WHAT IS ORGANIZED STALKING?
"Cursed is he who strikes his neighbor in secret." And all the people shall say, ‘Amen!’
– Deuteronomy 27:24
TABLE OF CONTENTS ~
1. A Brief Explanation of “Gang Stalking”
2. Introduction to the Full Explanation of Gang Stalking
3. Crimes by U.S. Law Enforcement & Intelligence Agencies
4. Oversight of Law Enforcement & Intelligence Agencies
5. Published News Reports
EXPLAINING ORGANIZED STALKING
Just because something isn’t a lie doesn’t mean that it isn’t deceptive.
A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.
DEFINITIONS
Counterintelligence is the assessment and countering of threats posed by enemy subversion, espionage, and sabotage. Counterintelligence operations include covert surveillance (spying on the enemy), sabotage (disruption of the enemy’s activities), and disinformation (efforts to deceive the enemy and – when it serves the objectives of the counterintelligence program – the public).
“Gang stalking” – also known as “organized stalking” – is a slang term for a set of tactics used in counterintelligence operations involving the covert surveillance and harassment of a targeted individual. The goal of such operations – in the parlance of counterintelligence personnel – is to “subvert” or “neutralize” an individual deemed by a government agency (or corporation) to be an enemy.
“Organized stalking” is probably a better term than “gang stalking” since it more accurately conveys the systematic nature of the crime, and it avoids creating the erroneous impression that the activity is connected with street gangs.
This much can be said in defense of the term “gang stalking” however:
it is accurate in the sense that the perpetrators – federal and local law enforcement agencies and security-intelligence contractors – do often function in the manner of criminal gangs. Although they conduct their operations under the color of law, many of their activities have neither moral nor constitutional legitimacy.
That is true of all of the major perpetrators of organized stalking in the US: the FBI, local Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIUs), security-intelligence contractors, and U.S. military counterintelligence agents. All of those groups – and other federal intelligence agencies such as the CIA and NSA – have histories of abusing their powers dating back to their inceptions.
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. The Stasi referred to the tactics as “Zersetzung” (German for “decomposition” or “corrosion” – a reference to the intended psychological, social, and financial effects upon the victim).
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 MK Ultra 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 MK Ultra.
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 that 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.
by Timothy Snow
January 31, 2023
overtly gangstalked in Hollywood, CA on a Federal Level since May 2022.
It's just me, myself & I.
