At the
height of 2014’s Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri,
FBI agents tracked the movements of an activist flying in from New
York, and appear to have surveilled the homes and cars of individuals
somehow tied to the protests, according to recently released
documents provided to The Intercept.
The
documents, which include FBI emails and intelligence reports from
November 2014, suggest that federal surveillance of Black Lives
Matter protests went far beyond the online intelligence-gathering
first reported on by The Intercept in 2015.
That
intelligence-gathering by the federal government had employed
open-source information, such as social media, to profile and keep
track of activists. The newly released documents suggest the FBI put
resources toward running informants, as well as physical surveillance
of antiracist activists.
The
heavily redacted records were obtained by two civil rights groups,
Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights, through a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and are being published here for
the first time.
Internal
communications from Department of Homeland Security officials,
released through this lawsuit, also revealed the existence of a
document described by DHS officials as the “Race Paper,” which
was the subject of a filing by the civil rights groups on Monday.
Full
report:
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