I agree that it's not as bad as COINTELPRO. That doesn't make it right, though.
I'll inline my other comment: Mass gatherings of any kind are a public safety issue, and an organized nation-wide protest with anarchist overtones is hardly the least likely to result in violence and property damage. For police to not gather and share information on what to expect would be stupid.
You may get tons of warm fuzzies thinking about OWS, but it still involved thousands of angry people gathering in one place, which is not something any reasonable person expects the police to be wholly ignorant of.
See Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Oakland#Protestor_conduc...
Go watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ6mhRZ8LjM
Now we can see the police and FBI behavior toward the civil rights movement for what it was: the police helping people in power stay in power.
One of the defaults on Hacker News is a general skepticism toward increasing police power. It's amazing to me how quickly that can switch to justification when it's the "wrong" people getting policed. The reason Aaron Swartz got pursued so vigorously is exactly the reason that Occupy did: they were both (correctly) perceived as a political threat to people with power and wealth.
I'm just saying the documents mentioned above[1] don't back up your claims, and that what they do describe is mundane, expected behavior. (I know this because I read them myself, rather than relying on the summary of someone with a clear agenda.) If you weren't speaking in the context of the thread, why post in it?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7881884
One of the defaults on Hacker News is a general skepticism toward increasing police power.
First of all, that's not a default of Hacker News, that's a default of individual users of Hacker News. If you want a community of uniform opinion, I suggest digging out your dog-eared copy of 1984 and re-reading the scene of the two-minutes' hate to see where that leads.
Secondly, I'd like to point out that I share that default, but with the additional (and seemingly rare) default of skepticism toward reporting about increasing police power.