Report: police sharing intelligence on activists with gas industry
stateimpact.npr.org
stateimpact.npr.org
Cooperation between LEOs and the gas industry is neither new nor unique.
Now, that said, employing public resources (personnel and otherwise) for wild goose chases is my main concern. I won't get into an argument about civil liberties, but there is a very large amount of resources devoted to investigations that lead no where and pointless harassment of peaceful individuals.
Police sharing intelligence implies that police were wasting time investigating peaceful individuals, and as such this enables private industry to otherwise penalize such individuals.
Furthermore, imagine, for a moment, an environment where protesting increased your car insurance. This happened transparently and automatically, and you have no recourse. Your rates just suddenly went up for an unexplained reason. And you didn't even use your car before, during, or after protesting.
This is what frightens me, because it's plausible. The public sector now acts as an information broker -- a steady stream of data about you is flowing towards private networks, and you have no recourse to defend yourself.
> There have been instances of hazardous materials– including pipe bombs– being found near gas drilling sites, but the incidents have not been linked publicly to environmental activists.
Actually, that link seems broken; the story is here: http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2015/01/22/anti-dril...
It doesn't mean there isn't something to investigate. Or that the public knows everything the police do.
I remember the news about CISPA making it sound like it was only about bidirectional data sharing with corporate targets of foreign advanced persistent threats. I'm guessing that was wildly optimistic?
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