Revealed: FBI kept files on peaceful climate change protesters
Source: The Guardian
Revealed: FBI kept files on peaceful climate change protesters
A protest at a BP plant in Indiana landed three sixtysomething campaigners in a federal surveillance report, documents released to the Guardian under the Freedom on Information Act show
Adam Federman
Thu 13 Dec 2018 06.00 GMT
On 15 May 2016 three friends from Fairfield, Iowa, made the five-hour drive to an oil refinery on the shores of Lake Michigan to participate in what was part of a series of protests and acts of civil disobedience in the fight against climate change. They had every intention of getting arrested. What they didn’t expect was to end up in an FBI file for taking part in a peaceful protest.
But according to documents obtained by the Guardian through a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) lawsuit, the file on the Iowa protesters was part of a larger effort by the FBI to assess the danger posed by the climate change activist group 350.org in the run-up to a series of actions that were part of the Break Free from Fossil Fuels campaign. The FBI released seven pages and withheld 25.
Though there is no evidence the FBI has opened an investigation into 350.org, one of the documents, catalogued as part of a related domestic terrorism case, says: “350.org are referenced in multiple investigations and assessments for their planned protests and disruptions.” The file also makes an apparent reference to the 350.org founder Bill McKibben.
Protest march on Scribd
McKibben, who has been the subject of both rightwing surveillance and disturbing online death threats, said the FBI’s apparent failure to distinguish between non-violent civil disobedience and domestic terrorism was contemptible.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/13/fbi-climate-change-protesters-iowa-files-monitoring-surveillance-
