In what is starting to look like COINTELPRO updated and outsourced for the 21st century, it was recently revealed that cybersecurity firm ZeroFox monitored at least two high-profile Black Lives Matter protest organizers and labeled them as 'physical threats' in secret reports to Baltimore city administrators and to an unnamed 'classified partner' organization at Fort Meade (headquarters of the NSA and other intelligence agencies).
McKesson and Elzie both tell Mother Jones they were "not surprised" that they were being watched. "It confirms that us telling the truth about police violence is seen as a threat," McKesson says. Both activists say they do not know why they were identified as physical threats. McKesson and Elzie live in Missouri, where they helped organize the Ferguson protests. They traveled together to Baltimore for a week and a half during the Freddie Gray protests.
This classification of non-violent political protesters as threats follows the nationwide, FBI-orchestrated purge of the Occupy movement that was legally enabled by labeling them a terrorist threat.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @09:21PM
I'm guessing that the labeling is probably based upon past events and the slight possibility that with enough pot stirring somebody loosely affiliated might go nuts.
More than that, "terrorist" is the root password to the constitution so of course law enforcement tries to use the password every chance they get no matter how tenuous the link. The less accountable they have to be, the easier their lives are. In a free country the job of the police is to make citizen lives easier. In an authoritarian country the job of the citizens is to make police lives easier.