A Public-Private Partnership We Could Do Without

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement of course freaked out the banks. But now we're learning that it also freaked out our surveillance-prone government, which formed its own apparent conspiracy with the corporate world to hobble, or cripple or outright eliminate, OWS.

Naomi Wolf summarizes the beans spilled in FBI documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests:

The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations' knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).

It's like the election of 2008 really meant very little, so far as the domestic spying abuses of the Bush administration are concerned.