U.S. bosses’ National Security Agency and other agencies have been spying on other capitalist leaders and scooping up huge amounts of e-mails and phone records around the world. They are up to their necks in spying and sabotage against workers fighting back, In fact, even they are ready to commit murder, or at least stand by while it happens.
While investigating Occupy Houston, the FBI found a plot to assassinate its leaders, but made no attempt to warn them. A plot probably organized by the FBI’s friends.
The information emerged partly from a graduate student’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) document. The government  is now refusing to reveal the rest of the information, on grounds that Occupy is a terrorist group. A Houston judge has called that absurd, and ordered them to prove it or provide the papers, although they probably won’t comply (Houston Chronicle, 3/18; Vice magazine, 3/21).
Meanwhile, a separate investigation in Olympia, WA, has exposed a coordinated effort on the part of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, all three branches of the military, and 16 other local and national police agencies to infiltrate the Port Military Resistance Movement and Evergreen College Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The exposures prove an FBI campaign to spy on and suppress the Occupy Movement — something widely believed, but vigorously denied by the Obama Administration.
A 2009 FOIA request filed by SDS members revealed the man they knew as “John Jacobs” was actually John Towery, a member of the Army’s Force Protection Service (Democracy Now, 7/28/09). Now an SDS lawsuit has revealed an email sent by Towery saying he was trying to “develop a leftist/anarchist mini-group for intel sharing and distro [independent publishing source]” with police departments in Everett, Spokane, Portland, Eugene, and Los Angeles. He even repeatedly tried to convince SDS members to stockpile guns and suggested that they engage in domestic terrorism, so he could entrap them (Democracy Now, 2/25/14).
Spying on the Left is nothing new. In 2004, Drake University in Iowa was subpoenaed by a federal prosecutor to turn over records from an anti-war conference it hosted. This led to the exposure of police infiltration of anti-war groups in Fresno, CA, Grand Rapids, MI, Boulder, CO, and Albuquerque, NM (Salon, 2/11/04).
In 2007 the New York Times revealed that the NYPD had extensively infiltrated Left groups prior to the 2004 Republican National Convention as part of a massive surveillance operation (3/25/07). This spying operation continued well past the Convention, at least until 2008 (Guardian, 3/23/12). The memoir of Minnesota cop Richard Greelis bragged about his state’s massive infiltration of Left groups prior to the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul.
During student protests over budget cuts in 2010-11, campus police infiltrated groups at the University of Washington and UC Davis to spy on student activists. (KIRO7, 4/20/10; California Aggie, 3/10/11)
All this only skims the surface of the capitalist class’s surveillance state. COINTELPRO, a surveillance and disruption program started by the FBI in 1956, included surveillance, police frame-ups, and assassinations in effort to destroy the Left in the U.S. (Ward Churchill, COINTELPRO Papers, 1990). COINTELPRO supposedly was stopped after it came to light in 1971, but recent revelations prove it’s still alive and well. These incidents show that the capitalist class will stop at nothing in order to maintain its economic and political power.