FBI Invokes National Security to Justify Surveillance of Tar Sands Protestors
The FBI has wide leeway to conduct surveillance on possible threats to “national security.” Where the rubber meets the road, of course, is who the Bureau decides constitutes such a threat.
Both the president and the Pentagon have proclaimed that global warming is a threat to U.S. national security. But there’s no sign that the FBI is wiretapping fossil fuel company CEOs.
On the contrary, in fact: as an FBI document published last week by the Guardian and Earth Island Journal demonstrates, the FBI has monitored members of Tar Sands Blockade, an organization trying to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline because its members believe it would mean “game over” due to climate change. Part of the FBI’s justification was that the “Keystone pipeline, as part of the oil and natural gas industry, is vital to the security and economy of the United States.”
According to the Guardian, FBI files show it conducted an investigation into Tar Sands Blockade members in which the Bureau “collated inside-knowledge about forthcoming protests, documented the identities of individuals photographing oil-related infrastructure, scrutinised police intelligence and cultivated at least one informant.”
The Guardian adds that “the documents connect the investigation into anti-Keystone activists to other ‘domestic terrorism issues’ in the agency and show there was some liaison with the local FBI ‘assistant weapons of mass destruction coordinator.’”
And that “the FBI files appear to suggest the Houston branch of the investigation was opened in early 2013, several months after a high-level strategy meeting between the agency and TransCanada, the company building the pipeline.”
Tar Sands Blockade members are attempting to stop the development of the Keystone pipeline, using non-violent tactics like locking themselves to pipeline equipment and climbing trees that must be cleared for construction.
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