These conservatives love playing at being spies and soldiers, don’t they?
The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters’ moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group’s internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group’s plans to the authorities as well as corporations targeted by protesters.
Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he’s done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads “a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world.” But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers’ social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.
As part of their intelligence-gathering operation, the group gained access to a listserv used by Occupy Wall Street organizers called September17discuss. On September17discuss, organizers hash out tactics and plan events, conduct post-mortems of media appearances, and trade the latest protest gossip. On Friday, Ryan leaked thousands of September17discuss emails to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is now using them to try to smear Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist conspiracy to disrupt global markets. What may much more alarming to Occupy Wall Street organizers is that while Ryan was monitoring September17discuss, he was forwarding interesting email threads to contacts at the NYPD and FBI, including special agent Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the FBI’s New York-based cyber security team.
Deserves the fate of all narcs.
For the most part those on the Right are afraid of their own shadows. That’s why they never want anything to change or progress. They have an unhealthy fear of the unknown. “Let’s leave it like it is,” they say, “Because we know how it works and we can deal with it.” (Conservatives must be the most boring sexual partners on the planet.) It’s the Left which is willing to try something new. Something not tried before. Something that may turn out to work better for everyone. To the conservatives out there, quit holding humankind back. Lead, follow or just get out of the way.
“(Conservatives must be the most boring sexual partners on the planet.)”
I strongly suspect that David Vitter, Larry Craig, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Eric Cantor, Rick Perry, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Scott Brown, Greta van Susteren, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Ann Coulter, Marcus Bachman, George W. Bush, Ruppert Murdoch, Victoria Jackson, Rush Limbaugh, Sam Zell, Laura Schlesinger, and Rick Santorum might surprise you on that count.