NYPD was using this during Occupy. Everyone complained that Occupy lacked organization.

But what was happening on the ground was that the NYPD was identifying who potential leaders were by using face recognition technology and (we believed) cell phone tracking to identify people who consistently showed up to different meetings.

They would then use the same face identification technology to pick these people out of crowds, and arrest them before or when major events occurred, so they would be in holding during the event.

Eventually the individuals would either be charged for resisting arrest, or let go since they were arrested without reason. Which dovetails into the other NYPD/LAPD tactic during mass protests of , in their words: "arrest people now, end the protest now, pay the civil liberties fines 10 years later."

> Well it’s very simple what happened. Everybody in America was convinced they literally lived in a police state, that if you go out to the streets and demand change, even if you non-violently sit in a park, RoboCops will come and beat you up. And for a moment, when we did this thing in Zucotti Park, that didn’t happen! Everybody was like: ‘What? You mean this actually is a free country? We can actually protest?’ And so they came. And then, in about two months, the cops said ‘no this is not a free society’ and they beat them up again.

> It’s not that Occupy dissolved, but you can only create a movement for direct democracy if you can get everybody out in some kind of public place. They have to be safe enough to go there. So if going to an Occupy march means risking getting beaten up with stick, or being thrown into prison, then people with children, old people, they’re just not going come. And then only the hardcore activists come. It’s that simple.

https://www.eurozine.com/anarchism-work-and-bureaucracy/

And then the society that lets that happen picks out the worst examples of misbehavior by hardcore activists, calls itself noble in comparison, and goes back to sleep.

Beat them up? That all? Seriously, is everybody asleep?!

The FBI was standing ready so assassinate all the leaders of Occupy "if deemed necessary". See my comments to other posters in this thread and the links I provided. Once the news leaked that snipers were in place even the hardcore Occupy members decided to fold their tent (literally). Most people can probably deal with a few beatings, some will even sue for brutality and win decent awards, and maybe get some police scum fired. But suing is not an option if you get killed, and most people (rightly) draw the line there and decided a protest is not worth it. The society that lets that happen is a gang of drooling imbeciles, zombified by decades of SSRI and anti-anxity therapy, psyops by media and government, and kept in constant fear by being on the brink of financial ruin 24x7. How can you expect people to care about political protests if most of them worry to death about the next day, every day?? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18682331 https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

Summary of the second link above, if you don't read it - SEVENTY EIGHT percent of working Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck! You can only imagine the financial situation of "non-working" Americans. So, do you think in that state anybody would care the slightest bit about a political protest?? The 99% are nothing but slaves and the 1% own us. Any other discussion is empty talk...or a psyop.

I have never heard of this, do you have references to this?

If this is true, and even if you (or someone) made it up but it is a practical possibility, then it has truly horrific consequences for social organization and the peaceful transition of power (democracy).

I've written about that before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15110645

This is bad.

If you take away more and more ways to (relatively) peacefully protest something (for example by arresting the leaders as you say). Then the frustration will just continue, and grow and grow until the only way is violence, say what Marx had in mind.

> New York City Police Department documents obtained by The Verge show that police camera teams were deployed to hundreds of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests from 2011–2013 and 2016. Originally acquired through a Freedom of Information Law request by New York attorney David Thompson of Stecklow & Thompson, the records are job reports from the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) that document over 400 instances in which the unit’s video team attended, and sometimes filmed, demonstrations. More important than the records the NYPD turned over, however, are those that it claims it cannot find: namely, any documents demonstrating that legal reviews and authorizations of these surveillance operations took place.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/15016984/nypd-video-surve...

The MUCH bigger story is FBI standing ready to kill protestors with snipers "if deemed necessary". All of these disruption tactics articles are just "soft" news to gently irritate the public and convince it that the truth is known, is regularly leaked and the press will keep the public informed. The real truth (the planned murder of activists MLK-style) is mostly NOT known, virtually no news outlets write about it, and FBI refused to declassify it. The truth is this: If somebody is a real threat to established order they get killed, plain and simple. This should be the discussion, not "disruption" tactics of the police and how allowable/legal they are.

> Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a "systematic effort" by the agency "to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations" linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

> Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...

Variations of this tactic (disrupt the leader before they create a useful coalition) used to be called COINTELPRO[1]. The methods used changed as technology changed, but the core tactic is still used in many places. GCHQ even has an entire department dedicated to this type of disruption: JTRIG[2].

> then it has truly horrific consequences for social organization and the peaceful transition of power (democracy).

Snowden tried to tell everybody that. I recommend reading the actual documents in [2]; they paint a very clear picture about the tactics being used.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Intended_effects

[2] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

Similar response to the one I made to other commenters in the thread. The MUCH bigger story is FBI standing ready to kill Occupy protestors with snipers "if deemed necessary". All of these disruption tactics articles are just "soft" news to gently irritate the public and convince it that the truth is known, is regularly leaked and the press will keep the public informed. The real truth (the planned murder of activists MLK-style) is mostly NOT known, virtually no news outlets write about it, and FBI refused to declassify it. The truth is this: If somebody is a real threat to established order they get killed, plain and simple. This should be the discussion, not "disruption" tactics of the police and how allowable/legal they are.

See my response above to the comment you are replying to. It is MUCH MUCH MUCH worse than that. The government had tasks force with snipers ready to eliminate the leaders "if deemed necessary". FBI refused to disclose who those snipers were, but since no arrests were made it is quite obvious the snipers are not some local criminal gang. This has been going on since the early 20th century and has to do with money. Not race, and not human rights. Money, and only money. Class warfare of the purest kind. Both MLK and Kennedy are probably the most notable examples of people who were quickly killed when they tried to change the system and enfranchise the poor. You probably think of MLK as a racial rights leader, but that's only 10% of the story. The other 90% are his efforts to end the oligarchy that rules America and as soon as he started talking about poor vs. rich instead of black vs. white, he was promptly killed. I am not even sure why we are even having these discussions, as not much can be done about it. The world is basically an international fascist regime, and the presence of separate countries is largely meaningless. We are all ruled by a handful of multi-national corporations that obey no laws, and are accountable to nobody. See the recent news about J&J knowingly selling for decades baby powder contaminated with asbestos. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18684384

If something so horrible (knowingly killing babies) can happen so habitually and be concealed for decades, then who the hell cares about freedom of speech or your civil rights?!? Seriously, wake the fk up!

I mean, you see a camera pointed at a crowd, then they stop on one person, and cops push through to arrest a specific person, its pretty easy to figure out what's going on. They used a lot of techniques, honestly, that until that point I thought were in the realm of Hollywood speculation, not actual reality. This was not the most concerning thing that happened, by a long shot.

I think you're right, for the exact reason that you stipulated in your other post. I also think that our society is embracing technology in a way that makes this an increasingly difficult problem going forward. I don't want to put Kaczynski on a pedestal, as I significantly disagree with both his actions, and the conclusions he came to, but I think he and others were right to identify this as _the_ issue for western society going forward, when combined with wealth inequality.

As bad as these tactics sound, they were still laughably benign compared to the plot to kill Occupy leaders by snipers. https://www.chron.com/houston/article/Occupy-Houston-assassi...

The FBI refused to release documents or identify the group that had snipers tracking Occupy leaders in Houston but if you read the redacted documents it becomes quite clear it was a government agency. The redacted documents contain lines that basically said the sniper "group" would take out any Occupy leaders "if deemed necessary". That latter language is used to describe government agency activities, not some renegade alt-right group who decided to take out Occupy by force. If the FIB has knowledge of ANY criminal group ready to take out people on-demand "if deemed necessary" there would be quite a few arrests, even if no murders took place. The fact that FBI arrested nobody in that plot speaks volumes about who the snipers were. Either the FBI itself, the Houston SWAT team, or some 3-letter agency that officially does not exist.

Those same forces that were ready to take out Occupy leaders are the same forces that killed MLK. Most people, even African Americans, do not know that MLK's biggest threat to the established order was not his campaign for racial equality. It was his campaign for economic equality. As soon as he made the issue class instead of race, he was killed. MLK planned something called "Poor People's Campaign" and envisioned a million-people-strong demonstration in DC with the goal of non-violently interfering with government business and "occupying" the capital until the demands of the poor people are heard. Does it sound eerily similar to the Occupy group? Where do you think the Occupy leaders got the idea from? It was a re-incarnation of the MLK campaign from the start. And just like back in MLK's days, the government stood ready to murder the inconvenient leaders. Thankfully, it did not get to that point but it is quite obvious that individual rights and the law in general in the Western capitalist "democracies" are long gone.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/why-... "...Yet in December, 1999, after hearing the testimony of over 70 witnesses, including the owner of a restaurant close to the murder scene who admitted his complicity in the plot to kill King, an interracial jury in Shelby, Tennessee unanimously concluded that King’s murder was the result of a conspiracy of unnamed “GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES.”

It is way overdue that we ALL wake up and realize the truth - we ALL live in an international fascist dictatorship that knows no boundaries and obeys no laws. The laws are just for us, to keep us from disturbing the status quo. And no matter how hard organizations like ACLU et. al fight for the rights of the common person, it is a lost cause from the start as these secret entities do NOT follow laws. They cannot be reformed. President Kennedy said the same thing about the CIA (that it cannot be reformed) and he was killed a month later. I think it is rather obvious where this whole process is going.

Unfortunately, history repeats itself, even for the people who learn from it.

This is exactly how FR is designed to operate (author of an FR system here). The FR system's gallery is loaded with persons of interest, and then video acquired from various sourced is analyzed. When a person of interest is identified, that "identification" is in the form of "here is person N with a probability of X% accuracy". That "notification" is then presented to a human, who then makes the human decision "yes, that is our person or no, that is not our person" and then whatever organic response that person's presence triggers occurs.

FR is like having a human lookout who is really good with faces.

Beyond that, it is all humans using this capability for good or bad purposes.

Yeah but at least it's the police who control the data. Who knows what Amazon can do with that info. We're handing over the keys of the power to a private company.

Nevertheless, is as scary as you think...