Torchlight has received the following communique form a local anarchist that we trust.
A person named Michael Kenney has been hanging out at the Big Idea Bookstore and attending events who works for the FBI and has done work with DHS and the Office of Naval Intelligence to research extremism in social movements. For the past year he has been attending prisoner letter writings and when he came to a protest I was at he gave me his name and I looked him up. The following is a link to his GSPIA (Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at Pitt) page which has his resume and picture.
If you see this person at a demonstrations or events, definitely make folks aware and call him out. We think he is doing intelligence gathering work for the federal government on movements in Pittsburgh although we aren’t sure what role GSPIA plays in all of this.
We are including Kenney’s picture at the bottom of this post in case it disappears from Pitt’s web site.
In addition, Torchlight’s DC sources report seeing Kenney at recent demonstrations in that city. He has also been attempting to interview anarchists in Pittsburgh, possibly in preparation for a book. His previous publications include (according to his faculty page linked above) “From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation, and the co-editor of Organizational Learning in the Global Context” as well as “numerous academic journal articles on terrorism, Islamist militancy, and transnational organized crime in Survival, Orbis, Terrorism and Political Violence, Global Crime, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution, among other publications.”
Kenney’s previous work has obviously been in service to the military and police apparatus of the state, and there is no reason to think his current project is any different. Under no circumstances should anyone give Kenney information, or cooperate with him in any way.
Anyone with additional information they can share is urged to get in touch, torchlight@riseup.net. More as we get it…
