How I Exposed an Undercover Cop By Lacy MacAuley

[Demeter]

http://otherwords.org/i-exposed-an-undercover-cop-lacy-macauley/

She was an undercover cop who called herself “Missy.” When I first met her four years ago, I couldn’t have known that the small-framed woman with spiky brown hair and intense eyes was anything but a fellow activist showing up for a protest in Washington, D.C. I certainly didn’t know she was actually Nicole Rizzi, an undercover cop ordered to secretly spy on peaceful protesters, violate our freedom of speech and assembly, and disregard our right to privacy.

Sure, I thought something was odd about her. She stared just a little too long. Her irreverent sense of humor made the hair stand up on the backs of a lot of necks. Her favorite t-shirt read “OBEY” and it wasn’t clear that she wore it for the irony. When I looked at her rippling arm muscles, I wondered whether they came from workouts at some spy academy or a downtown yoga studio.

So sure, I did suspect from the start that she could be an FBI agent, a police officer, or something else. But if you start being suspicious of newcomers, every honest newbie will look like an infiltrator. I kept my paranoia mostly to myself...The Twitter account was shocking. There was “Missy” tweeting about the daily grind of working for the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department. There were photos of her at the shooting range and a photo of her giant walkie-talkie. There were tweets about “the academy” and “the new morgue.”

There was a comment about her working during Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration on “ninja assignment,” and a remark that reading Miranda rights isn’t actually required...Spying on protesters is the worst violation of our freedom. It not only disregards the freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and right to privacy of the people who are being spied upon, it makes us crazed and paranoid. One person who turns out to be an infiltrator can keep us pointing fingers at each other for years. It makes us distrustful of people we don’t know, instead of finding safe ways to welcome newcomers and building vibrant social movements.

Distrust can mean slow death for a group of any kind...

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[Dawson Leery]

1. Ms. Piggy was working against protesters of sweat shops.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/technology/internet/undercover-cop-nicole-rizzi-blows-cover-social-media-sites

Ms. Rizzi puts a new spin on the term "fascist pig".

[Ash_F]

2. Do they ever go this far to infiltrate boardroom meetings? /nt

[midnight]

3. It's called divide and conquer.... It's suppose to cause distrust....

[Earth_First]

4. I was accused in late 2008 and again in 2012 as being an undercover cop in Rochester...

Its frustrating and incredibly unfair.

To this day, despite several efforts to dispell this, there are a handful of activitsts and two organizations whom do not trust me nor do I feel ever welcomed by.

Unfortunately its a lot of the reason I do not participate locally much anymore.

Mostly, its the younger anarchist-types who have done a wonderful whisper campaign with other groups...

Then in the same breath, complain there aren't enough interested individuals to mount these campaigns.

Sigh.