Today, I filed for a FOIA at the US Department of State.
I am seeking any correspondence, which includes emails, memos, transcripts, reports, Threat Assessments, meta-data, and social media, by the The Bureau of Counterterrorism and the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) personnel, including Department of State field agents and officers, and law enforcement agencies, including but not limited to, local police personnel, CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland, and private contractors both employed or not employed by the US Government or other Governments, concerning my person, Alexa O'Brien, and aliases: including @carwinb, @usdayofrage, usdayofrage.org, and antibanks.net.
These documents should cover the time frame of December 26, 2010 and April, 6, 2012.
If these documents are regarded as potentially exempt from disclosure requirements, I requested that they nonetheless exercise their discretion to disclose them. I also asked that they kindly release all reasonably segregable nonexempt portions of documents.
If they deny all or any part of this request, I asked them to kindly cite each specific exemption they think justifies their refusal to release the information and notify me of appeal procedures available under the law.
I specified that there is a compelling need for the requested information because the information would contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of the government, and its relationships with former employees and private contractors.
In an email exchange recently leaked by WikiLeaks on February 27, 2012 from a "global intelligence" company called Stratfor which does work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency, and dated August 18, 2011, Fred Burton, Stratfor's Vice-President for Counterterrorism and Corporate Security, and former Deputy Chief of the Department of State's (DoS) counterterrorism division for the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), and Thomas Kopecky, Director of Operations at Investigative Research Consultants, Inc and Fortis Protective Services, LLC.
Re: Fwd: Question
Email-ID5462138
Date2011-08-18 19:29:44
[email protected]
[email protected], [email protected]
No, we're not aware of any concrete connections between fundamentalist Islamist movements and the Day of Rage, or the October 2011 movement at this point.
On 8/18/11 1:17 PM, Fred Burton wrote:
?
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Question
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:15:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: Thomas Kopecky
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: Fred Burton
Hi Fred & thanks for those books you signed....my father thought that was a great gift.
I was looking into that U.S. Day of Rage movement and specifically asked to connect it to any Saudi or other fundamentalist Islamic movements -
Thus far I have only hear rumors but not gotten any substantial connection.
Do you guys know much about this other than its U.S. Domestic fiscal ideals ?
thanks
Tom
Thomas Kopecky, Director of Operations
- Investigative Research Consultants, Inc.
- Fortis Protective Services, LLC
1 E Wacker Dr. Suite 2300
Chicago, IL 60601
312.832.9600 - office
1145 West 5th St. #101
Austin, TX 78703
512.381.9000
800.578.8212 - fax
www.ircIntelligence.com
www.fortisworldwide.com
Though the above-cited emails said they did not find a direct link to Islamic radicals "at present", subsequent to this email other individuals working in conjunction with the United States and the FBI have tried to linked our group to Al-Quaeda and other terrorist groups.
In early September, the US Day of Rage official twitter profile, @usdayofrage, began receiving messages that falsely accused US Day of Rage of being affiliated with terrorist groups. These were from a privately owned security and intelligence contractor, Provide Security (Twitter handle @providesecurity), managed by Thomas Ryan and Dr. Kevin Schatzle CISSP, CFE, CPP.
On the firm's website and LinkedIn profile, Provide Security describes itself as:
"[H]andpicked from the ranks of highly trained and experienced former agents of the U.S. Secret Service, members of U.S. Special Forces, Global Intelligence Agencies and other premier law enforcement organizations. Our experts are Board Certified in multiple aspects of Security from leading Security Associations, including ASIS International, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and ISC2."
On September 1, 2011, @usdayofrage received three private twitter message, called a direct message, from @providesecurity:
On October 14, 2011, Thomas Ryan of Provide Security, published an article entitled "The Email Archive of the #OccupyWallStreet Movement" on Andrew Breitbart Presents Big Government.
Thomas Ryan directly associates our group US Day of Rage with Al Quaeda and other terrorists organizations and states that he has "recruited other people to help U.S. begin the collection of data" from social media sites including U.S. Day of Rage. Ryan stated:
On August 10, 2011, the hacker group "Anonymous" announced that it would join the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. That's what sparked my interest in monitoring #OccupyWallStreet.I reached out to a colleague and asked if he would be interested in studying the protest with me. At first, it seemed disorganized, and we believed it would only be a few hundred protestors.
As we engaged in monitoring its growth, we recruited other people to help us begin the collection of data available via social media. We began mapping out key players, and monitored Anonymous's [sic] efforts to organize protests in the San Francisco Bay area public transportation system (#opBART) in order to detect patterns and key influencers.
Then, at the end of August, we were alerted by a fellow researcher that information about USDoR (U.S. Day of Rage, to which Occupy Wall Street is connected) had been posted on Shamuk and Al-Jahad, two Al-Qaeda recruitment sites. We began to take the "Occupy" protest more seriously, and dedicated more time to research and monitoring.
Days later, Anonymous announced that it would be releasing its new DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) tool. Because of the Al-Qaeda posting, we contacted the New York Field Office of the FBI so they could investigate the potential threat. From that point on, we decided we needed to include the Human Element of Intelligence (HUMINT), and to infiltrate the protestors to map their ties to Anonymous, and to the postings on Shamuk and Al-Jahad. (Source: The article was removed on or around March 5, 2012. A screenshot of the article is available here. Breitbart's Big Government)
Between October 18, 2010 and December 31, 2011 I was employed full time at a publicly traded energy efficiency firm, responsible for the content strategy of the firms internal content management system and website.
In a late October 2011 telephonic meeting, between myself and the firm's director of federal programs, who is also a former interrogator and foreign language specialist with the Massachusetts Army National Guard, I was told that multiple individuals in the U.S. government on multiple occasions had asked him about me by name.
Moreover, on January 11, 2012 Australian Security Magazine published an article entitled, "Radical Islam: Global influence in domestic affairs" that directly linked, again incorrectly, U.S. Day of Rage to radical Islamists.
"More recently we found the same types of activity by radical Islamists during the planning of the U.S. Day of Rage that was scheduled for September 17th 2011. While it certainly did not take root and there were none of the violent clashes that took place during the UK riots, none the less the same types of people were there seeking to influence proceedings. Those aiming to influence the U.S. Day of Rage followed a similar pattern as the group and individuals we found to be trying to influence groups for CHOGM. Most were looking to promote violent confrontation, while some were spreading low level jihadist propaganda."
Then, on March 20, 2011; Jason Leopold, a journalist at Truthout.org, published a DHS FOIA documents concerning US Day of Rage.
I have been told that more DHS documents are forthcoming from Mr. Leopold's FOIA request in May 2012.
