file uploaded or created.
Take some images and video of the protest. Remove any camera serial numbers in the files, edit, add a voice over and your groups logo and branding, compress, then upload it using some existing network and on a computer that won't be used later.
Do not take a "computer" thats "fast" or "sealed against the weather" from protest to protest. Dont use wifi or networking from your computer like device.
Sneaker net your video file to a final separate, cheap device just for fast networking.
All MAC and any other unique details about all networks will be collected on.
Think about what device connects to that final network to send a file to the world. A random strangers offer of a free network, computer help could be an undercover contractor or police wanting to get more direct access to your hardware and software, OS.
Protect your devices and equipment from digital tracking and "new" best friends or "smart" friendly strangers with free offers of help.
Police and contractors can be anyone, thats why they are doing undercover work in protests. Some are past protesters who had to make a deal with the police to stay free. They have to collect it all and work very hard at making new friends.
While a protester might have been taking years of French or arts at some liberal university, police and contractors learned how to become "protesters" over the years.
The undercover officers offers will be for device access to help with "media" or "editing"
Every face at a protest will be stored for facial recognition. Any and all networks or networked devices will be collected on.
Read up on what the NSA, GCHQ, CIA and other 5 eye nations do when they "collect it all".
The same ability is now on the open market at a low cost for a city, state or contractor. Dont trust any hardware, software or OS thats been near a protest after a protest.
Anyone could have added code, altered the device, accessed the OS or collected its network details.
Ensure the only collection a city or federal gov or its contractors can do is facial recognition. Keep your hardware and software way from their networks.
A streaming cell phone is great for recoding an event and not having data erased on site but it comes with the cost of collection and device or OS alteration.
Dont bring malware pushed down a network home after a protest. If your security aware, use dedicated devices as bait and see if any devices are altered. Study bait hardware later under Tempest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... conditions but don't allow your own deices to get altered to test for such gov/police/contractor pushed malware.
The final thing to consider is the new stranger in your group. Get them talking about their past and get their image and see what different free and other image search products find online.
City or state contractors might not have the skills to remove all past images or their story will not mach a few traces found online.
Federal and contractors working undercover have the ability to rewrite online social media so their undercover "story" will mach perfectly to any and all online data sets that can be searched for.
If your protest group has some international funding, take the image to any of the big national private detective groups in the USA.
Their social media databases are long term, static, always updating and do not get altered like the online consumer networks.
They can rewind most accounts to creation and see ho
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
To my eye all these posts about the giant pile of garbage are a giant pile of bike-shed garbage.
It looks and smells like standard online disruption tactics, when there are far bigger fish to fry.
Also, any post (or poster) citing "roommate" as a source (with or without ambiguous irony) needs to mentally hell-banned. Don't waste mental effort attempting to parse ambiguous irony bait. Anyone with a constructive intent would know better than to further cloud a crap fight.
A worthwhile post: (1) does not mention giant piles of abandoned garbage, (2) does not employ irony or sarcasm on any level, (3) does not mention roommates or any other form of "some person I know".
I guess that's just for future reference, as I figure this thread is fried by opposing ideological troll armies, no matter what.
What a shitty world we're creating.
This place simply can't support this discussion, unless we're going to add:
-1 small-fish bike shed
-1 failure to speak plainly
-1 second-hand non-entity
And probably more.
One more thing about the money angle.
Over the years, I've listened to most of the EconTalk back catalog. I agree with Russ Roberts about 60% of the time, yet I have some pretty strong disagreements in the other 40%.
Part of his standard spiel about diminishing the role of government in all practical venues is his model of private charity. I just found this now, but it turns out he's actually written a paper on the subject:
A Positive Model of Private Charity and Public Transfers
The whole point of relying less on government to adjudicate public life is that every side of the argument can stump up their own pocket books, as they see fit as private citizens. My own gut instinct is that this would devolve into an extremely capricious network of civic concern and attention, by the standard mechanism of charismatic megafauna getting all the grease.
So if these protesters (or some subset thereof) turn out to have deep pockets behind them, that actually means, in certain well-established strands of orthodox libertarian theory, that they are in good standing with the giant neoliberal program of dragging big government into a small bathtub, and it would be entirely their own business how they raise their protest stake. Because under Libertarianism, all dollars are created equal, and from this assumption (and possibly also God) unencumbered moral equilibrium shall automatically flow.
Nevertheless, suck-and-blow types somehow always seem to show up with a steady supply of nefarious labels concerning the hidden ka-ching. The standard smoke machine demands this narrative. (Business As Usual wouldn't much mind if the protesters did conform to their established narrative lot of being eternally impoverished and poorly organized, so it wins either way.)
I actually prefer government as a player in many issues, because it aims (until corrupted) to be somewhat transparent (no-one ever accused government of getting anything exactly right, which I regard as a false standard, because no-one ever accused any human system of getting anything exactly right, modulo "law of the jungle, the losers can suck it"; government is simply better at counting up losers than most private-sector alternatives).
I guess many people out there figure that if America went much further toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum, we'd all be united in the Church of the Profit Motive, and this kind of dispute simply wouldn't transpire among gentlemen, and we would not be constantly up to our ankles in dark money vs. deep money shit storms. Well, I'm not personally signing up to test drive that experimental fork in the road. I'm not saying it couldn't possibly work. The world is a complicated place. But I'd rather not risk my own skin to that experiment.
Constructive public discourse is fragile. This one thing, for sure, we all know.
Seneca, Nebraska — 12 October 2016
Bike shed? Or canary in the coal mine?
In this instance, it's hard to say. The politics of division have this strange, new, frightening face.
They might have actually cleared their trash as they went along if doing so didn't involve running a gauntlet of law enforcement that wasn't particularly careful not to blow people's arms off, soak them to the bone in sub freezing weather, and such. Others have already explained the dogs and the cars.
Hey, we had a pipeline going across Alaska since the late 70's. With drunken idiots with guns trying to shoot holes in it and the occasional maintenance mishap leading to spills, Alaska has somehow not turned into a barren oil-soaked wasteland yet.
I never thought of it that way.
You are right, I'm sure. Never any damage caused to the environment in Alaska due to an oil spill.
Not everywhere, no.
But I somehow wouldn't really want to eat the snow within a mile of a pipeline...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wrong pipeline. Try to get your basic facts right. The DAPL pipeline is taking oil from the North Dakota oil fields to refineries near Chicago, where it is to be refined into petroleum products for use across the Midwest. None of that oil is going overseas. Until the Pipeline is/was up and running that oil is currently being shipped via truck and train, resulting in multiple large derailment leaks over the last few years.
The Keystone Pipeline, an entirely different pipeline is to take oil from Canada to Gulf coast refineries to be refined before being shipped overseas to China. Most if not all of that oil is going to China, we benefit from the jobs, Canada benefits from not having to build a pipeline across the Canadian Rockies.
Two different pipelines. This story is entirely about the DAPL pipeline.
Yes, how could we educated nobles leave half the planet to the unwashed masses?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, how dare they speak their mind? If we don't stop them right here, next they'll even demand the right to peacefully assemble, and what we got then may not be stoppable anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So... all it takes to get holidays all year long is about 10k dead people?
Hand me that machine gun, please.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just by posting this, I don't even have to look them up or send my resume!
I'm on their radar now.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
How is it illegal? Free country, remember? Everything, that is not explicitly prohibited, is implicitly allowed. Not the other way around.
There is nothing mentioned in the write-up, that should required a license...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I just hope you feel the same way when it's your water at stake.
There is no issue raised by the protesters that wasn't an item covered by the array of regulatory reviews that where required before construction could even begin. What fault do you find with the process that approved the pipeline and route? Where did the 50 agencies involved go wrong?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Let's say that all of that were true, what's your argument? That they don't deserve clean water because they litter? Help me understand that position.
It's pretty clear, but I'll spell it out: The protesters are not adults to be taken seriously. They can't even manage the environmental stewardship issues that are well within their control. We're certainly not going to let them impose mob rule on infrastructure projects that have passed all the required regulatory approvals.
One more time... what's your argument? That because they are [insert literally anything here], that in a first world democratic nation they do not deserve a basic survival commodity of clean water?
So what else don't they deserve? Protection of the law? Freedom of speech?
Land of the free, home of the [people I approve of]
There was no threat to clean water that wasn't addressed in the regulatory process that approved the pipeline to begin with. Tell me, what fault do you find with the laws, regulations, and agencies involved?
You don't have a serious answer because you're not a serious person. At best you're engaging in an emotional outburst that lets you paint yourself as the embattled hero. I'm not required to take you seriously. Yes, you have a right to the protection of law and freedom of speech. You don't have the right to trespass and destroy when you don't like the outcome of a legally made decision.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I'm commenting on how The Intercept is using language to portray the company in a certain light.
If you are trying to portray a company as "shadowy" when it has a fairly robust online presence, you aren't doing journalism, you're doing propaganda.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Sounds like TigerSwan had their own Edward Snowjob! :-)
Passed 100% on to protesters - LOL. Then you don't know how bands work. Band councils are controlled by a small group of closely related people from one or two families. That money was all kept to themselves.\
Now if we said ten people, who were very influential "elders" of their community, were each given nearly $40,000 each to stir up fervent opposition within the band.. well, I bet that $40k would speak louder than any actual reasonable discussion of the merits of the project.
Typically the opposition goes away when the pipeline company offers a greater amount. It's all about the money.
I was being as generous as possible with the paid protester claim, not suggesting what I believed happened. In fact, I do believe no money was passed on to the protesters.
so every problem looks like a terrorist "nail". Why would they take a different approach?
There was no threat to clean water that wasn't addressed in the regulatory process that approved the pipeline to begin with. Tell me, what fault do you find with the laws, regulations, and agencies involved?
Just because a process found no fault doesn't mean there isn't one. Politics/money/power. No-one should blindly accept results of any process. They should be free to question, free to object, free to protest.
You don't have a serious answer because you're not a serious person. At best you're engaging in an emotional outburst that lets you paint yourself as the embattled hero.
ignoring this little character assasination attempt. I'm quite calm about this all, as I don't have a stake in the battle, only the meta battle that people should be entitled to all protections regardless of their actions.
I'm not required to take you seriously. Yes, you have a right to the protection of law and freedom of speech. You don't have the right to trespass and destroy when you don't like the outcome of a legally made decision.
Correct you don't need to take me seriously, or anything seriously. Debate the points not the person.
You don't have the right to trespass/destroy. But you do have the right to protest. The two may even conflict. There might even need to be an arm of government dedicated to sorting out the application of laws to specific cases.
I hope all protesters are charged with (or at least considered for) all relevant offences, and I hope the judicial system weighs all appropriate considerations eliminating/reducing them as appropriate.
Are they guilt free? No
Was their access to clean water threatened? Maybe (cannot say 100% no, 99.9999% certainty is not enough)
Should they have been there? Hell yes (as cannot say 100% certainty to point above).
Should they wear the consequences of any UNJUST actions on their part? Yes.