FBI Admits to Spying on Burning Man Festival

While the annual art festival known as ‘Burning Man’ may sound like an innocent gathering of free-spirited hippies and ravers, in reality, you might be surprised to find that it has a dark underbelly that threatens the security of the United States of America. That is, if the FBI is to be believed anyway, because apparently Burning Man poses a big enough threat to be spied on by the government.

Recent documents attained by a FOIA request reveal that since at least 2010, the FBI has been keeping tabs on the festival, while maintaining documents on the revelers to ‘aid in the prevention of terrorist activities and intelligence collection’. Also, their involvement is apparently ‘even more critical in the light of the ongoing war on terrorism and the potential for additional acts of terrorism being committed in the United States.’  

So far the FBI has found that the greatest threat posed by the festival is illegal drug use and crowd control, which doesn’t exactly require a covert operation to discover. What’s more interesting though, are some of heavily redacted sections of the document, which suggest that the FBI is using the event to practice intelligence gathering and anti-terrorist operations. The technology they’re using to spy on the attendees was also completely redacted.