WE’RE CAUGHT IN A LOSE-LOSE SITUATION IN THE MODERN MEDIA WORLD: REFUSAL LESSENS OUR REACH, ENGAGING SETS US UP AS TARGETS ~ Rob Ray ~ A couple of friends of mine, hailing from an end of the anarchist scene where skipping and shoplifting are more common, were telling me about their experiences from this venerable part of the rebel lifestyle recently. It’s a time-honoured part of hunting dinner in the bowels of big supermarkets that the greatest flaw in even the best security systems has always been bored minimum-wage night staff whose class consciousness extends, at the very least, to not giving a single solitary wossit about some snacks and a tinny galloping out the door. The theatrically rolled eye, or a muttered “at least wait until my back’s turned” has been the saviour of many a struggling person. As with so much of our daily lives now, however, the rollout of not just CCTV but facial recognition technology is making itself known. Usually using the excuse of a “devastating wave of shoplifting” that’s “driving supermarkets out of the area.” This unpitying, inhuman eye does not roll, it simply reports directly up the chain, to someone whose actual class (worker) is blurred by their designation (manager). An unpaid, ever-vigilant quisling following the poor round the store. We’re filmed through almost every aspect of our public lives now, with both the State and private business rapidly converting the results into databases which, as the recent unpopular move towards a centralised ID system suggests, are only a stone’s throw from being amalgamated. For law and order purposes, naturally. As a result of this techno-stool pigeon’s spread, my friends were finding, a ban from one major store had become more easily enforced across all related properties. They were automatically flagged. Another few pounds saved for the bottom-line profit of the billionaire class. Later, away in another wing of the movement, I was reminded of this observation while listening to a talk by reps of Campaign Against Police Surveillance (COPS) and Police Spies Out of Lives. They were explaining their experiences dealing with spycops who had infiltrated so many of the left’s political movements throughout the 20th and early 21st century. For anarchists, particularly those active in the environmental movement of the 1990s and 2000s, the officers who infiltrated their communities were a particular horror. They started relationships with women and even had kids with them purely as cover for forms of petty snooping which, as the inquiry has revealed, amounted to little more than coppers pathetically cosplaying the spy game. Infamously, while the inquiry ground on over the years, legislation was brought in not to restrain, but to enable, similar behaviour in future. After seven years of slowly leaking revelations and a mountain of evidence that it couldn’t be trusted to follow even the most basic ethical standards, the Met was gifted the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021. It allows any police force, security service branch and every other major agency up to and including the Food Standards Authority to break laws if it brings in “intelligence.” What this should tell any reasonably-minded person is that the State is not a responsible body. It does not care about the safety of the public, but instead is quite happy to endanger it for the sake of knowing what non-violent dissenters are up to. And the irony? They may not even need it, for the most part. Because similar to skipping and shoplifting, it is technology, rather than sex-offending liars, which now provides their primary method of surveillance. Handing spycops total impunity to exploit the families of the bereaved, like Stephen Lawrence, is a bastard’s bonanza enacted just on the off-chance, in case they ever feel the need to rape their way to some extra data. In-person spying is in many ways less powerful and a lot more expensive than getting yourself added to a messaging group and just feeding the whole thing into a database for later sorting. You can discover networks of support for a given organisation simply by filtering through their social media followers. Cameras and mics no longer need to be laboriously installed in likely places, they’re everywhere, being sorted and catalogued by increasingly clever large language models (marketed as AI). Which isn’t to say it won’t happen, especially if dealing with a savvy group, but technology has made watching us, every step and finger swipe, every day, in many ways trivial. What’s remarkable is how weak opposition to it really is. NGOs do the usual liberal thing, lefties have been quite slow on the uptake outside of the everyday grind of protest, and of course, no parliamentary party has shown any interest in making the law less onerous. In fact the grouping which has been most vocal about civil liberties in the media is probably the far-right, which, for all its huffing and puffing about free speech, has little to no quarrel with the core functionality of government intrusion. What victory is it to secure Graham Linehan’s right to be an obsessive, self-destructive bully without let or hindrance when the State is busily drawing to itself all the apparatus of a surveillance state in the sort of granular detail Orwell could never have foreseen? They have had nothing to say about – or have been joyously in favour of – the extension of repressive legislation and policy against left-wing targets. Most notable is Palestine Action, but prior laws and policing priorities aiming to take out the non-violent climate actionists of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil met with a similar shrug/jeer response. It’s only when their own are threatened, or in service of a rhetorical bete noir (universities), that they suddenly discover their freedom-loving backbone. The truth of where Reform and its fellow travellers are going with this can be seen in the US, where it has taken a matter of months for the far-right to utilise all that power to purge the public sector, academia, and media of perceived enemies. The social media presences of everyone from judges to teachers to generals has been pored over for years by the MAGA grassroots, more efficiently by the likes of the Heritage Foundation and its allies, and in bulk by tech barons such as Zuckerberg, Musk and Thiel, as they sucked in endless data across various platforms. And now, with Trump at the helm, these once relatively latent forces, easily augmented by the powerful tools of the State, have been used as, effectively, a giant shopping list of people to be hounded out of key roles and replaced with loyalists to the cause. Visitors and students who show solidarity with Palestine are not just censured, but jailed and deported. Migrants are tracked and deported. Where supermarkets and activist surveillance go today in Britain, so broad civil society goes tomorrow via the landslide-in-the-making of Reform UK, or perhaps slightly more slowly through the grinding decay of technocrats. We have several difficulties dealing with this situation, especially in the event that the far-right gain power and feel emboldened enough to volte face completely on their “principles.” To start, much of the damage is already done. Few of us are entirely without footprint giving our opinions on social media – and indeed if we were we’d be caught the other way. Because despite all their carping, the far-right have very few real barriers to saying exactly what they want any more – egregious racists are actively welcomed in serious positions in the major parties – and we already have problems countering their reach. A wholesale abandonment of social media would be an abandonment of its hostage public to algorithmic pipelines leading straight to Andrew Tate or, worse, Robert Jenrick. But in presenting our own cases in the era of Tiktok and Instagram, we are expected to show faces, in public. To record our voices. To not do so by wearing masks or Anon-styled faceless screens usually restricts the audience, largely, to fellow-travellers and topics where masking up is considered logical. Which rather defeats the purpose of outreach, except as a recruitment tool for the already-interested – one that is in the hands of the very people we’re supposed to be resisting. So we’re caught in a lose-lose situation in the modern media world. Refusal lessens our reach, engaging sets us up as targets. What is to be done? What strategies can we work with? If engagement is necessary, how do we protect ourselves? Present ourselves? There is AI which can very effectively throw a realistic virtual mask over recorded videos – providing the expected friendly face. Deepfaking behind a VPN on a throwaway account? Grim, but plausible. And then the task of building our own media is always there, more important than ever as a means of locking identities away from the snoopers. Freedom is just one of several online media projects which are all understaffed and constantly in need of help – not just the odd bit here or there, but joining up with an understanding that the project is going to be long and difficult, and will be fighting to get heard over the noise. Finally there is the offline. Away from facial recognition cameras. The communities we live in. The analogue way may be the most important of all, the only one they won’t have access to, the hardest to infiltrate. The future of resistance, using the oldest methods. Much of the resilience we need to build has to happen in short order. If Trump’s ascension is any sort of guide to the ambitions of Reform, we will not simply be needing a better, more joined-up form of prisoner support but mechanisms to fight purges of progressive voices from every walk of life, or at least to help such Official Cancellations with support, and an entryway into effective resistance. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was originally published in the Winter 2025-26 issue of Freedom anarchist journal. Public domain image by VideoGirl The post A wall of electronic eyes replacing human feeling appeared first on Freedom News.

THE UCPI SPEAKS OF TAKING A TRAUMA-BASED APPROACH, BUT ITS ACTIONS ARE CONSTANTLY SQUEEZING THOSE WHO WERE SPIED UPON ~ Donal O’Driscoll, Undercover Research Group ~ The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) started tranche three of its hearings in the autumn, looking at undercover policing in London from 1992-2007. The very first day of live evidence was cancelled, while behind the scenes participants looked on in bewilderment as the Inquiry struggled with basic activities. The Inquiry has been looking at three aspects. The Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad, which operated out of London from 1968 to 2007, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) from 1999 to 2010, and then other miscellaneous issues. These are divided into tranches. It took from 2020 to July this year to hear about the SDS from 1968 to 1992 – tranches one and two. Phase one of tranche three started in October, looking at the SDS from 1992 to the closure of the unit in 2007, continuing until December. The UCPI orders evidence by hearing from those who were affected first, then the undercover. This phase hears about James Thomson (‘James Straven’) who targeted animal rights groups and had multiple relationships. Following that is Peter Francis, who targeted anti-fascists, Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE) and Militant. There has been considerable focus on the spying on the family, friends and justice campaign of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, killed in a racist attack in 1992, and which led to the Macpherson Inquiry. Amazingly, the Inquiry gave a pass to key undercover HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’ an infiltrator of campaigns around the murder who was not called, to the horror of everyone involved. Apparently he was too ill. Finally there is Mark Jenner (‘Mark Cassidy’) who targeted the Colin Roach Centre and Anti-Fascist Action, and deceived ‘Alison’ into a relationship. Absent from this tranche was ‘Christina Green’ who infiltrated London Animal Action and took part in mink liberations. She left the police after starting up a relationship with an activist. Apparently she is not cooperating with the Inquiry. ‘Jackie Anderson,’ who targeted Reclaim the Streets and the WOMBLES, is also missing, apparently untraceable. Phase two, covering other tranche three undercovers from the SDS, will come in February 2026, when we can expect to hear from the likes of Reclaim the Streets and learn more about undercovers ‘Jason Bishop’ and ‘Rob Harrison’. Tranche four, which looks at the NPOIU including the likes of Mark Kennedy, ‘Lynn Watson’, Rod Richardson and ‘Marco Jacobs, will take place later in 2026. Perhaps. The Undercover Policing Inquiry was announced in 2014. Originally due to report to Parliament in 2018, it’s increasingly looking like it will be 2028 at the earliest. The first chair died, the second recently announced he will be retiring, and we still have to learn who will succeed him. It’s unprecedented to have two chairs, but three is next level. He’s not the only one leaving, with key staff changeovers now a regular occurrence and people being shifted around in order to cover the shortfall. All this is having knock-on effects. With an onerous security checking process, the release of material is being delayed. A good proportion of the tranche two material was yet to be made public at the time of writing. Meanwhile, lawyers trying to make opening statements for tranche three were drip-fed the material they needed right to the last minute. As so often in this inquiry, the needs of those who suffered at the hands of the undercovers are left standing last in line. Unrealistic timetables continue to be applied to core participants’ lawyers, to make up for the Inquiry’s own delays. Unfairly, some people who waited a decade have been denied the basic right to make opening statements, based on arbitrary decisions. Core participant Dave Smith, of the Blacklist Support Group, has had to force a judicial review as the Inquiry had decided he should not give evidence on blacklisting – part of its terms of reference. Illness of officers is also a recurring theme. The opening day of evidence for this tranche was due to take place on October 16th, but former Special Branch chief Peter Phelan was too ill. Behind the scenes as the current chair, Sir John Mitting, wanted to keep the name of Mark Kennedy’s handler, an officer known only as EN31, secret – because the poor guy was having a hard time of it. This also caused outrage, as EN31 was the one who provided cover for the entirety of Kennedy’s abuses and clearly knew about the undercover’s many sexual relationships. The Inquiry speaks of taking a trauma-based approach, but its actions are constantly squeezing the victims, while undercovers remain treated with kid gloves. As has been pointed out repeatedly, the undercovers are demanding the sort of respect and anonymity that they denied all those they targeted. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was first published in the Winter 2025-2026 issue of Freedom anarchist journal The post Spycops inquiry update: Victims’ needs are last in line appeared first on Freedom News.

~ Jon and Simon round off the year with a trip into the weeds talking about reaching the Mark Jenner period in the Spycops saga, Labour’s disgusting joining in on European far-right efforts to undercut human rights laws, the real reasons why housing is under so much pressure, and the latest stories from our newswire. The post Anarchist News Review: What have human rights ever done for us? appeared first on Freedom News.

EDITORIAL FROM OUR NEW JOURNAL ISSUE ON SURVEILLANCE EXPLORING STATES’ AMBITIONS TO CONSTRAIN AND REFUSE OUR FREEDOM – AND WAYS TO FIGHT BACK Anarchism in its essence is a lived philosophy of freedom. It is also a recognition that freedom, as Mikhail Bakunin knew, depends on equality. Only when we are equal can we be truly free from domination; free not just in mind but in body, to realise all the possibilities of life in a society forged through mutual aid and solidarity. But in a capitalist society guaranteed by the power of the state, we anarchists are engaged in an everyday war to preserve, protect, and expand freedom. If, as Freedom’s own Colin Ward claimed, anarchism remains a seed beneath the snow, ready to blossom if the conditions are right, then the fight to secure those conditions has seldom been more desperate. In this issue, we explore the challenges and possibilities of anarchist freedom in a time when supposedly ‘democratic’ states – aided and abetted by digital firepower – are seeking to constrain and refuse freedom in ways that would make some authoritarian regimes blush. In Ukraine, war itself is the testing ground for the technologies that seek to reduce freedom to a memory, with AI targeting systems demonstrating in the sharpest relief the power concentrated in the hands of right-wing tech barons such as Peter Thiel. These technologies fuel killing on the battlefield and the analysis of health data here in the UK, with the desperate Labour government also betting big on the magic beans of AI to somehow deliver ‘growth’, at any cost. How to fight in a situation where the implications of totalitarian technologies are – to paraphrase one of our writers in this issue – simply ignored with a shrug is a critical question for we anarchists. A return to more traditional forms of communication and the resurrection of zines and hardcopy media represents a partial way out, but it requires us to fundamentally reorient our audience – addicted as they are to the instant hits of easily-surveilled social media platforms. Also in the UK, the ongoing Spycops inquiry – in which Freedom is a core participant – is a constant reminder that the state’s ambitions to constrain and refuse freedom are in its very nature. The state’s aims today are unchanged from the era in which police officers lied to women and fathered children with them; indeed as our author notes, what is being investigated by the inquiry has actually been made legal for future state agents. But there remains cause for hope. From the Twin Cities in Minnesota where abolitionist initiatives are contesting the authority of the Trump regime, to Greece where anarchist groups are mobilising actively around the cause of prisoners arrested for protest, battles are being won. The German police’s lack of appetite for scrutiny comes up too, but while the police may not be comfortable with being watched, the security apparatus is perfectly delighted to watch us. So much so that we at Freedom recently learned that two separate US Department of Homeland Security accounts were subscribed to our newsletter. Meanwhile, despite civil liberties being up for grabs on a daily basis in the form of a Labour government who thinks an eternal right-wing drift is the cheat code for success, the popular response to the government’s heavy-handed attacks on those protesting genocide implies very strongly that Reform voters are not, nor should they be, the centre of gravity for UK politics. The veteran Spanish anarchist Jose Peirats once said ‘the state is a virus, it can exist in all of us’. The key question in the coming weeks and months will be how can an anarchist immune system effectively fight it? Some of the ideas are in these pages. The rest are in our communities. Together we have everything we need. The post Freedom winter 2025-6: Watched, databased, yet to be controlled appeared first on Freedom News.

THE RECENT CONVICTION IS ESPECIALLY TROUBLING FOR THOSE WHO HAD CHILDREN AT NEWBURY BYPASS PROTEST CAMP ~ Helen Beynon ~ The man I now know as Nicholas Gratwick was exposed as a police informant around a decade ago. I had not given him the time of day until a couple of weeks ago, when an activist friend asked me if I’d be willing to share my memories of Gratwick with a Guardian journalist. ‘Radio Nick’, as he was known, turned out to be on trial for a range of offences connected to child abuse and possessing indecent images of children—offences that the UK National Crime Agency called some of the worse ever encountered by specialist child abuse investigators. Shock waves ran through my old activist circles, with one question surfacing again and again – did the police who deployed him as an informant know of his behaviour? As Gratwick does not have a record for such offences dating from the time, this is hard to prove, and it is unlikely we will ever know. Yet, some activists recall police officers telling them there was a paedophile on the camps, and of course, a lack of a criminal record proves little here. The recent conviction is especially troubling for those who had children at Newbury (both locals who welcomed Gratwick into their homes and those on the camps), or who remember how many young and vulnerable people, including teenagers recently out of care were involved.  For me, the revelations brought back some odd memories of Gratwick talking about pornography to me at a social gathering – something which, at the time, I thought was just an attempt to shock me. I first met Gratwick the day he turned up at the Newbury bypass protests in early 1996. I was working in a little upstairs office that the campaign rented and, as usual, it was chaos. Work had just begun on the motorway that would destroy ancient woods and heaths, damage two clear-flowing chalk streams and wreck nine miles of open countryside. Camps were springing up along the route, with tree top walkways and tree houses spanning the land. In those days when mobile phones were rare and expensive and the internet unheard of, the office was where people came for information. There would be people from the camps seeking news, new people turning up and wondering where to go and what to do, journalists seeking new stories, and a small group of us who somehow juggled all of this and kept the busy hub going. Gratwick arrived and said he was an engineer who could help us set up a short-wave radio network—something that was invaluable for passing messages along the route of the road. He quickly got stuck into this and helping with other useful things like driving our vans. For several months, he acted as a semi-official ‘quartermaster’ helping distribute all the ropes, climbing equipment, tools and so on that needed to go the camps. In hindsight, this is a pattern of behaviour that undercover police officers also deployed to win trust and get quickly to the core of a campaign—although plenty of us who did these jobs were not undercovers of course! At the time, Gratwick aroused my suspicions. Every morning, I would head out to the route early to see where security guards and workers were gathering for the day’s round of tree-felling. Over a couple of weeks, Gratwick kept pressuring me to get a radio fitted in my car—at the time I thought it strange how much he really wanted me to do this and had a distinct sense that he was keeping tabs on me. In the end, a kind benefactor bought me a mobile phone, but Gratwick’s insistence played on my mind. In the years after Newbury, Radio Nick turned up on climate camps, anti-capitalist demos, in the Greenpeace office, various other campaigns and social events, including at least two weddings I know of. Like undercover officers I have known, his politics and reasons for being on protests seemed flimsy. Also, like many undercover officers, Gratwick formed a relationship with at least one young woman. When Mark Kennedy and other undercover police officers were exposed more than a decade ago, Gratwick was revealed to be not a cop, but a paid informant, acting either on his own or as part of a spy-company working under contract. Gratwick currently awaits sentencing, but prison for a grass and a child abuser will not be a lot of fun, I suspect. As I write, the next stage of the UK’s Undercover Policing Inquiry is getting going and it feels as if most of us who have been close to both informants and ‘spy-cops’ are beyond being shocked about the depths that the state will sink to for information on environmental and social justice campaigners. The post Did police know their informant was a paedophile? appeared first on Freedom News.

FIFTEEN YEARS ON, ONE OF THE WOMEN WHO BLEW THE LID OFF THE SPYCOPS SCANDAL TALKS TO FREEDOM ABOUT HER POLITICAL INSIGHTS — AND WHAT THE UNDERCOVER POLICING INQUIRY HAS REVEALED ABOUT THE WORKINGS OF THE BRITISH SECRET STATE ~ Interviewed by Uri Gordon ~ You’ve just launched your book Disclosure, how did it go? It’s been really great actually, I was kind of nervous because I didn’t really think about it for a long time and then suddenly it was like ‘Oh my God that’s happening next week’ but it was really good—we did the talk at Hay on Wye, Housmans bookshop which was really lovely, and Sumac centre in Nottingham—it was lovely to be back at the Sumac, it felt really vibrant when we were there, and people were saying that’s something that’s happened in the last year or so, like since COVID. After it was trashed by the spycops stuff and then COVID now it’s finally starting to get back to being an exciting community space so that was really lovely to see. It’s coming on to 15 years since Mark Kennedy was exposed and the huge snowball that followed, with the Undercover Policing Inquiry still moving on with lots of issues and delays. But looking back, what did you learn through the inquiry that you hadn’t already known about infiltration, entrapment… OK so this is quite complicated, because the political police that were spying on my groups were not trying to send people to gaol for the most part, and I think there’s quite a big difference between the political police who are reporting back on everything you do, every aspect of your social network, every conflict or embarrassing thing that’s ever happened in your life with a view to maybe being able to leverage it; this kind of weird shadowy ideological political policing is obviously very different from the undercover police officer who is there to gather evidence and get people sent to gaol. But there’s stuff that I learned right at the beginning when Mark was first uncovered, because it’s not like we didn’t think they might be spying on our meetings. But when it turned out to be Mark, and it turned out to be Jim Boyling, and Rod Richardson, and Lynn Watson, then I really learnt that, you know, the people who are socially awkward and make you feel uncomfortable and maybe come to one meeting and don’t get involved in very much and then leave—who were the people we always assumed were the spies—are just socially awkward people. And again, in my naiveté this surprised me at the time, but the spies have read How to Make Friends and Influence People cover to cover, and they’re charismatic, they’re trained in emotional manipulation, they’re right in there at the heart of stuff, and they’re living in your house and sleeping in your bed. So that was a learning curve. The Undercover Research Group put together a very good document with “15 questions to ask” if you suspect someone in your group is a cop, it’s also got a lot of disclaimers about how not to destroy your group with paranoia and rumours. Let’s zoom out to the bigger picture, what are we finding out through the UCPI? The insights that we’ve gained into the big picture are massive. Lots of people are quite rude about the Inquiry—and yes it’s a public inquiry run by the British state, and it’s mistreating the victims in horrible ways, but the information that is coming out of it is incredible. First of all, just in terms of insights into the workings of the secret state. One big story that didn’t get enough attention is how the Conservatives in 1983  had the police dig dirt on CND to discredit Labour—that’s straight out of the tin-pot dictatorship play book. But another thing that you see, and I say this in the book, is that the secrecy around it creates this glamour and this air of exciting spy stuff—but in fact so much of it is incredibly bureaucratic. For these officers to be sent undercover you have this whole employment structure of handlers, and people who are filing the reports, and a budget line that is coming from the Home Office that they have to justify every year so that people keep their jobs. I hadn’t really thought about that part and there’s so much of it in the disclosure that I got around Mark, things about expenses and management, and I’m sure there’s way more that was not disclosed just because the court didn’t think it was relevant. So on the one hand there’s the deep state and the ideological war that is being waged on the progressive left, then on the other hand you have all this petty middle-management and people trying to keep their jobs. The other thing that the inquiry is giving us is this incredible history of social movements— because the cops were everywhere and writing everything down. The Special Demonstration Squad was set up in 1968 after the riots in Grosvenor Square against the Vietnam War, and ran right up until 2008, so forty years. And sure a lot of it is wrong or misunderstood, or they’ve reported on really weird and inappropriate stuff, but the overall picture you get of political movements right the way across the left is absolutely fascinating.   An interesting example was the Brixton riots in 1981. And the intelligence around that is really interesting because what they basically say is ‘there’s no one you could have spied on to stop this happening’, this was a spontaneous outbreak of community anger, essentially in response to the police’s Operation Swamp and the general racism and brutalised policing that was taking place. But did you know, what the Met actually did was try to blame the anarchists. Scotland Yard basically did a press release saying violent anarchists kicked off the riots in Brixton, and they arrested and prosecuted some people from the squats in Brixton, but at the same time the spycops in the field were basically saying ‘you do realise that these people had nothing to do with making Brixton happen?’. But there’s also a whole bunch of stuff that we’re not even seeing, I suspect because the police didn’t get a look in and it was being handled by MI5. So the miners’ strike we saw almost nothing about. You talk about a ‘game of broken telephone’ in terms of how intelligence gets more and more politicised as it goes up the pipeline. Can you say more about that? So this is the process where raw intelligence goes into intelligence reports for internal consumption, and from there it gets passed on, ‘sanitised’ they call it, into higher level documents that are going to senior police officers, the Home Office and wherever else. And the language changes, and the mischaracterisations get more stark as you go higher up the chain. The really classic example is that you have lots of intelligence about hunt supporters violently assaulting hunt saboteurs. And then you move to read the funding applications and the annual reports, the authorisation documents that are being passed up the chain to be signed off by senior officers, commissioners, Home Office. And now they say things like ‘Hunt sabotage causes significant problems for police in many areas, often resulting in violent assaults including grievous bodily harm’—just not who harmed who. So the statement is not untrue but if you read that underlying intelligence you understand that there is some very creative editing going on here, and that happens a lot. Or the police could know that an attempt to get into Drax power station and get up on the buckets intends to do no damage, but that will be recorded in their early intelligence but left out of the reporting about  ‘attacks on British infrastructure’. Because they need to make themselves sound important. What about your political insights? What would you say today to people who might, for example, talk about the “illusions” of democracy and human rights? I’d say that those illusions are actually quite politically important. These days I find myself talking a lot about human rights and about democracy, because what I discovered is that if you believe you already live in a police state and just allow those illusions to die, then you increase the available space for the police state to expand. The fact that the general population is quite attached to the idea that they live in a free country with human rights and democracy is really fuckin’ important. And I totally remember us being like ‘well you know it’s the police, it’s just what they do’—and that’s not OK, you need people to believe that human rights and democracy are important otherwise the state just gets away with trampling all over society. Those things just weren’t in question in the same way that they are now, yes they were coming after protest but we had a lot more political space, even with the Criminal Justice Act and the 2001 Terrorism Act. Last question: do you think they’re still at it? I mean the sexual relationships specifically. The short answer is ‘yes I do’. I don’t have any particular evidence for that, but I believe that they’re still doing it. It’s still a legal grey area around sexual relationships. There are instructions to undercover officers to not have sex with people that they’re spying on, but there is no law that prohibits it, and in fact the CHIS Act basically makes anything that they’re authorised to do lawful, however illegal. Kate Wilson and Uri Gordon in 2004 The police have also said they’re no longer sending undercover officers to spy on political movements—which may be true, it may be a straight-up lie—but what we also know is that Martin Hogbin was uncovered at the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, and he was a corporate spy working for British Aerospace. There was also a corporate spy we know in London Rising Tide, these are private contractors who were hired by the companies that we’re protesting against. So my big question is, if the police are no longer sending officers to spy on these groups—who is? Are the police paying private contractors to provide them with intelligence? Are companies bypassing the police and just going straight in? At the same time, I think the digital age has changed a lot about how people organise politically, and probably also around how spying happens. I hope that the work that we’re doing means people are more aware and it is less easy to spy on groups, but yeah my gut feeling is that they haven’t stopped. Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files by Kate Wilson. W&N, 2025. 352pp. ISBN 978-1399614290 The post Holding back the police state: Interview with Kate Wilson appeared first on Freedom News.

HOW THE BELARUSSIAN KGB HAS BEEN TARGETTING THE DIASPORA IN EUROPE ~ Nikita Ivansky ~ In 2023, a scandal broke out when a Belarusian opposition activists signed up for a job to “research” the Belarusian opposition for a special EU commission that was supposedly investigating corruption. The job was posted in one of the oppositional chats and turned out to be a scam created by KGB to collect data. The scammed activist was even paid small sums for his work. The story climaxed with the KGB publicly announcing that the activist was working for them—during one of the security workshops organized by the scammed person. Last year, a series of video interviews with an opposition journalist for a documentary were published on the web. The person later turned out to be a Belarussian KGB agent working out of Belarus. Parts of the interview were later even published by the state propaganda media to show success in its operations against the diaspora. In its fourth decade of existence, the Belarusian dictatorship now stands in the shadow of the Kremlin and its war in Ukraine. The horrors the Russian army has visited on occupied territories are quite often much worse than what Belarusian society has to go through. However, the war against any opposition was started by Lukashenko in 1994 and continues to this day. And if repressions of anarchists, antifascists and liberals inside the country quite often ends up in the mainstream media, the targetting of those living in the diaspora rarely attracts attention. With hundreds leaving the country after 2020, authoritarian states are using modern tricks to attack the opposition in “safe” countries. Belarussian KGB outing its own fake seminar, 2023 Some of the regime’s work is ‘classical’ spying. Military intelligence agent Pavel Rubtsov, who was extradited by Poland to Russia in August 2024 as part of a prisoner exchange, transmitted information about the Belarusian opposition in Warsaw to Moscow. According to the newspaper Wyborcza, Rubtsov, who was working undercover as Spanish journalist Pablo Gonzalez, informed the leadership in 2020 that he had met with members of the Coordination Council of the Belarusian opposition, and handed over data about the old and new offices of the “Belarus House” foundation. But on the internet, the Belarusian regime’s operations on the internet can sometimes resemble the activity of scam groups. In the past years, Belarusian political police has been running several phishing campaigns online, trying to gather information via unsuspecting activists. The fake EU seminar is a case in point: for months, the KGB was getting locations of different oppositional events and names of participants. In the 1990s, some oppositional politicians were recruited before leaving, and started to pass information back as soon as they ended up in some western country. This old-school tactic of recruiting people from society instead of trying to infiltrate oppositional circles continued through all these 30 years. Scandals around different activists who signed papers to work for the KGB continue on a regular basis now in exiled opposition circles. One example is the case of Fyodor Garbachou, the husband of a Belarusian journalist, who was found to have an agent passport in the name of Viktar Makeev issued before the protests of 2020. And even though it is unknown what Fiodor/Viktar was doing abroad, it is clear that he was recruited at some point in the past to work for KGB (while still officially working for the Wargaming development company). This tactic was used by the Tsarist and Soviet secret police for many generations, not only to be able to control dissidents in exile, but also to spread paranoia and mistrust within activists circles. Olga Semashko and Fyodor Gorbachev. Photo: social networks Pressure points on activists can also be arrests on drug charges or some other offenses, but also retaliation against their family members. These days it is quite common for relatives of activists who are living abroad and continuing political work to be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to years in a penal colony on made-up charges. Through the control of relatives within the country, the Belarusian political police and KGB can control people outside of it, whether through preventing them from doing political work at all, or making them work for the regime to collect information on other activists. This is the case for many anarchists and antifascists who left the country in the past years. One of the anarchists from Belarus who died fighting in Ukraine is still listed as anonymous due to possible revenge prosecution of the relatives Taking these examples into account, we can only imagine the scale of operations of authoritarian regimes that have much bigger coffers, whether Russia, Iran or China. Quite often, western activists see those living in exile as a bit over-paranoid, with vivid imagination. However, as authoritarianism becomes more pervasive, it is crucial that we fully understand the dangers coming not only from within the state we are living in, but from outside as well.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Top photo: Protest in Minsk, 2020. Wikimedia. The post Lukashenko’s tentacles: Scams, phishing and threats to families appeared first on Freedom News.

AS THE UK SPYCOPS INQUIRY CONTINUES, A PROMINENT TARGET OF POLICE OVERREACH REFLECTS ON THEIR INTERNATIONALISM—AND OURS ~ Dave Morris ~ Victories continue to stack up in the campaign to expose and challenge the Met Police’s spycops scandal. First their secret political policing unit was outed. Then the authorities were forced to call a public inquiry. £82 million (and counting) of public funds later, we have forced the Met and Security Services to release tens of thousands of secret reports on campaigners. These expose the range of disgusting police tactics employed. All the Met have to show for it so far is a series of grovelling apologies they’ve been forced to make for the targeting of women activists for abusive sexual relationships, and for the monitoring of anti-racist organisations and family justice campaigns. And to cap it all the Inquiry judge ruled last year that the spying operations should have been closed down in the early 1970s. One aspect of the Inquiry, officially limited to “England and Wales,” which has emerged is the Met and MI5’s obsession with “international links.” For example, in 1978 the pacifistic anarchist group London Greenpeace was added to a UK Terrorism Briefing sent to the government’s cabinet. Why? Because it was making links with those abroad opposing nuclear power plants and uranium mining. The spycops, originally set up to undermine opposition to the Vietnam war, soon started to report on the anti-apartheid movement. In July a spycop in the Inquiry witness box admitted MI5 had close links with other security service “partners” abroad, including the South African government’s notorious ‘BOSS’ security service. We look forward to hearings in 2025 which will reveal how spycop Mark Kennedy travelled to Iceland and Germany to report on environmental activists. Most of these spies, when they “disappeared” at the end of their deployments, pretended to have emigrated. It is becoming clear that local special branches and police abroad helped them. Governments, and their police and security services, have always collaborated together globally, as do corporations and military organisations. They just don’t like it when activists do the same. In the 1990s there were some determined efforts to develop ongoing international links among grassroots anti-capitalist movements. This included the development in 1996 of the Peoples Global Action anti-capitalist network in Mexico, followed by gatherings in Spain 1997 and Geneva 1998. In the UK, the Reclaim The Streets movement was particularly involved. There were also mobilisations related to major financial and political gatherings, such as the Battle of Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organisation meeting in the USA, later G8, G20, Rio Earth Summit, COPs climate summits etc. One international campaign I was involved in was against McDonald’s. This features in the latest Inquiry hearings, which started in October. In 1990 the McDonald’s Corporation junk food transnational sued members of London Greenpeace. The group had produced leaflets attacking its exploitation of workers and suppression of union activity, unethical advertising targeting children, promotion of unhealthy junk food, damage to the environment caused by packaging and beef production, and industrial-scale cruelty to billions of animals. The resultant court case became the longest and one of the most controversial in English legal history. In response, the incredibly effective McLibel Support Campaign (1991-2005) was set up to ensure the corporation’s efforts to censor their critics failed. What’s Wrong With McDonald’s? leaflets had been handed out in the low thousands before libel writs were issued in 1990 — by the end of the trial millions were being given out globally. We were sent various versions of that flyer in at least 20 languages — all put up on mcspotlight.org, possibly the world’s first internet site targeting a corporation, encouraging people to print them off and adapt/distribute them themselves. On the Saturday after the trial verdict in 1997 two thirds of McDonald’s 750 stores in the UK were leafleted. October 16th, ‘UN World Food Day’ had been re-designated ‘World Anti-McDonald’s Day’ and on that day in 1999 we had feedback from 425 protests outside stores in 345 towns in 23 countries. The success of the campaign involved no PR firms, marketing budget, paid staff, or formal backing from any large organisation, and was up against maybe the world’s largest and probably most successful marketing firm. Indeed, McDonald’s spent an estimated £10m on legal costs for the trial (in contrast to the defendants’ £35k), and utilised a global advertising budget of $2b per year. However, we had demonstrated — as if we didn’t already know — the huge potential of coordinated grassroots action and people power. That, and the other examples above, is of course exactly what no government wants, what the spycops were obsessed with monitoring and undermining, but which is the essential basis for ending oppression and creating a decent society for everyone. So let’s send our admiration and solidarity to all those around the world who are contributing to such vital struggles. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal The post “McLibel demonstrated the huge potential of coordinated grassroots action” appeared first on Freedom News.