by Mark Olalde

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Ka’ila Farrell-Smith grew up in a community that was deeply involved in the fight for Indigenous rights, protesting broken treaties and other mistreatment of Native American people. Members of the movement, she said, understood that law enforcement agencies were surveilling their activities.

“I’ve been warned my entire life, ‘The FBI’s watching us,’” said Farrell-Smith, a member of the Klamath Tribes in Oregon.

Government records later confirmed wide-ranging FBI surveillance of the movement in the 1970s, and now the agency is focused on her and a new generation of Indigenous activists challenging development of a mine in northern Nevada. Farrell-Smith advises the group People of Red Mountain, which opposes a Canadian company’s efforts to tap what it says is one of the world’s largest lithium deposits.

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have for years worked alongside private mine security to surveil the largely peaceful protesters who oppose the mine, called Thacker Pass, according to more than 2,000 pages of internal law enforcement communications reviewed by ProPublica. Officers and agents have tracked protesters’ social media, while the mining company has gathered video from a camera above a campsite protesters set up on public land near the mine. An FBI joint terrorism task force in Reno met in June 2022 “with a focus on Thacker Pass,” the records also show, and Lithium Americas — the main company behind the mine — hired a former FBI agent specializing in counterterrorism to develop its security plan.

“We’re out there doing ceremony and they’re surveilling us,” Farrell-Smith said.

“They treat us like we’re domestic terrorists,” added Chanda Callao, an organizer with People of Red Mountain.

All told, about 10 agencies have monitored the mine’s opponents. In addition to the FBI, those agencies include the Bureau of Land Management, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Nevada State Police Highway Patrol, Winnemucca Police Department and Nevada Threat Analysis Center, the records show.

Andrew Ferguson, who studies surveillance technology at the American University Washington College of Law, called the scrutiny of Indigenous and environmental protesters as potential terrorists “chilling.”

“It obviously should be concerning to activists that anything they do in their local area might be seen in this broad-brush way of being a federal issue of terrorism or come under the observation of the FBI and all of the powers that come with it,” Ferguson said.

The FBI did not respond to requests for comment. The Bureau of Land Management, which coordinated much of the interagency response, declined to comment. Most of the law enforcement activity has focused on monitoring, and one person has been arrested to date as a result of the protests.

Mike Allen, who served as Humboldt County’s sheriff until January 2023, said his office’s role was simply to monitor the situation at Thacker Pass. “We would go up there and make periodic patrol activity,” he said.

Allen defended the joint terrorism task force, saying it was “where we would just all get together and discuss things.” (The FBI characterizes such task forces, which include various agencies working in an area, as the front line of defense against terrorism.)

Tim Crowley, Lithium Americas’ vice president of government and external affairs, said in a statement: “Protestors have vandalized property, blocked roads and dangerously climbed on Lithium Americas’ equipment. In all those cases, Lithium Americas avoided engagement with the protestors and coordinated with the local authorities when necessary for the protection of everyone involved.”

Crowley noted that Lithium Americas has........

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