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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @03:00PM
English language has the feature, both advantageous and disadvantageous, that any noun can be made into a verb. For journalism it is more of a disadvantage, tough. The shortened, telegraph-like style of headlines often leads to readers having to re-read the sentence in order to tell the verb from the nouns. Actually, this is the reason because of which I stopped reading the otherwise brilliant The Register - the time available to me for reading news everyday is too little, so it is important not to waste it understanding headlines.
But this present news is actually worse. Just look at it: "Cybersecurity Firm Labels Black Lives Matter Protestors 'Physical Threat'". There are three verb candidates there: "Labels", "Lives" and "Matter". Which one is the verb? You just cannot tell it until you are told that "Black Lives Matter" is a name for something. And you wouldn't know it is a name even tough it is capitalized because every other word is too. You cannot understand the headline unless you learn something first - which is, I think, the opposite to the purpose of headlines.
Bottom line: SoylentNews, if you are to stick with telegraph-like headlines, at least save the capitals for words that really need them. Stop making your readers waste time de-cyphering your headlines.-Ignacio Agulló