Featureless Features

Some of us may have been shocked to have read The New York Post’s coverage of trouble at #OWS.  As a native born Neu Yawker I'm used to the Post's peculiar way of, uh, I think they call it reporting.  I did a little research and I’m gonna say, the NY Post twists a story with clear intent to spread propaganda and to sow seeds of discontent, divide and conquer, create media stars and generally distract from the fact that #OWS is astonishingly, beyond comprehensionally, ragingly SUCCESSFUL!  Now, I’m not there so I can only make assumptions based on what I read and what I already know.  So I present the NY Post’s coverage of what was “important” today, followed by what I found on #OWS:

Occupy Wall Street kitchen staff protesting fixing food for freeloaders

By SELIM ALGAR and BOB FREDERICKS

Last Updated: 10:58 AM, October 27, 2011

Posted: 1:43 AM, October 27, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street volunteer kitchen staff launched a “counter” revolution yesterday -- because they’re angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for “professional homeless” people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters.

For three days beginning tomorrow, the cooks will serve only brown rice and other spartan grub instead of the usual menu of organic chicken and vegetables, spaghetti bolognese, and roasted beet and sheep’s-milk-cheese salad.  [Sounds almost as good as Guantanamo Bay!  BTW--Haven't we seen that guy before?  Like early on in this movement as a former Wall St. hot shot who knew better than anyone else what to say and do next?]

They will also provide directions to local soup kitchens for the vagrants, criminals and other freeloaders who have been descending on Zuccotti Park in increasing numbers every day.

It goes on but there’s nothing really relevant until this little paragraph sneeks up:

As the kitchen workers met with the “General Assembly’’ last night, about 300 demonstrators stormed from the park to Reade Street and Broadway, where they violently clashed with cops.

Officers made at least 10 arrests when rowdy demonstrators refused to get out of the street and stop blocking traffic. A dozen cops on scooters tried to force them back to the sidewalk.

There were no reported injuries.

The demonstrators said they were angry over the violence in Oakland.

Huh?  That’s it?  Then there’s a video which purports to be about the drummers being difficult, but if you’re really bored you can watch it to find out they’ve already worked things out (with one exception, brought to you by the NY Post!)  Also sidebars about, hold your breath, the repuglican’s talking point for today:  #OWS is controlled by, gasp, ACORN!!!!

Read more if you can stand it, here: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/zuccotti_hell_kitchen_i5biNyYYhpa8MSYIL9xSDL#ixzz1c25h9iiT

I am sure there are grievances and difficulties for people living there, as the temperature drops and supplies and energy gets low, but if you go to #OWS’s web site, the lead story’s headline is what was given only a passsing mention in Rupert Murdoch's disinformation sheet:

#ows Takes The Streets In Solidarity With #occupyoakland

Posted Oct. 27, 2011, 2:53 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Last night hundreds marched through the streets of NYC, chanting "New York is Oakland, Oakland is New York." We circled City Hall, ran in the streets, refused to be kettled or have our voices silenced, marched up broadway, North on 6th Ave, circled around on Bleecker, and marched south against traffic on 6th ave, running past police barricades, running past our fear, running in solidarity with each other and #occupyoakland.

Further down are reports about many different solidarity actions for Oakland and significantly, announcements of vigils for Scott Olsen.  There’s a post from Cairo, a report titled “Drumming and the Occupation” and one called “Where Do We Go From Here?”  All the rest of the web home page is about getting more information and learning how to DIY.  As for the NY Post, there’s no “there” there.  I got the story and it wasn’t from them.

http://occupywallst.org/

#OWS Fnks Are Outed

What can you say about people who betray your trust?  Not a whole lot.  What can you do?  That depends on how egregious the betrayal.  In these times when a stark, survivalist mentality seems normal, it would seem "right action" requires a bit of thought and investigation. It does occur to me, however, that if the agency which is supposed to be tracking cyber crimes COMMITS them, an investigation would make sense.

Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD

By Adrian Chen

Oct 15, 2011 4:47 P

The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters' moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group's internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group's plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.

Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he's done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads "a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world." But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers' social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.

As part of their intelligence-gathering operation, the group gained access to a listserv used by Occupy Wall Street organizers called September17discuss.  […]  On Friday, Ryan leaked thousands of September17discuss emails to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is now using them to try to smear Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist conspiracy to disrupt global markets.

What may much more alarming to Occupy Wall Street organizers is that while Ryan was monitoring September17discuss, he was forwarding interesting email threads to contacts at the NYPD and FBI, including special agent Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the FBI's New York-based cyber security team. 
[…]  On September 26th, Ryan forwarded another email thread to Agent Loyd. But this time he clued in the NYPD as well, sending the email to Dennis Dragos, a detective with the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad.

[…]  Interestingly, it was Ryan who revealed himself as a snitch. We learned of these emails from the archive Ryan leaked yesterday in the hopes of undermining the Occupy Wall Street movement. In assembling the archive of September17discuss emails, it appears he accidentally included some of his own forwarded emails indicating he was ratting out organizers.

"I don't know, I just put everything I had into one big package," Ryan said when asked how the emails ended up in the file posted to Andrew Breitbart's blog. Some security expert.

[…]  Did the FBI and/or NYPD ask him to monitor Occupy Wall Street? Was he just forwarding the emails on out of the goodness of his heart? In a phone interview with us, Ryan denied being an informant. "I do not work with the FBI," he said.

Ryan said he knows Loyd through their mutual involvement in the Open Web Application Security Project, a non-profit computer security group of which Ryan is a board member. Ryan said he sent the emails to Loyd unsolicited simply because "everyone's curious" about Occupy Wall Street, and he had a ground-eye view. "Jordan never asked me for anything."

Was he sending every email he got to the authorities? Ryan said he couldn't remember how many he'd passed on to the FBI or NYPD, or other third parties. Later he said that he only forwarded the two emails we noticed, detailed above.

[…]  But regardless of how many emails Ryan sent—or whether Loyd ever asked Ryan to spy on Occupy Wall Street—Loyd was almost certainly interested in the emails he received. Loyd has helped hunt down members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, and he and his colleagues in the FBI's cyber security squad have been monitoring their involvement in Occupy Wall Street.

http://gawker.com/5850054/