The Department of Homeland Security struggled to avoid monitoring or suppressing the Occupy Wall Street movement last year, despite being bombarded with requests from various federal agencies for intelligence on the protests, according to documents released via the Freedom of Information Act.

The FBI conducted a three-year investigation, dubbed "Seizing Thunder," into a animal-rights and environmental "terrorists" in the Pacific Northwest that devolved into widespread—and seemingly pointless—surveillance of activists for no apparent reason aside from the fact that they were anarchists, or protested the war in Iraq, or were "militant feminists." Here's the file.

The Third Jihad is a "documentary" purporting to show that U.S. Muslims are here to "infiltrate and dominate" America, funded by a mysterious right-wing pressure group. So it was a natural fit for the NYPD, which has launched an unprecedented and illegal campaign of surveillance against Muslim New Yorkers. According to the New York Times, the NYPD screened The Third Jihad on a "continuous loop" for its trainees, and more than 1,500 officers have seen it.

Today there is yet another in an astonishing series of revelations from the Associated Press on the extent of the NYPD's illegal surveillance of Muslims: The city is sending undercover cops into local colleges to spy on Muslim students. Why? Because they're Muslims!

You'll be disappointed to find out that the ACLU's executive director doesn't spend Sundays burning anarchy signs into American flags while singing pre-abolition slave spirituals to the tune of "Poker Face." Per an NYT profile: he feeds horses grass. [NYT]

We like to avail ourselves of the Freedom of Information of Act now and again, because sometimes we find FBI memos about how the Green Party is a terrorist organization because we don't get too many libruls here in Georgia.

Boing Boing is excited by a YouTube video from a guy who claims Border Patrol agents tasered and beat him at an "anti-terrorism" checkpoint in Arizona when he declined a search of his car.

This is why Google has spent a decade collecting and preserving all the information it can gather about everyone on Earth: so it can prove in a court of law that your neighbors are perverts. There's an obscenity trial going on down in Florida, where life itself is generally obscene, against an icky hardcore pornographer (first they came for CumOnHerFace.com, and I said nothing, because I preferred alt-porn). In an obscenity trial, the prosecutors must prove that the material is in violation of "community standards." This is, obviously, a ridiculous yardstick. Everyone who watches movies knows that just below the friendly surface of American Suburbia lies violence, depravity, secret gay neighbors, and Dean Stockwell in eyeshadow. But jurors like to pretend that they've never enjoyed a little Skinimax. This is where Google—and your deepest, darkest secrets—come into play!