The Cop City Shuffle
Cops and intelligence agencies are spying on protesters. They don't want you to know that.
The Stop Cop City movement is a lightning rod for political surveillance. Judging from police presence at protests and internal documents showing an extensive social media monitoring apparatus, agencies across Georgia are spying on Stop Cop City. But understanding the true extent of that surveillance may be years in the making.
It took years after the 2020 Portland protests to bring to light a sprawling surveillance apparatus, which included DHS compiling dossiers of “derogatory information” culled from intelligence records, travel history, immigration status, and criminal history. And throughout US history, intelligence agencies have nursed an obsession with anarchists, from abusing the immigration system to deport anarchists during the Palmer Raids to collecting license plates at Iraq War peace protests attended by Food Not Bombs. (We submitted a FOIA request on the Houston chapter of Food Not Bombs in 2023, and received the response that “revealing these records would provide wrong-doers, drug traffickers, terrorists, and other criminals with invaluable information.”) That’s not to mention the Trump-era moral panic over Antifa, which led to warnings from DHS and the FBI that anarchist violence might be on the rise, likely leading to heightened surveillance of protesters suspected of anarchist leanings.
Local agencies also conduct their own sprawling investigations. Police departments in large cities have their own homeland security agencies, intelligence operations, and even international field offices. In just the past few months, FOIA filers released documents showing that the Los Angeles Police Department, the Atlanta Police Department, and New York Police Department routinely scrape social media for posts they deem noteworthy or event postings they find potentially dangerous. This surveillance ranges into the absurd - apparently the purchase of a Grim Reaper costume for a protest is worthy of police attention?
Image credit: Joey Scott (other FOIA linked here).
Ahead of the June Stop Cop City week of action, Atlanta PD grabbed screenshots of Stop Cop City events, tracking the number of likes on Instagram each event received. The events monitored included a film screening, fashion show, and a protest outside DeKalb government offices.
Image credit: Image credit: @GORA4ORRAU (link) + Atlanta Community Press Collective
Weekly reports from April included monitoring of a documentary film screening Defend the Atlanta Forest was “promoting.”
Image credit: @GORA4ORRAU
Chicago PD got in on the action, surveilling a local anarchist bookstore that hosted an event during the Defend the Atlanta Forest speaking tour. The NYPD Intelligence Bureau distributed screenshots of vigils held after Tortuguita’s murder, including a food distribution event. NYPD instructed the 275+ police departments in its nationwide Sentry network to report back any “civil disorder / criminal activity” so it could be compiled “similar to how we did in 2020.”
Image credit: Defending Rights & Dissent
There’s no question that police agencies across the country surveil protest movements, including Stop Cop City. Arrest warrants and FOIA documents reveal spying on the basis of protected political speech and First Amendment-protected association. At the federal level, legislation like the FBI First Amendment Protection Act that would prevent the FBI from conducting preliminary pre-investigation inquiries from drawing on protected speech and association has not yet passed Congress. At the local level, activists often find out about the kind of surveillance that happens behind closed doors when protests are met with a hefty policy presence, or, rarely, when their elected representatives demand information be made public. In theory, FOIA provides a mechanism for accountability of police and spy agencies through facilitating public shaming, spreading awareness among activists, and providing the information needed for attorneys pursuing lawsuits and public officials conducting oversight.
In the resistance to Cop City, tireless reporting by the Atlanta Community Press Collective and the Saporta Report has uncovered lies about the cost of Cop City, basic errors in claims made by the Atlanta Police Foundation about compliance with the terms of the lease, and other information about the project concealed from the public, down to who’s funding the solar panels. Citizen filer @GORA4ORRAU has obtained damning information through FOIA, including unburying the lie that no other site was considered, and embarrassing tidbits such as APF officials asking if there was antifa funding behind a letter writing campaign. These documents uncover key facts relevant to public debate amid an enforced culture of silence around the project. For the people of Atlanta, basic information about where the shooting range will be located, what happens to the neighboring Intrenchment Creek Park, and the scale of the project is highly relevant. Open records requests have rebuked Atlanta’s attempts to push through Cop City in secret through any means necessary, and have provided at least knowledge if not yet accountability for political spying.
Cop City in the Shadows
It comes as no surprise that Georgia agencies are fighting tooth and nail to keep buried what records they can, especially when those records contain politically damning information and potential ammunition for journalists and activists. For every document request begrudgingly fulfilled, agencies take steps to conceal records through outright denials and bureaucratic inertia.
Along with Project South and Community Movement Builders, Defending Rights & Dissent filed an open records request with the Atlanta Police Department querying documents and communications pertaining to a variety of Stop Cop City topics. After a back and forth exchange in which APD refused to turn over documents, we were forced to narrow our query to communications only. APD informed us that 411,714 emails were responsive, which could be redacted at a cost of $38,247.25. When we attempted to narrow the request further, we were told to resubmit the request, resetting the clock on response time. After the statutorily permitted days elapsed, APD claimed that all Homeland Security Unit emails were exempt from disclosure.
In February 2023, we ran into similar obstructionism from Georgia authorities. We filed requests with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and the Georgia Intelligence Analysis Center (GISAC) for emails mentioning the Atlanta Police Foundation. An amalgamation of state, local, and federal agencies, fusion centers such as GISAC are notoriously secretive, dodging both local oversight and compliance with open records requests. In response to our request, GISAC claimed that the agency was wholly exempt from open records requests (if that were true, why post an open records point of contact on the website?). For its part, the GBI found 4,252 responsive emails that could be redacted at a cost of $32.63 per hour, for an estimated total of $6,656.52. We narrowed the request by a series of search terms, including:
Cop City
Defend the Atlanta Forest
Atlanta Public Safety Training Center
Terrorism
Domestic violent extremism
Anarchist
According to the GBI, zero emails were responsive to the revised query, a response which strains credulity. The agency charged search fees for both queries, and returned an invoice that overstated the cost, apparently in error. (We reached out to the GBI and received a corrected invoice.)
These responses from Georgia authorities are egregious in expense, but hardly out of step with FOIA evasion occurring federally and in jurisdictions across the country. Reasoning that the vast expansion of information sharing across federal, state, and local police agencies post-9/11 might land documents in obscure jurisdictions, we also queried state and local agencies across the country to seek information about surveillance of local solidarity movements and Stop Cop City organizing in Atlanta. With the exception of the City of Boise, cities and state agencies uniformly denied requests, procrastinated, or returned ridiculous responses. Phoenix police claimed to be exempt from FOIA. LAPD asserted that they were unable to conduct a search without easily-Googleable email domains for DHS and the FBI. The Arizona fusion center told us that they do not retain any emails. Most agencies have yet to return a response to our FOIA requests.
Liberating documents and the public’s right to now
At the time of its passage, the Freedom of Information Act was pioneering legislation. Few countries at the time had open records legislation, and the passage of the Act in the US was a small miracle. During World War II, the national security state secrecy apparatus expanded, in part to conceal atomic secrets. The FBI and policing always operated in the shadows, but the 1940’s saw the expansion of secretive agencies to include the CIA and the precursor to the NSA. Amid the Cold War culture of fear, Truman created the modern classification regime in 1951. In 1953, realizing the mounting public information problem, the American Society of Newspaper Editors commissioned a report on the state of government transparency. In damning words, Cross wrote:
The people have the right to know…Without that, the citizens of a democracy have but changed their kings.
Recognizing this dire state of affairs, Congressman John Moss fought for twelve years for the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. The Act was opposed by every federal agency and department at the time of its proposal. Finally, on July 4, 1966, FOIA was signed into law. After Watergate, Congress revised FOIA to give the law more teeth. Key figures in power, particularly Donald Rumsfeld, opposed the expansion, but Congress passed revisions over President Ford’s veto. FOIA has weathered executive orders from Reagan and Bush, and undergone five revisions in Congress. From the early days where all FOIA requests for a year could fit in a small compendium, FOIA has evolved into a powerful tool in the fight for government transparency and accountability.
The federal FOIA spawned passage of open records laws at the state level across the country. These statutes vary widely in deference granted in favor of open records, fees permitted, and statutory time to respond to requests. Some add accountability mechanisms for records disclosure, such as the Michigan law, which requires fees to be diminished should agencies exceed the allotted number of days to respond. Others add restrictions, such as the Virginia law, which prohibits nonresidents from filing.
Despite the promise of FOIA, open records acts remain under siege from secretive agencies, chronic underfunding, and bureaucratic procrastination. The length of the wait time is extending. As of 2019, five federal agencies had FOIA requests outstanding for over a decade, and one had an unfulfilled request over 25 years old. The government can evade requests or redact heavily through use of the FOIA exemptions, one of which the National Security Archive has termed the “withhold it because you want to exemption.” Some exemptions have been interpreted to withhold records even from members of Congress. As happened to us in Georgia, states can selectively interpret federal law, charge exorbitant fees, or claim exemption to avoid records disclosure. Often, the only remedy for lack of transparency is FOIA litigation, which can incur significant expense and pose a barrier to entry for most filers.
The National Archives considers the right to know a “one of the fundamental rights of a democratic government,” and annually commemorates FOIA Day on March 16. We release this piece on September 28, the date the UN designated as the International Day for Universal Access to Information. Every September 28, the UN convenes summits, often targeted at nations in the global south, to discuss the right to public information. While events are held annually in the US and across the world celebrating the right to know, the request backlogs grow year by year.
Government records are the property of the people, and are a potent tool to fight for accountability, especially in cases like Cop City where the government would prefer to operate in the shadows. In Cop City, as activists are spied upon and public relations interpreted as conspiracy, intelligence and policing agencies get away with hiding surveillance and concealing communications that rightfully belong to the public. We have a right to know. That right shouldn’t be buried under fees, bureaucratic obfuscation, and an exaggerated deference to the security state.