When the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan was barely a month old, federal and local law enforcement agencies were already receiving inside intelligence about the movement’s plans. The source was not an undercover officer or a formal informant — it was Thomas Ryan, a New York-based computer security consultant who took it upon himself to infiltrate the protesters’ communications and share what he found with the FBI and NYPD.

Who Was Thomas Ryan and What Was Black Cell?

Ryan operated a private security team he called Black Cell, which he described on his personal blog as consisting of elite physical, threat, and cybersecurity professionals. He had reportedly performed contract work for the United States Army. Despite these credentials, his surveillance operation against Occupy Wall Street was apparently self-initiated rather than officially sanctioned.

Beginning around the time protesters first gathered in Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, Ryan and associates from the computer security community began attending Occupy meetings in person, tracking organizers’ social media activity, and embedding themselves among demonstrators in the Financial District.

How Ryan Accessed the September17discuss Mailing List

The centerpiece of Ryan’s intelligence gathering was his access to September17discuss, a private email listserv used by Occupy Wall Street organizers for tactical planning. On this list, activists debated media strategy, coordinated upcoming actions, analyzed past events, and shared internal movement news.

Ryan monitored the list continuously and selectively forwarded email threads he considered noteworthy to law enforcement contacts. The recipients included FBI Special Agent Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the Bureau’s New York cybersecurity team, and NYPD Detective Dennis Dragos of the Computer Crimes Squad.

Documented Email Forwards to the FBI and NYPD

On September 18, 2011 — just one day after the occupation began — Ryan forwarded an internal discussion to Agent Loyd. The thread itself was unremarkable: organizer Jackie DiSalvo argued for greater union outreach, listing potential labor partners, while another organizer named Conor endorsed the idea and suggested inviting people to protest the pending execution of Troy Davis at Liberty Plaza. Loyd responded with a simple acknowledgment and copied his FBI colleague Ilhwan Yum on the reply.

Eight days later, on September 26, Ryan escalated his reporting by simultaneously alerting both the FBI and the NYPD. The email thread in question involved a proposed demonstration outside One Police Plaza, NYPD headquarters. Organizers were debating whether to join a press conference organized by marijuana legalization advocates celebrating Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s directive to stop arrests for small-quantity possession. One participant asked whether protesters should attend to chant about recent incidents of police violence, including the widely circulated video of Officer Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying a demonstrator.

Corporate Intelligence Sharing Beyond Law Enforcement

Ryan’s distribution network extended beyond government agencies. When Occupy organizers discussed staging demonstrations outside the studios of morning television programs including Today and Good Morning America, Ryan forwarded the thread to Mark Farrell, Chief Security Officer at Comcast, which owned NBC Universal. In his message, Ryan noted that his team had been conducting extensive monitoring of both Occupy Wall Street and the hacktivist collective Anonymous. Farrell acknowledged the tip and indicated he would pass the information to his counterpart at NBCU.

How Ryan Accidentally Exposed His Own Surveillance

Ironically, it was Ryan himself who revealed the scope of his activities. In October 2011, he compiled thousands of September17discuss emails and provided the archive to conservative media figure Andrew Breitbart, who intended to use them to characterize Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist plot to destabilize financial markets.

In assembling the document package, Ryan inadvertently included his own forwarded messages — the very emails showing he had been passing information to federal agents and police detectives. When questioned about how those emails ended up in the leaked archive, Ryan offered a remarkably candid admission for a self-described security expert: he said he had simply packaged everything he had without sorting through it carefully.

Ryan’s Denials and the FBI’s Silence

In subsequent interviews, Ryan denied being a formal informant, stating plainly that he did not work for the FBI. He explained his relationship with Agent Loyd as a professional acquaintance through their shared involvement in the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), a nonprofit focused on web application security where Ryan served as a board member.

Ryan characterized his email forwards as casual information sharing motivated by general curiosity about the protests, insisting that Loyd never specifically requested intelligence. He initially claimed he could not recall how many emails he had shared with authorities, then later asserted it was limited to the two documented instances.

His stated motivation for assisting the NYPD was personal. Ryan described how firefighters and police officers had saved his life during a house fire in Sunset Park, Brooklyn when he was eight years old, and how the September 11 attacks had deepened his respect for first responders.

Agent Loyd declined to answer questions about his interactions with Ryan and referred all inquiries to the FBI press office.

The Limited Value of Email Surveillance on Occupy

Veteran Occupy organizer David Graeber, who was involved from the movement’s earliest days and who had first proposed the now-iconic “We Are the 99%” slogan on the September17discuss list, offered perspective on the practical significance of the leaked communications. According to Graeber, while some genuine planning occurred on the listserv in the early days, it had evolved primarily into a forum for discussion and expression. No serious organizer would use such an accessible channel to coordinate anything sensitive or potentially illegal.

Nevertheless, the FBI had institutional reasons to pay attention. Agent Loyd had been involved in investigating Anonymous, and the Bureau’s cybersecurity division was actively monitoring the hacktivist group’s connections to Occupy Wall Street. At a cybersecurity conference held at the New York Institute of Technology on September 16, 2011 — one day before the occupation launched — Loyd specifically cited Occupy Wall Street as an emerging threat to U.S. information systems, noting that Anonymous had issued threats against the New York Stock Exchange. He told attendees the FBI was monitoring the situation online and preparing a physical security response.

The episode stands as a revealing case study in how protest movements can be surveilled through their own digital infrastructure, even when the watchers are self-appointed volunteers rather than sworn officers of the law.

Originally published at DecryptedMatrix.com. Historical account based on leaked email records and interviews with Thomas Ryan, October 2011.