NSA contractors, BOA and Chamber of Commerce caught in plan to smear critics in online forums!

[starroute]

51. There's an interesting passage in David Graeber's The Democracy Project

This is from pages 132-33. (Emphasis added)

Back in 2000, I spent a good deal of time documenting how this first stage worked in the wake of the WTO protests in Seattle. At the time I was often working with activist media liaisons, and we would have to deal with bursts of bizarre claims that always seemed to suddenly appear on the horizon, clearly deriving from multiple official sources, all at the same time. During the summer of 2000, for example, there was one week when suddenly everyone started saying that anti-globalization protesters were all actually rich kids with trust funds. Shortly thereafter we began to hear a list of ultraviolent forms of behavior that protesters were supposed to have employed in Seattle. … Warnings about such violent tactics soon began regularly appearing in the newspapers before trade summits, often on the authority of experts sent to drill the local police, creating a mood of looming panic – despite the fact that during the Seattle protests themselves, no one had even suggested anyone had done anything of the sort. … While there's no way to know precisely what was happening, the bits of evidence we could glean suggested they traced back to some sort of a network of private security companies that worked in liaison with police, right-wing think tanks, and possibly some sorts of police intelligence units.