FBI keeps tabs on OWS

It turns out that all you crazy, post-hippy Occupy Wall Streeters were right: the government does not have your best interest at hearts. In fact, the FBI just released a heavily redacted memo that details some of the ways that it used its anti-terrorism surveillance power to keep last year's OWS campaign heavily guarded.

Released by the Partnership for Civil Justice after it pursued the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, the items included will just serve to (depending on your worldview) reinforce your paranoia American security bureaus having the carte blanche to become Big Brother, or terrify you into validating the belief that those kids with the drums and the dreadlocks were planning another 9/11.

-As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.

Translation: You guys never had a chance. The FBI knew about the plans to occupy Zuccotti Square before most of you did.

-Documents released show coordination between the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and corporate America. They include a report by the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), described by the federal government as “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector,” discussing the OWS protests at the West Coast ports to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report shows the nature of secret collaboration between American intelligence agencies and their corporate clients - the document contains a “handling notice” that the information is “meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…” (The DSAC document was also obtained by the Northern California ACLU which has sought local FBI surveillance files.)

Translation: You want to know how Citibank had the drop on protesters last October? They were tipped off by the FBI/Department of Homeland Security and/or the Domestic Security Alliance Council.

-The Memphis FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force met to discuss “domestic terrorism” threats, including, “Aryan Nations, Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.”

Translation: One of these things is not like the other...

To read the entirety of the document, click here. But don't even bother clearing your browser history: the FBI already knows you're reading this article.

After getting to know a few NYU faculty members, the Illuminator team was asked to partner with them and spread the message on campus. Last night, they hit the street, projecting soothingly clever graphics onto the side of three different structures around campus.

The first target was Bobst Library, where a few students actually bothered to gawk and take cellphone photos before heading off to study. Then came the side of one of the Washington Square Village apartment slabs, where the faculty soon to be afflicted by the campus expansion about to drop into their midst live. Lastly, the illuminator did battle with the already quite illuminated Washington Arch Park at the foot of Fifth Avenue. At least that was the plan; the crew was running behind throughout the evening and there was dinner to attend to.

"We want to get people awareness, to awaken people after the summer," professor and protestor spokesman Bo Riccobon said. "The faculty disengages over the summer. People don't like conflict, and NYU was smart enoug to sneak this thing through the City Planning Commission and the City Council in May, June, July, when everybody was gone. This is not over."

Certainly nothing has been built yet, and murmurings about the fate of university president John Sexton, however unfounded, persist amongst an angry cohort. Then again, the city did vote, and whatever happens, NYU has its millions of extra square feet, whether it wants to build it now, in 2031, or in 2131.

"This helps students, faculty and staff ask questions," Miabi Chatterji, an organizer for the faculty group, explained. "Like, where is our tuition going, is it going where it needs to go? We're some of the most indebted students in the country, Times says we have the sixth most debt, in the middle of a recession. Shouldn't we focus on that, focus on class size, focus on faculty? They're focusing on the largest real estate deal in the Village's history instead."

The light displays were only up for about 20 minutes in each spot, so it was hard to tell what impact they had. "It's cool, yeah," said Sharon, a curly-haired sophmore passing by the Washington Square Village light show. (Hope nobody was home for that bright surprise.)

"They should put something funny up, though," she continued. "It's a little harsh. Not that it's not a harsh thing they want to do, it's a lot of bullshit. But if you want people to do something about it, make it funny."

Lucky Tran, an Occupy education organizer who helped set up the Illuminator, said there was a visceralness to the protest. "The goal here is just awareness," he said from the front seat of the "99%" addorned van onto which a giant digital projector had been mounted, "The Illuminator" (and a Twitter handle) emblazoned on its side. "To illuminate anything effected is very exciting. You're directly communing with the surfaces that you want to change."

Or not change.

In the park, a group of grown men were putting on another light show, dueling with light sabers, apparently unaware, like everyone else around them, of what was taking place two blocks away.

Peregrine Financial Group founder Russell Wasendorf Sr. pleaded guilty to charges that he stole about $200 million from clients at the futures firm. It was initially believed that Mr. Wasendorf would be set free pending sentencing, the judge ordered the fraudster held behind bars pending a determination on the flight risk posed by the Iowa man. Meanwhile, Wasendorf's son, Russell Jr., sued U.S. Bank for allegedly failing to supervise properly the transfer of customer funds.

Lenders to embattled broadband wireless company LightSquared want permission to go after Harbinger Capital, the hedge fund founded by Phil Falcone, in bankruptcy proceedings, The Wall Street Journal says.

A Morgan Stanley infrastructure fund is tripping over the Volcker rule, which dictates how much of its own capital a bank can risk, according to Reuters. Some senior executives have left the firm rather than accept a smaller share of profits.

SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro is on medical leave, according to The New York Post, and may leave the agency before her term expires in 2014.

Andrew Ross Sorkin relegates the Occupy Wall Street to the dustbin of history, along with the misfits and vagabonds he says diminished the movement.

Harvard grads are earning less than alumni of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, says Bloomberg.

Short sellers have more than doubled their bets against Manchester United since the British soccer club that went public in a U.S. offering this summer, according to the Telegraph (h/t Business Insider).

Sarah Fox (AMW/Jessica Katz)

The unsolved 2004 murder of Juilliard acting student Sarah Fox is going from cold to hot--and new evidence in the case has been tangentially linked to Occupy Wall Street. NBC 4 reports police have connected DNA found at the Inwood Hill Park murder scene to DNA collected from a chain found at the scene of an Occupy Wall Street protest in East Flatbush late last March. The evidence is direct; the genetic evidence was obtained from Fox's pink CD player, found near her nude and strangled corpse in May, 2004:

Sources said Tuesday the DNA found on the CD player is linked to DNA found on a chain left by Occupy Wall Street protesters at the Beverly Road subway station in East Flatbush on March 28, 2012.

That Wednesday morning, protesters chained open emergency gates and taped up turnstiles in eight subway stations and posted fliers encouraging riders to enter for free.

The protest was a response to this action posted by something called the Rank and File Initiative. The communique called the action #farestrike and stated that on the morning of March 28 "teams of activists, many from Occupy Wall Street, in conjunction with rank and file workers from the Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the Amalgamated Transit Union, opened up more than 20 stations across the city for free entry."

The NBC affiliate's sources say the DNA has yet to lead to a suspect.

Police have long regarded  Dimitry Sheinman as a person of interest but Mr. Sheinman has never been charged.

Sarah Fox's murder was strange in many respects. She wasn't found for six days after she disappeared on a run. According to America's Most Wanted, yellow tulip tree petals were arranged in a circle around her remains.

Facebook limbo: It's not lost on the Wall Street Journal that investors who bought Facebook shares on the pre-IPO market are stuck with Zuck's plummeting stock until November. (That's when the lock-up period that bars employees from selling shares in the 90 days after the IPO ends.)

Life of Aubrey: Chesapeake Energy founder and chief executive Aubrey K. McClendon leads a lavish and highly leveraged life, Reuters reports. Among the findings: Chesapeake employees charged with conducting Mr. McClendon's personal business, extensive use of company jets, sometimes for dubious business purpose, and loans against Mr. McClendon's stake in the Oklahoma City Thunder, the NBA franchise in which the Chesapeake boss is part-owner.

Winnowing: Goldman Sachs is expected to name fewer than 100 partners this year, one of the smallest classes in recent memory, the New York Times reports, as the firm shrinks staff in response to lower revenue. Goldman has cut its headcount by about 8 percent in the last year, and axed about 50 employees last week. (In 2010, Goldman named 110 partners; in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, the firm named 94 partners.)

Whither Europe: Spain sold debt, so that was good.

When capital isn't enough: Morgan Stanley is the best-capitalized Wall Street bank. That may make regulators happy, but the firm faces the biggest ratings downgrade from Moody's and trades at the greatest discount to liquidation value.

Prosecution rests: The government is expected to conclude its case in U.S. v. Gupta today.

Occupy no more? Reuters wonders if Occupy Wall Street is over.

Can we meet in the middle? R. Allen Stanford says time served is probably enough; the government, which won a conviction against Mr. Stanford for operating a $7 billion Ponzi scheme, recommended a sentence of 230 years.

Dimon. (Eric Piermont/AFP/Getty Images)

In the days leading up to JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s bombshell announcement of $2.3 billion in trading losses, chairman and chief executive officer Jamie Dimon faced a delicate predicament. His executives had scheduled visits with banking analysts to discuss the state of affairs at JPMorgan—the company whose stock Mr. Dimon knew was sure to plummet when news of the trading losses were disclosed. These weren’t just any trading losses, of course; they were losses incurred on credit derivatives bets placed by a mysterious trader nicknamed the London Whale and Voldemort by the financial press. And it wasn’t just any bet—it was the same trading position that Mr. Dimon had described as “a complete tempest in a teapot” not one month previous.

“On the inside, Dimon must have been trying to figure out what was happening with the trade, and what to do about it,” said Frank Partnoy, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, currently a law professor at the University of San Diego. “It’s like he has an inside personality, and an outside personality that he shows the world, and the two things must have been in conflict, like what politicians deal with when they’re handling a crisis.”

Mr. Dimon’s “outside personality”—supremely confident, sharp-tongued, charismatic—has long made him among the most charming figures on Wall Street (some might say one of the only charming figures on Wall Street). He’s the industry’s swaggering posterboy, the brilliant manager who sidestepped the worst of the subprime disaster, a fierce opponent of regulation meant to curb proprietary trading and a Teflon target for the financial sector’s critics. But in the wake of JPMorgan’s Thursday evening announcement, a flood of Dimonfreude ensued.

Whatever Mr. Dimon was thinking on the inside, it seemed clear that his oft-admired bluster had contributed to JPMorgan’s public relations disaster, and just as clear that it represented a crucial weapon in the firm’s fight to save its reputation and swooning market share. The pivot, when it came, was exquisitely executed: “These were grievous mistakes,” Mr. Dimon said with what seemed the epitome of corporate candor. “They were self-inflicted, we were accountable and we happened to violate our own standards and principles by how we want to operate the company. This is not how we want to run a business.”

For years, Mr. Dimon’s straight-talk express has made him a nightmare for publicists and recent months have been no exception. In January, he launched a rant against bureaucratic regulation, suggesting that a strongman approach could prevent overlapping rules from strangling growth. “It’s quite clear that regulatory policy, government policy, central bank policy, it’s not coordinated,” he said. “You could fix all this if someone was in charge.” In February, he took a playful swipe at the press, noting that compensation ratios in the newsgathering business exceed the 34 percent share of revenues JPMorgan paid investment bankers last year. “Newspapers—I went and got this one day just for fun—42 percent payout ratio, which I just think is just damned outrageous.”

The press didn’t have to wait long to settle the score. The Times published 11 stories on JPMorgan’s trading losses on Friday alone. Then Sen. Bernie Sanders called for the break-up of the six largest U.S. banks, and Rep. Barney Frank declaimed on the risk merchants’ inability to learn from past mistakes. But in a public sphere that tends to group banks into the good (JPMorgan, Wells Fargo) and bad (Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, though usually for different reasons), Mr. Dimon’s past performances have generally stood to enhance his firm’s reputation.

It’s not as though JPMorgan maintained a pristine record through the financial crisis. The firm agreed to provide as much as $5.29 billion in homeowner benefits to settle the state attorneys general’s robo-signing suit and was ordered to pay $373 million to American Century Investments after arbitrators said JPMorgan breached its contract to promote American Century’s products.

“If you look at Goldman and JPMorgan side by side, they do the same thing, they’re in the same businesses, they pay themselves in roughly the same way,” said Duff McDonald, who chronicled Mr. Dimon’s rise to Wall Street’s apex in his book Last Man Standing. “But if you look at the PR, he’s a jujitsu master. People just like him.”

“Of all the bankers to play, I think I got a good one,” said Bill Pullman, who portrayed Jamie Dimon in the HBO adaptation of Aaron Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail and who was busy promoting his new NBC series 1600 Penn. Praising “his comfort in his own skin,” Mr. Pullman noted that Mr. Dimon “is both capable of strong decisions but also humble. He’s very human.”

The fallout from JPMorgan’s Thursday evening disclosure continued through the weekend. Mr. Dimon rushed to re-tape a weekend appearance on Meet the Press, and the SEC launched an investigation. Ina Drew, JPMorgan’s chief investment officer and one of the most powerful women on Wall Street, resigned on Monday, and rumors swirled that her entire London operation might be next. On Tuesday morning, President Barack Obama went on The View to resume his intermittent call for banking reform. At JPMorgan’s annual shareholder meeting the same day, Mr. Dimon said the firm may endeavor to claw back bonuses as it seeks to set things right with investors.

Though Wall Street maintained its habit of staying quiet publicly when a rival is down, banking analysts worried about reputational risk and suggested Mr. Dimon tone down his public profile. Nancy Bush, an independent bank analyst and founder of NAB Research, went so far as to suggest the previously unthinkable: that the world’s premier banking franchise should take a page from the playbook of its embattled neighbor to the south.

“The big banks should be doing what Bank of America is doing—go about the business of de-risking and stay out of the spotlight,” Ms. Bush told The Observer. “Say what you will about Brian Moynihan, but in the very best of circumstance he would not be out there trying to shape public opinion.”

From the moment the London Whale emerged in the public eye in April, the forensic technicians of the financial press have poured over the known details of the trade. Federal investigators are now lining up to answer several key questions: Was the firm merely hedging “downside risk,” as chief financial officer Doug Braunstein suggested in April, or had JPMorgan transformed its chief investment office into a profit center?

It would be just as interesting to learn how the firm’s blue-ribbon risk management team blundered in such a familiar manner: Like Long-Term Capital Management, Amaranth Advisors and countless others, JPMorgan’s chief investment office assumed a massive position, then watched helplessly as competitors attacked the firm’s holdings. “We see this time and again,” said Bert Ely, chief executive officer of bank consulting firm Ely & Co. “JPMorgan became the market, and then they were sunk.”

“There are very few people who are good with details and the big picture, and Jamie is one of them,” Mr. McDonald said. “That’s why this is so jarring: How did it get by him?”

And how did an executive who made his reputation managing details come to downplay the importance of the London Whale’s trade before he understood the consequences fully?

“It’s possible that he just shot from the hip,” Mr. Ely said, “and that he should have been more cautious. He may be more cautious now.”'

pclark@observer.com

Illustration by Zina Saunders

You can still see traces of the Occupy Wall Street encampment that once stood in Zuccotti Park—a contingent of police officers by the plaza’s entrance and an NYPD watchtower standing guard on Zuccotti’s
northern edge. However, the protesters who made this park their home before being evicted by the police last November are largely gone and the news trucks that formerly stationed themselves outside have departed in favor of a Chabad Mitzvah Tank.

On a recent afternoon at Zuccotti, The Observer encountered handful of tourists and businessmen on lunch breaks but there was nary a demonstrator in sight. At nearby Federal Hall, there were about 11 Occupiers holding signs and sitting on the steps. On the street below, workers were seemingly oblivious to the Occupiers in their midst.

“You’re a Republican?” a suited man asked his friend as they briskly passed by. “Good man!”

Seven months into the movement, the Wall Street that protesters are ostensibly trying to occupy has become inured to the spectacle of carnivalesque protests, demonstrators sleeping on sidewalks and mass arrests. And it seems the rest of the city has too. The protesters are in danger of becoming just another discordant note in the daily din that New Yorkers are so adept at tuning out, like panhandlers, street performers, sidewalk preachers and the other distractions of urban life.

“Their entire message, it’s so fragmented that no one hears it,” said Sam Padilla, the owner of a construction firm behind several developments in the financial district. “It becomes a nuisance, it’s like a gnat that you’re just trying to swat away. It’s just another element of the background noise. They want to be heard, but their message is too confusing.”

Daby Carreras, a broker with Spartan Capital, smoked a cigar a half block away from the Federal Hall Occupiers. With their many messages, Mr. Carreras said the protesters concerns just get “mixed up” and don’t grab the attention of Wall Street workers.

“The brokers are thinking about how to make more money than they did last year,” he said.

Wider public interest in the Occupy protest has also waned. Mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” in the news media are down this month by nearly 75 percent from peak in October, according to Google News. During that same period, Google searches for “Occupy Wall Street” dropped by over 80 percent nationally. The decline was even steeper in New York.

On May 1, however, Occupiers hope to jump back to the forefront of the city’s collective consciousness with a massive day of demonstrations that has been termed a “general strike.” The forecast for the day includes civil disobedience, political performance art, flash mobs and a push into Midtown.

As they move toward May Day, the protesters promise the debut of a new, decentralized model for the movement that will fuel a comeback following their eviction from the park. However, their adversaries on Wall Street aren’t the only ones who don’t seem to speak the protesters’ language.

Occupy’s planned spring reawakening is the brainchild of a secretive group of protesters who have proved markedly unfriendly to outsiders. Progressive political types and union leaders who seem like the protesters’ natural allies have had difficult experiences working with them. Even some Occupiers are complaining they’ve been left in the dark and don’t know what’s on the menu for May Day. Amid this handwringing, the insular core planning the “general strike” are more than happy to do their own thing and confident they’re going to change the world.

The May 1 Occupy comeback is currently being planned at small meetings around the city. At one of these gatherings in a Lower East Side church Sunday night, a group of about 30 Occupiers met on folding chairs and a single couch. The crowd was evenly divided between men with shaggy hair and beards and women with edgy haircuts and thick glasses. They were almost all in their 20s. A handful were members of minority groups.

A skinny man with a combination Mohawk/mullet (call it a mullhawk) and striped overalls stood at the front of the room and scrawled a list of scheduled May Day activities on a large piece of paper as they were mentioned by the group’s members. There was a panoply of protest actions planned by different Occupy-affiliated groups—including marches, “choir flash mobs,” union rallies, games of “capture the flag,” a “music dance party” and a demonstration involving “trying to levitate the Goldman sign and throwing pennies at the Federal Reserve.”

Occupy has always prided itself on being a diverse, leaderless movement, but the downside of this structure was on display at the planning meeting. Many of the attendees clearly didn’t know the details of all the events in this smorgasbord of May 1 actions.

“There’s a ‘Shit Has Got to Go’ event posted on a news site,” pointed out a man named Malcolm, who wore a sleeveless shirt, Afro and beaded necklace.

“What does that mean?” a girl asked.

“I don’t know, I just thought people would want to know about it even though it’s vague,” Malcolm said.

At one point, a man named Chris discussed plans for the aftermath of one of the main marches, which was to take protesters from Union Square to Wall Street. The ideas were rather open-ended.

“At that point, some folks from Occupy are going to ask anyone in the crowd who’s willing to, to leave to go to an evening staging area,” Chris outlined. “From there, there’ll be, like, whatever the hell we want to make it. So, some people probably want to do a march. Some people probably want to, like, go sleep out on Wall Street or something.”

In addition to these activities, people at the meeting described even vaguer protests planned for “50 to 70 targets across Midtown.”

Organizers at the strategy session said union workers would be holding “99 pickets” as part of the festivities, but they had scant details about the union element of the protests.

“Some TWU union workers are going to be like, We don’t have a contract or whatever,” Chris said when asked to give details on a transit workers’ rally.

As attendees pressed for more information about union participation, a young woman seated on the couch explained that organizers might not be able to provide more detail about the union portions of the protest because they were being planned separately.

“There’s like 40 different groups plus that are doing this and we have to get confirmation from a bunch of different bureaucracies,” she said.

Another woman with a blond chunk of hair in her otherwise brown bob was clearly unsatisfied with this explanation.

“Talking about bureaucracy in this room makes me cringe and a lot of this info should be worked out already,” she said.

The distance from organized labor was maintained partially because many Occupiers are uncomfortable with the structured nature of established progressive political groups. Because of this, May 1 marches will be facilitated by union marshals but will also include segments solely made up of Occupiers.

“There’s an Occupy Wall Street zone in the march and anyone who doesn’t feel like marching with marshals should go with the Occupy zone,” one of the organizers said at the meeting.

After about two hours of talking, the disagreements over the unknown aspects of various events seemed to have taken their toll on the group.

“Can we do a vibe check? It seems like people are getting really angry,” said a young woman with a plaintive voice. “Can we all just take a moment and take a deep breath? We all want this to be really awesome and we shouldn’t be fighting with each other.”

The meeting concluded soon after.

Despite being branded a general strike, one thing that isn’t on the menu for May 1 is a work stoppage. Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, told The Observer the Occupiers haven’t worked with the unions in “a serious way.”

“They haven’t tried to understand how you create coalitions with established elements of the progressive community,” Mr. Appelbaum said.

Despite the fact he and his union were early supporters of the Occupy movement, Mr. Appelbaum said the protesters made no attempts to communicate with organized labor.

“We’re on the same side, that’s what the Occupy movement doesn’t seem to understand,” Mr. Appelbaum said. “We’re on the same side and we should be talking to each other, not just being talked at.”

Over 20 labor groups, including Mr. Appelbaum’s RWDSU, have endorsed the Occupy protests. However, they have not called on workers to strike. Mr. Appelbaum said Occupiers should have checked with the
unions before proclaiming a strike.

“You’re not going to see workers leave their jobs in large numbers,” Mr. Appelbaum said. “That was what was called for at this time without appropriate discussion and involvement.”

A union official, who didn’t want to be named because his group is endorsing the protest, said “continuing conversations” between Occupiers and unions broke down because the diffuse, leaderless nature of the movement made it difficult to collaborate with.

“With the Occupy movement, it’s not always clear who you’re even supposed to be speaking with,” he said.

The union official also described the culture clash that occurred between labor groups and Occupiers.

“I think that, because the labor movement was established with hierarchy and the like, that it was held up to a little bit of disdain. It didn’t reflect the way the Occupy movement thought that democracy should operate, so I think that there were language barriers because of that,” the official said. “I also think that the labor movement, because it has such a hierarchical structure, has difficulty in understanding a movement without structure like that.”

Mr. Appelbaum believes Occupiers’ inability to partner with unions and other established progressive political groups shows the movement might not be able to grow beyond the cadre of young protesters who have kept the occupation alive after its eviction from the park.

“I think that in order for a movement to be successful, you have to expand beyond your core constituency and that has not happened with Occupy Wall Street,” Mr. Appelbaum said.

None of the May Day festivities planned by the Occupiers are part of the “99% Spring,” a slew of Occupy branded activities hosted by the multimillion-member progressive fund-raising organization MoveOn.org.

Justin Ruben, MoveOn’s executive director, told The Observer his group got behind the protests almost as soon as they began.

“Economic injustice and inequality had been our top priority and campaign since the beginning of last year,” Mr. Ruben said. “Then, when Occupy happened, we kind of jumped in. It was articulating the exact same concerns that our members were really frustrated about and had been working on all year, but in a really compelling, amazing way. So, we sort of jumped in to connect people with it, to support it.”

MoveOn’s involvement triggered a backlash from Occupiers who abhor the organization’s work on Democratic political campaigns. Last week, AdBusters, the anticorporatist magazine that initially launched the call for a Wall Street occupation, published a scathing online editorial blasting MoveOn for sending Occupy-themed solicitations for donations and calling the organization part of the “dead body of the old left.”

“MoveOn wants to hijack our movement with their 99% Spring,” the AdBusters editorial said. “MoveOn is an existential threat to our movement because they don’t have a revolutionary bone in their body.”

Mr. Ruben vigorously denies the charge his group was trying to co-opt the Occupiers. He also suggested protesters’ intolerance of different approaches may hurt them, especially as the presidential election
nears.

“Many of these groups and strains, who have been fighting together against economic inequality and for the power for the 99 percent, are going to go in different directions around the elections,” Mr. Ruben said. “Some people want to put their energy in different places and, I think, we need to have a notion of a diversity of strategies that we all respect, because we’re doing the work of the 1 percent if we just tear each other down.”
Electoral politics can be a “useful tool,” he added, “and even if that’s not your bag, hopefully we can sort of honor the fact that some folks are going to want to get into that.”

Protesters we spoke to seemed unconcerned what others think of their methodology and confident they’ll blow the city’s collective mind, come May Day. “Ultimately, this will be a catalyst for a lot of people who are in their early 20s and relatively middle class to wake up and recognize their place in the theater of the world and the social struggle,” said one Occupy organizer we spoke to after the planning meeting.

“That brings more people to it. It’s a new context.”

What remains to be seen is whether the Occupiers can continue to make an impact on the larger world by speaking on their own terms. And whether they can regain the attention of a city populated with habitual ignorers. The kids say they’re all right. The rest of us will find out on May 1.

hwalker@observer.com

Seems appropriate.

Occupy Wall Street grows more inventive with each new protest action and the movement's latest tactic may be well-suited to many who have, until now, followed events passively via the Internet: protesters are sacked out tonight on sidewalks  not far from the New York Stock Exchange. What's more, the concrete naps of the disaffected may have more legal protection than a tent in Zuccotti Park:

Attorney Gideon Orion Oliver says protesters are protected from arrest by a 2000 court decision that allows sleeping on sidewalks to express political views.

A spokesperson told the Associated Press that the action is already several days old.

The Sleep-out isn't actually a brand-new tactic; various Occupy movements were holding solidarity sleep-outs for the homeless in late 2011.

It does appear peaceful protest can't get much more peaceful.

Cecily McMillan/Facebook

While there is a great deal of dispute over the content of the video showing the arrest of 23-year-old Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan Saturday night, the N.Y.P.D. has no doubt as to who was in the wrong. The Daily News, in an article about an investigation into online death threats made against the police on Twitter as well as comments in a UStream chat, reports that Ms. McMillan was "seen elbowing her arresting officer in the face" as she was being led out of Zuccotti Park.

The officer who arrested the activist was reportedly injured as well:

[Cecily McMillan] was treated at New York Downtown Hospital and released into police custody, cops said. She was charged with assault on a police officer.

Her arresting officer suffered a cut to the eye but refused medical attention, police said.

Social media reports from Occupy Wall Street supporters as well as members of the media indicate Ms. McMillan may face charges of aggravated assault and bail as high as $50,000, but the bail amount has not been confirmed.

The video published by the Observer here and subject to a great deal of parsing across the Internet as well as the comments attached to that post is below.

Update: A video of events surrounding Ms. McMillan's arrest was posted Sunday by WeAreChange. The events in question occur around 6:45 into the 14-minute video. This will probably raise more questions than it answers.

Cecily McMillan/Facebook

Cecily McMillan, an Occupy Wall Street activist once profiled in Rolling Stone, suffered a seizure Saturday night during protest action near Zuccotti Park. Many on-scene reported Ms. McMillan had trouble breathing after she was tackled and handcuffed by law enforcement.

A video uploaded to Youtube late Saturday night purports to show the attack. Two women can be heard commenting, "There's Cecily," then there is confusion as the police clearly perform a violent take-down on someone in the crowd.

According to Jeff Sharlet's November, 2011 article about the Occupy Movement, this may be Ms. McMillan's second violent encounter with police. She is an organizer for the Northeast region of youths involved in the Democratic Socialists of America, which Mr. Sharlet reports is "the largest socialist organization in the United States." Ms. McMillan, however, once led a more conventional life:

She's a former cheerleader; she used to want to be a politician. She says her studies and her work – she's also a nanny – prevent her from sleeping in the park. But she's not afraid to put her body on the line. She was arrested after she charged Wall Street three times, a "direct action" that even some veteran anarchists – militant and masked – considered wildly courageous, if foolish. A cop thought so, too, blasted her with pepper spray, knocked her down, stepped on her head and snarled at her, "Shut up. You get what you deserve, cunt bitch."

Reports from various sources over social media and live feeds on UStream indicate she had a seizure and has been taken to an emergency room, possibly with cracked ribs. Jeff Sharlet posted a link to the video on his Twitter feed and pointed out, "Camera's far off & u can hear body smack."

The video supposedly showing Ms. McMillan's arrest is below.

Update: Bucky Turco of AnimalNewYork has published a video of the same event from a different angle. It is no less confusing in showing what happened to Ms. McMillan: