They also show the department watching over gatherings that seem benign and even mundane. For example, DHS circulated information on a nationwide series of silent vigils and a DHS-funded agency planned to monitor a funk music parade and a walk to end breast cancer in the nation’s capital.
“It is concerning that the government would be diverting resources towards surveilling citizens who are assembling and expressing their First Amendment rights,” says Maurice Mitchell, an organizer with Blackbird, a group that helps support activism against police violence in communities across the country. “The fact that our government is doing this — I can only assume to disrupt us — is pretty alarming… Directly after 9/11, people said, ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about.’ Well, now we’re fighting back against police brutality and extrajudicial killings, yet they are using this supposedly anti-terrorist infrastructure against us.”
– From the Intercept article: Feds Regularly Monitored Black Lives Matter Since Ferguson
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. Nothing.
In fact, as I and many others have stated for years, the primary purpose of the DHS, and well as the other intelligence-industrial complex agencies, is to keep the unwashed masses in line when they wake up to the incredible criminality and theft perpetrated by the status quo. Pointing this out in 2015 isn’t particularly novel, prescient or insightful. It’s just obvious.
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Before I get to the meat of this post, let me provide a little background. Late last year,