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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

They did the same thing during the Occupy Wall Street movement protests. There is a video of federal agents pulling protesters off the street and into an unmarked car, during that time. The federal response to these protests is far lighter than their response to that protest movement was, they've arrested a lot fewer people and have been far less physical with the protesters. They're using many of the same tactics though:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-co...

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I seem to recall hearing similar claims made about Iraq War protests circa 2003. People said mysterious agents rounded up people in vans and released them without explanation. I have no mainstream sources that back that up, just a claim I heard made at the time and later, by partisans. Have no idea if it's true or not.

The 2003 protests were in a weird time. The Internet was a thing, yet the old media still controlled the image to a large extent. There were hundreds of thousands of protestors in large cities, but it was pretty consistently under-reported.

Today it would be impossible to ignore something that big, it would show up on social media.

To people arguing these are "arrests", well funny the arrested are just let go when they ask for a lawyer. It's an intimidation tactic. The rubberhosing and disappearing will come too, when that's deemed an acceptable intimidation tactic.

It's going to backfire in cities with popular support for the protests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onmsFzEtK7U

Can you link any evidence of federal agents pulling occupy protestors off the streets into unmarked cars? I cannot find any and the linked article does not discuss them.

You have to make the distinction between violent rioters (namely antifa) and genuine protestors. this is the 2nd high-profile time this attempted hijacking has happened. there is even a meme: look up "bike lock guy" (Internet Historian's video on YouTube is pretty funny). anyways the federal agents are not pulling out random genuine protestors (how would that make sense?). they are pulling out the violent ones.

'Antifa' and 'violent rioters' is absolutely not the same thing. Please don't conflate them. Some antifascists are indeed violent; most are not. There are also many violent rioters who are not antifascists in any way - there are groups of fascists trying to make things violent, and there are many people who simply want to take advantage of the riots to steal and fight for the 'fun' of it.

> anyways the federal agents are not pulling out random genuine protestors (how would that make sense?). they are pulling out the violent ones.

You are assuming that the federal agents are interested in the well-being of protestors. There is no proof of that. Much more likely, the federal agents have 2 goals: stop and deligitimize the protests, and protect federal or local property from the looting.

The first goal is best achieved by detaining and threatening non-violent protestors, especially their leaders, and journalists friendly to the cause. Violent protestors are already giving the protests a bad name, so they are helping the government's cause. Of course, some violent protestors also need to be stopped, to fulfill their second goal.

There is never, ever, ever any possible excuse for kidnapping people without due process. Ever, ever. Because there's no way to prove that they were violent rioters. They just as well could have been total innocents, and you'd have no way to know.

Except you'd have no way of knowing whether they knew they were violent rioters.

What you're calling kidnapping is actually referred to as arresting, and it is entirely possible to identify violent individuals with certainty. Every riot in Seattle has had multiple police helicopters circling the area; it isn't difficult to identify and track particularly violent participants.

Proving whether that person participated in the riot is a matter for the courts, all that's needed for an arrest is reasonable suspicion.

> There is never, ever, ever any possible excuse for kidnapping people without due process.

I don't know if you are a native speaker, but the word kidnap might not be the one you should be using. "Kidnap" has strong connotations, and while sime people will happily use that property of the word to create feelings I don't think it is appropriate here.

kidnap: abduct (someone) and hold them captive, typically to obtain a ransom.

There's a lot to be said about police, federal agents, TSA etc, but lets keep this serious.

you do realize that in norther california the people shooting cops during the protests were right wingers, and not antifa?

I would guess this is some kind of a standard procedure for detaining people during a protest. And by detain I don't mean code-word for arrest, I mean the legal term for questioning people when police have reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Due to the presence of an unfriendly crowd, they presumably try to avoid escalation by grabbing the person quickly and having the discussion elsewhere. In the previous link someone gave, the police said as much. If this is the case, then other than the relocation they still shouldn't be able to go any farther than any other stop in terms of searching the person or anything.

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