That is according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), which has just obtained FBI documents revealing that from the inception of the Occupy movement, an anti-corporate greed and anti-war movement, the agency treated it as a potential criminal and terrorist threat.

The documents show that as early as Aug. 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month.

By September, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an Occupy protest.

Those same documents reveal that the FBI acknowledged that Occupy organizers explicitly called for peaceful protests and did “not condone the use of violence.”

The PCJF began seeking the material under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the fall of 2011 as the crackdown on the movement began.

“The FBI has a long history of conduct toward social justice movements and political activity in the U.S., from gathering intelligence to disrupting operations,” Executive Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard tells MintPress.