Organized stalking and police surveillance of social media: ACLU notes that targeted ‘influencers,’ activists and other TI’s are ‘real’

Police Use of Social Media Surveillance Software is Escalating, and Activists are in the Digital Crosshairs

By: Nicole A. Ozer
Map of California, with dots marking the areas where local law enforcement has acquired social media monitoring software

It goes without saying that speaking out against police violence or government overreach shouldn’t land you in a surveillance database. But it can, and it does.

The ACLU of California has received thousands of pages of public records revealing that law enforcement agencies across the state are secretly acquiring social media spying software that can sweep activists into a web of digital surveillance.

This set of public records requests is part of our ongoing work with community groups to shine a light on surveillance technologies and call for community control in decision-making around policing. Last year, we worked with local activists in Fresno to reveal that its police department was using a MediaSonar social media surveillance tool that boasted the capacity to identify so-called “threats to public safety” by monitoring hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #DontShoot, #ImUnarmed, #PoliceBrutality, and #ItsTimeforChange.

But we had a hunch that Fresno was not an isolated case.

So this summer, we requested records from 63 police departments, sheriffs, and district attorneys across California. And what we learned from the documents was alarming.

Of the responses we’ve received, 40% of the agencies (20 in total) have acquired social networking surveillance tools — many of them in the last year.

We found no evidence in the documents of any public notice, debate, community input, or lawmaker vote about use of this invasive surveillance.

And no agency produced a use policy that would limit how the tools were used and help protect civil rights and civil liberties.

The utter lack of transparency, accountability, and oversight is particularly troubling because social media surveillance software used by California law enforcement — tools like MediaSonarX1 Social Discovery, and Geofeedia — are powerful. And our records from Fresno and several other communities reveal that some have been marketed in ways to target protesters.

Our records show that Geofeedia’s marketing materials, for instance, refer to unions and activist groups as “overt threats,” and suggest the product can be used in ways that target activists of color. At least 13 California law enforcement agencies have used or acquired Geofeedia.

In one exchange with law enforcement, a company representative suggested to San Jose Police that they should use the product to surveil the “Ferguson situation,” even though the city is roughly 2,000 miles from Ferguson, Missouri. San Jose Police did in fact use Geofeedia software to monitor South Asian, Muslim, and Sikh protesters only a few days after acquiring it.

An email to the San Diego Sheriff touts a “collection” of social media content curated by Geofeedia following the non-indictment of Darren Wilson.

And yet another promotional email invites the Los Angeles District Attorney to learn how Baltimore used the software to monitor and “stay one step ahead of the rioters” after the police killing of Freddie Gray.

Law enforcement should not be using tools that treat protesters like enemies.

The racist implications of social media surveillance technology are not surprising. We know that when law enforcement gets to conceal the use of surveillance technology, they also get to conceal its misuse. Discriminatory policing that targets communities of color is unacceptable — and secretive, sophisticated surveillance technologies supersize the impact of racial profiling and abuse.

The good news is that we’ve seen that when surveillance is forced into the light, communities have the power to call out racist policing practices and stop discriminatory surveillance in its tracks.

Remember Fresno? Armed with proof of Fresno’s social media surveillance experiment, a diverse coalition of local activistsknown as Faith in the Valley successfully mobilized and organized to pressure the police to roll back their social media surveillance program. The community is now pushing to pass a surveillance technology ordinance to make sure all surveillance technologies are publicly debated.

In Oakland, community members organized against plans to build an expansive Domain Awareness Center that would have collected and stored hundreds of terabytes of data on Oakland residents. Now Oakland has a Privacy Commission that advises the City Council on surveillance decisions and is currently drafting a surveillance technology ordinance.

And in Santa Clara County, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, a diverse coalition successfully organized against plans to buy a Stingray cell phone tracker and then worked to enact a comprehensive surveillance technology ordinance that requires transparency, accountability, and oversight for all surveillance technologies.

In this spirit, a powerful coalition of national organizations is launching a multi-city legislative initiative, Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS), to introduce more local laws to bring transparency and community control to the acquisition and use of local police surveillance technologies.

Here in California, community members are working in Palo Alto, Fresno, Oakland, Berkeley, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz to ensure that similar laws are introduced in their cities.

Whether it’s social networking surveillance, stingrays, or something else we haven’t heard of yet — it’s time to push secret surveillance into the light.

We have the power to stop discriminatory surveillance and put control where it belongs — in the hands of the community.

Nicole Ozer is the Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director at the ACLU of California. 

Read more about community control and surveillance technology in California:

Gang stalking and Dr. Lorraine Sheridan and David V. James meet Elizabeth Dietrich at the discrediting narrative in action: mass shooters in the summer of ’16.

As victims of organized gang stalking began to organize online and off, and alternative media outlets carried an increasing number of articles revealing organized gang stalking between 2008 and 2015, institutions and academics, as well as crisis PR agents and agencies, working with mainstream media, began a discrediting narrative about organized gang stalking. Not surprisingly, they all just agreed-by coincidence, no doubt-that those who claim they are gang stalked must be silenced.

Any diligent researcher of organized gang stalking might ask “but why would they want to silence victims of OGS?” And the answer is this: if every victim of OGS could do what I have done, and prove that OGS is what I say it is, then there would be tens of thousands of “deprivation of civil rights under color of law” cases where TI’s would (and still can) prevail against gang stalkers. See this case here of gang stalking BINGO where one of these small town gang stalking operations was buried after they lost a lawsuit to their victims.

Related Story: The most censored news article of 1977 is more pertinent than ever- “America’s Secret Police,” the para-military, para-judicial para-police unit’s of current and active duty officer who slip into and out of the CIA one day, and into the local police departments the next, carrying closely held, illegally obtained dossiers’ on “intelligence targets.” Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit’s and their reign of sabotage, slander and defamation campaigns, black bag jobs, and blackmail outside the purview of the law itself set the standard for NSA spying, and the death of American Democracy.

While the mainstream media had previously-though rarely- carried occasional stories of actual victims, such as Garrick “Rick” Krlich, who has been stalked by the city fire department for ten years, the push was on to keep OGS under wraps, hidden from the public, and relegated to mental illness.

Without fail, any diligent researcher of organized gang stalking will find what I have found: that most cases between 2008 and today were the direct result of efforts by “progressive” organizations and individuals, working together to subvert the internet at the switch, and to use illegally and warrant-lessly obtained personal information about people for blackmail or other purposes. I myself even disrupted a plot by some to steal one of the largest identity management databases in the world, and that data theft was plotted by LEO’s and common criminals working together.*

The “Rational Wiki” and it’s post about TI’s is one such example of a long standing effort by leftist’s such as Glenn Greenwald’s former law partner Mona Holland, and cultish neo-cons who discredit their victims, but I am certain the right wingers have their own special hellhole of gas-lighting disinformation too. And this, as nearly every progressive writer is aware that the government does in fact, target individuals based on pure first amendment protected speech.

The psychology/academic/healing/pharmaceutical  community has a history with participating in the abuse of people, and then, the cover-up of these abuses as well, and the issue of OGS is certainly that. But for proof of that-DON’T ask them or their pal’s in crime, the crisis PR industry, as they are all in on it at some level, from fake news, to character assassination campaigns.

While many cases of mass hysteria are still believed by some to be the “work of the devil,” such as was the case of the Salem Witch Trials, or some other supernatural total bullshit, OGS is neither “mass hysteria” nor is it a psychogenic illness in most cases. And what it actually is, causes most researchers, and most citizens to avoid the topic entirely, as there can be real, unjust, and often outrageous consequences for discussing it “out loud,”or for merely questioning official sources and their well heeled crisis PR narratives.

Seeking to mask the widespread illegality and harmful effects of government and law enforcement agencies-and their cohort of political PAC’s and community policing initiatives- that have attempted to link those who claim they are gang stalked to violence and mass shootings, programs of counter-terrorism which had very little actual success capturing any foreign terrorists, turned the massive power of the federal budget, and the hidden investigatory police power on the people of their own nations(which was in fact and practice, the un-spoken goal of nearly ALL so-called anti-terrorism initiatives all along).

But most notably,  in the summer of 2016, there was a full court intelligence agency level propaganda press to discredit those who claimed to be gang stalked, and several mass shooter events shortly thereafter, almost as if they had been planned and timed to go that way.

That summer, the New York Times did a hit piece on the OGS narrative, citing Dr. Lorraine Sheridan and David James who did what amounts to little more than an internet pol with science sprinkled in-aka junk science- and found all victims who responded to their anonymous internet survey to be worthy of discredit, and spoke of them as such, using classic propaganda smear tactics. One must certainly ask-if such TI’s are in fact menatally ill, what could be the good of mocking them, or otherwise piling on?

Yup. See this post about no-touch torture, via influence operations, and how the psychiatric community is complicit at all levels in CIA torture and mind control and discrediting of TI’s (especially read the last link on mind control-it is literally about how a cop who was a psychologist brainwashed a group of people into false confessions-in what amounted to the biggest DNA exoneration in American history. Some of them still have Stockholm Syndrome-but the won a 30 million dollar settlement, and bankrupted the town that gang stalked them).

Starting with the picture of their chosen poster child for gang stalking which is worth a thousand words to explain to anyone who is familiar with propaganda-how clearly planned this media assault was, but the lie travels the world a thousand times before the truth gets its pants on.

And, in the waning days of his presidency, President Obama notoriously tried to outlaw alternative media, and allowed intelligence agencies to begin propaganda experiments and influence operations on the American people-in what some have likened to behavioral experiments, and there were outcries everywhere about how corrupt mainstream media had become during the election. And then, the focus turned to “fake news” stories, and the exact media in which those who have been harmed by these OGS operations find their voice came under attack.

There is ample evidence that mass shooters and school shooters have claimed they are gang stalked or that intelligence agencies had created them as Manchurian Candidates, as has been the case since the 1960’s, in the CIA era of Wild Bill Donovan. Most famous of these are Sirhan Sirhan who killed Bobby Kennedy, and John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, but there is a host of other data that indicates that-while it wasn’t necessarily the CIA or the FBI that directly pulled the trigger, there is ample evidence that hey worked with “community organizations” and actual assassins alike, while overlooking, and even conspiring with LEIU’s.

Fast forwards to the summer of 2016,  Gavin Long, aka Cosmo Setepenra, a marine, and a life coach as well as an author and a likely CIA or other agency asset, claimed he had been followed across the country, and federal agents were hounding him. Without irony, he hailed from San Diego at the time, which has an exceptionally high rate of gang stalking complaints.

Other previous shooters had military affiliations, and notably, high clearances, an OGS is a common occurrence in the military. Notably Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter who claimed he was targeted with directed energy weapons. Whether it was our own government, any of the many spies and traitors from America that have infiltrated every institution (especially those that contain databases of private information on Americans),  or a foreign government targeting him, the scientifically verifiable claim that electronic weapons is vindicated by our own government, as the Associated Press noted on 08-09-2017 that Cubans had most likely targeted US diplomats with sonic weapons.

From the AP newswire:

“the US investigation says investigators are looking into whether elements of the Cuban government placed sonic devices that produce non-audible sound inside or outside the residences of roughly five US Embassy staffers with the intent of deafening them.”

But all of these, military affiliated or not, share one other common feature: that they tried to report these stalkings to the proper authorities ranging from police to psychologists, and were rebuffed and called crazy. In other words, in the creation of patsies and fall guys and scapegoats that drive policy formation, or create cause for traitors to say “see-we need to sacrifice our Constitution for more security!” official gas-lighting is a key feature of the dialectic, and part of the practice of OGS.

Myron May, a Florida shooter who reported his gang stalking to many police officers in multiple reports before he shot up a college. And certainly psychology, stuck as it is in Cold War Era definitions of schizophrenics and definitions of delusions (most notably, most of these doctored up by D.E. Cameron and others who took CIA hush money in the form of research grants).

A very short list of CIA mind control experimentees instantly pops up a few well known celebrities:

  1. Ken Kesey, who wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest,” was an LSD experimentee, and was influential among the “Beat writers” of his era.
  2. Whitey Bulger, the Boston gangster-a member of “organized crime” which is a category of LEIU ‘organized stalking; and who had FBI agents on his payroll, and who escaped to Santa Monica for decades before he was “caught,”was a coerced participant in LSD experimentation while incarcerated. He was given acid EVERY DAY for nearly two years.
  3. Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead ( Deadheads, and the networks of Phish, and other tribal groups is still one of the best known places to “cop some acid,” but also a “grate place” to meet naive rich kids who are vulnerable to becoming targets of all kinds of experimentation, blackmail, and subversions of entire family fortunes and more)

When it comes to the mind, any legitimate researcher will note that there are only two ways to get into one, and only one way to get out of it. And the two ways in are drugs and mind control via influence operations under duress, coercion, or torture; but the one way out is through the first amendment, and every persons right to speak without being pre-empted by junk science or psychologists on the state teat.

I might add, for the researcher’s sake, and for the sake of those who are currently, or who believe themselves to be experimentees or otherwise enmeshed in the OGS dialectic, that my own father was an electric shock recipient as well as an FBI informant, both of which facts can be added to my dossier. Oh, never mind-they are already there!

You see, as many who stalk you say in the OGS dialectic “it is inter-generational,” whatever “it” is. And much like “They” “it” has a name now. It’s called “database abuse and attempts at constant control of narrative.”

So, generally, the patterns in the data do NOT indicate paranoid delusions of patterns (stripes with PLAIDS!?), or necessarily organic psychongenic mental illness any more than they indicate stress and PTSD that is directly caused by knowing one is targeted by hidden actions, by hidden groups on the internet, and tracking software, Facebook monitoring, and more. And these indicate that OGS is a real thing, and not even close to a delusion.

And for the lawyers peeking in, it might be added that Whitey Bulger could have had a successful defense had it been introduced at trial that he was a coerced LSD victim. We see today what we saw yesterday that “Manchurian candidates” and contract killers-and mobsters, have a lot in common, and these days with “augmented reality” via the internet.

In one case after another, we discover that shooters such as the Florida shooter Omar Mateen had extensive, long term contact with many agencies and agents, particularly the FBI before he is alleged to have shot up a gay nightclub (and that just as the Democrats were ramping up dialogue about the need to control propaganda.) We also see that his father was involved with alternative media.

Again-Mateen’s killing spree occurred in June of 2016, ironically the same month that the New York Times ran the now infamous discrediting narrative about gang stalking, and in the same month Dr. Mike Wood wrote his opinion about gang stalking as mental illness. And it cannot be missed that Mateen was then slandered in the media after the event by the DVIC, with the smear that he was a wife beater-another pattern in these events is one-sided story telling, directly related to DVIC policy.

Seeing any correlations yet, diligent researcher of “organized” or  “gang” stalking? No? Then stop reading right here and go douche those cunty minds of yours, they reek of institutional psychopathology.

But what makes Omar Mateen’s case remarkably different from other cases is that his sexuality also became an issue after the shooting, and a classic smear campaign was begun, just as data trickled out that the majority of those killed, were killed by SWAT team members; and what mattered in the MSM was that Mateen was portrayed as “claiming loyalty to ISIS,” when in fact he had been under scrutiny for years by the FBI and others,  with no such connections anywhere. In other words-the lies flowed quicker than truths, or even good reporting from the “trusted” sources.

And it is here where we see that there is in fact a hidden, secret group of people-the “Deep State” that is in control of the narrative. When even the FBI finds that the disinformation and lies are in fact disinformation and lies, well-who can out do that opinion? This is why it is time to examine OGS from my frame of reference-that of intelligence cuts active at all levels of media and working behind every case to create a discrediting narratiive to cover their tracks. OSI informers, the anti-Constitutional LEIU’s,, ADL bribery in the form of  junkets to Israel, and various Catholic cults, and church goers alike, all of whom work together and plainly “do harm” are what OGS is.

In the “umbrella” of community organizations that receive funding to profile, database, follow, track, stalk and harass activists, dissidents and criminals alike, there is literally one LEO/intelligence agent/ security guard per 30 citizens in the US alone-and this figure does NOT take into account agents from the Five Eyes Nations, or Israel, which gets raw data straight from the NSA on EVERY communication of EVERY American citizen IN REAL TIME. Nor does this figure include every community policing block captain and their “neighborhood watchers.” And it certainly does not tabulate the entire para-militaries who work outside the law, under color of law and authority.

Related Story: Trayvon Martin and Organized Community Gang Stalking

So, while Google results indicate that 1.5 million personal blogs exist that use the phrase gang stalking in their materials, psychology professionals and major media work with law enforcement to spin it as an issue of dangerous individuals meeting technology,  despite the fact that those who do take up arms are statistically far on the outside of outliers, and OGS is under-researched. and that, as most citizens in general are unaware that they are being entrapped into massive databases, and literally followed about by government and corporate interests alike.

And so, recent attempts by victims of organized gang stalking to bring attention to the real harms of it have been relegated by some-and those with vested interests- to the one size fit’s all category of mental illness, and then, agencies and academics have worked hard to spin them all as crazy people, rather than as actual claimants of government harm, or even as an eerie indicator that something in our societies is not right-and that the narrative as it exists is not sufficient to explain it to the public.

Most if not all of these cases exhibit another symptom of a social disease: they are clearly the Martha Mitchell effect in action, or cases where punitive psychology has been applied. And if anything stands out more clearly than at any time in history, it is that the media is having a hard time keeping the lid on hidden policing practices that have long been buried even deeper by calling them conspiracy theories.

With video, and phone camera’s, the internet and alternative media, the egg of organized gang stalking that precedes these events is being cracked open, one peck at a time on the deep cover shell that as worked so well in decades past.

The two academic studies about organized gang stalking, both of which call it a mental illness, rather than indicate that it is s ymptom of a larger social disease:

In academic research of gang stalking, there are only two studies I have found that address it specifically. The Sheridan and James study, and one by Elizabeth Dietrich of Berkely-both of whose bio’s read as liberal-progressive, and likely international feminist, aka, neocons and part of the marriage between propaganda, fake news feminism, and police state control. These are really shitty people, from any angle you can choose if they can stand by their recommendations that TI’s should be isolated:

1) Complaints of group-stalking (‘gang-stalking’): an exploratory study of their nature and impact on complainants
Pages 601-623 | Received 16 Dec 2014, Accepted 06 May 2015, Published online: 16 Jun 2015

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14789949.2015.1054857

2) Elizabeth Dietrich’s study is one of the most pernicious attempts I have seen online to discredit the narrative of targeted individuals. She believes that the best way to deal with these is to relegate them into the category of  “mentally ill” who claim they are isolated due to gang stalking, and her remedy is to cut them off from communication with each other, which is itself a form of punitive psychology, and in fact isolation is a form of torture according to the UN conventions.

This is not insignificant, as then, the claims of TI’s and claims of isolation by institutional elements are validated in the gang stalking narrative. Dietrich’s thesis ironically proves my thesis, and the thesis of any who make the claim they are TI’s. And not insignificantly several of the mass shooters themselves claimed tat they were being intentionally isolated.

Dietrich:

Publication Date 2015

Keywords

Online social networks-Psychological aspects, Cyberstalking-Psychological aspects, Delusions, Interpersonal relations, Theoretical, Emergent internet trends, Social contagion, Emergent norm theory, Relational theory, Delusional disorder

Abstract

This study examines emerging concerns about small online social communities that purport to support their members, but which in actuality exacerbate mental health issues. Here, the author focuses on one such community that has gone unstudied: The Gang Stalking community. Here, individuals who seem to suffer from Delusional Disorder come together and discuss their experiences of being stalked by a multitude of people in concert with the sole aim of creating terror in their lives.

 

UPDATE 08-10-2017: In one of the great ironies of this bizarre but predictably validated dialectic, several people from Australia and Britain have been looking in constantly at posts that mention Sheridan, James, Wood, or Dietrich, attempting to form a narrative.

The irony is that the internet is doing a great job in this case of NOT isolating a narrative, and hopefully, that with good effect. But sadly, it is more likely these types who are obsessively reading, and re-reaading the same posts (as per my stats) are brewing a defamation and libel case rather than an academic refutation. Not a single one of them has contacted this blog for any refutation whatsoever. Such is the nature of the fragile and famed “narcissistic academic ego.”

*This story would deserve it’s own novel. But you are welcome to look it up: it was the CHRI database, which holds the fingerprints, and the background checks of ever single American, and international who has ever had a print taken, or a background check run on them. In other words, I disrupted an institution wide plot, before the agencies did, and I did it for FREE-didn’t cost the taxpayers a single dime.