FBI probed Occupy protests as terrorism

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has employed ‘counterterrorism agents’ to investigate the Occupy Wall Street movement, evidently regarding the movement’s activities as domestic terrorism.

According to The New York Times, newly disclosed FBI records indicate that as early as September 2011, about when Occupy Wall Street activists set up a camp in Zuccoti Park in Lower Manhattan to protest corporatism and income inequality in the US, the agency’s agents from its “counterterrorism task force” in New York notified “officials” of two major Manhattan landmarks “that their building was identified as a point of interest for the Occupy Wall Street.”
According to the report, in the following months FBI operatives across the US were “routinely involved in exchanging information about the movement with businesses, local law-enforcement agencies and universities.”
It further adds “An October 2011 memo from the bureau’s Jacksonville, Fla., field office was titled Domain Program Management Domestic Terrorist.”
The report further reiterates that since the September 11, 2001 incidents, still widely regarded as quite suspicious, the FBI has come under growing criticism for “deploying counterterrorism agents to conduct surveillance and gather intelligence on organizations active in environmental, animal-cruelty and poverty issues.”