Friday, October 14, 2011

Watermelon Watch: Red (and Green) October

» The Email Archive of the #OccupyWallStreet Movement: Anarchists, Socialists, Unions, Democrats and Their Plans - Big Government: "On August 10, 2011, the hacker group “Anonymous” announced that it would join the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. That’s what sparked my interest in monitoring #OccupyWallStreet.

I reached out to a colleague and asked if he would be interested in studying the protest with me. At first, it seemed disorganized, and we believed it would only be a few hundred protestors.

As we engaged in monitoring its growth, we recruited other people to help us begin the collection of data available via social media. We began mapping out key players, and monitored Anonymous’s efforts to organize protests in the San Francisco Bay area public transportation system (#opBART) in order to detect patterns and key influencers.

Then, at the end of August, we were alerted by a fellow researcher that information about USDoR (U.S. Day of Rage, to which Occupy Wall Street is connected) had been posted on Shamuk and Al-Jahad, two Al-Qaeda recruitment sites. We began to take the “Occupy” protest more seriously, and dedicated more time to research and monitoring."
In Britain, they call environmentalists "watermelons" since they are green on the outside and red on the inside.

Click through to the article and follow the links at the end to download the email archive.