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Gang Stalking ~ What Every TI Should Listen To

U.S. Government Gang Stalking: America's Dirty Little Secret - 4/16/2016

Gang Stalking: Nowhere To Hide- With Eric Karlstrom

    If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or

  intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth,

  Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any

  right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of

  the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same;

  or

    If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the

  premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free

  exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured -

    They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than

  ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in

  violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an

  attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit

  aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined

  under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life,

  or both, or may be sentenced to death.

“Gang Stalking” is, very likely, a disinformation term created by U.S. intelligence agencies. It refers to the intense, long-term, unconstitutional surveillance and harassment of a person who has been designated as a target by someone associated with America’s security industry.

Such operations have nothing to do with criminal gangs. Official domestic counterintelligence operations of this type are – apparently – perpetrated by federal agents and intelligence/security contractors, sometimes with the support of state and local law enforcement personnel. Unofficial operations of this type are, apparently, perpetrated by private investigators and vigilantes – including many former agents and cops, some of whom are members of the quasi-governmental Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIU), sometimes on behalf of corporate clients and others with connections to the public and private elements of America’s security industry.

The goal of such operations – in the parlance of counterintelligence agents – is “disruption” of the life of an individual deemed to be an enemy (or potential enemy) of clients or members of the security state. Arguably, the most accurate term for this form of harassment would be “counterintelligence stalking.” Agents of communist East Germany’s Stasi (state police) referred to the process as Zersetzung (German for “decomposition” or “corrosion” – a reference to the severe psychological, social, and financial effects upon the victim). American and British victims have described the process as “no-touch torture” – a phrase which also captures the nature of the crime: cowardly, unethical (and often illegal), but difficult to prove legally, because it generates minimal forensic evidence.

Tactics include – but are not limited to – slander, blacklisting, “mobbing” (intense, organized harassment in the workplace), “black bag jobs” (residential break-ins), abusive phone calls, computer hacking, framing, threats, blackmail, vandalism, “street theater” (staged physical and verbal interactions with minions of the people who orchestrate the stalking), harassment by noises, and other forms of bullying.

Both the facts and the geographical distribution of relevant published news reports – as well as other evidence cited on this website – suggest that such stalking is sanctioned (and in some cases, orchestrated) by federal agencies; however, news reports, credible anecdotal information, and my own experiences, indicate that such stalking is also sometimes used unofficially for personal and corporate vendettas by current and former corrupt employees of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, private investigators, and their clients.

Since counterintelligence stalking goes far beyond surveillance – into the realm of psychological terrorism, it is essentially a form of extrajudicial punishment. As such, the harassment is illegal – even when done by the government. It clearly violates, for example, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unwarranted searches, and the Sixth Amendment – which guarantees the right to a trial. Such operations also violate similar fundamental rights defined by state constitutions. Stalking is also specifically prohibited by the criminal codes of every state in America.

Although the term “gang stalking” is intentionally misleading, it does have one merit: it is accurate in the sense that the perpetrators – law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, and private security thugs – do often function in the manner of criminal gangs. Although they sometimes conduct their operations under the color of law, many of their activities have neither constitutional nor moral legitimacy. That is true of all of the likely major perpetrators of organized stalking in the U.S.: the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. military counterintelligence agencies, state and local Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIUs), and security contractors. All of those groups – and other federal intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and NSA – have well-documented histories of abusing their powers.

History

Organized stalking methods were used extensively by communist East Germany’s Stasi (state police) as a means of maintaining political control over its citizens. Although they are illegal in the U.S., the same covert tactics are quietly used by America’s local and federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to suppress dissent, silence whistle-blowers, and get revenge against persons who have angered someone with connections to the public and private agencies involved.

Illegal counterintelligence operations have been perpetrated against Americans by urban police departments in the U.S. since the late 1800s. Traditionally, the groups of mostly-undercover police officers involved are called “red squads,” although the modern official term is “Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIUs).”

The most well-documented example of such operations was the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Programs) under the direction of  J. Edgar Hoover. Those operations ran from 1956 until 1971 when they were exposed by political activists who broke into an FBI office and obtained secret documents which they handed over to the press.

COINTELPRO’s official goal was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” individuals and groups deemed to be subversive.

Tactics

As the U.S. Senate’s investigation of COINTELPRO found, tactics used by the FBI included many of the methods associated with gang stalking, such as overt surveillance (stalking for psychological operations purposes). The agency even perpetrated crimes such as blackmail and assassinations.

Organized stalking methods include warrantless electronic surveillance, slander, blacklisting, and a variety of psychological operations. The latter presumably exploit findings from studies such as the notorious MKUltra experiments conducted on American and Canadian citizens by the CIA, as well as the aforementioned psychological torture tactics refined by the Stasi. In fact, as explained in the overview below, former CIA analyst and expert on the history of U.S. spying, George O’Toole wrote about a connection between the CIA and the aforementioned LEIUs.

An organized stalking victim is systematically isolated and harassed in a manner intended to cause sustained emotional torment while creating the least-possible amount of evidence of stalking that would be visible to others. The process is sometimes referred to as “no-touch torture.” Methods are specifically chosen for their lack of easily-captured objective evidence. Perpetrators use common annoyances such as constant noise by neighbors or rude comments and abusive behavior by strangers, but on a frequent ongoing long-term basis. The cumulative effects of relentless exposure to such tactics can amount to psychological torture for the victim.

Accomplices – such as neighbors, co-workers, and even friends or relatives of the victim in some cases – are recruited to participate (often unwittingly) by counterintelligence personnel using various means, such as by telling them that the target is a potential threat or that the target is the subject of an “investigation.”

A whole set of psychological operations are perpetrated against targeted individuals. These methods, described in detail in the overview below, include such things as threats, slander, vandalism, abusive phone calls, computer hacking, tormenting the victim with noise, and “mobbing” (orchestrated verbal harassment by strangers, neighbors, or co-workers).

Accounts by numerous victims of organized stalking share common specific details – suggesting that the perpetrators are following a well-tested and standardized playbook of methods that have proven to be easily kept off of the radar of potential witnesses and the mainstream news media.

News Reports

Note:  The following published news reports are discussed in more detail later in this overview, and accompanied by links to the original sources.

Although Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 and 2014 generated a great deal of public discussion about mass surveillance, U.S. domestic counterintelligence activities receive relatively little attention. This is so despite reports – such as those which follow – from sources across the political spectrum.

Published articles and anecdotal reports have appeared with increasing frequency – especially in the past decade or so – alleging that something comparable to the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations is still happening, although it naturally involves more advanced surveillance technology.

One of the first significant works of investigative journalism about U.S. domestic counterintelligence operations in the post-COINTELPRO era appeared just 7 months after the U.S. Senate’s “Church Committee” issued its final report about COINTELPRO and MKUltra.

Pulitzer Prize nominee George O’Toole, a novelist and historian who specialized in the history of American espionage, and who had worked for the CIA as an analyst, wrote an article titled “America’s Secret Police Network.” The article, which was published in the December 1976 issue of Penthouse, exposed a secretive quasi-governmental organization called the Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIU).

Although LEIUs – or “Red Squads” – have existed in America since the late 1800s, the private national network of such intelligence units that was quietly formed in the 1950s had remained – and still remains – mostly unknown to the general public. O’Toole described the group this way:

“The organization forms a vast network of intelligence units that exchange dossiers and conduct investigations on a reciprocal basis. Several of the police departments belonging to the group have recently been caught in illegal wiretapping, burglary, and spying on the private lives of ordinary citizens. The LEIU is, in effect, a huge, private domestic-intelligence agency.”  

A New York Times article published in April 1979 reviewed a three-and-a-half-year study of the LEIU association by the American Friends Service Committee. The study described the LEIU as “an old-boy network” whose illegal surveillance “of groups and individuals for political purposes is continuing on a vast scale in the nation.” According to the report, the widespread illegal spying posed “a grave threat to the constitutional rights of freedom of expression, due process and privacy.”

A Los Angeles Times article published in September 1979 under the headline “FBI Admits Spreading Lies About Jean Seberg” was the lead story on the paper’s front page. Seberg – a successful film actress and a political activist – had died the month before in Paris from an apparent suicide. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Seberg had been the target of a systematic campaign by the FBI to slander her. She had also apparently been blacklisted and terrorized by the FBI using tactics associated with counterintelligence operations intended to neutralize political dissidents, such as “black bag jobs,” illegal wiretapping, and overt stalking.

During the 1980s and 90s a trend toward militarization began in American police departments. For example, Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams were being created across the nation. However, relatively little news about U.S. counterintelligence operations emerged. This is not to say that illegal spying was not taking place; it just mostly stayed out of the media. A book published in 2014, L.A. Secret Police, exposed such spying in Los Angeles and explained how it was kept out of the news. Police Chief Daryl Gates apparently used threats and blackmail to scare city council members and the Los Angeles Times away from digging into his activities.

Here is an excerpt from a description of the book:

“L.A. cops ruined lives and reputations, inflicted mindless brutality, committed murder and engaged in massive cover-ups. In Los Angeles, police corruption was much more than unmarked envelopes stuffed with cash. It was a total corruption of power. For decades LAPD engaged in massive illegal spying and lied about it. Its spying targets included politicians, movie stars, professional athletes, news reporters and anyone wielding power or those of interest to Daryl Gates.”

An apparent case of organized stalking by federal agents which did appear in the news during that era was the high-profile case of a cancer research scientist named Arnold Lockshin, who fled with his family to the Soviet Union in 1986 and was granted political asylum. An article in the Gadsen Times – and other newspaper reports – in October 1986 brought national attention to the case. According to Lockshin, he and his family were being intensely harassed by agents because of the socialist political views of Lockshin and his wife. The harassment tactics included many of those associated with organized stalking: slander, spying, break-ins, threats, harassing phone calls, etc.

News reports about domestic spying and subversion in the U.S. and other Western nations became more frequent in the post-9/11 era.

In 2004 the PBS news program NOW and Newsweek magazine both reported that the Pentagon had quietly resumed its practice of domestic spying, and suggested that “something like Cointelpro may again be at hand.” Spying on civilians by the U.S. Army was one of the scandals which led to the famous Church Committee investigations by Congress in the mid-1970s.

In October 2004 the U.K newspaper The Sunday Times published an article about the use of Stasi-type psychological operations to punish whistle-blowers by MI5 – an intelligence agency with close ties to the U.S. intelligence community.

In December 2005 National Book Award winner Gloria Naylor, wrote a semi-autobiographical book in which she described her experiences as a target of organized stalking. The book’s title, 1996, was the year it became apparent to Naylor that she was being stalked. Apparently, her harassment began after she had a minor dispute with a neighbor whose brother worked for the National Security Agency (NSA).

The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper in Canada, reported in May 2006 that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) used organized stalking techniques (referred to as “Diffuse and Disrupt” tactics) against terrorism suspects for whom they lacked sufficient evidence to prosecute.

A cover article in The Washington Post Magazine in January 2007 by a journalist familiar with military policies and weapon systems portrayed self-proclaimed victims of gang stalking as intelligent and credible, and suggested that claims about exotic non-lethal weapons being used by the U.S. government to harass targeted individuals were plausible.

Former CIA division chief Melvin Goodman was quoted in a June 2008 article by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation (America’s oldest continuously-published weekly magazine) on the vast private contractor element of the intelligence-security community:

“My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control.

It’s outrageous.”

A newspaper article in the Verona-Cedar Grove Times in March 2009 titled “Stalker Claims Unsettle Police” described how a self-proclaimed target of gang stalking had been distributing flyers in his former neighborhood in Verona, New Jersey, warning about organized stalking of targeted individuals. The flyers stated: “Their intention is to murder their target without getting their hands dirty. It’s the perfect hate crime.”

A post on the political blog Daily Kos in October 2010 alleged that intelligence agencies in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada use gang stalking (Zersetzung as East Germany’s Stasi called it) against targeted individuals.

A local TV news broadcast in California in January 2011 (on KION – Channel 46 and KCBA – Channel 35) featured a report about gang stalking – referred to as such by the reporters and by Lieutenant Larry Richard of the Santa Cruz Police Department.

In his February 2011 article for the Guardian, “The Dirty History of Corporate Spying,” investigative reporter James Ridgeway described how corporations target people with what is, in effect, a secret private law enforcement system:

“The private detective firms working for corporations can develop information against their own targets and find eager recipients among federal and local law enforcement agencies, some of whose employees end up retiring into private-sector detective work. The corporate spy business thus amounts to a shadow para-law enforcement system that basically can get around any of the safeguards set out in the American legal system; it ought to be subject first to transparency, and then to banning.”

A newspaper article in The Record and a TV report on KCRA Channel 3 in August 2011 reported that the city manager of Stockton, California was stalked by local police after a break-down in contract negotiations. The brazen tactics used by the police included purchasing the house next to that of the city manager and using it as a base for psychological operations of the sort used by counterintelligence personnel.

Florida’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sun Sentinel reported in December 2012 on the organized stalking of a police officer by other police officers and sheriff’s deputies from multiple jurisdictions. The victim of the stalking had cited an off-duty police officer for reckless driving. The stalking – which included illegally snooping on the victim’s private data and efforts to harass and intimidate her – was apparently done in retaliation.

An article in CounterPunch magazine in January 2013 asserted that the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO operations have re-emerged in full force: “Cointelpro is alive and well.”

A June 2013 article in the Nation said this about activities by private security firms, the FBI, and the Department of Justice:

“One might think that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0 – an outsourced surveillance state – but in fact it’s worse.”

Articles in the Washington Times and Wired magazine about the September 2013 mass shooting at the Washington D.C. Navy Yard included reports of speculation that the incident resulted from the shooter having been systematically tormented by gang stalking, including tactics such as constant noise harassment.

The cover article of Fortean Times magazine in October 2013 (U.S. edition) was about “state-sponsored gangstalking.” The author, a professor from California State University Long Beach, described in detail how a former military service member who stole some equipment from the U.S. military has been relentlessly stalked by undercover operatives and psychologically tortured.

A TV news broadcast in West Virginia on 14 November 2013 (on CBS affiliate WDTV) included a report about “organized stalking” which featured two individuals from Pennsylvania who appeared to be credible and sincere, discussing their constant harassment by perpetrators using gang stalking tactics.

In November 2013, a TV and radio broadcast of Democracy Now! featured an interview with the director of the Center for Corporate Policy in which he discussed the shadowy industry of spies employed by major U.S. corporations to conduct secret – and often illegal – counterintelligence operations against critics of those corporations.

Articles published by CBS, the Daily Mail, RT, Tech Dirt, and Courthouse News Service in December 2013 reported that a U.S. government contractor filed a lawsuit against multiple federal agencies for gang stalking him (the complaint refers to gang stalking as such). The plaintiff claims he was subjected to constant surveillance – including inside his residence and his vehicle – and constant psychological harassment from co-workers and strangers.

An article in The New Yorker in February 2014 gave a detailed account of an organized stalking campaign by a large corporation. Research biologist Tyrone Hayes discovered some disturbing effects from a pesticide made by the agribusiness corporation Syngenta. When he refused to keep quiet about it, the corporation’s goon squad began slandering him to discredit him. They also stalked him, hacked his emails, and threatened him for more than a decade.

A report on the ABC News TV program 20/20 – and an article in the Daily Mail – in May 2014 chronicled the ordeal of a couple in Hubbard, Ohio who were systematically harassed for 7 years in a vengeance campaign orchestrated by the town’s fire chief. Apparently, the fire chief was angry at the couple because of a real estate dispute, so he enlisted the help of other firefighters, police officers, and local residents to perpetrate a campaign of constant vehicle horn honking outside the couple’s home. The harassment – which the couple thoroughly documented on video – resulted in legal claims which were still pending at the time of the news reports.

Disinformation

In addition to the use of covert methods, another factor contributing to the low profile of organized stalking in the media is a disinformation campaign – a common tactic in counterintelligence operations. In the case of organized stalking, the disinformation is mainly intended to mitigate exposure of the program.

Toward that end the Internet has been flooded with websites and forum comments about gang stalking that falsely purport to be from self-proclaimed victims of organized stalking, making irrational claims – references to demons and such. The intended effect is to convey the impression that everyone who claims to be targeted by gang stalking is simply delusional.

An additional disinformation strategy has been the establishment of front groups – most notably, FFCHS (Freedom From Covert Harassment and Surveillance) – ostensibly a gang stalking victims support group, but actually an organization run by counterintelligence operatives.

Scope of Operations

U.S. Department of Justice crime statistics from a 2006 survey indicated that an estimated 445,220 stalking victims reported being stalked by three or more perpetrators.

Such statistics suggest the existence of activities whose scope cannot be explained simply as stalking by criminals – especially given that the otherwise-comprehensive index of crime categories in the DOJ’s website conspicuously makes no mention of this type of stalking.

Another indication of how common organized stalking in the U.S. has become can be seen if you perform a search-engine query of the term “gang stalking.” You will get millions of results. The total silence of the DOJ and FBI on this crime is an obvious clue that it is sanctioned by those agencies.

Organizational Structure

Ted L. Gunderson was a high-level FBI official during the COINTELPRO era. After he retired from the agency he asserted that a much more sophisticated version of COINTELPRO began to re-emerge in the 1980s. A link to Gunderson’s affidavit on the subject is included in the overview below.

Based on news reports, accounts of self-proclaimed victims, and the DOJ statistics cited above, the apparent scope of current organized stalking operations would require the acquiescence of multiple federal and local government agencies (including the FBI and the Department of Justice, among others). Local and federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies now share crime and national security information via a nationwide network of data “fusion centers” – an element of the extensive post-9/11 homeland security infrastructure.

America’s now-vast industry of intelligence-security contractors, federal intelligence agencies (there are 16 not including the Director of National Intelligence office), and the hundreds of local police department Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIUs) make it difficult to speculate about exactly how domestic counterintelligence operations are currently being administered.

Increasingly-common reports of illegal spying by corporations as well as reports of police officers and federal agents sometimes initiating gang stalking operations for personal vendettas further complicate the analysis.

Numerous job listings by intelligence/security contractor corporations for “surveillance role players” with active security clearances and training in counterintelligence (links and details in the overview below) strongly suggest that federal law enforcement agencies have largely outsourced these operations – which would be consistent with other security programs. A June 10, 2013 article in USA Today noted that about 1.4 million Americans had top-secret security clearances.

Federal and local law enforcement agencies also make extensive use of criminal informants (who are in large supply in America, with its extraordinary per capita incarceration rate). It would be natural for such informants to be used in a counterintelligence program. Indeed, the original Cointelpro was found by the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee investigations to have delegated some activities to organized crime groups. First-hand accounts of self-proclaimed victims of gang stalking support this assumption: by their appearance and behavior, many street-level perpetrators appear to possibly be ex-convicts.

Regardless of the exact nature of organized stalking in the U.S., any national counterintelligence program would require at least passive acquiescence by the U.S. Department of  Justice (DOJ) – just like the first version of COINTELPRO did. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy approved some of the original COINTELPRO operations. Because of the critical role of the DOJ in allowing organized stalking to occur, I devote an entire section of this overview to that agency.

Target Selection

Gang stalking apparently targets American citizens deemed to be dissidents or whistle-blowers (and perhaps potential dissidents and whistle-blowers), although others might be targeted for other reasons – such as for experimental or training purposes. For perspective, it should be remembered that for two decades the CIA performed secret illegal experiments on U.S. and Canadian citizens (the infamous MKUltra program). Those experiments included physical and psychological torture.

A lot of accounts by self-proclaimed targets of gang stalking suggest that people are often subjected to severe long-term harassment simply because they crossed someone connected with the agencies and security firms which perpetrate such operations.

An example of that type of abuse occurred in April 2012, when USA Today reported that one of its reporters and an editor were slandered by a secret disinformation campaign waged by an intelligence contractor firm to discredit them because the newspaper had investigated and reported on that contractor. The company involved conducted propaganda campaigns for the U.S. military. Similarly, in August 2013 it was reported that at least a dozen National Security Agency (NSA) employees had used their surveillance system access to spy on their current and former spouses and partners.

Implications

In addition to being morally reprehensible, gang stalking – just like the original version of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations – is illegal. It violates criminal laws in all fifty states against stalking, as well as grossly violating the U.S. Constitution’s prohibitions against warrantless searches and extra-judicial punishment.

While the vast majority of Americans are never personally targeted by gang stalking, they should still be concerned about the existence of such operations. Even if such activities were constitutionally legitimate (clearly they are not), they would still have an enormous potential for abuse as a personal or political weapon by the practitioners.

Ending this cowardly and illegal practice by law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, and their parasitic corporate contractors will require exposing what is happening to the public. Anyone reading this can assist with that exposure by simply sharing this information with others.

Blue Line

2.  Introduction to the Full Explanation of

     Gang Stalking

I urge readers to consider the evidence presented here in its totality; the nature of organized stalking – by design – is such that it is difficult to comprehend and evaluate without considering it in its full context.

With the goal of providing some of that context, the first page of this website (“COINTELPRO News”) includes not only the relatively infrequent mainstream press articles specifically about gang stalking, but also news which is only indirectly related. Published news and analysis of subjects such as government secrecy, police corruption, privacy, surveillance, private investigators, and various government scandals are relevant to organized stalking in ways which I try to make clear.

I hope readers are not put-off by my sometimes harsh views on related political topics. I express my opinions here candidly, and the intensity of my rhetoric is partly a function of having been on the sharp end of gang stalking for years.

As for my analysis of organized stalking, I try to be as measured and cautious as possible while still confronting the reality that the subject requires a certain amount of speculation because of the secrecy and deception which surrounds it.

Given the current state of technologies and government policies concerning surveillance, the average American faces many potential and actual invasions of privacy. For individuals targeted for gang stalking, the situation is infinitely worse. Given all of that, this website is only nominally “anonymous.”

Anyone associated with the professional news media who is interested in additional information about my personal experiences with gang stalking can reach me at the email address I have provided.

Thank you for taking an interest in this material.

For victims of gang stalking, I hope that the information I post here will be helpful.

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Definitions

dictionary

Counterintelligence is the detection and countering of threats posed by enemy subversion, espionage, and sabotage. Counterintelligence operations include surveillance (spying on enemies), sabotage (disruption of enemies’ activities), and disinformation (efforts to deceive enemies and – when it serves the objectives of the counterintelligence program – the public). A wide range of activities can qualify as counterintelligence operations, depending upon how a targeted person or group is deemed to be an “enemy,” and what activities and thoughts are deemed to be “subversive.” The FBI famously spied on Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, and even tried to blackmail him, on the grounds that his views were subversive.

Although some of the strategies and tactics associated with counterintelligence operations are used by private security personnel, for example, on behalf of corporate clients, they are most frequently used by government intelligence agencies. Here, for example, is a description of the organizational nature of counterintelligence, in a Wikipedia entry:

“In most countries the counterintelligence mission is spread over multiple organizations, though one usually predominates. There is usually a domestic counterintelligence service, usually part of a larger organization such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States.”

Uses of counterintelligence tactics by security personnel can be completely legal – for example, a government wiretap authorized by a legitimate search warrant. In other cases, the tactics are purely illegal – for example, “black bag jobs” (break-ins) and computer hacking by private investigators. Often though, the tactics are in a grey area of dubious legality. For example, depending upon the context, a “warning” can actually be a veiled threat. Similarly, if an agent or private investigator contacts a friend, relative, or associate of a targeted person, under the pretense of conducting an “investigation,” such contact can actually be an act of slander – the intentional destruction of the reputation and relationships of the target (even if it is difficult to legally prove).

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COINTELPRO (short for “Counterintelligence Program”) was a secret, illegal program run by the FBI from 1956 until it was exposed by civilian activists in 1971. The U.S. Senate’s Church Committee investigations in the mid-1970s found that, during the COINTELPRO era, FBI agents and their various accomplices systematically spied on, slandered, terrorized, blackmailed, and committed acts of violence (including murder) against American citizens who were deemed to be politically subversive by the FBI’s right-wing director, J. Edgar Hoover.

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Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIUs) – also called Red Squads – are intelligence units within local police departments (especially urban police departments). In addition to performing legitimate law enforcement activities, such as infiltrating criminal organizations, LEIUs have been used since the late 1800s to spy on and disrupt groups which are viewed as subversive by corporations and politicians. In 1956, the same year the FBI initiated its COINTELPRO program, 26 Red Squads gathered in San Francisco and formed an organization for sharing confidential intelligence. They adopted the name Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit. In 2008, the organization changed its name to the “Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Units,” but they retained the original acronym, LEIU. Because of its status as a private (although quasi-governmental) entity, the association’s files are not subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Based on their history, their reported connections with U.S. intelligence agencies, their secrecy, their quasi-governmental status, their members’ skill sets, their national network of professional connections, their organization’s membership of both current and former law enforcement personnel, and anecdotal reports, LEIUs are very possibly the main source of the illegal spying and harassment referred to by such terms as “disruption” and “gang stalking.”

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Surveillance Role Players (SRPs) perform jobs whose nature the federal government chooses to keep secret from the American public. During the past decade or so, numerous job advertisements for SRPs have been posted by military contractors. From the advertisements, it is clear that the jobs involve some type of domestic intelligence operations, but the specific elements of the job are never described. America’s news media outlets have shown no interest in this topic, perhaps because it does not involve the Kardashians. Interestingly, the job listings specify that these are mostly part-time positions – which presumably would make it easier to conceal the jobs from neighbors and others who know the people performing such “work.” The job listings specify that applicants must have active secret clearances and counterintelligence training, although the stated education requirement is often just a high school diploma. Some of the ads note that an element of the job is to “coordinate with local law enforcement.”

Although most Americans are unaware of it, the U.S. has a huge supply of people with security clearances – over 5.1 million people as of 2013– almost a third of whom worked for private firms. Nearly one-third of the Americans with top secret clearances are private contractors, rather than government employees. Whether SRPs are engaged in stalking some of their fellow citizens will probably remain a mystery in the near future. People who like easy money – and who are afraid to violate their security clearances – are far more plentiful in America than individuals with the courage and integrity needed to become whistle-blowers.

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Disruption – in the parlance of counterintelligence agents – is a strategy for neutralizing an individual (or group) believed to pose a potential threat to the clients or members of a security agency. For example, if there is no legal basis for arresting and prosecuting someone, and assassination is not a legal or practical option, an alternative is a long-term campaign of intense surveillance and harassment. The goal – at least ostensibly – is to limit the person’s potential to create trouble; this is done by keeping him or her distracted, agitated, and preoccupied with various challenges and provocations, by undermining the individual’s social and professional relationships, and by otherwise interfering with the person’s life in various ways.

Unlike the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, “disruption” is a strategy, rather than a program – although there might currently be one or more secret programs which involve the strategy and (often) illegal tactics associated with disruption. In recent years, classified documents made public by National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden exposed that the U.S. government and its private contractors engage in illegal domestic mass surveillance, and lie about it. Additional revelations in recent years include news reports – and a U.S. Senate report – which showed that the CIA and its contractors torture people and lie about it. Such revelations, among many others, add plausibility to reports by self-proclaimed victims of organized stalking.

In some cases, as with blacklisting, the motive for disruption activities can simply be revenge by the people who initiated the process, rather than a belief that the target actually poses a threat. Similarly – and this applies to a lot of activities in America’s massive “national security” industry – the actual primary objective can simply be to justify paychecks for the various bureaucrats, contractors, and agents involved.

Although disruption operations can be born out of illegitimate motives, such as an informant’s desire for vengeance, or to fulfill de facto quotas – the harassment can, in effect, validate itself through provocation: If you terrorize and spy on someone over a long period, he or she is likely to eventually respond in ways which can be used to rationalize labeling the person as a potential threat.

“Disruption” operations often involve tactics which are illegal, but difficult to prove. These tactics include – but are not limited to – overt surveillance (stalking), slander, blacklisting, “mobbing” (intense, organized harassment in the workplace), “black bag jobs,” abusive phone calls, computer hacking, framing, threats, blackmail, vandalism, “street theater” (staged physical and verbal interactions with minions of the people who orchestrate the stalking), harassment by noises, and other forms of bullying.

Although the general public is mostly unfamiliar with the practice, references to “disruption” operations – described as such – do occasionally appear in the news media. In May 2006, for example, an article in The Globe and Mail, a Canadian national newspaper, reported that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) used “Diffuse and Disrupt” tactics against suspects for whom they lacked sufficient evidence to prosecute. A criminal defense attorney stated that many of her clients complained of harassment by authorities, although they were never arrested.

In November 2010, a classified U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks documented a discussion between a U.S. State Department official and the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in which the CSIS director said the agency was “vigorously harassing” members of Hezbollah – an apparent reference to disruption crimes.

An article published by The Intercept in February 2016 explained that the FBI had adopted a system of measuring its counterterrorism achievements by counting the number of “disruptions” of terrorism threats the agency has supposedly achieved. As usual with matters involving the federal government’s primary secret police agency, when journalists inquired about the exact meaning of this statistical category, the FBI refused to discuss it:

“The FBI didn’t respond to emails asking basic questions such as what qualifies as a disruption, [or] why the number is so much higher than the bureau’s recorded arrests…”

As The Intercept article notes, the FBI’s definition of “disruption” is vague:

“A disruption is defined as interrupting or inhibiting a threat actor from engaging in criminal or national security related activity. A disruption is the result of direct actions and may include but is not limited to the arrest; seizure of assets; or impairing the operational capabilities of key threat actors.”

Regardless of the exact scope of official disruption programs (and non-sanctioned practices by private investigators and LEIUs), many points in The Intercept’s article are clearly relevant. For example, the following quotes are included from an ACLU report:

“The FBI’s overbroad and aggressive use of its investigative and surveillance powers, and its willingness to employ ‘disruption strategies’ against subjects not charged with crimes can have serious, adverse impacts on innocent Americans,”

“Being placed under investigation creates an intense psychological, and often financial, burden on the people under the microscope and their families, even when they are never charged with a crime,”

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Zersetzung (German for “decomposition” or “corrosion”) was the term used by communist East Germany’s infamous secret police agency, the Stasi, to refer to the long-term effects of “disruption” operations. A disruption strategy seeks to terrorize and socially isolate the victim, and to degrade his or her financial and emotional status – as well as inflicting the various physical effects of perpetual stress. Sometimes the word appears in the English language press; for example, in October 2004, The Sunday Times, a major newspaper in the U.K., reported that the intelligence agency MI5 uses disruption tactics to punish whistle-blowers who expose crimes perpetrated by the government.

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“Gang Stalking” is a slang term for disruption operations. Although it appears frequently online, the term “gang stalking” – unlike the term “disruption” – virtually never appears in official documents, except in occasional quotes by non-officials. Very likely, the term was coined by U.S. intelligence agencies for the purposes of online disinformation. Disruption operations are not perpetrated by criminal gangs, so the term is possibly intended to obfuscate the nature of the spying and harassment. Another term which is widely-used to refer to the same counterintelligence tactics, but which is slightly less deceptive, is “organized stalking.” As with the term “gang stalking” though – and the related term “targeted individual,” the term “organized stalking” primarily appears in websites, videos, and online comments whose purpose is to spread disinformation by discrediting legitimate reports of disruption operations.

In any case, the term “gang stalking” has gained traction. Even apparently-legitimate accounts of this form of spying and harassment often include the term. Whatever its origin and its defects, the term “gang stalking” has something of a foothold in online discussions, even though the subject remains mostly unknown to the general public. As far as I know, the term “gang stalking” has not yet found its way into any major published dictionaries.

Whistle-blowers are rare among the people who staff the giant pig trough that is America’s shadowy, bloated, post-9/11 security infrastructure. Also, the “code of silence” which prevails among corrupt law enforcement agents has deep roots. In addition, private investigators and other security contractors are subject to even less oversight than official enforcers. Consequently, the precise nature of the various programs and operations which make use of “disruption” crimes, is likely to remain obscure in the near future. Sometimes though, objective – if indirect – evidence hints at the expanding scope of abuses of power by the bureaucrats and thugs in America’s security industry. The following statistical trend could be an example of that, but it is impossible to make confident inferences from it.

Apparently, “gang stalking” began to appear among online searches in approximately 2005, and has increased steadily since then. The graph below was generated via the Google Trends webpage in May 2016. Based on this limited information though, it is anyone’s guess regarding, for example, whether the trend reflects an increase in disruption operations, or simply a growing awareness of such operations. Also, it should be understood that Google Trends graphs only reflect the frequency of online searches of a particular topic relative to past searches for that same topic; they do not display the total number of searches. “Gang Stalking” – or “disruption” operations are still mostly unknown among the general public.

Google Trends - Gang Stalking

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The Prevalence of Stalking by Multiple Perpetrators

U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) crime statistics from a 2006 survey indicated that an estimated 445,220 stalking victims reported being stalked by 3 or more perpetrators. (Page 12 of the report has the relevant numbers: 13.1 percent of 3,398,630 victims reported such group stalking.)

DOJ Stalking Survey – 2006

Incidentally, that percentage is comparable to what appears in crime surveys in the U.K. – a nation with whom U.S. intelligence agencies have very close ties. A 1998 crime survey of England and Wales found that 12 percent of stalking victims reported being stalked by 3 perpetrators (page 25).

British Crime Survey – 1998

Possibly more relevant to organized stalking is the number of victims stalked by “four or more” perpetrators. In the British survey, that group was approximately 8 percent of all stalking victims (page 25). That would be approximately 1 percent (0.944 percent) of all adults aged 16 to 59.

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A Curiously Incurious Justice Department

An attorney, Keith Labella, contacted the National Center for Victims of Crime (which is funded by the DOJ) in October 2008 to inquire about the frequency of reports the center receives about organized stalking crimes. He was informed that they receive “thousands of calls per month.”

Notwithstanding the frequency of calls to their helpline, the center offered no guidance or referral to other agencies or organizations. Here is Mr. Labella’s affidavit about his inquiry.

Make of it what you will, but the U.S. Department of Justice never publicly discusses the issue of counterintelligence stalking – not even to dismiss it as nonsense.

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COINTELPRO Version 2.0

In a society as heavily-policed as America now is – a society whose National Security Agency is tracking everyone’s phone calls and Internet activity for example – it is inconceivable that tens of thousands or more cases of criminal stalking (as documented in the DOJ crime statistics) fail to appear on the radar of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Yet there is no mention of such crimes by the federal government anywhere except in those statistics.

The implication is inescapable: federal agencies are acquiescing in what is happening. Assuming the statistics are even roughly accurate, there is no other explanation; organized stalking (the monitoring and “disruption” of the activities of targeted individuals) is being perpetrated as part of a counterintelligence program.

And it is being done illegally – as it violates state laws (in every state) against stalking as well as the U.S. Constitution’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and punishment without a trial. Stalking is also a violation of federal law (U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2261A).

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Under the Radar 

radar

How is it that the general public would not be aware of the re-emergence of COINTELPRO operations?

I address this question in more detail in the section titled “The Wall of Silence Which Surrounds Gang Stalking,” but here are the main factors:

(1) Covert Methods

The most fundamental explanation for the low-profile of gang stalking is that counterintelligence operations – by definition – are performed covertly. The FBI’s original version of Cointelpro remained undetected by the public until stolen secret documents were leaked to the press.

(2) Security Clearances

Law enforcement and intelligence agency personnel involved in counterintelligence activities are bound by secrecy oaths. This is also true of the vast industry of private contractors employed by those agencies. For example, job ads posted by security-intelligence contractors for “surveillance role players” (domestic spies) all require an active security clearance in addition to counterintelligence training.

Similarly, judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court which reviews legal issues about secret federal policies are also bound by secrecy oaths. That is also true of members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

(3) Whistleblower Protection Act Exemptions

Agencies such as the FBI are exempt from the Whistleblower Protection Act. Consequently, an agent who tries to reveal unethical behavior by the agency faces potentially serious legal consequences. Contractors of intelligence agencies are also not protected by the Whistleblower Protection Act.

(4) Legal Restrictions on Witnesses

Almost certainly, when an individual is targeted for subversion (“gang stalking”), the operation is portrayed to witnesses (neighbors, co-workers, etc.) as an “investigation.” In an investigation, law enforcement personnel can order witnesses to keep silent.  For example, when the FBI issues an administrative subpoena called a “National Security Letter” the document has a gag order attached which prohibits the recipient from discussing it.

(5) Tactics Which Create Minimal Evidence

Subversion tactics used by the FBI include many tactics from the original version of Cointelpro, and some which were futher refined by East Germany’s Stasi. For the most part, the tactics are all chosen because they are known to be effective forms of “no-touch torture.” The idea is to destroy the victim psychologically and socially and financially by forms of criminal harassment which create minimal objective evidence from the perspective of witnesses and courts.

Victims’ accounts tend to be dismissed since their experiences sound like commonplace occurrences – because that is indeed what they are: strangers who are rude, neighbors who are noisy, businesses which deliver bad service, drivers who cut-off the victim in traffic, pedestrians who bump them as they walk by, etc. These are things which happen to everyone. But for gang stalking victims, these things happen constantly – which becomes a form of real psychological torture, the intensity of which must be experienced to comprehend.

(6) Ignorance

Americans are largely unaware of the history of well-documented relevant programs, such as the FBI’s Cointelpro operations and the CIA’s MK Ultra program – even though both were thoroughly investigated and exposed by Congress in the 1970s. Similarly, although many people have heard of the Stasi (East Germany’s secret police agency), they are not specifically familiar with the Stasi’s use of Zersetzung – which was a set of methods virtually identical to current gang stalking in America.

This is not surprising; nearly three-quarters of Americans do not know what the Cold War was about, and 29 percent cannot even name the vice president. Counterintelligence operations can thrive in an environment of such widespread ignorance.

Of course, even well-educated individuals are unlikely to recognize the connections between a local situation in which they are told that a neighbor or co-worker or business patron is under investigation and historical phenomena like Cointelpro and East Germany’s Stasi.

Still, it can only make things easier for an agency such as the FBI to recruit vigilante citizen volunteers and to conduct illegal operations without detection when they are dealing with a society in which 64 percent of the public cannot name the three branches of their federal government and a fourth of the people do not even know that the earth revolves around the sun.

(7) Cowardice, Laziness, & Incompetence in the Mainstream News Media

Organized stalking goes mostly undiscussed in the mainstream news media. There are some notable exceptions – most frequently in the local and alternative press. I review those in detail throughout this website, but as a rule, major corporate news agencies avoid discussing matters which the intelligence and law enforcement community do not wish to have discussed.

This silence in the press is largely the result of the kinds of self-censorship documented in sources such as Kristina Borjesson’s Into the Buzzsaw, and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.

Laziness in the news media should not be underestimated either. Often when the federal government is engaged in serious deception and crimes, the news media play no role in the disclosure until a whistle-blower drops a set of incriminating official documents about it in their laps – as happened with the Pentagon Papers, Cointelpro, and the NSA’s mass surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of the news media’s cowardice as a factor in keeping modern Cointelpro operations off of the public’s radar. For perspective, one has to re-consider the reporting on crimes by U.S. intelligence agencies during the 1970s. A book by historian Kathryn S. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government  (1996), makes the case that Americans overestimate the boldness of the journalism during that period.

The following review of Olmsted’s book gives a sense of what really happened. With a few notable exceptions – such as reporters Seymour Hersh and Daniel Schorr – the news media generally had a loss of nerve at a critical moment in America’s history. As a result, we missed a golden opportunity to fully expose the deep corruption in the U.S. intelligence community, and implement serious reforms.

Conventional wisdom would have it that, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, the nation’s press was emboldened to enter a new phase of investigative zeal. Olmsted, a lecturer in history at U.C.- Davis, provides an absorbing contrarian account of the extent to which, with a few singular exceptions, the press retreated from such zeal, in part intimidated by the discovery of their own potential power. Thus, four months after Nixon’s resignation, when New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh launched a series charging that the CIA, “forbidden by law from operating in the U.S.,” had engaged in massive domestic spying, his reports were greeted with skepticism and tentativeness in follow-ups by fellow journalists. (Hersh’s vindication came from CIA Director William Colby’s Senate testimony, in which he disputed only the characterization of wrongdoing as “massive.”)

Olmsted charts how Hersh’s story, along with a cautious but competitive exploration of FBI abuses by the Washington Post, resulted in two congressional investigations that also had the potential to break the code of deference previously accorded to organizations responsible for national security by both Congress and the press. Particularly compelling is the author’s account of how colleagues excoriated reporter Daniel Schorr when he went to the Village Voice with the confidential results of one of the investigations, after having been silenced by his own employers, CBS. This is a fascinating study of how, just months after Watergate, both press and Congress quietly retreated to the same silk-gloved handling of the CIA and FBI in the name of national security.

(8) Disinformation

Search results on the Internet’s largest search engine, Google, fluctuate wildly for particular words and phrases over time. Only people within Google know the exact policies and algorithms which determine those results, but the search results do provide a rough indication of the online presence of certain topics.

Typically, the list of websites generated by a search is the tip of an iceberg. Ten pages of website links will show the top 100 results, but the screen also displays a much larger number that indicates the number of references to the search term that were detected.

A Google query of the term “gang stalking” in October 2013 yielded over six million results.

As you begin to wade through the search results, you will mostly encounter websites filled with incoherent rubbish. Anyone even superficially familiar with counterintelligence will recognize this tactic; it is called disinformation.

This is another reason organized stalking has been able to remain mostly below the public’s radar. Disinformation is used to muddy the waters surrounding the topic wherever it is discussed online. The intent is to mitigate exposure of the operations.

Because of its central importance to counterintelligence generally – and organized stalking in particular – I explore the subject of disinformation at length in its own section of this overview and elsewhere in this website.

(9) Failure to Connect the Dots

If you view all of the mainstream press reports about domestic spying, counterintelligence activities, and gang stalking from the past decade, it is clear that something is going on. On the other hand, very few people see most of those reports – let alone all of them together and combined with the context provided by the analysis you are now reading.

If you browse through the “Published News Reports on Gang Stalking” section of this overview, you will see that the evidence grows every year that a government-sanctioned program of informants and domestic spying and organized stalking is an element of the current homeland security infrastructure. Unfortunately, very few civilians ever see that evidence all grouped together, and therefore they are very unlikely to realize what is happening.

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Lowering Requirements for Investigations

In 2008 the U.S. Department of Justice guidelines which govern FBI investigations were changed to create a new category of investigation called “assessments.” These investigations can be initiated with no evidence that any criminal activity has occurred, and the investigations can involve such intrusive measures as physical surveillance, recruitment of criminal informants, interviewing associates of the person being investigated and deploying undercover FBI agents.

The FBI’s internal rules were further relaxed in 2011 so that – without even opening an assessment – agents can begin searching commercial databases for information about the individual being investigated, and search through the subject’s trash.

Expansion of the powers wielded by the “surveillance state” – and the corresponding erosion of citizens’ civil liberties – has been occurring in the U.K. as well. Citizens of the U.S. should be mindful of that fact because a close relationship exists between the intelligence communities of both nations. Among the secret documents revealed by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, for example, were presentation slides about how the NSA assisted its British equivalent, GCHQ, in developing technology that was used to spy on citizens via their webcams.

In the same way that the U.S. government slashed some of Americans’ traditional rights by legislation such as the Patriot Act, in the U.K. the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) expanded the surveillance powers of the government in the name of national security. As far as I know, the members of Parliament did not hold much public discussion about how the U.K.’s intelligence agencies might want spy on a couple of million innocent citizens via their webcams.

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Exploiting a Government Program as a Private Weapon

The potential for abuse of power by members of private intelligence corporations and government agencies in all of this is enormous.

Here is an example of such abuse which was reported in the news media – partly because it was directed at members of the news media. One of the counterintelligence tactics which the federal government hires intelligence contractors to perform is spreading disinformation. Most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that systematically spreading lies is even a government contractor job which their taxes are funding, but they underestimate – despite President Eisenhower’s famous warning – the extent to which the U.S. government’s defense budget has become a pig trough for shady contractors.

If you criticize a comedian, you will likely become the target of a joke. Similarly, when a reporter and editor at USA Today investigated and reported on the U.S. propaganda industry in 2012, they were anonymously slandered by those same contractors.

This was the opening paragraph of their first report that apparently did not go over well with the businesses they were exposing:

“ As the Pentagon has sought to sell wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to often-hostile populations there, it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on poorly tracked marketing and propaganda campaigns that military leaders like to call “information operations,” the modern equivalent of psychological warfare.”

As a result of their reporting, this is what happened:

“Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names….”

“…Internet domain registries show the website TomVandenBrook.com was created Jan. 7 — just days after Pentagon reporter Tom Vanden Brook first contacted Pentagon contractors involved in the program. Two weeks after his editor Ray Locker’s byline appeared on a story, someone created a similar site, RayLocker.com, through the same company.”

The article notes that a proxy service was used to hide the identity of the owner of the websites, and a third website was registered to a non-existent address.

Slander is just one of the tactics used in organized stalking by counterintelligence operations. Any or all of the tactics – which are described in detail in a section of this overview – could be used as a weapon by people in the business.

In theory, an organized stalking operation against an individual could be initiated by anyone familiar with the tactics who has associates willing to participate. Perpetrators with financial resources could easily employ private investigators, for example, and others with relevant technical skills to wage a sophisticated operation against someone for revenge or intimidation.

Someone with connections to current or former law enforcement or intelligence agency personnel – or military personnel with a background in intelligence – could mount a very serious campaign against a victim without even (officially) involving government agencies in the initial stages of the investigation and harassment.

In a tactic called “baiting” a surveillance operation can selectively capture evidence of a targeted person responding to harassment. That evidence could then be used to justify the initiation of more formal scrutiny by a government agency.

At whatever point at which it becomes useful or necessary, the perpetrators can – officially or unofficially – turn over to the government counterintelligence personnel whatever they have gathered to have the individual targeted more formally. For example, they could contact a “Terrorism Liaison Officer” (TLO) – a government or civilian operative entrusted with hunting for “suspicious activity.” More on TLOs in section 10 below (“The Organizational Structure of Gang Stalking”).

In essence, organized stalking tactics (and a national counterintelligence program which uses such tacics) could easily be exploited – and probably are – as a weapon against individuals who are disliked for any reason by someone who is either a member of the community of intelligence/security firms, law enforcement agencies, and intelligence agencies. Similarly, being a member of the FBI-corporate alliance called InfraGard (discussed in detail below) could create a perfect opportunity to have someone blacklisted.

Being associated with the national counterintelligence program of organized stalking (“Cointelpro 2.0”) is like having a cousin who is in the Mafia.