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Social media monitoring room at Mall of America where the marketing department works with security.
Documents obtained by The Intercept indicate that security staff at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota
used a fake Facebook account to monitor local Black Lives Matter organizers, befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their knowledge.
Evidence of the fake Facebook account was found in a cache of files provided by the Mall of America to Bloomington officials after a large Black Lives Matter event at the mall on December 20 protesting police brutality.
The files included briefs on individual organizers, with screenshots that suggest that much of the information was captured using a Facebook account for a person named "Nikki Larson."
Metadata from some of the documents lists the software that created them as belonging to "Sam Root" at the "Mall of America." A Facebook account for a Sam Root lists his profession as "Intelligence Analyst at Mall of America."
The fake Larson account featured a profile photo that a Google reverse image search shows is identical to a photo associated with a woman who is Facebook friends with Root. The account, previously found at
this url, was deleted soon after
The Intercept contacted the Mall of America for this story.
On December 11, as news of the planned Black Lives Matter protest began to spread, the "Nikki Larson" account was updated with a banner image of an (apocryphal) Martin Luther King Jr. quote: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." At some point, the Larson account "liked" the Black Lives Matter Minneapolis Facebook group.
Comment: This is what Russians do while in contrast the US just creates more havoc in Syria with drones and supplying IS.