Cyber activists associated with Anonymous have posted the private information of Oakland city officials in response to an ongoing crackdown against OccupyWallStreet (OWS) protestors.
“Since the inception of Occupy Oakland, we have been actively monitoring your behavior, and exposing the identities and sensitive information of Officers of the Oakland Police Department; as they have continued to act in an unprofessional and violent manner. You tear gassed us. You shot us with your weapons. You arrested us. You beat us. You also did this to our friends, and to our families,” the group wrote in an online communiqué.
“We watched as you cut budgets, cut our jobs, closed our schools, our parks, and our libraries, while leaving your own salaries alone. The people on this list are supposed to represent the best of what the City of Oakland has to offer. If they are the best, why is there so much trouble within the Police Department, and in the City of Oakland? We are shocked and disgusted by your behavior. Before you commit atrocities against innocent people again, think twice. You should have expected us.”
Unsurprisingly, neither the city nor the Oakland Police Department (OPD) has shown any sign of changing its current approach towards OWS protestors, despite concerns from various human rights organizations and civil liberties groups.
Indeed, the OPD is planning to step up its surveillance of the movement by using forensic video enhancement software coded and donated by Cognitech, Inc.
“It is our sincere hope that in donating our forensic video Tri-Suite software to the Oakland Police Department, we are helping to assist the entire community,” Cognitech CEO Lenny Rudin said in a statement quoted by the SFChron.
“Pictures tell the truth and when enhancing these videos and photos forensically, unlawful acts will be seen and analyzed clearly and scientifically, no matter who committed them.”
However, Occupy Oakland protester Shon Kay says he doesn’t believe the forensic tech will deter demonstrators from taking to the streets in the future.
“This kind of thing aids their attempt to portray the movement as criminal, by being able to single out the actions of certain individuals and use that as a way to frame everyone that was there,” he told the SFChron.
“I wish that some private video analytics firm would give us that equipment so that we could analyze what the OPD is doing… I think we’d find a lot of criminal activity there.”
February 2012 certainly has been a busy month for groups like Anonymous and AntiSec, with the collective managing to obtain a “sensitive” FBI-Scotland Yard conference call while jacking various police department sites, including those run by law enforcement officials in Syracuse (New York), Boston and Salt Lake City.
The group also posted an e-mail archive related to the deaths of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians during a 2005 US operation in Haditha and raided Syrian government networks – extracting sensitive docs advising President Bashar al Assad how to handle the fallout over his bloody crackdown against protestors demanding regime change.
