Please read and share the announcement below originally sent by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund

New York Times publishes major article in today's paper based on materials released by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)-funded Fusion Centers used their vast anti-terrorism and anti-crime authority and funding to conduct a sprawling, nationwide and hour-by-hour surveillance effort that targeted even the smallest activity of peaceful protestors in the Occupy Movement in the fall and winter of 2011. This spying effort was exposed in a report issued today by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) based on 4,000 pages of government documents obtained by the PCJF.

The newly published documents reveal the actual workings of the Fusion Centers, created ostensibly to coordinate anti-terrorism efforts following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in collecting and providing surveillance information on peaceful protestors.

The new documents roll back the curtain on the Fusion Centers and show the communications, interactions and emails of a massive national web of federal agents, officials, police, and private “security” contractors. They accumulated and shared information, reporting on all manner of peaceful and lawful political activity that took place during the Occupy movement, from protests and rallies to meetings and educational lectures. This enormous spying and monitoring apparatus included the Pentagon, FBI, DHS, police departments and chiefs, private contractors and commercial business interests.

There is now, with the release of these documents, incontrovertible evidence of systematic, and not incidental, conduct and practices of the Fusion Centers and their personnel to direct their sites against a peaceful movement that advocated social and economic justice in the United States. 

To read the full PCJF report on the Fusion Centers' domestic spying operation, follow this link. Sections of the report include:

• Anti-Terrorism Resources Devoted to Spy on Occupy Movement; Major City Police Chiefs Used Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Center to Produce Regular National Reports on Occupy Movement
• Investigating Terrorism in Boston: The Boston Regional Intelligence Center Monitored and Catalogued Occupy-Associated Activities from Student Organizing to Political Lectures
• Pentagon and Dept. of Defense Worked Through Fusion Centers to Target Occupy Movement
• The Terrorist Threat to U.S. National Security: Black Friday Consumer Boycotts
• Let’s go down to Occupy Encampment “hear some tunes and get laid”: Communication from Washington D.C. Fusion Center official to Maryland Fusion Center official
• Scared When the “Watched” Start Watching the Watchers
• Watching the PCJF
• A Well-Funded Surveillance-Industrial Complex in Search of a Mission to Justify its Exponential Funding 
• The Fusion Centers are Incompatible with Democracy and Must Be Ended

Read the full report

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has also initiated a nationwide campaign to flood Congress and the President with letters demanding that the Fusion Centers be defunded and ended immediately. Please take a moment to join this campaign and send your letter.

We need your help! PCJF attorneys have worked for years to expose the government's use of counter-terrorism authority against the peace and social justice movement, including the Occupy movement. Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible contribution to support these efforts in defense of freedom, dissent and constitutional rights.