officials cast wide net in monitoring occupy protests

NYTimes | When the Occupy protests spread across the country three years ago, state and local law enforcement officials went on alert. In Milwaukee, officials reported that a group intended to sing holiday carols at “an undisclosed location of ‘high visibility.’ ” In Tennessee, an intelligence analyst sought information about whether groups concerned with animals, war, abortion or the Earth had been involved in protests.

And in Washington, as officials braced for a tent encampment on the National Mall, their counterparts elsewhere sent along warnings: a link to a video of Kansas City activists who talked of occupying congressional offices and a tip that 15 to 20 protesters from Boston were en route. “None of the people are known to be troublemakers,” one official wrote in an email.

The communications, distributed by people working with counterterrorism and intelligence-sharing offices known as fusion centers, were among about 4,000 pages of unclassified emails and reports obtained through freedom of information requests by lawyers who represented Occupy participants and provided the documents to The New York Times. They offer details of the scrutiny in 2011 and 2012 by law enforcement officers, federal officials, security contractors, military employees and even people at a retail trade association. The monitoring appears similar to that conducted by F.B.I. counterterrorism officials, which was previously reported.

In many cases, law enforcement officials appeared to simply assemble or copy lists of protests or related activities, sometimes maintaining tallies of how many people might show up. They also noted appearances by prominent Occupy supporters and advised other officials about what — or whom — to watch for, according to the newly disclosed documents.

The files did not show any evidence of phone or email surveillance; instead, much of the material was acquired from social media, publicly disseminated information and reports by police officers or others. While a Homeland Security bulletin in October 2011 warned that protests could be disruptive or violent, some civil liberties advocates are concerned about the monitoring of lawful political activities tied to the Occupy movement. Homeland Security officials acknowledged that the movement, which criticized the financial system as undemocratic, was “mostly peaceful.”

 “People must have the ability to speak out freely to express a dissenting view without the fear that the government will treat them as enemies of the state,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which obtained the documents.

The nation’s 78 fusion centers — which have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, as well as money from state governments — are run by state and local authorities. They were created after the 2001 Qaeda attacks to share information about terrorism or other national security threats, but have provided little of value related to that mission, a Senate subcommittee report concluded in 2012. Many centers, which can involve dozens of officials from police and fire departments, federal agencies and private companies, now focus on more routine criminal activity.