Thousands in Times Square protest the grand jury decision in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Photo: Christopher Sadowski
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[From article]
Last week, activists armed with untraceable “burner phones” used social media and online bulletin boards to stay one step ahead of city cops and create mayhem after a grand jury cleared Officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
The anarchists clearly won the game of “Whac-A-Mole’’ — shutting down major roads including the FDR Drive, Lincoln Tunnel and West Side Highway and frustrating the NYPD, sources said.
[. . .]
“They wore me out,” said one counterterror expert who monitored the protests. “Their ability to strategize on the fly is something we haven’t dealt with before to this degree.”
While the NYPD actively monitors Twitter, Facebook and other social media for intelligence, sources said the official chain of command keeps squadrons of cops from moving around as quickly as protesters.
A “technology gap” also favors the activists, many of whom have the newest electronic gear, sources said.
“A lot of these anarchists are from the Occupy Wall Street group. They are little rich kids, little techie brats,’’ a source said.
[. . .]
“They have their little MacBook Air computers, their Wi-Fi, their smartphones, and they’re off to the races. We’re reacting to these situations, which means we are not fully in control of them,” the source said.
Authorities suspect “a few hundred” of the estimated 4,000 protesters who took to New York City’s streets after the Ferguson decision used their knack for mobile technology to send out real-time advisories on where cops were located and where they were headed.
“They were giving instantaneous commands to their followers, and this enabled them to stay one step ahead of us,” a source noted.
http://nypost.com/2014/12/01/
Protesters using tech to run rings around cops
By Philip Messing, Jamie Schram and Bruce Golding
New York Post
December 1, 2014 | 1:39am
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