I don't think this claim is accurate. Federal, state, and local law enforcement have always been happy to investigate and suppress nonviolent protest activity (much of it from the left).
Other commenters have pointed out the FBI's involvement. Other state overreactions that immediately come to mind:
- Oil companies and the North Dakota AG working with private military contractors to "defeat" peaceful protests oil pipelines https://theintercept.com/2017/05/27/leaked-documents-reveal-...
- Military surveillance technology used against peaceful graduate student protests at UC Santa Cruz https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kppna/california-police-use...
- 'The Drug Enforcement Administration has been granted sweeping new authority to “conduct covert surveillance” and collect intelligence on people participating in protests over the police killing of George Floyd, according to a two-page memorandum obtained by BuzzFeed News.' https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/george-flo...
Among others.
eta: more good reading here -- https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/terrorism-fbi-political-...
He said the SPD has the support of the city attorney. The Seattle city attorney, Pete Holmes, is mostly famous for not prosecuting anyone.
The chief said it had nothing to do with who occupies the whitehouse.
Google has hired a bunch of 28 year old kids in HR and PR, that never used Usenet, that never used IRC, that barely remember AIM, that had a smartphone before they had their own laptop, that don’t understand the internet or technology.
And they’re the ones making these decisions. There aren’t rooms full of Google PMs and programmers and engineers debating the implications. It’s 3 or 4 kids in-between the ages of 24 and 34, and that room is increasingly technically illiterate, and increasingly unable to imagine an internet before (or after) FAANG hegemony.
This isn’t Google being evil to protect advertising dollars, or to kill Matrix, etc.
It’s google hiring young, unimaginative, uninteresting social justice warriors. We’ve taken for granted that most of the people working in FAANG have been using computers for longer than these companies existed. That’s no longer really the case, and the attitudes of these companies are going to continue to change further and further from the unique values that the industry used to represent. In ten years it’s going to be worse, and in 30 it’s going to be unrecognizable.