US conducted mass spying campaign against leftwing and anti-ICE protesters

> The records also showed undercover agents surveilling a virtual meeting at Hunter College in New York [...] ; a meeting at a labor center in Minneapolis

> The documents indicate that agents made audio recordings of the events.

For anyone else wondering (particularly if you're accustomed to it) it looks like neither NY nor MN are two-party consent ones for recording things.

Americans have zero muscle to stand up for the people who actually care for this country.

What measures can protesters take against this? With agents actively infiltrating groups, it seems impossible to prevent this level of spying.

I'm no lawyer, but sure sounds a lot like entrapment as much as spying

Freedom.

Small wonder.

The US has surveilled political factions that they've considered potentially subversive or corrupt machine politics - right and left wing - for ages. RICO prosecutions against politically motivated corruption are long overdue, and should definitely land on both parties because the grift seems to be the order of the day. But that doesn't happen without actual investigation of the political machine - and incidental local low level conspirators are mostly patsies for the people calling the shots. I applaud the protestors for wanting to change things, but shake my head at the naivete of thinking that being a martyr for the Instagram cameras is the way to do it.

Unconstitutional domestic spying in the US is a tale as old as time. Time and time again, the "patriots" can't help themselves. Gotta "protect the nation" by...uh...completely throwing out core constitutional rights. And they're surrounded by people who also have no problem with it.

I think most people don't remember that US postal inspectors used to primarily concern themselves with the distribution of erotica. And most people probably still don't wonder "gee, why is the USPS able to email me a picture of whatever I'm about to get in my mailbox?" Answer: the USPS stores a high resolution, high-dynamic-range image of every single piece of mail that passes through a high-speed sorting machine. And let's just say that you should try opening up some of those images in an image editor and mess with the curves/levels...

Hoover's FBI was spying on damn near anyone who had a remotely liberal viewpoint. If your parents are dead, submit a records request to the FBI to find out if they had an FBI file. Decent chance that if they were liberal, the FBI has something on them. Here's another fun fact: a huge number of FBI agents are Mormons. Our FBI is infested with Christian religious cultists. The idiots who show up on your doorstep to try and preach their religious values. Those people. They become FBI agents.

During the "occupy wallstreet" era state cops posted a photo on social media from inside the state's "command bunker", of a projector screen showing the output from a laptop displaying some sort of live status map or the like. I don't remember what the event was. It was a web page. In the browser bookmark bar was the facebook page for the city's "Occupy Wallstreet" facebook group along with another group that was clearly a liberal/progressive FB group. The state has a surprising number of violent white supremacists and curiously, none of those were in the browser bar...

Many years later, right around the time of the George Floyd protests - someone near a college campus snapped photos of university cops loading one of their patrol vehicles - a pickup truck - with bricks - in a back alley.

They came up with some laughable excuse that their sharp-eyed officers spotted a bunch of loose bricks in a sidewalk a full block from University property and decided to scoop them all up to do a favor for the city. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight....

Imagine being so hungry for power that you justify this.

Not really a new phenomenon.

Actually one of these stories I found super amusing, apparently back in the day the Australian government got it into their head that all they really needed to break up the communist Indonesian government under Sukarno was a cunningly deployed pamphlet pointing out the contradictions in their philosophy.

So they made the pamphlet, had agents distribute it at a communism convention, and uh nothing came of it. Because everyone else there had similar pamphlets.

COINTELPRO, part two.

We need to make it unappealing to act upon the intelligence gathered through means that weren't a part of legitimate criminal investigations. Introduce consequences for those who do the collection at the local, state, and federal level. Require these findings be destroyed. In other words, all of the stuff we didn't do when COINTELPRO was uncovered.

The more we do in the next two-to-three years, the less we'll have to worry about in the long run.