Walking down a public street absent some public safety or similar imposition is in fact a Constitutionally protected activity. It is not at all like driving.
No, that is your opinion and not a cite. In fact, the government can regulate your walking with cross walks and traffic lights.
Again, why are the police in this case monitoring constitutionally protected activity?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
You're just wrong. There's a whole line of cases about this.
Walkers and strollers and wanderers may be going to or coming from a burglary. Loafers or loiterers may be "casing" a place for a holdup. Letting one's wife support him is an intra-family matter, and normally of no concern to the police. Yet it may, of course, be the setting for numerous crimes.
The difficulty is that these activities are historically part of the amenities of life as we have known them. They are not mentioned in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights. These unwritten amenities have been, in part, responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent, and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits, rather than hushed, suffocating silence.
You keep repeating "constitutionally protected activity" like it carries more weight the more you repeat. The Intercept article does the same thing.
If we step back and look at what's happening at "pro palestine" protests across the world, much of it is toxic and unwelcome by the wider community. Law enforcement sees the negative energy and responds using passive tracking tools and other measures. They're seeing escalating "decolonizing" associations too, as these groups try to merge with their socialist friends and agendas.
In my country Australia, they've taken the Aboriginal flag and Palestine flag and joined them together, parading them along the street screaming about colonisation. Many contain raised fist graphics and calls for resistance. And you wonder why cops are monitoring?
Barely qualifying as activity worth "protecting" in many cases. In particular, the terror-aligned rhetoric by masked mobs screaming about global intifadas, "resistance by any means necessary" and other stuff unrelated to peace or anything remotely "anti-war". No peace symbols in the crowd but plenty of Hamas flags, is the answer to your question.
Law enforcement sees the negative energy and responds
Typically, in sane societies, it's preferable that the coercive part of state power is deployed for things more concrete and definable than 'negative energy'.
In this case, negative energy often leads to civil unrest and other things in law enforcement's wheelhouse. The police were even called to Google's offices last year, you might remember. Pro-palestine clowns refused to leave the office. They were arrested and fired.
See how easily negative energy turns into trespass? Nothing wrong with cops planning ahead for the inevitable, based on historical data for that type of protest.
