Montana Free Press (https://montanafreepress.org/tag/keystone-xl/)
Documents reveal state and federal agencies are training law enforcement agencies to surveil anti-Keystone XL pipeline activists’ social media, and how to arrest protesters en masse.
Civil liberties groups say a government report conflated indigenous protesters with violent “environmental rights extremists,” and revealed anti-Keystone XL pipeline protesters’ free speech rights were being chilled by surveillance.
The Keystone XL pipeline oil pipeline is slated to cross the Missouri River near the edge of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. The Assiniboine & Sioux Tribes say the pipeline is a threat to their drinking water and way of life.
A federal judge in Great Falls on Wednesday ordered the U.S. Department of State to update its environmental assessment of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to reflect changes in the pipeline’s route through Nebraska. District Judge Brian Morris’ 13-page partial order is a temporary win for environmental and indigenous rights groups who sued the federal government under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.
Fort Peck Indian Reservation tribal chairman Floyd Azure said he plans to urge the tribes’ executive board to join a lawsuit that accuses the federal government of failing to address the threat a foreign-owned oil pipeline poses to the tribes’ drinking water.
Anti-pipeline plaintiffs presented oral arguments today in Great Falls federal court in a lawsuit against the federal government seeking to revoke permits greenlighting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline that environmental and indigenous groups say were granted based on faulty outdated data.
Opponents of the Keystone XL oil pipeline gathered at Riverside Park in Great Falls on Wednesday in support of environmental and indigenous justice groups suing the U.S. government in federal court to stop the pipeline. The lawsuit, combined by U.S. District Judge Brian Morris from two similar suits, claims the U.S. Department of State and the Bureau of Land Management violated federal environmental laws when the Trump administration resurrected Keystone XL in January 2017.