Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Seit 2012 soll der festgenommene BND-Mitarbeiter im Auftrag der CIA spioniert haben. Das berichten verschiedene Medien unter Berufung auf deutsche Sicherheitskreise. Bundespräsident Gauck äußert sich empört zu dem Skandal: “Jetzt reicht’s auch einmal.”
Der am Mittwoch festgenommene BND-Mann spionierte angeblich für die CIA.
Medienberichten zufolge lieferte er seit Ende 2012 sensible Papiere an die USA.
Bundespräsident Gauck reagiert empört auf die Affäre, auch Außenminister Steinmeier fordert von den USA schnellstmögliche Aufklärung
Spionage für die CIA
Der wegen Spionageverdachts festgenommene Mitarbeiter des Bundesnachrichtendienstes (BND) hat Medienberichten zufolge den US-Geheimdienst CIA mit Informationen versorgt. Noch am 1. Juli habe der 31-Jährige geheime Dokumente zum NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss geliefert, so die Bild am Sonntag.
Demnach seien sich die deutschen Dienste sicher, dass die CIA in die Angelegenheit involviert sei. Der mutmaßliche Doppelagent habe angegeben, einmal pro Woche geheime Dokumente an die USA geschickt zu haben. Die US-Behörden hätten den BND-Mitarbeiter offenbar genau gesteuert, hieß es in dem Bericht weiter.
Aus Regierungskreisen hatten NDR, WDR und Süddeutsche Zeitung erfahren, dass der BND-Mann auch über die Aktivitäten des NSA-Untersuchungsausschusses in die USA berichtet haben soll. Nach Angaben der Bild am Sonntag haben die letzten beiden Sendungen der insgesamt 218 Dokumente, die der BND-Mitarbeiter an die USA geliefert haben soll, den NSA-Ausschuss betroffen.
BND Pullach
NSA-Ausschuss
BND-Mitarbeiter unter Spionageverdacht
Ein Mitarbeiter des Bundesnachrichtendienstes hat nach eigenen Angaben den NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss ausspioniert – angeblich im Auftrag der USA. Das erfuhren NDR, WDR und “Süddeutsche Zeitung” aus Regierungskreisen. Zuvor hatte die Bundesanwaltschaft die Festnahme eines 31-jährigen Deutschen bekanntgegeben.
US-Agent seit 2012
Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) zitiert einen ranghohen BND-Mitarbeiter, der über den 31-Jährigen sagte: “Alle Indizien sprechen dafür, dass er für die Amerikaner gearbeitet hat.” Demnach wurde er seit Ende 2012 von einem US-Dienst als Agent geführt. FAS-Angaben zufolge arbeitete der Mann im Stab der Abteilung EA “Einsatzgebiete/Auslandsbeziehungen”, wo er für die technische Unterstützung zuständig gewesen sei. Nach Angaben der Zeitung hatte er sich selbst der US-Botschaft in Berlin per E-Mail angeboten. Bei insgesamt drei Treffen mit Kontaktmännern in Österreich habe er 25 000 Euro für seine Dienste erhalten.
Bundespräsident Gauck: “Jetzt reicht’s auch einmal”
Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck sieht durch die Affäre um den mutmaßlichen Doppelagenten die Beziehungen zu den USA belastet. Sollten sich die Spionage-Vorwürfe bewahrheiten, bedeute “das ein Spiel mit Freundschaften und enger Verbundenheit”, sagte Gauck dem ZDF.
Gauck äußerte sich in dem Interview empört. “Wir hatten wirklich eine lange und intensive Debatte darüber, mit welchen Rechten die NSA ausgestattet ist gegenüber anderen Ländern und den Bürgern aus unserer Nation”, sagte Gauck. Wenn der Mitarbeiter des BND tatsächlich für den US-Geheimdienst spioniert haben sollte, “dann ist ja wohl wirklich zu sagen, jetzt reicht’s auch einmal”. Das ZDF sendete am Samstagabend Ausschnitte aus dem Sommerinterview, das am Sonntag ausgestrahlt wird.
Auch Außenminister Frank-Walter Steinmeier nimmt die USA nach den neuerlichen Enthüllungen in die Pflicht. “Wenn die Berichte zutreffen, dann reden wir hier nicht über Kleinigkeiten”, sagte der SPD-Politiker bei einem Besuch in der Mongolei. Die USA müssten “mit ihren Möglichkeiten an einer schnellstmöglichen Aufklärung mitwirken”. Weiter sagte der Außenminister: “Aus Eigeninteresse sollten die USA dieser Mitwirkungspflicht auch Folge leisten.” Nichts dürfe unter den Teppich gekehrt werden.
Google-Datenzentrum
Chronik des NSA-Geheimdienstskandals
Affäre ohne Grenzen
Vom Tisch? Von wegen! Seit Juni 2013 werden dank des Whistleblowers Edward Snowden nahezu täglich neue Details über die Spähpogramme des US-Geheimdiensts NSA und seiner Verbündeten bekannt. Egal ob Amerikaner oder Deutsche, Durchschnittsbürger oder Kanzlerin: Alle sind betroffen. SZ.de dokumentiert die Medienberichte sowie die Reaktionen der Politik.
Worum geht es in der Spionage-Affäre?
Ein 31-jähriger BND-Mitarbeiter steht im Verdacht, für die USA den Untersuchungsausschuss zu den Abhörpraktiken des US-Geheimdienstes NSA ausspioniert zu haben. Er soll aufgeflogen sein, weil er Ende Mai seine Dienste offenbar auch den russischen Geheimdiensten angeboten hatte.
Der NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss im Bundestag beschäftigt sich mit den Überwachungsmethoden des US-Geheimdienstes. Die Affäre um das massenhafte Ausspähen der Kommunikation unbescholtener Bürger durch die NSA, öffentlich gemacht durch den Whistleblower Edward Snowden, überschattet die Beziehungen zu Washington seit mehr als einem Jahr.
Die NSA soll unter anderem das Handy von Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel überwacht haben. Im März hatte der Ausschuss seine Arbeit aufgenommen. Er soll allerdings nicht nur die Rolle der NSA, sondern auch des BND in der Affäre klären.
6. Juli 2014 11:25 Neue Medienberichte
Find this story at 6 July 2014
Copyright: Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Er speicherte Dokumente auf einem USB-Stick – und soll sie an die Amerikaner verkauft haben: Der Spionageverdacht gegen einen BND-Mitarbeiter sorgt für Empörung in Berlin. Die Details irritieren selbst hartgesottene Experten.
Berlin – Es lag ein Hauch von Staatsaffäre in der Luft am Donnerstagabend. Seit dem späten Nachmittag schon flirrten Gerüchte über einen neuen Spionageskandal im Regierungsviertel herum. Es sei etwas Großes im Gange, vielleicht sogar heikler als die NSA-Abhöraffäre, die Edward Snowden durch seinen Schatz an internen Dokumenten aufgedeckt hat, hieß es.
In den Schlüsselministerien, dem Innen- und Justizressort, aber auch im Auswärtigen Amt herrschte wenig später Klarheit. Über verschlüsselte Handys wurden die Minister informiert, dass die Bundesanwaltschaft einen mutmaßlichen Spion festgenommen hatte, der Interna des Bundesnachrichtendienstes (BND) gegen Geld verkauft haben soll. An die Amerikaner.
Noch ist unklar, ob alle Aussagen des 31-jährigen BND-Mannes aus der Abteilung für Auslandskontakte stimmen. Aber der Fall hat das Potenzial für eine Affäre, die beim Bundesnachrichtendienst und seinen Sicherheitsmaßnahmen beginnt und in einem fatalen Zerwürfnis mit den USA und der Zusammenarbeit zwischen den Diensten beider Länder enden könnte.
Der Bundesnachrichtendienst weiß, wie heikel die Angelegenheit für die Zukunft der Behörde sein kann. Und so zeigte sich Präsident Gerhard Schindler am Donnerstag ungewöhnlich informativ. Die Mitglieder des geheim tagenden Parlamentarischen Kontrollgremiums wurden kurzfristig zu einer Sondersitzung zusammengerufen, die Kollegen aus dem NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss hinzugebeten.
Ein äußerst ungewöhnlicher Vorgang, manch einer wunderte sich über das spontan anberaumte Treffen. “Ob der Snowden etwa doch nach Deutschland kommt?”, witzelte einer der Anwesenden. Zum Lachen war bald niemandem mehr zu Mute. Schindler berichtete dem Ausschuss über die Hintergründe der mutmaßlichen Spionage-Affäre.
Für den BND-Maulwurf war die Arbeit lukrativ
Der Fall ist voll bemerkenswerter Details. Ins Netz ging der Mann, der inzwischen in Untersuchungshaft sitzt, den Ermittlern nicht etwa wegen seiner Kontakte mit den Amerikanern. Der Verfassungsschutz fing vor einigen Wochen eine E-Mail von ihm ab, in der er russischen Behörden seine Spionagedienste angeboten haben soll. Erstaunt mussten die Beamten schließlich feststellen, dass die Spur zum Bundesnachrichtendienst führt.
Über Jahre soll der BND-Mitarbeiter zwischen 200 und 300 vertrauliche Dokumente aus dem internen BND-System abgezapft und auf einem USB-Stick gespeichert haben. Papiere zu unterschiedlichen Themengebieten sicherte er, auch vor Dokumenten aus dem NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss machte er nicht Halt. Zwischen 2012 und 2014 soll der Mann die Informationen verkauft haben – an einen Mitarbeiter eines US-Geheimdiensts. Den Kontakt stellte er offenbar vergleichsweise simpel her: Er soll eine E-Mail an die US-Botschaft geschrieben und die Möglichkeit einer Zusammenarbeit ins Spiel gebracht haben.
Für den Maulwurf war die Arbeit offenbar durchaus lukrativ: Mehrere 10.000 Euro habe er von dem Amerikaner für seine Dienste erhalten. Man traf sich angeblich an Orten in Österreich. Sämtliche Details, die Schindler dem Parlamentarischen Kontrollgremium offenbarte, stammen aus der Aussage des Mitarbeiters, die er kurz nach seiner Festnahme am Mittwoch gegenüber den Behörden machte.
BND dürfte erneut in den Fokus rücken
Im BND will das illegale Treiben des Mitarbeiters niemandem aufgefallen sein. Sicher, ein wenig geltungssüchtig habe er sich hin und wieder gezeigt, heißt es. Von einer leichten Behinderung ist die Rede. Aber dass der Mann aus dem mittleren Dienst als Spion für die Amerikaner tätig sein könnte, das hielt in Pullach offenbar niemand für möglich.
Angesichts der potenziellen Folgen, die der Fall haben kann, sind viele Eingeweihte noch etwas vorsichtig, was die Aussagen des BND-Mitarbeiters angeht. Kann das alles wirklich sein? Ist es nicht möglich, dass er in seiner Vernehmung Falschangaben macht? Sich als Wichtigtuer aufspielt? Ausschließen kann man das nicht. Aber warum sollte sich der Mitarbeiter selbst so massiv belasten?
Der Fall schreckt die Bundesregierung auf. Die Aufklärung steht erst am Anfang, die Folgen sind unabsehbar. Es stellen sich etliche Fragen, nicht nur für das transatlantische Verhältnis. Sollten sich die Angaben des BND-Mitarbeiters bewahrheiten, dürfte dies erheblichen diplomatischen Schaden anrichten.
Wegen des Verhaltens der Regierung in Washington während der NSA-Affäre sind viele in Berlin ohnehin nicht gut auf die Amerikaner zu sprechen. Schon wird auf den Fluren des Bundestags darüber spekuliert, wie man der US-Regierung symbolisch eins auswischen könnte. Vielleicht, indem man doch nochmal über eine Vernehmung Edward Snowdens in Deutschland nachdenkt?
Auch die Arbeit des Bundesnachrichtendienst dürfte erneut in den Fokus rücken. Schon im NSA-Skandal war die Behörde aus Pullach etliche Male in Erklärungsnot geraten. Nun aber steht die Frage im Raum, wie viel wert ein Auslandsgeheimdienst eigentlich ist, der nicht einmal verhindern kann, dass ein eigener Mitarbeiter für eine Partnerbehörde spioniert.
04. Juli 2014, 16:43 Uhr
Von Matthias Gebauer, Veit Medick und Jörg Schindler
Find this story at 4 July 2014
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2014

Spies such as Mata Hari, heroic nurse Edith Cavell, suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst and the Boy Scouts feature in documents

Exotic spies, heroes, and known and suspected communists feature in top-secret MI5 files available online for the first time on Thursday to mark the 100th anniversary of the first world war.

Mata Hari, Edith Cavell, Sir Roger Casement, Arthur Ransome, Sidney Reilly, a leading suffragette and the Boy Scouts were among those MI5 kept under surveillance in its early years as Britain’s Security Service.

Mata Hari, one of history’s most celebrated honey-trap spies, first came to MI5’s attention in December 1915 when she arrived at Folkestone on the Dieppe boat train. She admitted her destination was The Hague to be near her lover Baron Van der Capellen, a colonel in the Dutch Hussars.

The following year, MI5’s informant in The Hague, codenamed “T”, reported: “Mata Hari is a demi-mondaine who is in relation with highly placed people and during her sojourn in France she made the acquaintance of many French and Belgian officers. She is suspected of having been to France on an important mission for the Germans.”

In November 1916, questioned by MI5, Mata Hari claimed that a French consul in Spain had subsequently asked her to go to Austria to spy on that country’s forces.

A renowned dancer, Mata Hari was a Dutch divorcee born Marguerite Gertrude Zelle in the Dutch East Indies. A French intelligence report dated 22 May 1917, shown to a MI5 officer in Paris, noted: “Mata Hari today confessed that she has been engaged by Consul Cremer of Amsterdam for the German Secret Service. She was paid 20,000 francs in advance.”

She was shot by a French firing squad in 1917.

Edith Cavell, a British nurse at a Red Cross hospital in Belgium, was executed by a German firing squad in October 1915 for helping 200 allied soldiers to escape. The files in the National Archives show that British diplomats clung to the hope that Germany would not execute a woman who was regarded as a heroine.

An MI5 agent in Liège said he had been told by a reliable source that “the two spies who denounced Nurse Cavell have both been killed, one by a bullet in the head, the other by a dagger thrust in the chest”.

Sir Roger Casement, a British consul in Africa and South America knighted for his work in exposing the exploitation and slaughter of Africans and South American Indians, and Sidney Reilly, a naturalised Russian Jew dubbed the Ace of Spies, are other victims of espionage who feature among the 150 MI5 files.

Casement was arrested on a beach in Co Kerry, three days before the 1916 Easter rising, after landing in a boat that had picked him up from a German submarine. A trawler accompanying the submarine and carrying 20,000 guns was scuttled after being intercepted.

The MI5 documents show Casement knew the Easter rising was doomed to failure after Germany reneged on its promises to send troops to help the rebels. The UK government used his “black diaries” to smear him and sabotage a campaign to save his life.

“I have done nothing dishonourable, as you will one day learn,” he told Frank Hall, a senior MI5 officer. Casement was hanged in Pentonville prison on 3 August 1916.

Reilly was recruited to work for the British secret intelligence service, MI6. When he died in 1925 the Russians claimed a guard had shot him as he crossed the border with Finland. MI5 documents suggest he was executed by Bolsheviks in 1925.

Reilly had many wives, according to MI5. A Special Branch informer reported that his second wife, actress Pepita Bobadilla, went to the Russian embassy in Paris following his death. As she applied for a visa, she told the Russians her husband had been “spying for the British government”.

Arthur Ransome, author of Swallows and Amazons, caught MI5’s attention as correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Moscow who married Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina.

British officials told MI5 that Ransome was “exceedingly clever and interesting fellow – but an out and out Bolshevist”. The British consul and MI6 officer in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, soon corrected them. Ransome, who was given the codename S76, was a valuable intelligence asset during the chaos of the Russian revolution, he said.

The files include one on the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, one of MI5’s later targets. MI5 noted that in 1940 she wrote to Viscount Swinton, chairman of a committee investigating Fifth Columnists, sending him a list of active Fascists still at large and of anti-Fascists who had been interned. A copy of the letter includes a note by Swinton, saying: “I should think a most doubtful source of information.”

The files also show how MI5 was concerned that the Boy Scouts were being infiltrated by Communists after the first world war.

The files can be accessed at the National Archives link – First World War 100.

Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian, Wednesday 9 April 2014 22.43 BST

Find this story at 9 April 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

World War I spy Mata Hari refused to fully confess to espionage before facing French firing squad in 1917.

Mata Hari was a wildly-popular Dutch exotic dancer, who was executed as a German spy in 1917.

The spy known as “Mata Hari” was glib in her final prison interrogation before her life ended in front of a French firing squad in the First World War, according to formerly top secret files from the British intelligence agency MI5.
Mata Hari, once a wildly popular Dutch exotic dancer, didn’t appear fazed when an interrogator confronted her with a long list of her lovers, an MI5 report released earlier this month states.
“When faced with her acquaintances with officers of all ranks and all nations, she replied that she loved all officers, and would rather have as her lover a poor officer than a rich banker,” the MI5 files note.
Walking the Western Front:
• Where John McCrae wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’
• The ‘Trench of Death’
Her lovers included a wide range of ages and nationalities, including Germans, French, Russians, Swiss and Spaniards, the files state.
At the time of her execution on Oct. 15, 1917, in a muddy field outside Paris, she was accused of feeding Germany information that cost some 50,000 Allied troops their lives.
But two academics who have studied her case say they don’t believe she provided Germany with any useful information for its war effort.
“She really did not pass on anything that you couldn’t find in the local newspapers in Spain,” said Julie Wheelwright of City University in London, the author of The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage.
Mata Hari was the stage name for Gertruda Margaretha Zelle, who was born July 8, 1876, in the Dutch East Indies to a Dutch father and a Javanese mother. Wheelwright said she became an exotic dancer after fleeing an abusive marriage.
Wheelwright described her as “an independent woman, a divorcee, a citizen of a neutral country, a courtesan and a dancer, which made her a perfect scapegoat for the French, who were then losing the war.”
“She was kind of held up as an example of what might happen if your morals were too loose,” Wheelwright said.
Wesley Wark, a security, intelligence and terrorism expert at the University of Ottawa, said Mata Hari provided France with a scapegoat when the country wrestled with emerging power for women and fears of losing the war.
“They needed a scapegoat and she was a notable target for scapegoating,” Wark said.
In the MI5 files, an intelligence officer sounds impressed with her attitude during her final days.
“She never made a full confession nor can I find … that she ever gave away anyone as her (accomplice),” the report states.
“She was a ‘femme forte’ and she worked alone,” the report concludes.
The newly released files show Mata Hari was trailed by Allied surveillance officers across France, Spain and England.
The officers noted that on Aug. 4, 1916, she wrote to a Don Diego de Leon and then met a Capt. Vladimir de Masloff, of the Russian army, stationed in France.
“He was very intimate with her from this date and constant letters pass between, he was her favourite lover,” the MI5 files state.
“Same day she met PROFESSOR MARIANI Captain Italian Army.”
While in custody in the ancient Prison de Saint-Lazare outside Paris, she admitted to having spied for the Germans, the MI5 files state.
A file dated May 22, 1917 states: “Matahari today confessed that she has been engaged in Consul CREMER of Amsterdam for the German Secret Service. She was paid 20,000 (francs) in advance and her number was H.21.”
That file also notes her German spymasters gave her vials of invisible ink.
Much of her prison interrogation statement concerns mundane thoughts, not troop movements.
Her MI5 file includes the note: “She had discussed the life led by people in Paris, as regards supply of food etc., had said that the English officers in Paris treated their French Allies badly, although the French went out of their way to treat them ‘like Kings’; that the French nation might live to regret that they had ever allowed the English into the country … .”
Even if she wanted to divulge information, there wasn’t much she could say, Wark said. “Politics wasn’t really part of her world.”
Accounts of her execution say she waved off the offer of a blindfold or the last sacrament. She was reportedly blowing a kiss — at her lawyer, a nun or the firing squad, depending on who’s telling the story — the instant her life ended.
Wheelwright thinks this was likely bravado on the dancer’s part.
“This was going to be her last performance and she was going to go out in style,” she said. “She was playing to the crowd, which is what she always did.”

By: Peter Edwards Star Reporter, Published on Thu Apr 24 2014

Find this story at 24 April 2014

© Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. 1996-2014

Mata Hari: beautiful exotic dancer turned espionage agent
Mata Hari, the glamorous World War I spy shot by the French in 1917, was watched by MI5 for two years, according to the newly released secret government papers.
The former wife of a Dutch army colonel, she was recruited by German intelligence while performing as a stripper in Berlin.

Special Report: Wartime Spies The sultry spy, who was notorious in prewar Paris for her exotic dancing and libidinous lifestyle, was interrogated twice by the British secret service but they could not force her to reveal her activities.

She later confessed all to French authorities and was executed. Her MI5 files note however that there was never any evidence that she passed on anything of military importance.

‘Unfavourable impression’

Mata Hari was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands.

She first attracted the suspicion of British officials in December 1915 and was arrested at the southern English port of Folkestone attempting to board a boat for France.

Under interrogation, she admitted she was heading for The Hague to live near her lover, a Dutch colonel. But MI5 could not pin anything further on her.

Her interrogator, Captain S S Dillon, noted at the time: “Although she had good answers to every question, she impressed me very unfavourably, but after having her very carefully searched and finding nothing, I considered I hadn’t enough grounds to refuse her embarkation.”

The report also noted that she was “handsome, bold … well and fashionably dressed” in a costume with “raccoon fur trimming and hat to match”.

Suspect

Mata Hari
MI5 decided to keep tabs
MI5 continued to monitored her after she settled in The Hague, and soon an informant revealed she was being paid by the German Embassy.

A February 1916 intelligence report noted that she was “in relation with highly placed people and during her sojourn in France she made the acquaintance of many French and Belgian officers”.

“She is suspected of having been to France on important mission for the Germans,” the report said. The report concluded that the matter was being followed up.

Wrongly suspected

In November 1916, British authorities removed Mata Hari from a steamer at the port of Falmouth en route from Spain to Holland, believing she was another German spy, Clara Benedix.

She was taken, along with her 10 travelling trunks, to be interviewed by MI5 and the police. She told them she had been recruited by a Belgian officer, to work for his country’s intelligence service.

She also alleged that the French consul in Vigo, Spain, had asked her to spy on Russian forces in Austria.

Death by firing squad

Once again there was insufficient evidence to detain her and she was sent back to Spain.

The following year she was arrested by the French authorities, court martialled and sentenced to death by firing squad.

A French intelligence report shown to MI5 noted: “Mata Hari today confessed that she has been engaged by Consul Cremer of Amsterdam for the German Secret Service.”

She admitted sending “general information of every kind procurable,” but mentioned no military secrets, it said.

Tuesday, 26 January, 1999, 23:22 GMT

Find this story at 26 January 1999

© BBC

from the holds-several-‘most-rights-violated’-trophies,-however dept

Certain demographics are desirable. 18-34? Taste-makers and early adopters. 35-49? Money. Muslim and New York City resident? Being a member of this group meant (until recently) having First Amendment-protected activities being closely scrutinized by the NYPD’s now-defunct “Demographics Unit.”

This special unit was recently disbanded, roughly a decade after it should have been, thanks to a new mayor and a new police commissioner. The unit was put together by a former CIA officer who used the post-9/11 attack climate to push for expansive surveillance of the city’s Muslim population, including designating entire mosques as terrorist-related entities. Despite all the extra attention being paid to Muslims, not a single useful investigation resulted from this unit’s work.

The surveillance being done by this unit so pervasively subverted civil liberties protections that not even the CIA could access the NYPD’s files without breaking its internal rules. The same goes for the FBI, which has long partnered with the NYPD in its counter-terrorism efforts. Don Borelli, a former FBI agent, has written a piece for the New York Daily News, detailing why police commissioner Bill Bratton was right to disband the Demographics Unit.
Together, we were able to stop many threats — and save many lives — including a serious plot against the subways from Najibullah Zazi, an ethnic Afghan who grew up in Queens and went on to become an Al Qaeda operative.

Interestingly enough, the NYPD demographics unit had detailed files on Zazi’s neighborhood in Flushing during the period in which he was becoming radicalized. It kept files on businesses and visited coffee shops believed to be hangouts for potential terrorists. The unit even visited the travel agency where Zazi bought his ticket to travel to Afghanistan for terrorism training.

So why wasn’t Zazi identified until he was driving to New York from Denver to blow up the subway? Because the program was ineffective. The mission of the demographics unit was to spot the terrorists in the haystack, but again and again it failed to do so.
All haystack, no needle, like so many other surveillance programs. The unit overwhelmed itself in useless data, keeping it from finding what it needed when it mattered most. These data swamps built by investigative agencies have proven to be more dangerous than old-fashioned police work.
During my time with the Joint Terrorism Task Force, I read many reports derived from investigations conducted by the NYPD Intelligence Division, which may well have relied on the demographics unit’s work. I was presented with many interesting facts about where people were attending Friday prayers and who belonged to various Muslim student associations.

But rarely did I learn anything I didn’t already know through traditional investigations, much less anything that would have led me to open a terrorism investigation.
Adding to the mess here is the NYPD’s twisted relationship with the FBI. While it clearly enjoys access to G-men and their tools, former police chief Ray Kelly often made it clear that his officers did superior work and that the FBI’s production of information was too slow to be useful. Of course, FBI agents have said the same thing about the NYPD, particularly in the information department, where the sharing was usually a one-way street that flowed out of the FBI and into the NYPD’s hands.

Beyond the antagonistic relationship is the Demographic Unit itself — its own worst enemy. The former CIA officer who had a local judge rewrite guidelines to give the NYPD unprecedented permission for pervasive surveillance also managed to ensure that most info flowing back upstream to the FBI ended up being routed directly into the trash can.
Moreover, I wound up shredding some of these reports because they had no investigative value and, in my opinion, did not belong in any FBI file because they solely reported on what was First Amendment-protected activity.
Much like other failures to stop terrorist activity, the problems here were communication (too little) and information (too much). As Borelli notes, in his experience, it’s been more useful to build trust than to endlessly spy, something the NYPD really hasn’t made much effort to foster over the years. But its failure to do so means it has buried itself in data and alienated those who could bring an inside perspective. A decade’s worth of spying resulted in nothing but violated rights.

by Tim Cushing
Mon, Apr 28th 2014 4:05pm

Find this story at 28 April 2014

• Photographer arrested after 2008 protest wins ruling
• FBI sought to protect ‘confidential sources’

The FBI has lost a legal battle to prevent the disclosure of documents that could reveal the identity of two of its covert informants.

In highly unusual case Laura Sennett, a freelance photojournalist, has won a ruling from a district court that compels the FBI to provide her with documents that shed light on informants use by agents used in their investigation into a protest which resulted in damage to a hotel lobby in Washington.

The FBI launched its joint terrorism task force investigation days after anarchists protested a World Bank and International Monetary Fund meeting in the capital in April 2008.

Protesters stormed into the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel around 2.30am, chanting slogans and throwing paint-filled balloons. Most of the criminal damage, including a broken window, was minor, although the hotel said a statue worth more than $200,000 was damaged.

Sennett had been tipped off about the protest and attended to take photographs. She believed the protesters planned to wake up the IMF delegates by making a commotion, and maintains she had no prior knowledge of their criminal intent. She did not enter the hotel lobby – choosing to photograph events from outside.

Both of the “confidential sources” cited in the court case were asked by the FBI to review surveillance footage of the protest, in order to help identify who was there. They identified a handful of activists as well as Sennett, who specialises in reporting grass-roots activism.

The FBI placed the photojournalist under surveillance before raiding her home with two-dozen armed law enforcement officials, who seized memory cards, hard drives and computer and camera equipment.

In an effort to find out more about why she was targeted, Sennett, 51, has been running a legal campaign to obtain information the bureau holds about her, using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

She had so far been given more than 1,000 pages of FBI documents, which the Guardian has seen, but the bureau withheld key portions, claiming they fell under an exemption intended to protect the identity of “confidential sources”. That decision has been challenged in court by Sennett’s lawyers.

On Wednesday, district judge James E Boasberg sided with Sennett, ordering the FBI to release the contested documents, which all parties accept “could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source”.

The judge said that despite three attempts, the FBI had failed to convince him the sources would have inferred confidentiality from their interactions with agents.

Dan Metcalfe, who directed the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy for more than 25 years before retiring in 2007, and has represented the FBI in dozens of similar cases, said it was “extremely rare” for the bureau to be forced to reveal the identity of a source.

“I can think of just a handful of cases at most in which the FBI has had to disclose potentially identifying information about a confidential source over the past 40 years,” he said.

The case, he said, was a significant blow for the FBI, which is very strongly opposed to revealing the identity of its sources, not least because doing so could discourage future informants from co-operating.

Metcalfe, now a law professor at the American University, said the solicitor general was highly unlikely to launch an appeal.

“I’ve read thousands and thousands of FOIA opinions,” he said. “I would put this in the top percentile for being analytically sound and written exceptionally well. Based upon the facts that one gleans from reading the opinion, this is an entirely correct outcome. I see little or no prospect for reversal on appeal.”

Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said he believed the two informants in the case, one of whom is said to have attended anti-capitalist meetings, could be private investigators.

“That is something that, having seen the documents, the judge may be less keen on keeping secret,” he said.

German said the fact an act of vandalism against the Four Seasons was even investigated by the FBI’s counter-terrorism teams followed a pattern of investigations into protest movements that are “more about suppressing dissent than investigating serious or violent crime”.

Detective Vincent Antignano, the federal marshall deputised to run the FBI’s investigation into the protest, said in a deposition conducted by Sennett’s legal team he believed Sennett was “like-minded like anarchists”, because she was among the 16 people captured on the hotel’s surveillance video.

“Everyone on that video is a suspect, so that’s the way I look at it,” he said, adding that he assumed she had similar views to the protesters captured in the video “who despise their government”.

Asked to elaborate, Antignano said that while he did not know Sennett’s dietary preference, “she could also be a vegan like … [people] who are against animal protests [sic] or animal research or won’t eat meat and stuff like that.”

Antignano had a broad notion of what behaviour constituted “terrorism”, saying that even an assault could fall within the definition.

“If you get assaulted and you believe you’ve been terrorised, then maybe that is terrorism,” he told Sennett’s lawyer.

The deposition was part of a separate case, in which Sennett’s lawyers sued the FBI for damages they said Sennett suffered as part of the raid on her home, which was led by Antignano.

Sennett said the raid was traumatising. Around two-dozen agents “yanked my 19-year-old son out of bed at gunpoint”, she said, before quizzing her about political books on her shelf and asking what “kind of an American” she was.

Sennet said she replied: “I’m a photographer.”

A freelancer whose images have appeared on CNN, MSNBC and the History Channel and in the Toronto Free Press, Sennett is adamant the FBI must have known she was present at the protest in a journalistic capacity. The FBI denied its agents knew of her occupation.

Sennett was never arrested or charged. She believes undercover police or moles within the protest group may have been responsible for giving the FBI details, including a cellphone number, which allowed agents to track her down.

Her lawyer, DC-based Jeffrey Light, argued that her status as a photojournalist should have barred agents from seizing her material, under a clause of the Privacy Protection Act.

However in that case a district court ruled against Sennett – a decision upheld in 2012 by the court of appeal, which found that while Sennett’s occupation provided “an innocent explanation” for her presence at the protest, the FBI, when it launched its inquiry, still had “probable cause” to believe she was part of a conspiracy to commit vandalism.

Wednesday’s court ruling by judge Boasberg, a Barack Obama appointee, was far more sympathetic to Sennett’s case.

Boasberg said the FBI had failed to provide sufficient proof that its informants “inferred that their communications with the bureau would remain confidential”. While acknowledging the FBI’s argument regarding preserving the confidentiality of informants – “one of source protection and empowerment of law-enforcement agencies” – Boasberg added: “That solicitude, however, can only carry the court so far.”

Light said he hoped Wednesday’s victory, which the government has 90 days to appeal, would take the capital’s protest community a step closer to discovering the identity of potential moles in their midst.

“People want to know who is spying on them,” he said.

Sennett said she hoped that by identification of the FBI’s informants in her case would discourage the bureau from conducting similar quasi-terrorist investigation in the future.

“I pursued this case because I don’t think anyone – activists, freelancers, bloggers – should have to go through what I went through.”

The US attorney’s office said it was reviewing the case but declined to offer further comment.

The FBI also declined a request for comment.

Paul Lewis in Washington
theguardian.com, Friday 2 May 2014 18.01 BST

Find this story at 2 May 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

The timely new documentary Better This World tells a provocative and cautionary story about the shifting fault lines of civil liberties, protest and government vigilance. Two boyhood friends from the heart of Texas, Bradley Crowder and David McKay, find themselves increasingly out of step with their neighbors as they react against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After moving to Austin, they go to a presentation at a local bookstore about protesting the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC) in Minneapolis-St. Paul. There they are approached by a charismatic older activist, who suggests that they work together to prepare for the demonstrations.

Six months later, on the eve of the convention, the two young friends make eight Molotov cocktails but then decide not to use them. The matter might have ended there — but not everything was as it seemed. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies had been engaged in a two-year, multimillion-dollar counterterrorism effort leading up to the convention. The young men’s mentor, it turns out, was a government informant and had been long before meeting them; Crowder and McKay were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism.

McKay calls home from jail
David McKay calls home for the first time from jail
Credit: Mike Nicholson

Growing up in Midland, Texas, Crowder and McKay had little political education beyond their parents’ encouragement to “stand up for the oppressed” and to “stand up for what you believe in.” Somewhere along the way, partly in late-night walks through the town’s deserted streets, the friends began to form their own interpretation of their parents’ words. It was Crowder who made the first public statement of his political beliefs in 2003 when the United States declared war on Iraq. He drew an upside-down American flag with the words “No War” on a T-shirt and wore it to his high school the next day — a move that, he recounts, “became a pretty dramatic event.”

Seeking “something else,” Crowder and McKay moved to more progressive Austin, where they met Brandon Darby, who had gained prominence as the co-founder of Common Ground, a grassroots relief organization that fed and housed thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina. Crowder and McKay were flattered when the larger-than-life activist approached them at a bookstore in Austin about organizing together.

Two years prior to the 2008 RNC, Minneapolis-St. Paul was designated a “homeland security site” and the FBI began “preventative” intelligence operations nationwide, including sending informants into many activist circles. As FBI Special Agent Christopher Langert says, “We . . . knew that there were . . . some people [coming] to St. Paul to do more than just demonstrate. . . . They were going to try to block delegates, cause destruction.” So the FBI tasked Darby with infiltrating Austin-based activist groups.

Police pepperspray protesters at the 2008 RNC
Police unleash pepper spray at protesters during the 2008 Republican National Convention.
Credit: Courtesy of Better This World

As several people in the film who knew Darby, Crowder and McKay recount, Darby urged the young men to become more radical — to take more extreme actions. According to Larra Elliott, one of the activists who accompanied the three to the RNC, “Brandon . . . said something that caught my attention, like, ‘Don’t you feel that firebombs and armed militias . . . that kind of . . . action is necessary sometimes?’ And Brad was like, ‘No, I don’t feel that way.’ Brandon would not leave it alone.”

Darby echoes some of this sentiment in letters to his FBI handler about meetings with McKay and Crowder. “I told them that direct action is intense, and we could all expect to have violence used against us. I told them I was ready to deal with that, and if they weren’t, then they shouldn’t work with me.”

On Aug. 28, 2008, Crowder and McKay joined Darby and several other activists Darby had brought together for the long van ride up to the RNC, where they would join thousands of other protestors. Within days Crowder and McKay were under arrest. The “Texas Two” faced multiple domestic terrorism charges, agonizing legal decisions and decades in prison. Darby, until then their mentor, would be the government’s star witness against them.

Better This World reconstructs the story of the relationship between these three men and the subsequent twists and turns of their legal cases through interviews with Crowder, McKay and their family members; FBI agents and attorneys; and a wealth of intriguing surveillance and archival footage — presenting an extraordinarily well-documented account and untangling a web of questions: Why did Darby, a committed activist, become a government informant? What led these young men to build eight homemade bombs? Did Darby and law enforcement save innocent victims from domestic terrorists bent on violence and destruction? Or were Crowder and McKay impressionable disciples set up by overzealous agents and a dangerous provocateur? Or does the answer lie somewhere in between?

Better This World probes these questions and more as it paints a gripping portrait of the strange and intriguing odyssey of these men — poignantly describing not only the problems of power and authority, but also the ultimate power of friendship, forgiveness and love.

Premiere Date: September 6, 2011

Find this story at 6 September 2011

Copyright © 1995–2014 American Documentary, Inc.

FOR A FEW DAYS IN SEPTEMBER 2008, as the Republican Party kicked off its national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Twin Cities were a microcosm of a deeply divided nation. The atmosphere around town was tense, with local and federal police facing off against activists who had descended upon the city. Convinced that anarchists were plotting violent acts, they sought to bust the protesters’ hangouts, sometimes bursting into apartments and houses brandishing assault rifles. Inside the cavernous Xcel Energy convention center, meanwhile, an out-of-nowhere vice presidential nominee named Sarah Palin assured tens of thousands of ecstatic Republicans that her running mate, John McCain, was “a leader who’s not looking for a fight, but sure isn’t afraid of one either.”

The same thing might have been said of David McKay and Bradley Crowder, a pair of greenhorn activists from George W. Bush’s Texas hometown who had driven up for the protests. Wide-eyed guys in their early 20s, they’d come of age hanging out in sleepy downtown Midland, commiserating about the Iraq War and the administration’s assault on civil liberties.

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St. Paul was their first large-scale protest, and when they arrived they were taken aback: Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tumbling tear-gas canisters—to McKay and Crowder, it seemed like an all-out war on democracy. They wanted to fight back, even going so far as to mix up a batch of Molotov cocktails. Just before dawn on the day of Palin’s big coming out, a SWAT team working with federal agents raided their crash pad, seized the Molotovs, and arrested McKay, alleging that he intended to torch a parking lot full of police cars.

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Since only a few people knew about the firebombs, fellow activists speculated that someone close to McKay and Crowder must have tipped off the feds. Back in Texas, flyers soon began appearing at coffeehouses urging leftists to beware of Brandon Darby, an “FBI informant rat loose in Austin.”

The allegation came as a shocker; Darby was a known and trusted member of the left-wing protest crowd. “If Brandon was conning me, and many others, it would be the biggest lie of my life since I found out the truth about Santa Claus,” wrote Scott Crow, one of many activists who rushed to defend him at first. Two months later, Darby came clean. “The simple truth,” he wrote on Indymedia.org, “is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Darby’s entanglement with the feds is part of a quiet resurgence of FBI interest in left-wingers. From the Red Scare days of the 1950s into the ’70s, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, a.k.a. COINTELPRO, monitored and sabotaged communist and civil rights organizations. Nowadays, in what critics have dubbed the Green Scare, the bureau is targeting the global-justice movement and radical environmentalists. In 2005, John Lewis, then the FBI official in charge of domestic terrorism, ranked groups like the Earth Liberation Front ahead of jihadists as America’s top domestic terror threat.

FBI stings involving informants have been key to convicting 14 ELF members since 2006 for a string of high-profile arsons, and to sentencing a man to 20 years in prison for conspiring to destroy several targets, including cell phone towers. During the St. Paul protests, at least two additional informants infiltrated and helped indict a group of activists known as the RNC Eight for conspiring to riot and damage property.

Brandon Darby.: Couresy Loteria Films
Brandon Darby. Courtesy Loteria Films
But it’s Darby’s snitching that has provided the most intriguing tale. It’s the focus of a radio magazine piece, two documentary films, and a book in the making. By far the most damning portrayal is Better This World, an award-winning doc that garnered rave reviews on the festival circuit and is slated to air on PBS on September 6. The product of two years of work by San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega, it dredges up a wealth of FBI documents and court transcripts related to Darby’s interactions with his fellow activists to suggest that Darby acted as an agitator as much as an informant. (Watch the trailer and read our interview with the filmmakers here.)

The film makes a compelling case that Darby, with the FBI’s blessing, used his charisma and street credibility to goad Crowder and McKay into pursuing the sort of actions that would later land them in prison. Darby flatly denies it, and he recently sued the New York Times over a story with similar implications. (The Times corrected the disputed detail.) “I feel very morally justified to do the things that I’ve done,” he told me. “I don’t know if I could have handled it much differently.”

Darby “gets in people’s minds and can pull you in,” one activist warned me. “He’s a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him.”
BRANDON MICHAEL DARBY is a muscular, golden-skinned 34-year-old with Hollywood looks and puppy-dog eyes. Once notorious for sleeping around the activist scene, he now often sleeps with a gun by his bed in response to death threats. His former associates call him unhinged, a megalomaniac, a manipulator. “He gets in people’s minds and can pull you in,” Lisa Fithian, a veteran labor, environmental, and anti-war organizer, warned me before I set out to interview him. “He’s a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him.”

The son of a refinery welder, Darby grew up in Pasadena, a dingy Texas oil town. His parents divorced when he was 12, and soon after he ran away to Houston, where he lived in and out of group homes. By 2002, Darby had found his way to Austin’s slacker scene, where one day he helped his friend, medical-marijuana activist Tracey Hayes, scale Zilker Park’s 165-foot moonlight tower (of Dazed and Confused fame) and unfurl a giant banner painted with pot leaves that read “Medicine.” They later “hooked up,” Hayes says, and eventually moved in together. She introduced him to her activist friends, and he started reading Howard Zinn and histories of the Black Panthers.

Some local activists wouldn’t work with Darby (he liked to taunt the cops during protests, getting them all riled up). But that changed after Hurricane Katrina, when he learned that Robert King Wilkerson, one of the Angola Three—former Black Panthers who endured decades of solitary confinement at Louisiana’s Angola Prison—was trapped in New Orleans. Darby and Crow drove 10 hours from Austin towing a jon boat. When they couldn’t get it into the city, Darby somehow harangued some Coast Guard personnel into rescuing Wilkerson. The story became part of the foundation myth for an in-your-face New Orleans relief organization called the Common Ground Collective.

It would eventually grow into a national group with a million-dollar budget. But at first Common Ground was just a bunch of pissed-off anarchists working out of the house of Malik Rahim, another former Panther. Rahim asked Darby to set up an outpost in the devastated Ninth Ward, where not even the Red Cross was allowed at first. Darby brought in a group of volunteers who fed people and cleared debris from houses while being harassed by police, right along with the locals who had refused to evacuate. “If I’d had an appropriate weapon, I would have attacked my government for what they were doing to people,” he declared in a clip featured in Better This World. He said he’d since bought an AK-47 and was willing to use it: “There are residents here who have said that you will not take my home from me over my dead body, and we have made a commitment to be in solidarity with those residents.”

But Common Ground’s approach soon began to grate on Darby. He bristled at its consensus-based decision making, its interminable debates over things like whether serving meat to locals was serving oppression. He idolized rugged, iconoclastic populists like Che Guevara—so, in early 2006, he jumped at a chance to go to Venezuela to solicit money for Katrina victims.

Darby was deeply impressed with what he saw, until a state oil exec asked him to go to Colombia and meet with FARC, the communist guerrilla group. “They said they wanted to help me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana,” he told “This American Life” reporter Michael May. “And I was like, ‘I don’t think so.'” It turned out armed revolution wasn’t really his thing.David Mckay: Couresy Loteria Films
David McKay. Courtesy Loteria Films

Darby’s former friends dispute the Venezuela story as they dispute much that he says. They accuse him of grandstanding, being combative, and even spying on his rivals. In his short-lived tenure as Common Ground’s interim director, Darby drove out 30 volunteer coordinators and replaced them with a small band of loyalists. “He could only see what’s in it for him,” Crow told me. For example, Darby preempted a planned police-harassment hot line by making flyers asking victims to call his personal phone number.

The flyers led to a meeting between Darby and Major John Bryson, the New Orleans cop in charge of the Ninth Ward. In time, Bryson became a supporter of Common Ground, and Darby believed that they shared a common dream of rebuilding the city. But he was less and less sure about his peers. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve replicated every system that I fought against,'” he recalls. “It was fucking bizarre.”

By mid-2007, Darby had left the group and become preoccupied with the conflict in Lebanon. Before long, Darby says, he was approached in Austin by a Lebanese-born schoolteacher, Riad Hamad, for help with a vague plan to launder money into the Palestinian territories. Hamad also spoke about smuggling bombs into Israel, he claims.

Darby says he discouraged Hamad at first, and then tipped off Bryson, who put him in touch with the FBI. “I talked,” he told me. “And it was the fucking weirdest thing.” He knew his friends would hate him for what he’d done. (The FBI raided Hamad’s home, and discovered nothing incriminating; he was found dead in Austin’s Lady Bird Lake two months later—an apparent suicide.)

MCKAY AND CROWDER FIRST encountered Darby in March 2008 at Austin’s Monkey Wrench Books during a recruitment drive for the St. Paul protests. Later, in a scene re-created in Better This World, they met at a café to talk strategy. “I stated that I wasn’t interested in being a part of a group if we were going to sit and talk too much,” Darby emailed his FBI handlers. “I stated that I was gonna shut that fucker down.”

“My biggest impression from that meeting was that Brandon really dominated it,” fellow activist James Clark told the filmmakers. Darby’s FBI email continued: “I stated that they all looked like they ate too much tofu and that they should eat beef so that they could put on muscle mass. I stated that they weren’t going to be able to fight anybody until they did so.” At one point Darby took everyone out to a parking lot and threw Clark to the ground. Clark interpreted it as Darby sending the message: “Look at me, I’m badass. You can be just like me.” (Darby insists that this never happened.)

“The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use” the Molotovs, Crowder told me.
When the Austin activists arrived in St. Paul, police, acting on a Darby tip, broke open the group’s trailer and confiscated the sawed-off traffic barrels they’d planned to use as shields against riot police. They soon learned of similar raids all over town. “It started to feel like Darby hadn’t amped these things up, and it really was as crazy and intense as he had told us it was going to be,” Crowder says. Feeling that Darby’s tough talk should be “in some ways, a guide of behavior,” they went to Walmart to buy Molotov supplies.

“The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use them,” Crowder told me. They stored the firebombs in a basement and left for the convention center, where Crowder was swept up in a mass arrest. Darby and McKay later talked about possibly lobbing the Molotovs on a police parking lot early the next morning, though by 2:30 a.m. McKay was having serious doubts. “I’m just not feeling the vibe on the street,” he texted Darby.

“You butt head,” Darby shot back. “Text me when you can.” He texted his friend repeatedly over the next hour, until well after McKay had turned in. At 5 a.m., police broke into McKay’s room and found him in bed. He was scheduled to fly home to Austin two hours later.

Bradley Crowder: Courtesy Loteria Films
Bradley Crowder. Courtesy Loteria Films
The feds ultimately convicted the pair for making the Molotov cocktails, but they didn’t have enough evidence of intent to use them. Crowder, who pleaded guilty rather than risk trial, and a heavier sentence, got two years. McKay, who was offered seven years if he pleaded guilty, opted for a trial, arguing on the stand that Darby told him to make the Molotovs, a claim he recanted after learning that Crowder had given a conflicting account. McKay is now serving out the last of his four years in federal prison.

AT SOUTH AUSTIN’S STRANGE BREW coffeehouse, Darby shows up to meet me on a chromed-out Yamaha with flames on the side. We sit out back, where he can chain-smoke his American Spirits. Darby is through being a leftist radical. Indeed, he’s now an enthusiastic small-government conservative. He loves Sarah Palin. He opposes welfare and national health care. “The majority of things could be handled by people and by communities,” he explains. Climate change is “a bandwagon” and the EPA should be “strongly limited.” Abortion shouldn’t be a federal issue.

He sounds a bit like his new friend, Andrew Breitbart, who made his name producing sting videos targeting NPR, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and others. About a year after McKay and Crowder went to jail, Breitbart called Darby wanting to know why he wasn’t defending himself against the left’s misrepresentations. “They don’t print what I say,” Darby said. Breitbart offered him a regular forum on his website, BigGovernment.com. Darby now socializes with Breitbart at his Los Angeles home and is among his staunchest defenders. (Breitbart’s takedown of ACORN, he says, was “completely fucking fair.”)

“No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative,” Darby says. “And I’ve quit giving a shit.”
Entrapment? Darby scoffs at the suggestion. He pulls up his shirt, showing me his chest hair and tattoos, as though his macho physique had somehow seduced Crowder and McKay into mixing their firebombs. “No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative,” he says. “And I’ve quit giving a shit.”

The fact is, Darby says, McKay and Crowder considered him a has-been. His tofu comment, he adds, was a jocular response after one of them had ribbed him for being fat. “I constantly felt the need to show that I was still worthy of being in their presence,” he tells me. “They are complete fucking liars.” As for those late-night texts to McKay, Darby insists he was just trying to dissuade him from using the Molotovs.

He still meets with FBI agents, he says, to eat barbecue and discuss his ideas for new investigations. But then, it’s hard to know how much of what Darby says is true. For one, the FBI file of his former friend Scott Crow, which Crow obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request last year, suggests that Darby was talking with the FBI more than a year before he claims Bryson first put him in touch. Meanwhile, Crow and another activist, Karly Dixon, separately told me that Darby asked them, in the fall of 2006, to help him burn down an Austin bookstore affiliated with right-wing radio host Alex Jones. (Hayes, Darby’s ex, says he told her of the idea too.) “The guy was trying to put me in prison,” Crow says.

Such allegations, Darby claims, are simply part of a conspiracy to besmirch him and the FBI: “They get together, and they just figure out ways to attack.” Believe whomever you want to believe, he says. “Either way, they walk away with scars—and so do I.”

—By Josh Harkinson | September/October 2011 Issue

Find this story in September/October 2011

Copyright ©2014 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress.

A well-known activist—an anarchic, revolutionary activist—is accused of spying on other activists for the FBI. The strangest thing about the rumor is, it’s true. How Brandon Darby transformed from cop-hater to federal witness. Plus, a story by Etgar Keret, about a boy who betrays his people with a pair of shoes.

Brandon Darby was a radical activist and one of the founders of the incredibly effective relief organization Common Ground. Michael May reports on how Darby changed from a revolutionary who wanted the overthrow of the U.S. government into an informant working with the FBI against his former radical allies.

MAY 22, 2009

Find this story at 22 May 2009

© 1995 – 2014 Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass

Last year on Aug. 28, eight Austin activists traveled north in a rented white van to join thousands of protesters in St. Paul, Minn., for the Republican National Convention. In the trailer behind them were shields homemade from traffic barrels – cut in half, painted black, and fitted with Plexiglas windows. The shields mimic police riot gear and are often used in “black blocs,” a method of street protesting with origins in Germany that became prominent stateside at the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests, during which a black bloc caused property damage to various businesses. The black bloc is sort of like the punk rock version of protest, and its alluring combination of direct action and danger similarly attracts mostly young, white men.
On Aug. 31, a couple of days after the group’s arrival in Minnesota, St. Paul police searched the trailer without a warrant and seized the shields. The next day, two of the van’s passengers, David McKay, 22, and Bradley Crowder, 23, were arrested for disorderly conduct. McKay was released later that day, but Crowder remained in jail. According to a subsequent police affidavit, McKay met the next day with fellow activist Brandon Michael Darby, 32, who had also traveled to St. Paul with the Austin group. Angry that his friend was still being held, McKay told Darby that he and Crowder had made some Molotov cocktails (i.e., bottled gasoline bombs) and that he was planning on throwing them at cop cars parked in a parking lot.
According to the partial transcript in the affidavit, Darby asked McKay, “What if there’s a cop sleeping in the car?” “He’ll wake up,” replied McKay. “What if he doesn’t?” Darby asked. McKay was silent. Darby pressed on, asking McKay if he would “leave the scene with a cop burning or dying.” McKay answered, “Yes.” And then, again, according to a partial transcript of the recorded conversation, McKay told Darby that it was “worth it if a cop gets burned or maimed.” These words, along with eight Molotov cocktails found in the basement of the house in which McKay was crashing, have him facing up to 30 years in federal prison for charges related to possession and assembly of “unregistered firearms,” as the weapons are defined by federal law.
McKay did not know that his words to Darby, spoken in a moment of foolish hotheadedness that his friends say he is known for, were being transmitted to agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation via electronic surveillance gear that Darby had hidden out of sight. Nor did he know that Darby had supplied the FBI with the information that led to the seizure of the homemade riot gear. More­over, Darby had already told the feds that, in retaliation for the cops’ apparently illegal bust, the group had gone to Wal-Mart with a shopping list that might have supplied a touring Roller Derby team – elbow pads, gas cans, bike helmets, motor oil, tampons – but included also the potential fixings for some Molotov cocktails. The youths’ recklessness, as well as their implicit trust in Darby, had led them into a police trap.
Who Is Brandon Darby?
At first glance, Brandon Michael Darby seems a typical Austin lefty activist. He entered Austin’s radical progressive scene nearly a decade ago; through a former activist girlfriend, he became involved in a variety of small groups engaged in progressive projects: getting dirty drug needles off the streets, innocent prisoners out of jail, and recent immigrants into stable homes. He’s a boyishly handsome guy, in good shape from martial arts training, and he currently lives on several acres of farmland beyond the city limits, where he keeps chickens and a pig. He says he’s planning on getting a goat and has a “massive compost operation” going. He talks excitedly about making his home more sustainable and about the impending installation of a solar water heater. He collects rainwater for the garden and is restoring an old house.
Darby’s now employed as a legal and investigative assistant for an attorney, work that he feels good about because, he says, his employer doesn’t buy in to the whole “how much justice can you afford” system and does a lot of pro bono work. He recently became a father, to 9-month-old Olivia, and though he and Olivia’s mother don’t live together, he says that they are “co-parenting.” All in all, a contemporary portrait in progressive rationality and sustainable ambitions.
Prior to his latest incarnation, Darby had also acquired a considerable national reputation as a valiant and committed community activist, especially in New Orleans. There, initially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he had helped rescue stranded residents and rebuild housing and had been centrally involved in the work of the Common Ground Relief – a community effort focused on restoring neighborhoods, defending residents’ rights, and trying to rebuild the community from the ground up. Darby was featured in national interviews about post-hurricane New Orleans and more particularly had a reputation for defying authority and especially cops – not necessarily the profile of a potential police informant.
But ask around Austin activist circles, and a more contradictory portrait emerges. Several local activists describe Darby as a troubled, paranoid man with a volatile history with women, a penchant for violent rhetoric, and a strong authoritarian streak. At best, Darby might be just an ordinary and confused young person, fired with generalized idealism and stumbling through this world on his own tangled, misguided mission to save it. But at worst, he might have been – might have become over the last several years – a manipulator with a hero complex, bent on inflating his own self-importance in the comfortable guise of moral superiority.
Finding Common Ground
For much of 2006, Darby was heavily involved with Common Ground Relief, the post-Katrina recovery effort that has gained national attention for its endeavors. Darby himself came to national attention when he and one of Common Ground Relief’s founding members, Scott Crow, the prominent anarchist community organizer behind a host of Austin organizations including Radical Encuentro Camp, Ecology Action, and Treasure City Thrift, traveled to New Orleans right after the levees broke in search of their friend Robert “King” Wilkerson, who had stayed in his home to weather out the storm.
Crow’s detailed account of the apocalyptic journey, “It Takes a Spark to Start a Prairie Fire: Desperation, Racism and the Beginnings of Common Ground Relief,” can be read in full at Infoshop News (news.infoshop.org). (Crow’s book, Black Flags and Windmills: Anarchy, Hope and Common Ground, which also recounts the episode, comes out this year.) Their first effort failed, but the two friends decided to try again when they got a call from Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther, community organizer, and childhood friend of King’s, who reported that his neighborhood, Algiers, was being patrolled by white militias harassing unarmed black residents. The men set out once again, this time determined to bring supplies and aid to Rahim and to bring King back to Austin.
It was on this second trip that Rahim and Crow planted the seeds for Common Ground Relief using, Crow writes, “a strategy mixed from the Black Panther survival programs, the current work in Chiapas, Mexico of the Zapatistas and good old community organizing.” It was also when Darby made national headlines by taking a dip into the dreaded “toxic sludge,” a gnarly mix of industrial waste, waterlogged carcasses, and other nastiness, to find King. Crow writes: “Brandon called me one last time before he dropped into the dark water, and Malik and I told him we would come looking for him if he didn’t return. He started swimming with his phone held in the air, and he made good progress alternating between wading and swimming, trying to keep the water out of his mouth.” Federal Emergency Management Agency agents spotted Darby and ordered him out of the water, but he would not do so until they dispatched a boat to find and retrieve King; a hero’s welcome awaited Darby when he and King returned to Rahim’s home. After celebrating the reunion, everyone went to work, doing what they could to put the world right again.
At the time of Common Ground’s inception, the mood in New Orleans was tense. The U.S. government had completely failed the community, all the proof that most people needed that the system wasn’t working. Revolution was in the air, and Common Ground was at the forefront of envisioning a potential new world. In that heady atmosphere, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez offered the group monetary relief in the form of Citgo gas cards, and Common Ground sent a delegation, including Darby, to Caracas. On pirate radio, Crow described Common Ground as “a paramilitary organization” – a statement for which he was criticized within the group. But given the atmosphere of chaos and devastation and uncertainty, people behaved in ways they normally would not.
As for Darby, those who were involved in Common Ground describe him as a simultaneously dynamic and divisive character, with an authoritarian streak that the mostly anarcho-hippie crowd didn’t care for. One volunteer coordinator who worked with Common Ground from January to July 2006 recounted a disturbing episode: A couple of volunteers called back to headquarters concerned they were about to get jumped, and Darby leaped into his truck to save the day – reportedly by firing his gun into the air in the middle of the street. “It just seemed like an unnecessarily violent escalation,” she recalled. “Everything I heard about Brandon Darby during my time at Common Ground was that he was crazy, and what I witnessed was that he was very prominent and very divisive. He’d come into town and everybody would be whispering, like: ‘Oh, shit. Brandon Darby’s back.’ ”
Darby explains the perception of him as authoritarian this way: “For some, Common Ground might have been about creating a little anarchist utopia. For me, it was about helping people have their rights heard and have their homes [restored], and it was about getting things done.” Darby also denies that he has ever discharged a firearm anywhere in the state of Louisiana.
“I know that Brandon has been trained in firearm safety, and I just don’t see him doing that,” says Andy Gallagher, a New Orleans resident who’s known Darby since he was 18 and who has lived with him in the past. “In all honesty, there have been situations that I have witnessed where Brandon has had a gun on hand and used it [in] a way that actually de-escalated the situation and protected the lives [of those] who were with him.” Though Gallagher wasn’t involved with Common Ground, he was in town at the time doing his own aid work – locating displaced foster children – and would often visit Darby.
Another prominent organizer of the Com­mon Ground effort was Lisa Fithian, who says she has never gotten along with Darby. “He was a leader of the organization, though, and because of that, he was able to set some patterns in motion that I believe led to systemic issues of sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and violence,” she says. “He kicked the door down of a women’s center at 2am to throw a guy out; he kicked in the door of a trailer where there were volunteers with guns on them. He did a lot of Wild West shit – Mister Macho Action Hero.”
Darby responds that this portrait is both inaccurate and unfair. “We were in an aggressive situation that was frightening; we felt like it was the end of the world,” he explains. “So if there is a man living in a women’s center illegally, against the wishes of the women in the center, and all of the women exit that center, leaving that one guy who barricades himself in and is pissing and pooping on the floor, I think it’s totally fine to kick down the door. But really, if I was so bad, why was I the spokesperson for Common Ground Relief for so long?” Darby asks. “Why, after 2006, did they have me come back and ask me to direct the organization and be the spokesperson again?”
In retrospect, Darby’s friend Crow adds his own doubts. “He inserted himself as ‘co-founder’; he wanted that status, even as people were getting written out of the Common Ground history, people who did a lot of work organizing. He also made sure that the media followed him extensively and didn’t interview other people when he was director and also when he was just another person around,” insists Crow. “If you look at the way Brandon tells it, he did the whole Lower 9th Ward with one hand tied behind his back, when really there were a lot of people who did the work, and the organizing too, who you’ll never hear about because of Brandon’s monopoly on the media. So, did he do that just because he’s crazy, or did he do that to get more credibility for himself so that he could gather more information?”
Bad Intentions
Malik Rahim now fervently believes that Darby was an informant for at least part of the time he worked for Common Ground, a conclusion he describes as heartbreaking. “Look, Brandon and Scott brought weapons to my house to help me defend my home,” he says. “So my first feeling for both of them was love.” But that love, Rahim laments, soon turned to blind defense of someone with whom many in the organization, including his own family members, had problems. “It came to the degree that my son just knew that there was something too wrong with Brandon, and he searched Brandon’s possessions, because he said, ‘This guy is an agent, or he is an informant,'” Rahim recalls. “And, let me tell you, it caused a rift between my son and I, so much so that eventually, he left. Because I believed Brandon. I defended him.”
Rahim believes that something happened to Darby while he was in Venezuela and that it was then that he became an informant, because that is when Rahim now sees that Darby began to impede the group’s progress. “I think that Brandon had a nervous breakdown in Venezuela and that when he came back he was messed up in the head,” Rahim explains. “At the very beginning, he was helpful, but after Venezuela, he became harmful. … He did everything he could to destroy St. Mary’s, which was where we were housing the majority of our volunteers, by letting a bunch of crackheads move in there. And he also drove a wedge between me and Lisa Fithian and eventually caused her to leave, too. He was doing everything you’re supposed to do as a government agent in that situation. Divide and conquer.”
What Rahim considers sabotage and what Fithian calls patriarchal power plays Darby just sees as trying to do something good in a bad situation. Though he disagrees that his adamant refusal to turn people away from St. Mary’s was harmful, he agrees that something bad really did happen to him in Venezuela and that he came back a changed man. “I probably should have left New Orleans at that point and come back to Austin and gone to therapy. But I didn’t. I stayed,” he says. “I didn’t want to be there, but I thought I should have been there. Maybe that was my biggest mistake.” While in Venezuela, Darby says, he was informed by “someone in the Venezuelan government” that what he was doing – essentially seeking funds from the Chávez administration to undermine the Bush administration – was illegal. Darby freaked out and says that at times he was frightened for his life. He thought he might be arrested when he returned to the States, and he was angry that he had been put in that position by Common Ground, particularly Crow and Fithian. But he swears, again and again, that he was never working for the federal government while in New Orleans. Not ever.
These activists believe Brandon Darby reported on their activities to the FBI. Those interviewed for this story include Scott Crow (back, center). Next to Crow is Ann Harkness. Simon Evans is back row, far right, and Lisa Fithian stands in front of Evans.
These activists believe Brandon Darby reported on their activities to the FBI. Those interviewed for this story include Scott Crow (back, center). Next to Crow is Ann Harkness. Simon Evans is back row, far right, and Lisa Fithian stands in front of Evans.
PHOTO BY JANA BIRCHUM
Though he refuses to give a start date, Darby says he’s been working with the FBI for less than two years. FBI documents have him making phone calls to the bureau beginning in November 2007. Though he still describes himself as a lefty and says he’s “the furthest thing from a Republican,” it was protecting the rights of Republicans, he says, that finally persuaded him to work with the feds. “One morning, I woke up and realized that I disagree with the group I was associating with as much as I disagree with the Republican Party,” he recalls. “I began to feel that a small select group of people had bad intentions, and I felt the need to do something about it.”
The relationship began with a call to a cop that Darby knows in another city, because, he says, there was a situation that needed to be reported. He told that person what his concerns were, and that cop gave him the name of a federal agent. Darby says he met with some federal agents, told them what he had to say, and left. The agent later contacted him again, they had what Darby says was a “good conversation,” and over the course of a few months, Darby agreed to go undercover. Though he won’t say what it was exactly that made him make that initial call, he will say this about the eventual decision to go undercover: “My deal was with a small group of people whom I personally wouldn’t call terrorists but whose views and ideologies, in addition to their actions, are a little bit frightening and not in the best interest of the world. … So, with that said, I did what I can to make sure that that’s not an issue. Because I felt like I owed that to life, and I felt like I owed it to this little collective we call a nation who are trying to get through the world together.”
This sudden bout of patriotism sounds odd coming from a guy who witnessed complete governmental breakdown in New Orleans and went to Venezuela with revolution on his mind, but Darby says that it was those very experiences that added to his shift. “I think I began to see things very differently as a result of my experiences around Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath and my experiences as a person of leadership in a large organization. I saw the absolute importance and the absolute negative effect that happens to individuals or groups whenever there’s no stability in a system,” he explains. “I began to feel that we as a radical, radical left, because of the way we pseudo-governed, I started to feel like we were a little silly, critiquing the U.S. government, when we had so many faults of our own.”
Soul on Fire
Some people who worked with him are frankly suspicious that Darby’s acknowledged collaboration with the FBI hints of something much larger and more sinister. Some Austin activists have formed the Austin Informant Working Group; currently focused on the McKay and Crowder cases, they are also considering the wider implications. The term “Green Scare” (by analogy to earlier anti-communist “Red Scares”) refers to the federal government’s growing interest in prosecuting environmental activist groups, particularly the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. Austin Informant Working Group member Simon Evans points to a report by former University of Texas law student Elizabeth Wag­goner, who said that FBI agent Charles Rasner announced to her class that Food Not Bombs and Austin Indymedia were on the bureau’s terror watch list. “It doesn’t seem unreasonable to question,” says Evans, “whether or not something larger is at play here.”
“They’re going after me and Scott and other organizers, but they nabbed the low-hanging fruit,” said Fithian, who was also involved in the RNC protests in Minnesota. Fithian was not surprised at the news that Darby was an informant. “I always said at Common Ground: If he was not a cop or an agent of the state, he was doing their job for them, creating division and disrupting our work.”
Crow initially came to Darby’s defense, posting a strenuous denial, when a story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press first fingered him as an informant, based on FBI documents. “It was more about defending the truth than it was about defending Brandon as a person,” says Crow. “When I asked him, he told me it wasn’t him, and I believed him. I’ve had to apologize to people like Lisa, because I gave him credibility with my initial statements. I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t being maligned. Now, I didn’t defend his misogyny or his antagonism; I defended him based on what he told me. It’s still heartbreaking, you know.” Darby eventually wrote an open letter coming out as an informant, but Crow first learned the truth by reading FBI documents furnished to him by McKay’s defense team. Crow was hurt by the news, as this wasn’t the first time he had found himself defending Darby.
“A lot of women had been hurt by this man, and a lot of men had defended him over the years, and it’s not OK,” says Fithian. “That’s a whole part of the healing process that we are going to have to deal with as a community.” This sentiment was echoed by other sources who spoke of a particular romantic relationship in Darby’s past that they describe as emotionally abusive and Darby as paranoid, jealous, and possessive. “I was a total asshole in my early 20s,” Darby admits freely. “My entire adult life has been a process of trying to be less of an asshole. What on earth my penis has to do with this case, I have no idea.”
Regarding Darby’s obsessive and paranoid nature, Crow says that sometimes Darby would call him 30 times a day. “I’m not a psychologist, but I would definitely say that guy’s paranoid. I mean, he sleeps with guns under his pillow. This is not something I have been told; this is something I have seen. The guy has a cache of weapons.” This depiction from Crow, who legally owns an AK-47, pisses Darby off. “I have legal firearms that I have a right to own,” he says, “and I live out in the country, and I think it’s OK. And I did have a gun in New Orleans, and as a citizen I have a right to do that.”
Sometimes, when Darby speaks of his old friend Crow, there’s a catch in his voice – as when he says that they were close, once, but that Crow hasn’t accepted his recent invitation to his home nor met his daughter. “I will always have a bond with him because of what we went through together, and no evil or anything that he would perceive as bad would come from my hand toward that person,” he says, sounding sincere. Yet the documents reflect that during 2007, Darby secretly informed on Crow’s whereabouts and actions. His defense is that he reported what he saw. “Wouldn’t it be more frightening,” he asks, “if the person in my position picked and chose what truth they told rather than say the facts?”
“Even though I was a shield for him in a lot of ways,” Crow now argues, “he really was marginalized in our community. A lot of people wouldn’t work with him on stuff, and even I didn’t have anything to do with him for a year before Common Ground, because he would start getting paranoid and do divisive things, like tell everyone that Lisa was out to get him, for example. For one period in New Orleans, he started to get King to think that Lisa and I were colluding against him – and I took Brandon’s calls more than anybody would. I counseled that guy many times and actually considered it more of a mentorship than a friendship. That guy asked me a lot of questions. And now of course, it all makes sense.”
So when he had his personal epiphany, why didn’t Darby reach out to other activists and tell them about his change in world-view – rather than begin spying on them? “If I felt like the best thing I could have done to right my wrongs was to come out and say how I felt, I would have done so. I just didn’t feel like it was. I felt like I would be completely marginalized and nobody would want to hear my opinions.” Darby uses the controversial civil rights leader and Black Panther turned Republican born-again Christian Eldridge Cleaver as an example. “He wrote a book called Soul on Ice, and it sold a million copies and is touted at all the anarchist bookstores. Most people in radical communities have heard of it. Then, if you say to an auditorium, ‘Have you ever heard of a book called Soul on Fire?’ No. That’s when Eldridge Cleaver became a born-again Christian and changed his views and recanted much of what he had earlier believed. They don’t promote it. Just like the school board: They promote a version of history that isn’t historically accurate.” Like a petulant teenager whose parents just don’t get him, Darby adds: “Nobody lets you voice your opinions. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear it.”
Pissed Off and Pissed On
Fithian says she was wary of Darby’s presence in Minnesota last September. “Nothing about Brandon going to the RNC made any sense to me, and I spoke out about it, and I warned people. When he came to meetings, I actually asked, ‘What the fuck is he doing here?'” She says she pulled him aside and asked him to leave communication meetings where strategic details of actions are worked out. “He said he was there to do medical, but instead he was at all the meetings, all the comms. When he stood up at a spokes meeting [i.e., organized like ‘spokes’ on a wheel], I told him he needed to leave.”
Gabby Hicks, a 21-year-old activist who traveled in the van with Darby, McKay, Crowder, and others, said that the Darby in the open letter – who sounds like a thoughtful guy opposed to violence – is very different from the argumentative and nonsensical Darby she met. Once, on the drive up, Darby became agitated because he needed to go to the bathroom. “He at one point threatened a driver of the van, because the person didn’t pull over fast enough, and Brandon was literally yelling, ‘I’m a 31-year-old revolutionary, and you can’t tell me when I can or can’t pee!'” Hicks laughed. “Once we pulled over, they were still fighting, and someone asked if they needed mediation. Brandon was like, ‘I can put it behind us if we can all act like adults.’ He turned the whole thing around and acted like we were the ones who had freaked out. That was his tactic. It was just weird.”
At the heart of the Darby story remain those two young men from Midland, Texas, Bradley Crowder and David McKay, who are currently facing years in federal prison based in no small part on information that Darby gave to the FBI. Though there are no legal restrictions preventing Darby from commenting on the case, he says he declines to do so out of “respect for the bureau.” Darby is a decade older than either defendant and, as far as direct action is concerned, much more experienced. So why didn’t he simply try to talk these guys out of doing something stupid or criminal instead of turning them over to the feds?
“Why didn’t I try to discourage them? You don’t know that I did or didn’t,” Darby insists. “For all you know, I could have gotten in trouble for violating the rules and trying to discourage somebody from doing something. I’m just saying you don’t know what the facts are yet.”
Indeed we don’t, says Evans of the Austin Informant Working Group. “There is still the issue of entrapment: I want to be clear that we may never know Brandon Darby’s full role or motivations in this incident, as these details are omitted from the FBI documents and informant reports provided to the defense. But something I keep coming back to is: What would I have done in the same position? I consider myself a moral and ethical person; I believe in nonviolence; I’m an ‘anarchist.’ What I would have done is talk to anyone thinking of illegal action, weigh in with my experience, point out the potential consequence, and dissuade that person. If that didn’t work, I would have prevented them from purchasing the materials or going on the action. I feel that a strong community can educate and police itself.”
Darby rejects the depiction of McKay and Crowder as kids easily influenced by an older activist. “If these two ‘kids’ had been stopped in the midst of a plot to bomb an abortion clinic, all these same people would be like: ‘Why wasn’t the government watching these people? Why weren’t they involved?'” he says, exasperated. “The guys who dragged James Byrd to death were the same age as these two, and they weren’t kids; they were monsters.” (Actually, two of the perpetrators in Byrd’s 1998 murder in Texas were 24; the third was 32.) In any case, Darby is sticking to his story. “In regards to this case, there’s no evidence that shows that I assumed a leadership role, and I didn’t,” he says. “I didn’t encourage anybody to do anything, and if you think that I should have done everything I could have to talk these guys out it, you’re not going to be let down [as the trial proceeds] a month from now.”
Good Career Move
Whatever his current motivations, Darby acknowledges his past mistakes. “When I was younger, I identified as a revolutionary, and I believed that many people around the world had a right to take up arms against oppression,” he says. “But I mistakenly felt that our system was one where that would be appropriate.” Then why does he feel that he deserved the benefit of maturity and hindsight, when McKay and Crowder deserve multiple years in the pen? How does he justify robbing them of their chance to go through their own maturing process and personal evolution of political ideology? “Because I didn’t actually do any of it,” he says. “Because I always had enough sense to know that I didn’t have the wisdom to make decisions that endanger people’s lives.”
Darby does say that McKay and Crowder were not the focal point of the investigation. In the course of an ideological shift that took him from armed revolutionary to FBI mole, Darby says he began to see major problems with certain actions that were being planned for the Republican National Convention – particularly by the black bloc and a group of organizers calling themselves the Welcoming Committee. “Anytime that a group of people get together and say that they are going to use ‘any means necessary’ and have images of firebombs and all kinds of other things on their website and they organize around the country, not to protest but to specifically prevent another group of American citizens to exercise their right to assemble, the U.S. government is going to get involved,” he says. “And they should get involved, and I support it wholeheartedly.”
Crowder and McKay, he suggests, were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, adding, “Then, if at the very end of an investigation like that, as a complete shock to everybody, a group of people decide to do something that’s insane, they’re going to get in trouble for it.”
None of this fully explains why Darby chose to go undercover as an FBI informant and surreptitiously spy on his friends when he could have instead simply left the movement and tried to get involved in public policy in some other productive way. “I’ve watched countless activists begin to work in the Legislature and begin to do things that participate in the system; we have a system that is wide open for our involvement,” he said. “You can get involved and have a say so; if you disagree with the way our city is run, you can get involved. If you have an ideological bent that’s on social justice, you can become a law enforcement officer, you can get involved with the FBI, or a lawyer.”
Darby says he was indeed compensated at times for his work with the feds, although he’s vague on the details except to say he turned down witness protection and a lump sum offered to people who testify in federal cases. He does say he is able to be independent because he has some money from his family. Darby sees his current role with the FBI as something akin to a “volunteer firefighter” and believes it to be a natural extension of his desire to do what’s right, no matter how uncomfortable. Yet with his decision to go undercover instead of any other of the myriad choices he had to change the direction of his life, Darby has effectively reinforced the notions that many in the activist community already had: that the Man is always out to get you, and you just can’t trust anyone.
Activist, adventurer, hero, revolutionary, informant. For his next transformation, Darby sees a future for himself in law enforcement. His first gig was surely a foot in the door.

BY DIANA WELCH, FRI., JAN. 23, 2009

Find this story at 23 January 2009

COPYRIGHT © 1981-2014 Austin Chronicle Corp.

People forget that the FBI is the NSA’s primary partner in domestic spying, which allows them to work in secret

FBI director nominee James Comey oversees a growing part of the US surveillance state. Photograph: Gary Cameron/Reuters
The new documentary 1971, about the formerly anonymous FBI burglars who exposed the crimes of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, debuted to a rapt audience at the Tribeca film festival last night. As the filmmakers noted in an interview with the AP, the parallels between Nixon-era FBI whistleblowers and Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations are almost eerie in their similarity.

But while the NSA connection seems obvious, the movie will actually shed light on the domestic intelligence agency with far more power over ordinary Americans: the modern FBI.

Everyone seems to forget that the FBI is the NSA’s primary partner in the latter’s domestic spying operations and that, in fact, the NSA’s job would be impossible without them. Whenever you see a company deny giving any data to the NSA remember: It’s because it’s not the NSA asking (or demanding) the information of them, it’s the FBI. They use the same Patriot Act authorities that the NSA does, and yet we have almost no idea what they do with it.

In fact, the FBI has gone to extreme lengths to just keep their surveillance methods a secret from the public, just like the NSA. And the more we learn, the scarier it gets.

On Monday, the EFF revealed through its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that the FBI’s “next generation” facial recognition program will have as many as 52m photographs in it next year – including millions that were taken for “non-criminal purposes.” It’s massive biometric database already “may hold records on as much as one third of the U.S. population,” EFF found.

Lavabit, the email provider once allegedly used by Edward Snowden, also lost an appeal this week, leaving its founder Ladar Levinson in contempt of court for failing to hand over Lavabit’s encryption keys to the FBI that would have exposed all 400,000 users of Lavabit. The court failed to rule on the larger issue – leaving the door open for the FBI to try it again.

And we know they want to. Foreign Policy’s Shane Harris reported last year, the FBI “carries out its own signals intelligence operations and is trying to collect huge amounts of email and Internet data from U.S. companies – an operation that the NSA once conducted, was reprimanded for, and says it abandoned.” The FBI’s activities include trying to convince “telecom carriers and Internet service providers to install [port readers] on their networks so that the government can collect large volumes of data about emails and Internet traffic.”

We also know they routinely get cell phone location information without a warrant. (If you want to see how your cell phone location information reveals almost every detail of your life, watch this amazing ACLU video.) We also know they’re using Stingray devices, which are fake cell phone towers that vacuum up all cell phone activity in a particular area.

We know that the FBI is still issuing thousands of oversight-free National Security Letters a year, despite multiple government reports detailing systematic abuse, and a federal court ruling that they are unconstitutional last year. (The ruling was put on hold pending appeal.)

The FBI has pushed Congress and the White House – and reportedly quietly lobbied the tech companies – to support a dangerous overhaul to wiretapping laws that would require Internet companies like Google and Facebook to create a backdoor into their services, giving the FBI direct access if they get the requisite legal authorities. And, at the same time, the FBI also wants to be able to expand their ability to hack suspects’ computers.

(At least some judges have been pushing back, noting that the trove of information that the FBI can get from hacking suspects is often far beyond what the agency’s investigation requires.)

Worse, Wired discovered FBI training materials in 2012 that told agents they had the “ability to bend or suspend the law and impinge on freedoms of others,” in national security cases. The materials were quickly withdrawn when they became public.

All of this leads to why a comprehensive report released by ACLU late in 2013 called the FBI a “secret domestic intelligence agency” that “regularly overstepped the law, infringing on Americans’ constitutional rights while overzealously pursuing its domestic security mission.”

After watching 1971, or reading Betty Medsger’s corresponding book The Burglary, it should be a scandal to everyone that the FBI building is still named after J. Edgar Hoover. Unfortunately, his ghost also still seems to permeate in much of what they do.

Trevor Timm
theguardian.com, Saturday 19 April 2014 15.00 BST

Find this story at 19 April 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

This week’s episode, “The Convert,” was about FBI informant Craig Monteilh, who went undercover in southern California’s Muslim community to try to find people who were recruiting and training terrorists. Craig’s operation, which took place in 2006 and 2007, was called Operation Flex.

On Tuesday, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that was filed against the FBI as a result of Operation Flex. Several people Craig spied on — including Yasser AbdelRahim, who was featured in our episode — sued the Bureau, claiming it had violated their first amendment rights during Operation Flex by targeting them because of their religious beliefs, and that they’d been subjected to searches and monitoring without a warrant.

In response, the government asserted the state secrets privilege, arguing that the suit shouldn’t be allowed to move forward because it would force the FBI to reveal classified information and would put national security at risk.

U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney sided with the government. After reviewing confidential statements from top FBI officials, Carney wrote in his decision that allowing the suit to proceed could “significantly compromise national security.”

It was a difficult decision, according to Carney. He compared himself to an ancient Greek hero:

In struggling with this conflict, the Court is reminded of the classic dilemma of Odysseus, who faced the challenge of navigating his ship through a dangerous passage, flanked by a voracious six-headed monster, on the one side, and a deadly whirlpool, on the other. Odysseus opted to pass by the monster and risk a few of his individual sailors, rather than hazard the loss of his entire ship to the sucking whirlpool. Similarly, the proper application of the state secrets privilege may unfortunately mean the sacrifice of individual liberties for the sake of national security.

We reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU, and the Council on American Islamic Relations, CAIR, who are representing the people Craig spied on. Peter Bibring, an attorney at the ACLU, sent us this statement:

As troubling as we find the implications that it might be okay to feed the Muslim community to a monster, it’s a mistake to think that closing courts to claims of religious discrimination in the name of national security affects only the few who bring those cases. The government that refuses to let courts determine whether it has violated our most basic Constitutional values because the whole matter is supposedly secret steers our nation into much more dangerous waters. It’s wrongheaded, in the name of defending freedom, to give up its hallmarks, including the basic balance of powers our founders so carefully set.

The judge’s dismissal means that the case against the FBI cannot move forward. But the plaintiffs are also suing individual FBI agents who were involved in Operation Flex, and Carney did allow certain charges against them to stand. Bibring said the ACLU and CAIR plan to appeal the judge’s decision.

AUG 16, 2012

Find this story at 16 August 2012

Find the radio show at 10 August 2012

© 1995 – 2014
Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass

Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau’s more ethically murky practices

Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.

“They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did,” Monteilh told the Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.

It is an astonishing admission that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious.

Monteilh was involved in one of the most controversial tactics: the use of “confidential informants” in so-called entrapment cases. This is when suspects carry out or plot fake terrorist “attacks” at the request or under the close supervision of an FBI undercover operation using secret informants. Often those informants have serious criminal records or are supplied with a financial motivation to net suspects.

In the case of the Newburgh Four – where four men were convicted for a fake terror attack on Jewish targets in the Bronx – a confidential informant offered $250,000, a free holiday and a car to one suspect for help with the attack.

In the case of the Fort Dix Five, which involved a fake plan to attack a New Jersey military base, one informant’s criminal past included attempted murder, while another admitted in court at least two of the suspects later jailed for life had not known of any plot.

Such actions have led Muslim civil rights groups to wonder if their communities are being unfairly targeted in a spying game that is rigged against them. Monteilh says that is exactly what happens. “The way the FBI conducts their operations, It is all about entrapment … I know the game, I know the dynamics of it. It’s such a joke, a real joke. There is no real hunt. It’s fixed,” he said.

But Monteilh has regrets now about his involvement in a scheme called Operation Flex. Sitting in the kitchen of his modest home in Irvine, near Los Angeles, Monteilh said the FBI should publicly apologise for his fruitless quest to root out Islamic radicals in Orange County, though he does not hold out much hope that will happen. “They don’t have the humility to admit a mistake,” he said.

Monteilh’s story sounds like something out of a pulp thriller. Under the supervision of two FBI agents the muscle-bound fitness instructor created a fictitious French-Syrian alter ego, called Farouk Aziz. In this disguise in 2006 Monteilh started hanging around mosques in Orange County – the long stretch of suburbia south of LA – and pretended to convert to Islam.

He was tasked with befriending Muslims and blanket recording their conversations. All this information was then fed back to the FBI who told Monteilh to act like a radical himself to lure out Islamist sympathizers.

Yet, far from succeeding, Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County’s Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. In an ironic twist, they also reported Monteilh to the FBI: unaware he was in fact working undercover for the agency.

Monteilh does not look like a spy. He is massively well built, but soft-spoken and friendly. He is 49 but looks younger. He lives in a small rented home in Irvine that blends into the suburban sprawl of southern California. Yet Monteilh knows the spying game intimately well.

By his own account Monteilh got into undercover work after meeting a group of off-duty cops working out in a gym. Monteilh told them he had spent time in prison in Chino, serving time for passing fraudulent checks.

It is a criminal past he explains by saying he was traumatised by a nasty divorce. “It was a bad time in my life,” he said. He and the cops got to talking about the criminals Monteilh had met while in Chino. The information was so useful that Monteilh says he began to work on undercover drug and organised crime cases.

Eventually he asked to work on counter-terrorism and was passed on to two FBI handlers, called Kevin Armstrong and Paul Allen. These two agents had a mission and an alias ready-made for him.

Posing as Farouk Aziz he would infiltrate local mosques and Islamic groups around Orange County. “Paul Allen said: ‘Craig, you are going to be our computer worm. Our guy that gives us the real pulse of the Muslim community in America’,” Monteilh said.

The operation began simply enough. Monteilh started hanging out at mosques, posing as Aziz, and explaining he wanted to learn more about religion. In July, 2006, at the Islamic Center of Irvine, he converted to Islam.

Monteilh also began attending other mosques, including the Orange County Islamic Foundation. Monteilh began circulating endlessly from mosque to mosque, spending long days in prayer or reading books or just hanging out in order to get as many people as possible to talk to him.

“Slowly I began to wear the robes, the hat, the scarf and they saw me slowly transform and growing a beard. At that point, about three or four months later, [my FBI handlers] said: ‘OK, now start to ask questions’.”

Those questions were aimed at rooting out radicals. Monteilh would talk of his curiosity over the concepts of jihad and what Muslims should do about injustices in the world, especially where it pertained to American foreign policy.

He talked of access to weapons, a possible desire to be a martyr and inquired after like-minded souls. It was all aimed at trapping people in condemning statements. “The skill is that I am going to get you to say something. I am cornering you to say “jihad”,” he said.

Of course, the chats were recorded.

In scenes out of a James Bond movie, Monteilh said he sometimes wore a secret video recorder sewn into his shirt. At other times he activated an audio recorder on his key rings.

Monteilh left his keys in offices and rooms in the mosques that he attended in the hope of recording conversations that took place when he was not there. He did it so often that he earned a reputation with other worshippers for being careless with his keys. The recordings were passed back to his FBI handlers at least once a week.

He also met with them every two months at a hotel room in nearby Anaheim for a more intense debriefing. Monteilh says he was grilled on specific individuals and asked to view charts showing networks of relationships among Orange County’s Muslim population.

He said the FBI had two basic aims. Firstly, they aimed to uncover potential militants. Secondly, they could also use any information Monteilh discovered – like an affair or someone being gay – to turn targeted people into becoming FBI informants themselves.

None of it seemed to unnerve his FBI bosses, not even when he carried out a suggestion to begin seducing Muslim women and recording them.

At one hotel meeting, agent Kevin Armstrong explained the FBI attitude towards the immense breadth of Operation Flex – and any concerns over civil rights – by saying simply: “Kevin is God.”

Monteilh’s own attitude evolved into something very similar. “I was untouchable. I am a felon, I am on probation and the police cannot arrest me. How empowering is that? It is very empowering. You began to have a certain arrogance about it. It is almost taunting. They told me: ‘You are an untouchable’,” he said.

But it was not always easy. “I started at 4am. I ended at 9.30pm. Really, it was a lot of work … Farouk took over. Craig did not exist,” he said. But it was also well paid: at the peak of Operation Flex, Monteilh was earning more than $11,000 a month.

But he was wrong about being untouchable.

Far from uncovering radical terror networks, Monteilh ended up traumatising the community he was sent into. Instead of embracing calls for jihad or his questions about suicide bombers or his claims to have access to weapons, Monteilh was instead reported to the FBI as a potentially dangerous extremist.

A restraining order was also taken out against him in June 2007, asking him to stay away from the Islamic Center of Irvine. Operation Flex was a bust and Monteilh had to kill off his life as Farouk Aziz.

But the story did not end there. In circumstances that remain murky Monteilh then sued the FBI over his treatment, claiming that they abandoned him once the operation was over.

He also ended up in jail after Irvine police prosecuted him for defrauding two women, including a former girlfriend, as part of an illegal trade in human growth hormone at fitness clubs. (Monteilh claims those actions were carried out as part of another secret string operation for which he was forced to carry the can.)

What is not in doubt is that Monteilh’s identity later became public. In 2009 the FBI brought a case against Ahmad Niazi, an Afghan immigrant in Orange County.

The evidence included secret recordings and even calling Osama bin Laden “an angel”. That was Monteilh’s work and he outed himself to the press to the shock of the very Muslims he had been spying on who now realised that Farouk Aziz – the radical they had reported to the FBI two years earlier – had in fact been an undercover FBI operative.

Now Monteilh says he set Niazi up and the FBI was trying to blackmail the Afghani into being an informant. “I built the whole relationship with Niazi. Through my coercion we talked about jihad a lot,” he said. The FBI’s charges against Niazi were indeed later dropped.

Now Monteilh has joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the FBI. Amazingly, after first befriending Muslim leaders in Orange County as Farouk Aziz, then betraying them as Craig Monteilh, he has now joined forces with them again to campaign for their civil liberties.

That has now put Monteilh’s testimony about his year undercover is at the heart of a fresh legal effort to prove that the FBI operation in Orange County unfairly targeted a vulnerable Muslim community, trampling on civil rights in the name of national security.

The FBI did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.

It is not the first time Monteilh has shifted his stance. In the ACLU case Monteilh is now posing as the sorrowful informant who saw the error of his ways.

But in previous court papers filed against the Irvine Police and the FBI, Monteilh’s lawyers portrayed him as the loyal intelligence asset who did sterling work tackling the forces of Islamic radicalism and was let down by his superiors.

In those papers Monteilh complained that FBI agents did not act speedily enough on a tip he gave them about a possible sighting of bomb-making materials. Now Monteilh says that tip was not credible.

Either way it does add up to a story that shifts with the telling. But that fact alone goes to the heart of the FBI’s use of such confidential informants in investigating Muslim communities.

FBI operatives with profiles similar to Monteilh’s – of a lengthy criminal record, desire for cash and a flexibility with the truth – have led to high profile cases of alleged entrapment that have shocked civil rights groups across America.

In most cases the informants have won their prosecutions and simply disappeared. Monteilh is the only one speaking out. But whatever the reality of his year undercover, Monteilh is almost certainly right about one impact of Operation Flex and the exposure of his undercover activities: “Because of this the Muslim community will never trust the FBI again.”

Paul Harris contributor jan 2013
Paul Harris in Irvine, California
theguardian.com, Tuesday 20 March 2012 16.50 GMT

Find this story at 20 March 2012

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An FBI informer sent to infiltrate a California mosque was made the subject of a restraining order after scaring Muslim worshippers with demands for holy war.
Craig Monteilh was known to members of the Irvine Islamic Center as Farouk al-Aziz, an apparently devout and at times over-zealous Muslim.
But when he began speaking of jihad and plans to blow up buildings, senior figures at the mosque reported him the FBI – the very people who sent him.
Informant: FBI operative Craig Monteilh was sent to spy on Muslims but was thrown out and reported to his handlers for extremist beahviour
Informant: FBI operative Craig Monteilh was sent to spy on Muslims but was thrown out and reported to his handlers for extremist beahviour
Now the FBI is facing criticism for its use of such stooges which have backfired in a number of cases.
The law enforcement agency’s problems have been confounded after Monteilh, a petty criminal with forgery convictions, went public with claims he received $177,000 tax free in 15 months for his work.

Shakeel Syed, of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California which represents more than 75 mosques told the Washington Post: ‘The community feels betrayed.
‘They got a guy, a bona fide criminal, and obviously trained him and sent him to infiltrate mosques.
‘And when things went sour, they ditched him and he got mad. It’s like a soap opera, for God’s sake.’
The emergence of details of the FBI’s attempted infiltration comes after an Oregan man was arrested for planning to bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
An explosive device he was discovered in possession of had been supplied to him by an undercover FBI agent and was made by FBI technicians in a case of apparent entrapment.
Sacred: The informant was send to the mosque to secretly record conversations (file picture)
Sacred: The informant was send to the mosque to secretly record conversations (file picture)
The FBI defended its tactics, claiming such operations had prevented further terrorist atrocities in the wake of 9/11.
Steven Martinez, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said that in certain circumstances, if there is evidence of a crime, FBI agents may ‘conduct an activity that might somehow involve surveillance in and about a mosque.’
He added: ‘I know there’s a lot of suspicion that that’s the focus, that we’re looking at the mosques, monitoring who is coming and going. That’s just not the case.’
Monteilh claims he was already working for the FBI when he was approached about infiltrating mosques and was told ‘Islam is a threat to our national security’.
He agreed and became Farouk al-Aziz, code name Oracle, a French Syrian in search of his Islamic roots.
He was trained by the FBI and claims he was told to infiltrate mosques in Orange County and two other counties.
Worshippers said that in Monteilh’s 10 months at the mosque, he became almost manic in his devotion, attending prayers five times a day but he was secretly recording conversations.
However, when he began to tell Muslims he had access to weapons they became convinced he was a terrorist and ironically reported the informant to the FBI.

UPDATED: 22:42 GMT, 6 December 2010

Find this story at 6 December 2010

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