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Title: Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD
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URL Source: http://gawker.com/5850054/meet-the- ... nd-nypd?tag=occupy-wall-street
Published: Oct 16, 2011
Author: Adrian Chen
Post Date: 2011-10-16 08:18:26 by Kamala
Keywords: None
Views: 249
Comments: 16
By Adrian Chen Oct 15, 2011 4:47 PM 190,620 174 Share Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD 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 authorities and 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. Full size 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. On September 18th, the day after the protest's start, Ryan forwarded an email exchange between Occupy Wall Street organizers to Loyd. The email exchange is harmless: Organizers discuss how they need to increase union participation in the protest. "We need more outreach to workers. The best way to do that is by showing solidarity with them," writes organizer Jackie DiSalvo in the thread. She then lists a group of potential unions to work with. Another organizer named Conor responds: "+1,000,000 to Jackie's proposal on working people/union struggles outreach and solidarity. Also, why not invite people to protest Troy Davis's execution date at Liberty Plaza this Monday?" Five minutes after Conor sent his email, Ryan forwarded the thread—with no additional comment—to Loyd's FBI email address. "Thanks!" Loyd responded. He cc'd his colleague named Ilhwan Yum, a fellow cybersecurity expert at the agency, on the reply. On September 26th, Ryan forwarded another email thread to Agent Loyd. But this time he clued in the NYPD as well, sending the email to Dennis Dragos, a detective with the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad. The NYPD might have been very grateful he did so, since it involved a proposed demonstration outside NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. In the thread, organizers debated whether to crash an upcoming press conference planned by marijuana advocates to celebrate NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly ordering officers to halt arrests over possession of small amounts of marijuana. "Should we bring some folks from Liberty Plaza to chant "SHAME" for the NYPD's recent brutalities on Thursday night for the Troy Davis and Saturday for the Occupy Wall Street march?" asked one person in the email thread. (That past Saturday, the video of NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying a protester had gone viral.) Ryan promptly forwarded the email thread to Loyd at the FBI and Dragos at the NYPD. Interestingly, it was Ryan who revealed himself as a snitch. We learned of these emails from the archive Ryan leaked yesterday in the hopes of undermining the Occupy Wall Street movement. In assembling the archive of September17discuss emails, it appears he accidentally included some of his own forwarded emails indicating he was ratting out organizers. "I don't know, I just put everything I had into one big package," Ryan said when asked how the emails ended up in the file posted to Andrew Breitbart's blog. Some security expert. Full size But Ryan didn't just tip off the authorities. He was also giving information to companies as well. When protesters discussed demonstrating in front of morning shows like Today and Good Morning America, Ryan quickly forwarded the thread to Mark Farrell, the chief security officer at Comcast, the parent company of NBC Universal. Ryan wrote: Since you are the CSO, I am not sure of your role in NBC since COMCAST owns them. There is a huge protest in New York call "Occupy Wall Street". Here is an email of stunts that they will try to pull on the TODAY show. We have been heavily monitoring Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous. "Thanks Tom," Farrell responded. "I'll pass this to my counterpart at NBCU." Did the FBI and/or NYPD ask him to monitor Occupy Wall Street? Was he just forwarding the emails on out of the goodness of his heart? In a phone interview with us, Ryan denied being an informant. "I do not work with the FBI," he said. Ryan said he knows Loyd through their mutual involvement in the Open Web Application Security Project, a non-profit computer security group of which Ryan is a board member. Ryan said he sent the emails to Loyd unsolicited simply because "everyone's curious" about Occupy Wall Street, and he had a ground-eye view. "Jordan never asked me for anything." Was he sending every email he got to the authorities? Ryan said he couldn't remember how many he'd passed on to the FBI or NYPD, or other third parties. Later he said that he only forwarded the two emails we noticed, detailed above. Full size But even if he'd been sending them on regularly, they were probably of limited use to the authorities. Most of the real organizing at Occupy Wall Street happens face-to-face, according to David Graeber, who was one of the earliest organizers. "We did some practical work on [the email list] at first—I think that's where I first proposed the "we are the 99%" motto—but mainly it's just an expressive forum," he wrote in an email. "No one would seriously discuss a plan to do something covert or dangerous on such a list." But regardless of how many emails Ryan sent—or whether Loyd ever asked Ryan to spy on Occupy Wall Street—Loyd was almost certainly interested in the emails he received. Loyd has helped hunt down members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, and he and his colleagues in the FBI's cyber security squad have been monitoring their involvement in Occupy Wall Street. Full size At a New York cyber security conference one day before the protest began, Loyd cited Occupy Wall Street as an example of a "newly emerging threat to U.S. information systems." (In the lead-up to Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous had issued threats against the New York Stock Exchange.) He told the assembled crowd the FBI has been "monitoring the event on cyberspace and are preparing to meet it with physical security," according to a New York Institute of Technology press release. We contacted Loyd to ask about his relationship with Ryan and if any of the information Ryan passed along was of any use to the agency. He declined to answer questions and referred us to the FBI's press office. We'll post an update if we hear back from them. We asked Ryan again this morning about how closely he was working with the authorities. Again, he claimed it was only these two emails, which is unlikely given he forwarded them to the FBI and NYPD without providing any context or explaining where he'd gotten them. And he detailed his rationale for assisting the NYPD: My respect for FDNY & NYPD stems from them risking their lives to save mine when my house was on fire in sunset park when I was 8 yrs old. Also, for them risking their lives and saving many family and friends during 9/11. Don't you find it Ironic that out of all the NYPD involved with the protest, [protesters] have only targeted the ones with Black Ribbons, given to them for their bravery during 9/11? I am sorry if we see things differently, I try to look at everything as a whole and in patterns. Everything we do in life and happens in life, there is a pattern behind it. [Photo, top, via dcannflan/Flickr. Photos of Zuccotti Square and arrests of protesters via AP
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#1. To: Kamala (#0)
This traitor has never outgrown his little boy love of the FDNY. He apparently doesn't understand that many of the FDNY and NYPD members were sacrificed on 9-11 in the "inside job" by members of our own government. Does anybody know if this twit still lives in sunset park or where he lives now, or is that only something he just can't forget? I bet he gets a woodie every time he hears a fire wagon or police car siren! One thing is for certain. He sure can lie with the best of them.
ugh..this makes me think this whole thing was organized for just this reason (even though i believe that a large percentage of the protesters themselves are correct with their grievances), it appears this is made to blame the crashing of the economy on the people.
i hear a lot of hubub about this "occupy" stuff but what did it really accomplish, & whats so radical about street marches? Most americans are still just going to work everyday to pay the bills.(if they have a job). This is nothing more than static, imo.
"Even to the death fight for truth, and the LORD your God will battle for you". Sirach 4:28
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one.
ugh..this makes me think this whole thing was organized for just this reason (even though i believe that a large percentage of the protesters themselves are correct with their grievances), it appears this is made to blame the crashing of the economy on the people. Or it may be part of the PsyOps/Black PR to discredit people rising up with legitimate grievance to petition for redress. Regardless of why it was set up I think it has now grown beyond the immediate control of the PTB and they are getting a mite worried. We really are not all that far from a congregation outside the "Bastille" in a "festive and celebratory" mood with some of the perps as "guests of honor". ;-)
Break the Conventions - Keep the Commandments - G.K.Chesterson I hope all of yall realize that this story is most likely complete bullshit propaganda. Every occupation is independent of every other one. It was set up as a leaderless movement for just this very reason. Even if this douche bag really did forward a few emails (which I am doubtful of) it only affects one cell and not the movement as a whole. More over ,if this fluffer really did have that kind of access to forward emails to the authorities they damn sure seemed not to care about it. They have not been one step ahead of anything. Besides that, most everything is done in plain site on their forum boards and in their chat groups on their web sites...These occupy folks ain't about being secretive. So much of this article "suspect" and its claims... I can not believe it is anything other than a complete fabrication meant to discredit and discourage. No doubt such propaganda BS will back fire.
___Occupy http://occupywallst.org/ ___ You ARE the 99% WE ARE the 99% http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/
At this point in time I regard virtually anything coming out of the Lamestream Media as complete bullshit propaganda until confirmed by at least two outside sources. However, I have not yet ruled out that the "Occupy This and That" was not originally set-up to be a PsyOp event to release social pressure building up, but if so I think it backfired. It is now a month along and still building. November, 2011 is shaping up to be a very critical month in the history of mankind on this planet.
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one.
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one.
The very first thing that anyone would be wise to consider is that it is part of an orchestrated movement designed to create an effect. I see this movement as a populace uprising not much different then the Taxed Enough Already populace movement. Granted the TEA party movement got co-opted quickly by the RNC and has since fizzled and failed to become the critical mass many of us hoped for. One thing these OWS folks have going for them is different tactics. The Tea Party folks went home at night. The OWS has a good idea on their tactic of occupation. And already the government has launched it's efforts to co-opt the OWS by claiming it had democrat ties but that tactic is not working out as well as it did last time with the TEA party. Many OWS folks are totally anti-obama types. And why would they be otherwise? Mr. Hopey changey ain't exactly delivered on the shit he promised his democrat devotees. You are right about this movement being designed to create an effect. Hopefully the effect will be huge, positive, and lasting. Their just ain't no reason in hell for BOA to be getting tax refunds when they make billions in profits and still take bail out money on top of it all. It is time for the plutocracy in the US to end. For the wars to end. For the bullshit to come to an end. It is time for a major US paradigm shift. For their part, the OWS crowd are making some kind of effort to draw attention to that.
___Occupy http://occupywallst.org/ ___ You ARE the 99% WE ARE the 99% http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one.
Upon further reading about thomas ryan and his bullshit... At one point he connects the OWS to Al-Qaeda and takes credit for stopping several anonymous cyber attacks that were most likely bogus to begin with (like the BS anon threat to erase NYSE from the net on OCT 10. I spoke on that thread... Anon, REAL ONES know that nothing as big as the NYSE can be erased from the net, and I have only ever seen government controlled media claim otherwise ). thomas Ryan also joins the gov effort to link the OWS to democrats... Yeah... I stand by my opinion about him and his BS investigation. Total fabrication. These occupy folks really seem to have the upper echelons of power in a twist.
___Occupy http://occupywallst.org/ ___ You ARE the 99% WE ARE the 99% http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/
Thanks. I picked November in part from intuition and partly from indicators of converging trends. We are without a doubt now in the middle of a period of great social turbulence. The "Occupy" movement, and to a lesser extent the "Tea Party" (which was hijacked and subverted), are what are called spontaneous or "Self Organizing Systems". In any system, and a society is a system, that has been driven from its equilibrium point greater and greater amounts of randomity, or Chaos, appear. However, man is among his basic nature an organizer, and likes order over chaos. So, because we have a chaotic scene there are "self organizing" pools and eddies. The "Occupy" protests are a "self organizing" response which are subject to a "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" which is also known as "The Butterfly Effect". In simple terms what this means is that in a very large complex system, such as a human society, that when the system moves into a nonequilibrium, disordered, state that there will be any number of unpredictable consequences to apparently small and simple actions. The classic example being a Butterfly flapping its wings in Rangoon causing a Tornado in Texas. (The concept, which now has wider applicability, was originally developed in the study of weather systems.) The variable here is that since humans prefer order what will the actions be, and what are the consequences of action, to return the system to a balanced, in equilibrium, state? So, after that long digression to explain my thought process we are now in a society that has moved out of equilibrium, and much like a rock balanced precariously upon a knife edged crag from which direction, and with what force, will the winds of change come? The social system has been poised on that precipice and the rock is yet to fall, but it is teetering. I don't know which way it will fall but at some point the winds will make it tumble.
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one.
When I read this thread, you came to my mind. And I recall you stating in another similar thread that this occupy wall street is probably the works of psyops. You were right!
My respect for FDNY & NYPD stems from them risking their lives to save mine when my house was on fire in sunset park when I was 8 yrs old. Also, for them risking their lives and saving many family and friends during 9/11.
#2. To: Kamala (#0)
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.
#3. To: christine (#2)
#4. To: Artisan (#3)
#5. To: christine (#2)
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.
#6. To: Original_Intent, 4 (#5)
Video is almost a year old, but it's even more valid today -
#7. To: christine, Artisan, Eric Stratton, ambi, Kamala, Original_Intent, Lod (#2)
(Edited)
#8. To: titorite, christine, Artisan, Eric Stratton, ambi, Kamala, Lod, TwentyTwelve, wudidiz, CadetD, Artisan, Jethro Tull, James Deffenbach, ratcat, all (#7)
I hope all of yall realize that this story is most likely complete bullshit propaganda.
#9. To: titorite (#7)
#10. To: Original_Intent (#8)
#11. To: Eric Stratton (#9)
(Edited)
Things like this either cause some change of some sort or get filed in the shitcan of good intentions or mis-directional plays.
#12. To: titorite (#11)
#13. To: All (#11)
#14. To: Eric Stratton (#10)
Not sure I'm on board with the month of November part, but I agree with you otherwise.
#15. To: Original_Intent (#14)
#16. To: Original_Intent (#8)
However, I have not yet ruled out that the "Occupy This and That" was not originally set-up to be a PsyOp event to release social pressure building up, but if so I think it backfired. It is now a month along and still building.
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