The national-security watchdogs at The Intercept have FOIA’d a bunch of Department of Homeland Security documents related to Black Lives Matter activists, and while the resulting article is marred by Greenwaldian hysteria as manifested in radical-bearded-professor statements like “terrorism isn’t a real threat,” it does indicate that the Department of Homeland Security may have way too much time on its hands:
An April 29th email from the DHS National Operations Center also mentions planned surveillance of three seemingly innocuous events, two of which were associated with historically black neighborhoods. According to the email, the DHS-funded DC Homeland Security & Emergency Management Agency decided to conduct “a limited stand-up… to monitor a larger than expected Funk Parade and two other mass gathering events” in case “any Baltimore-related civil unrest occurs.” It appears that the only Funk Parade in DC occurs in the historically black neighborhood of U Street. The other two events, according to another report, produced by the DHS National Capital Region‘s Information Collection and Coordination Center, were a community parade in Congress Heights, a predominantly black neighborhood, and the Avon 39-Walk to End Breast Cancer.
Basically it looks like DHS has been keeping track of some Black Lives Matter protests under the reasoning that doing would help provide “situational awareness” and “a common operating picture” for law enforcement in the event of an “act of terrorism, or other man-made disaster.” (Those are DHS’s own words.) Which would make sense—if Black Lives Matter was a terror group rather than a nonviolent protest movement.
