The FBI has admitted to gathering secret intelligence about the annual Burning Man festival since 2010.
In response to a request under the 2012 Freedom of Information Act, the security service said its Special Events Management unit has kept files on festival-goers, known as ‘burners’ – to ‘aid in the prevention of terrorist activites and intelligence collection’.
But the FBI’s 16-page response to the question by Inkoo Kang is heavily redacted, with information about the technology being used to secretly gather the information being blanked out.
The revelation comes as the 29th Burning Man takes place in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
When you think FBI surveillance you think of the movie Enemy of the State. You think of terrorists, top-level drug kingpins, mob bosses, or some other high-level threat. You think kick-ass guys who look straight out of the Marine Corps, their entire lives and careers dedicated to targeting the most evil people out there. What you do not think of is a bunch of hippie-looking stoner tween-like agents, surveilling a bunch of hippie-looking stoner tweens with the latest remote cell-phone hacking tech, the latest high-res hidden body-worn video, the latest aerial surveillance, tons of recruited paid informants run like a spy network, or complex radio-organized foot follows through large crowds. Look at the pictures at the article – that is exactly what the agents looked like.
I also find it interesting it began in 2010, shortly after the surge in reports online about gang-stalking.
I have no idea if this is justified. Maybe there are major drug dealers who hang out there. But if this were a specific operation targeting any individual then it would have had it’s records hidden under the authority of another unrelated government agency, and any records check at the FBI would have come back non-responsive.
The records on targeted operations are hidden because one thing surveillance fears is being dragged into court. Technically, law enforcement surveillance performed on an individual is done covertly. The techniques involved technically fall under the legal classification of the crime of harassment in most states. If an individual can identify the surveilling agency, he can file a police report and seek legal redress from civil lawsuits. Because these records were filed and turned up in response to a request, I tend to think this was just a general monitoring operation, partly done for no real reason at all, perhaps launched partly for training.
I have to admit, as you begin to see how pervasive the in-person surveillance state is, and how everywhere you look there seems to be an in-person element roving and sucking up a mass-data recording of their entire immediate environment, it just seems as if something has been lost. What happened to the old America where government stayed out of your life, and people were free to leave everyone else alone and enjoy their lives in private, if that was what they desired? Why is surveillance wasted on meaningless people? What does government think is coming, that is has built and deployed this giant leviathan?
I used to think all the kids today had it hard with every facet of their life online being preserved for all eternity. I had no idea so many other people were seeing the private moments in their own real-life lives recorded and stored to a master database somewhere.
Privacy Apocalypse here?
Could this be the effect of years of near unlimited budgets for intelligence organizations? Free resource availability for government agents, I imagine, would have a similar effect as in the other cases. They have more resources than they know what to do with, so they spy on everyone indiscriminately like a welfare whore copulates with ghetto thugs indiscriminately. The problem they have though, is the more people they put into spying the more likely it will be that some Snowden type figure will emerge and expose the whole damned thing.
The other thing I wonder about is, how much of this is real, and how much of this is merely psy-ops in order to make people too fearful to stand up to tyranny.