Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information

To the International Anarchist Movement: Three Security Proposals

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Nov 172024
 

From the No Trace Project

This text is addressed to the international anarchist movement, which we’ll define as the sum of individuals fighting for anarchist ideas around the world. This movement is in conflict with its natural enemies — the State, fascist groups, and so on — and must protect itself if it is to survive in this conflict. In this text, we make three proposals for the international anarchist movement to consider in the coming years in order to allow anarchists to continue attacking while limiting their chances of getting caught.

1. Share knowledge internationally

Our enemies organize internationally through cooperation between police and intelligence agencies and new developments in science and technology — the increasing precision of DNA forensics and the proliferation of drones being just two examples. This means that a repressive technique used in one country may soon appear in another where it is not yet being used. It also means that an effective countermeasure used by anarchists in one country may be effective in another. We should therefore share knowledge of repressive techniques and countermeasures on an international level.

Ideally, any experience of repression or experimentation with countermeasures that might be of interest to other anarchists should be written up, translated into several languages, and made public. When anarchists are arrested and brought to trial, we can often obtain court documents that reveal how they were caught: we should exploit this and publish analyses of such documents, bearing in mind that information obtained in this way may be partial or distorted. We should experiment with new countermeasures and write and publish reports on these experiments (except in cases where the State might adapt and weaken the countermeasure by reading the report). We should try to collect information at the source: read police training manuals, steal police files, analyze data leaks from police servers.

A specific feature of the international anarchist movement is its decentralization. We see this not as a weakness but as a strength: in addition to preventing the hierarchies inherent in centralized organizations, it makes it harder for our enemies to target us because they cannot topple the whole movement by disrupting one part of it. However, this decentralization also makes it harder for us to share knowledge across borders. To overcome this, we see two options: developing informal bonds with other anarchists by meeting at international book fairs and other events, and using the Internet. We propose using the No Trace Project as an international platform to share the knowledge that is suited for sharing on the Internet, not as a replacement for informal bonds but as a useful supplement to spread information beyond existing informal networks.

2. Establish a security baseline

Anarchists who carry out direct actions should analyze the risks associated with their actions and take appropriate precautions: dress anonymously, be mindful of video surveillance and DNA traces, and so on. However, this is not enough. If only those who carry out actions take precautions, it is easier for our enemies to target these individuals. This is, firstly, because they stand out: if only a handful of comrades always leave their phones at home, for example, this could be an obvious starting point for an investigation with no other specific leads. And secondly, because our enemies can get information about them through their friends who do not carry out actions: if someone doesn’t use social media but is mentioned on their friends’ social media, for example, an investigation could query their friends’ social media to get information about them. We should therefore establish a security baseline that everyone in anarchist networks agrees to follow, including those who have never carried out direct actions and have no intention of doing so.

We can’t say what this baseline should be, as it will depend on each local context, but we can give some ideas. As a bare minimum, everyone should help hide information from our enemies by not speculating about who is involved in an action, not bragging about one’s own participation in an action, not talking to the police, and encrypting any computer or phone used for conversations with other anarchists using a strong password. Discuss sensitive matters exclusively outdoors and without electronic devices, and don’t make it obvious to your social environment who you are having sensitive conversations with (e.g. don’t ask someone to “go for a walk” in front of people who aren’t involved in the project being discussed). In addition, we think everyone should stop using social media (and definitely stop posting photos of other anarchists, even with their consent, because this helps the State map anarchist networks) and leave their phones at home at all times (not just during actions). Carrying your phone with you has security implications for everyone you interact with.

It can be difficult to convince people to follow such a security baseline, especially if they think they have no personal interest in following it. If someone is reluctant, we should remind them that it’s not just their security that’s at stake, but also the security of other anarchists around them who may be carrying out or planning to carry out direct actions. Everyone who wants actions to happen has an interest in making anarchist networks as difficult as possible for the authorities to repress.

3. Explore new horizons

Our enemies evolve over time as they refine their strategies and techniques. We should prepare not for the battles that already took place, but for those yet to come. We should therefore go beyond our current security practices, anticipate the evolution of our enemies, and develop new countermeasures.

Here are three issues we think the international anarchist movement should explore in the coming years.

Drones

Aerial surveillance is rapidly becoming cheaper and more efficient. How should we react to the presence of police drones at riots, anarchist events, and so on? How can we detect or take down drones? Should we prepare for the risk of drones being used for routine aerial patrols, and if so, how?

Facial recognition technologies

In 2023, a journalist tracked down German left-wing militant Daniela Klette, who had been in clandestinity for decades, by using facial recognition technology to match a decades-old photo of her with a recent photo from Facebook taken during a dance class. What can we do against this threat? How can we prepare for the increasing integration of facial recognition technology into public video surveillance systems?

Lack of insight into police activity

Until a few years ago, radio scanners were used by anarchists to monitor police frequencies, for example to learn about nearby police activity while carrying out a direct action. In most contexts, this is now impossible because police communications are encrypted. Can we develop new techniques to functionally replace radio scanners or, more generally, to gain insight into police activity in a given area?

About the authors

We’re the No Trace Project. For the past three years, we’ve been building tools to help anarchists understand the capabilities of their enemies, undermine surveillance efforts, and ultimately act without getting caught. We plan to continue in the years to come. We welcome feedback. You can visit our website at notrace.how, and contact us at notrace@autistici.org.

This text is available as a zine (in Letter and A4 dimensions).

Let’s prepare ourselves, and may luck be on our side.

Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re a Cop: On Bad-jacketing

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Oct 082024
 

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

Read the full text, including visuals, online as a PDF.

Find the full text ready for printing as an imposed PDF.

Since the commencement of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, millions around the world have taken to the streets in support of Palestine against the genocidal Zionist entity. We are, globally, in an unprecedented moment of anti-imperialist mobilisation, which threatens not only the Zionist occupation but the colonial powers that uphold it.

This text was written through the summer and early autumn of 2024 from Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory (so-called Southern Ontario, Canada), where people, many new to the left, have been facing intensified violence and harassment from both police and Zionists. Protests are regularly met with arrests and other attacks, which have created a climate of fear among attendees and organisers.

At the same time, that fear, combined with a disconnect from previous generations of struggle and an often-unchallenged fear of militancy, has led to practices that end up putting our comrades in more danger. This text hopes to address one such recurring issue.

what is bad-jacketing?

“Bad-jacketing” (or “cop-jacketing,” “fed-jacketing,” or “snitch-jacketing”) is the practice of accusing people of being a cop, informant, fascist, or other kind of bad actor on specious or non-existent evidence.

The term has been used since at least the 1960s, where it primarily described COINTELPRO operations that bad-jacketed legitimate members of the Black Panther Party and other organisations. It was, ironically, rumours from infiltrators consolidating their own positions that led to organisations not only isolating but, in some cases, severely beating or executing innocent individuals.

why is bad-jacketing a problem?

A 2015 text titled “No badjacketing: the state wants to kill us; let’s not cooperate” by the Twin Cities GDC, Local 14, says:

  1. At the least, it pushes away people who have, or are willing, to do work and make sacrifices for the movements.
  2. Worse, it silences entire groups by sowing mistrust within them and making discussion of strategy and tactics difficult.
  3. Very commonly, those accused of acting as informants become so alienated from their accusers that they actually become snitches.
  4. Worst-case scenario, people die. That worst-case scenario is all too common and real, and there is a famous regional history to it as well, in the case of Anna Mae Aquash, a Native American woman from Canada who had worked and sacrificed tireless for the American Indian Movement, or AIM.

Southern Ontario in 2024 is, of course, not the US in the 1960s and 1970s. Our contemporary movements do not act on false accusations of snitching by killing the accused. And while we know that the police are trying to infiltrate us and turn people into informants, the vast majority of these accusations are definitely not coming from people on the state’s payroll.

The biggest threat that bad-jacketing poses to us, here and now, is that it singles people out for state repression. Militants are more likely to be on the receiving end of these accusations, but also, anecdotally, people of colour, neurodivergent people, and anyone who “does not belong” (and, of course, people who fall into all of those categories). In doing so, the people who make these accusations in effect carry out the work of the state. They reproduce the oppressive dynamics of the outside world and push people out – often, the very people our movements are supposed to be fighting for. By pushing them out, bad-jacketing then denies support to people who are often already at heightened risk of criminalisation. It makes people into easy targets, signaling to the police that they can get away with brutalising, arresting, and jailing someone without outcry from the community.

During the 2020 Black liberation uprisings in the US, posts flooded our feeds, warning of “agents provocateur.” Decontextualised videos of police unloading bricks spread like wildfire among both far-right and far-left social media networks. Fascist fear-mongering about out-of-town “ANTIFA” inciting riots trickled down into leftist hyper-vigilance against “white outside agitators.” These warnings often ventured into the realm of conspiracy theories, where protests with unknown organisers or cop cars on fire were signs of a police set-up.

All this has had devastating consequences. The normalisation of this paranoid urge to see false flags around every corner has empowered people “on the left” to share images and openly work to identify individuals carrying out illegal actions. Contrary to what they may believe, these people’s efforts to “root out infiltrators” have in many cases now become the actual basis for the state to arrest and jail its opponents.

Beyond that, bad-jacketing leads to feelings of insecurity and distrust that can tear apart a movement – even without any real infiltrators being involved. Both online and on the ground, we can hear breathless accusations that someone at a protest is an undercover Zionist operative, often for no reason beyond that “they make us look bad.” Zionists, constantly on the lookout for ammunition against us, gladly stoke the flames. Projects like the “Shirion Collective,” a Zionist doxing campaign that claimed on social media to be training undercover operatives, see and celebrate when the left eats its own. We must be equally vigilant against these psychological attacks, which are more subtle and yet can do more damage than any one undercover’s testimony.

“professionally trained to make us look bad”
– Kristina Beverlin on Isaiah Willoughby

On October 5, 2021, Isaiah Willoughby, a Black man, was sentenced to two years in prison for lighting a fire outside an abandoned police precinct in Seattle in June 2020. Willoughby acted because of the murders of Manuel Ellis, his former roommate, and George Floyd at the hands of the police.

When it happened, Kristina Beverlin, a white woman who now wears a kufiya and a “Free Palestine” hat in her profile picture, immediately blasted out a photo of Willoughby. She tweeted that he “just tried to start a fire at the abandoned precinct” and called on “everyone in Seattle to retweet the photo of this man.”

In subsequent tweets, she stated her belief that “SPD wanted the precinct to catch fire to make the peaceful protesters look bad, after SPD had looked like monsters for days.”

It was her initial tweet that appeared in a court affidavit against Willoughby, and her photo that the police disseminated to identify him. In other words, it was this white woman’s insistence that the police wanted someone to set fire to the precinct, and that anyone who did so could only have been directed by the police, that sent a Black man to prison. Like any other white vigilante, the self-deputised liberal peace police will discipline, with violence if necessary, Black or people of colour who step out of line. Unlike any other, she does it in the name of anti-racism, with an #ACAB hashtag in the same breath.

Similarly, social media users widely disseminated photos of a white woman suspected to have carried out the arson of the Atlanta Wendy’s where police murdered Rayshard Brooks. That she was white was proof to them that bad actors with no connection to the movement were behind property destruction during the uprisings, and that without those bad actors, the protests would have been peaceful. As it turned out, the woman in question was Natalie White, who Brooks had called his girlfriend on the night of his death. Two Black men, Chisom Kingston and John Wesley Wade, were later charged for the Wendy’s arson as well. As of December 2023, White and Kingston had accepted plea deals for probation, a fine, and community service, while Wade was scheduled to go to trial.

In both these examples, the people who sought to identify state agents “instigating” at protests were ultimately the people who acted as cops. The gravity of these actions cannot be overstated – they, and we, already know that police kill and torture Black people on the streets, and prison guards do the same against their captives on the inside.

Following the May 2022 leak of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Jane’s Revenge shared a communiqué about the fire-bombing of a predatory anti-choice “pregnancy centre” in Madison. The action sparked the usual uproar among the right about “woke ANTIFA terrorists” waging war against Christianity. But rather than defend the action’s righteousness, much of the left instead occupied itself with speculation about whether cursive graffiti and a “too-neat” circle-A meant that it was a false flag. The underlying logic here was that if something looked “too perfect,” if it made the right too angry, it couldn’t possibly be real. We may talk of rioting against the Supreme Court, but no one seriously means it.

In response to the right-wing outrage campaign about Jane’s Revenge, the FBI offered a bounty of up to $25,000 for information. Days later, in January 2023, the US Department of Justice indicted two people for graffiti on anti-abortion centres in Florida, actions that were also broadcast through Jane’s Revenge. The Florida investigation eventually produced in a total of four arrests, all but one of the defendants being women of colour. Worse, the Florida 4 were prosecuted under the FACE Act, a law intended to protect abortion access. Meanwhile, an investigation that involved 11 different state agencies and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force culminated in the March 2023 arrest of Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury for the Madison fire-bombing. Though the right jumped at the opportunity to gloat, widely publicising the defendants’ photos and personal information, charges against Roychowdhury and the Florida 4 received little attention from the left. Roychowdhury pled guilty after being denied pre-trial release and was sentenced to 90 months (7.5 years) in federal prison on April 10, 2024. Three of the Florida 4, after taking felony pleas that avoided convictions under the FACE Act, were also handed down prison time on September 12 of this year, ranging from 30 days to 1 year and 1 day. Popular support may not have prevented those prosecutions, but the significance of solidarity shouldn’t be understated. Instead, much of the left’s message to militants turns out to have been: “we’ll call you feds, and when it turns out we were wrong, we’ll abandon you anyways.”

Though we never had our own Third Precinct moment, left networks in Ontario fell victim to many of the same conspiratorial impulses. Reposted Instagram stories warned of “suspicious piles of bricks” left as bait near march routes and even “black blocs from Montréal” coming into town to start riots.

While, regrettably, no such riot materialised here in 2020, the bad-jacketing of the black bloc has a long history in Southern Ontario, as in other regions. A particularly egregious example came in the wake of the Toronto G20 in 2010, where liberals convinced themselves that the property damage was all an inside job and set out looking for proof. They singled out a muscular white man in combat boots and “cop-like” black pants for looking suspicious, digging up every image of him they could find. All of this crowd-sourced evidence built a convenient case for the police, who arrested and jailed the target of their suspicions.

A pattern emerges: subsequent repression draws only a fraction of the concern that the broad left had earlier put into interrogating the legitimacy of an action. This is one of the most insidious functions of badjacketing and disavowal – it aids the state project of disappearing people. Speculation about false flags, made exponentially worse by social media and algorithms that egg on endless engagement, steals away energy that could be spent preparing for the repression to come. It turns actions into abstractions ripe for every person to project their own arguments. That abstraction removes militants’ humanity from the picture, enjoining us to forget that real people, putting their lives on the line for the movement, must have lit the match or thrown the brick. The collective failure to adequately show up for each defendant and prisoner in this section – and many more not named – goes beyond a culture of disposability. It is a mass forgetting that makes each of us who partakes in it complicit in the work of the police, prisons, and the carceral state to not only extinguish our resistance but also erase our memory of its very possibility – and our memory and connection to the people who’ve sacrificed to keep that possibility alive.

when people are occupied, resistance is justified

The movement for Palestine has long been one of the most hyper-surveiled and attacked. Only when it comes to the Palestinian struggle will even the most mild, pacifist expressions of support land someone on McCarthyist blacklists like Canary Mission, extensive repositories of personal information stretching back years. It is no wonder, then, that people are – correctly – concerned about being targeted by our enemies, which include not just the settler colonial state itself but also Zionists who self-organise outside of it.

Unfortunately, this has once again meant a dangerous resurgence of bad-jacketing. In February 2024, social media posts from the “Shirion Collective” sparked mass outrage and panic among supporters of Palestine. Announcing an “Operation Global Insight,” the posts claimed to be launching an “undercover operation” in key locations such as Toronto. “Volunteers willing to wear keffiyehs and walk [masked] in these demonstrations” would “be provided an hour long basic training by one of [their] ex-Mossad team leads.” Further, “individuals with Arabic-sounding names and Middle Eastern appearance may be uniquely positioned for deeper infiltration and will receive cash compensation for their vital role in [the] operation.”

Though the collective is, without a question, real, there is plenty of reason to believe that the reaction to the post was disproportionate to their actual abilities. Sensationalist claims of Mossad ties in an emoji-studded public tweet do not paint a picture of a sophisticated intelligence operation. Neither do their existing “exposés” on social media, which, despite techno-babble buzzwords about AI, are largely limited to reposting other people’s footage and open-source information that anyone with access to Google could easily retrieve. The description of walking around at protests and “law enforcement presence” suggests no actual knowledge of how Palestine solidarity groups organise or bring in new members. A few people with bad intentions joining a march of hundreds or thousands, where every angle is already recorded and streamed live on Instagram, can hardly be characterised as “infiltration.”

If that were not enough on its own, the White Rose Society, an anti-fascist research group, shared internal screenshots from Shirion’s Telegram channel that confirmed the post’s real purpose was to sow fear and distrust. One Shirion volunteer is quoted as saying:

We won’t need to do anything. They will:

  1. Tone down
  2. Police their own
  3. Maybe even beat up their own just because they think those are us

That summary of their goals succinctly re-states the risks that bad-jacketing poses to our movements.

Even before the Shirion scare, claims that someone was secretly a Zionist or cop were already commonplace. People who wear the symbols or fly the flags of the Palestinian resistance have been accused of being “agitators,” sent by Zionist organisations like B’nai Brith to make protestors look bad. Over-the-shoulder glimpses of someone’s phone or poor fashion choices have been presented as evidence that a protestor is actually an undercover. Online, Palestinians have been accused of being Zionist sockpuppets off of little more than bad feelings. And, naturally, even minor disagreements or political critiques will end in allegations that so-and-so is a fed. While, thankfully, conspiratorial crowds here have not at least yet handed over one of our own to the cops, these accusations are sometimes accompanied by calls to act against someone. In one case recently, a queer person of colour known to other attendees was followed, harassed, and filmed aggressively at a protest because someone had decided for no clear reason that they were a Zionist in disguise.

As the police continue to crack down on us, it is all the more crucial that we learn from the mistakes of the recent past. We cannot let our rightful vigilance lead us to attack our own comrades. Nor should we water down our political lines, our demands, or our tactics for fear that the media and the right will smear us – they do that regardless. It may not be possible to eliminate some, faint chance that an infiltrator is behind a resistance flag, a punch thrown at a Zionist, a brick through a window, but far more likely is that some brave person, who has chosen to more boldly and unabashedly confront this genocidal system and its supporters, is responsible. For that, they deserve our support and our solidarity against whatever repression may come, not our condemnation.

knowing our enemies

An over-emphasis on undercovers may lead to an under-emphasis on other security vulnerabilities. Rather than acting according to a one-size-fits-all checklist or, worse, reacting to threats only as they appear, it’s important to proactively identify and individually study threats in order to understand how to address them. That is to say, what – specifically – is your enemy trying to do? How do they do it? The process of answering these questions is known as threat modeling.

Accounts like Shirion, Leviathan, or StopAntisemitism are real threats, as any of their victims know all too well. But OSINT, as well as everyday acquaintances, are much likelier to be the source of their information.

Your personal Instagram or TikTok page might already give away your identity, the protests you attend, your work or school, and the identities of your friends and family members. Your employer might publicly share profiles, including photos, of all of their staff on their website. Tools like PimEyes and FaceCheck.ID allow anyone willing to pay for them to run facial recognition technology and search the Internet for a given face.

If you’re a student, a Zionist classmate could easily recognise you from criticising racism in class and look up your personal information in a school database. A right-wing former colleague could remember you for being politically outspoken at your shared workplace. Knowing the true identities of everyone at a march will do nothing to prevent doxing if, for example, that march is being streamed online, your face is exposed, and your social media is public.

what about the real infiltrators and provocateurs?

Infiltration – actual infiltration, where someone comes into our organisations and our lives, pretending to be our friend, only to hand information over to the state – should not be taken lightly. But our baseline understanding of it often takes the form of a few convenient tropes, reinforcing existing biases against militancy and justifying dismissiveness towards criticism. These tropes prevent us from truly knowing our enemies.

The late Matt Cicero wrote that:

[there is a] misconception that all infiltrators act as agents provocateurs who try to manipulate activists into taking illegal, violent, unpopular, and ineffective actions. But as Gary T. Marx points out in his theory of social movement infiltration, social movements are damaged by “opposing organizational, tactical, and resource mobilization tasks.” In other words, infiltrators suppress social movements by fomenting divisions and internal conflicts, diverting energies toward defending the movement rather than pursuing broader social goals, sowing misinformation or damaging reputations, obstructing the supply of resources (money, transport, meeting spaces), or sabotaging planned actions. Many infiltrators are thus better described as agents suppressants, who are there to gather intelligence and channel groups away from militant action. […]

Incidents of provocation can be high-profile and sensational, such as undercover police posing as members of the black bloc at Montebello. This can lead activists to paint all militant action as the work of agents provocateurs, even if there is no evidence that this is true. Conversely, because of the low-profile of most agents suppressants, activists are often unaware of their role and impact in pacifying and controlling social movements.

The spectre of the provocateur itself, then, carries out the suppressant role of “put[ting] a damper on evolving movement militancy.”

The single-minded focus on the agent provocateur often goes hand-in-hand with a short-term view of state repression as having only two main goals:

  1. Criminalising individuals in order to take them off the board while making an example out of them; and
  2. Smearing the movement in the media, stigmatising it to the public, by associating it with criminality.

But as Cicero describes, the state is additionally engaged in a long-term project of suppression and counter-insurgency. The police cannot arrest every dissident – but they don’t need to jail us all to successfully maintain the colonial order. The central goal of counter-insurgency is to preserve legitimacy and control.

To that end, some further goals of state repression include, but are not limited to:

  1. Exploiting existing tensions in the movement in order to sow discord and distrust;
  2. Defanging the movement by discouraging forms of action that exceed accepted norms of protest; and
  3. Collecting intelligence to inform repressive operations, for the purposes of criminalisation and suppression.

We should examine the issue of infiltration with all of these goals in mind. David Gilbert says, “[t]here is no simple litmus test to differentiate sincere militancy from provocation or honest caution from suppression.” The same extends to the search for infiltrators more broadly. Most of the time, the only truly conclusive proof that someone is a police infiltrator comes from seeing the evidence against you that they’ve handed over to the state after you’ve been charged. That isn’t of much help – by the time you have those court documents in your possession, the damage will already have been done. That is assuming that the information they collect ever goes to court at all. RCMP documents from the G20 suggest that there may have been as many as 12 undercover officers. Far fewer than that were ever exposed by name, and the remainders’ identities may never be known.

People who’ve experienced the profound betrayal of finding out that someone they knew was an undercover or informant often end up drawing conclusions that are diametrically opposed from one another. But a common thread persists through most of their takeaways: there are few ways to prove for certain that someone is a cop, and many ways that the hunt for infiltrators itself instead undermines our work and furthers the state’s goals.

Accordingly, we should turn our energies to proactively building a security culture that protects us from both infiltration and other security threats. Much has been written on this subject already. In short: solid security practices should mean that an undercover cop is prevented from gathering meaningful information even if we do not know who they are, and that security risks are dealt with regardless of whether an individual is specifically acting on behalf of the state. If you do everything right, a plainclothes still won’t know who among the bloc smashed that ATM, even if they saw it happen with their own eyes.

As the ever-green “Why Misogynists Make Great Informants” reminds us, many of the greatest threats to our movements may not officially collaborate with the police either. In the Toronto anti-fascist scene alone, multiple people accused of misogyny and sexual violence/gender-based violence later went on to renounce the left, consort with their former opponents, and attack (verbally, physically, and with legal threats) their former comrades. None of those people, to our knowledge, were undercover cops, nor were they secretly fascists all along. Looking for a non-existent smoking gun to show that someone was lying about their identity would – and did – only delay people from taking necessary action against them when the myriad of other red flags should have been more than enough.

naming our enemies

The epidemic of bad-jacketing is inseparable from the problem of peace policing. Many organisers advocate for a policy of de-escalation at all costs, even in the face of potentially deadly violence from police and Zionists. They speak of “agitators” who disrupt and “escalate” “peaceful protests” – a nebulous euphemism that they apply to both the Zionist who shows up with a knife and the militant who comes prepared to fight back.

We should be clear: our enemies are not “agitators.”

Our enemies are the police, who brutalise us and lock us away to enforce settler colonial order. Our enemies are Zionists and other white supremacists, who assault and harass us in the streets, and stalk and threaten us in our everyday lives. Our enemies are politicians and other establishment liberals, who carry out colonial and imperialist genocides, here, in Palestine, and around the world, all the while crying crocodile tears about a so-called humanitarian crisis that they created. Our enemies are legacy media institutions, who smear resistance as terrorism and mobilise support for each of these attacks.

We must take care to differentiate between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, and to distinguish between enemies and potential friends. Too often, we see organisers reject co-strugglers in order to appeal to liberal institutions that will never be on our side. They may frame the conservative path as the only strategic option, rejecting open support for armed struggle, militant direct action, and anything else that would create “bad optics.” Disagreements from co-strugglers are treated as threats worse than that of liberal media, who we must appeal to for sympathy, or Zionists and cops, who we must appease for our safety.

When our enemies attack us anyways, these organisers pin the blame not on the perpetrators but on the co-strugglers who deviate from their line. They forget that to be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing. Our enemies do not strive for unity with us, knowing that ours is an antagonistic contradiction, knowing that our collective liberation requires their annihilation. It is better that we, too, abandon any notions of conciliation and recognise our enemies as enemies.

For all these reasons, we urge people to draw a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. Abandon the euphemisms and name our enemies. When we struggle through our differences, let us do so with a shared understanding of what we are for and what we are against.

by every means necessary

Not only is bad-jacketing dangerous, it is disempowering and demobilising. It forecloses entire realms of possibility, insisting that we limit ourselves to the same set of legal, non-violent tactics. It threatens state violence against people who do not comply with those limitations being imposed upon their actions. Many people cannot take the risk of arrest. But something being risky does not make it impossible. Just because some of us cannot act does not mean that no one should.

While its meaning is sometimes lost, respecting a “diversity of tactics” means refusing to impose non-violence upon our co-strugglers and declining to condemn those that destroy property or take up arms. As a group of autonomous UCLA students writes in the wake of vicious assaults on their encampment:

We have noticed a trend of the desire to appear peaceful for the media taking precedent over the right of protestors to self defense, mirroring the world’s response to Palestinians’ right to self defense in the face of blatant fascist attacks and eliminationist violence.

We cannot allow our resistance movement to demand obedience over safety in the same way as western imperialist forces against the colonized.

Without drawing false equivalence with a people living under active bombardment and military invasion, the liberal urge that leads people to denounce burning precincts or fake clinics as “giving police an excuse to crack down” is the same that denounces the Palestinian resistance for “giving Israel an excuse to destroy Gaza.” We must refuse any invitation to distance ourselves as the “good,” “peaceful,” “innocent” ones. Instead, we affirm the right of Palestinians and all people to resist colonial domination by any means necessary.

We would remind our co-strugglers, too, that our enemies do not care about the truth, and they have no conscience. We see this in the viciousness with which the police enforce an unprecedented ban on overpass protests in Toronto, where people rallied on the sidewalk to wave flags and chant. We see it in the eagerness with which a long list of electeds, including the Prime Minister himself, leapt to denounce a protest of a Jewish hospital that never happened. We see it in the adamance with which Zionists call the very existence of Palestinians a terrorist threat against them, no matter how young, no matter how innocent, no matter how non-violent. Right-wing propagandists will fabricate scandals out of thin air, and the establishment will happily take up their version of the story. Even if each and every one of us swears to turn the other cheek to our assailants, as long as we challenge the colonial status quo, in our enemies’ eyes, we will never be peaceful.

Another path is possible, and the movement to Stop Cop City sets a powerful example. In February, a journalist asked spokesperson Mary Hooks of Vote to Stop Cop City whether organisers condemned arsons of police vehicles. She answered:

Hell no. No. Not at all, And to be honest with you, Atlanta deserves more than that. Real talk, they’re lucky, this city is lucky, this country is lucky. Atlanta has its hands in literally murdering Palestinians right now. You think we give a damn about some equipment? Not at all. Not at all.

But some of us, we cannot take that risk. And those who can, bless them. Bless them. I cannot take that risk. But Lord knows, I’ll sit with my lighter and be like, damn. […]

We need every, every means necessary to deal in the police state we are dealing with. So I don’t care, no, and I would imagine my comrades would say the same. No, not gonna condemn nobody for doing righteously what they need to do when our city has silenced every quote-unquote proper, democratic process.

The movement’s aboveground and clandestine elements are two parts of a whole. Both are necessary for our victory.

Listen to Isaiah Willoughby speak in his own words on Kite Line Radio:

kitelineradio.org/tag/isaiah-willoughby/

Support defendants and prisoners from the George Floyd Uprisings:

uprisingsupport.org

Contribute to the Florida 4’s commissary and find other ways to support through the Anti-Repression Committee of South Florida:

linktr.ee/sfl_arc

more on peace policing

“ACAB Includes Peace Police: Three Report Backs from Palestinian Solidarity Actions” (November 2023) on Archive.org, online at archive.org/details/acab-includes-peace-police-en-print-8/page/2/mode/2up

“Peace Police are Police: How Protest Marshals Sabotage Liberation and Protect the State” (December 2023) on North Shore Counter-Info, online at north-shore.info/2024/03/11/peace-police-are-police-new-zine-classic-image/

more on security

“Confidence. Courage. Connect. Trust. A proposal for security culture” (November 5, 2019) on North Shore Counter-Info, online at north-shore.info/2019/11/05/confidence-courage-connection-trust-a-proposal-for-security-culture/

“Doxcare: Prevention and Aftercare for Those Targeted by Doxxing and Political Harassment” (August 26, 2020) on CrimethInc., online at crimethinc.com/2020/08/26/doxcare-prevention-and-aftercare-for-those-targeted-by-doxxing-and-political-harassment

The Threat Library by the No Trace Project, online at notrace.how/threat-library/

“Threat Modeling Fundamentals” by Håkan Geijer on Riot Medicine, online at opsec.riotmedicine.net

more on infiltration

Fuck the (Hamilton) Police, online at fuckhps.noblogs.org

“Infiltrated! How to prevent political police from undermining grassroots solidarity” (May 1, 2017) in Briarpatch Magazine, online at briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/infiltrated

“Living among us: Activists speak out on police infiltration” (July 1, 2011) by Tim Groves, online at briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/living-among-us

“Stop Hunting Sheep: A Guide to Creating Safer Networks” (2011) on Sprout Distro, online at sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/security/stop-hunting-sheep/

“The G20 Main Conspiracy Group: The Charges and How They Came to Be” (2012) on the No Trace Project, online at notrace.how/resources/#toronto-g20-main-conspiracy-group

“Why Misogynists Make Great Informants” (Spring/Summer 2010) by Courtney Desiree Morris on Incite! National, online at incite-national.org/2010/07/15/why-misogynists-make-great-informants-how-gender-violence-on-the-left-enables-state-violence-in-radical-movements/

Anti-Repression Talks #1: Preparing for Physical Surveillance

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Sep 272024
 

From the No Trace Project

he No Trace Project is launching a new initiative, the Anti-Repression Talks, to encourage discussion of surveillance and security issues within and between informal anarchist networks, on an international level. We believe that many anti-repression practices are more powerful when they are carried out across a network, rather than only by specific affinity groups.

The Anti-Repression Talks will be a series of sessions, each on a different topic, and each lasting three months. During a session, participants are encouraged to form local study groups with people they trust to discuss the topic of the session — we provide resources and discussion points to help kickstart those discussions. At the end of a session, an international online chat takes place, where participants can anonymously meet to discuss their thoughts and findings. After a session, its findings are published on the No Trace Project website, including any materials contributed by study groups and a summary of the online chat.

The first session, Anti-Repression Talks #1, will address the topic of preparing for physical surveillance and will take place in October, November, and December 2024, with the online chat taking place on January 4, 2025. The findings will be published here.

Physical surveillance

In the past decades, the surveillance capabilities of State actors have greatly diversified, thanks in part to new technological developments such as video surveillance, mobile phones and DNA sampling. Despite this, physical surveillance — the direct observation of people or activities for the purpose of gathering information — is still widely used by State actors, in particular in cases where other surveillance techniques are not effective. Our Threat Library references examples of the use of physical surveillance against anarchists.

We believe that the State is likely to use some degree of physical surveillance in contexts where high-impact anarchist direct actions are being investigated — for example in a city where an arson recently took place and the news of the arson has been posted on anarchist websites. We also believe that in many contexts, anarchists do not sufficiently prepare for the risk of physical surveillance. Preparing for physical surveillance isn’t straight-forward, it requires developing a specific skill set, but it is possible, and it is the only thing that will help you if cops are tailing you on the way to a sensitive meeting or action.

Local study groups

We encourage participants to form local study groups to discuss the topic of the session, from October to December 2024. During the session, if they wish to do so, study groups can send us any materials that they deem relevant to the discussion. We will add such materials to the session findings where other groups will be able to see them.

We recommend that study groups read the following resources:

  • The zine Measures Against Surveillance for an overview of the physical surveillance techniques used by police in urban areas, with examples from Germany.
  • The book The Theory of Covert Surveillance for a more comprehensive overview of the physical surveillance techniques used by private investigators (and most police agencies), with examples from the United Kingdom.
  • The book Surveillance Countermeasures for a comprehensive overview of physical surveillance countermeasures: surveillance detection (including counter-surveillance) and anti-surveillance. Once you understand the logic of the enemy’s physical surveillance techniques, we highly recommend this book to start learning countermeasures that you can apply in your life and projects.
  • Other resources can be found on our website.

And we suggest the following discussion points, which we encourage study groups to supplement with their own:

  • From the recommended resources, what have you found difficult to understand or apply?
  • How can we support each other in developing and practicing physical surveillance countermeasures?
  • If you detect physical surveillance, which activities or projects would you want to continue and which would you want to put on pause? If you stop meeting with your friends to prevent the surveillance operation from mapping your social network, how can your network help you feel less isolated?
  • If you detect physical surveillance, how can you communicate this to your network in a way that doesn’t alert the surveillance operation that they have been detected? How can such communication happen in a way that doesn’t bolster paranoia?

International online chat

An international online chat will take place on January 4, 2025. It will be open to anyone, so we ask that you do not share any identifying information or discuss anything that you wouldn’t want to see published. It will be limited to text messages (no audio or video). Discussions will be held in English, with live translation available to and from French and Spanish — please get in touch if you are able to help with live translation in these languages or others.

For instructions on how to join the chat, see here.

Rad Pride 2024: How a Night Demo Defeated the SPVM in the Village

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Aug 252024
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Sunday, August 10th was the second annual edition of Rad Pride. Over 250 people gathered at Papineau metro, pink balaclavas mingling with black bloc and our gayest demo attire. Under the rallying cries of “No pride in genocide” and “Queerness is resistance”, the march set off down Sainte-Catherine. Now, a couple weeks later, we want to offer a look back at this evening from a tactical perspective.

On Side Banners

The conflict between reinforced side banners and “side cops” has become a mainstay of combative Montreal demonstrations. Montreal’s reinforced banners are banners with a wooden frame, held by screwed in door-handles, used to protect against riot cop charges and hits by police batons. Over the summer, with terrasses and crowds often obstructing the sidewalks, the cops have apparently received orders to enter the street alongside marching protesters. It is essential to show the cops that this provocation is a grave error. A multiplication of reinforced side banner teams may be one of the best responses, but where these teams position themselves and how others in the crowd complement them are important to consider.

At Rad Pride, a single reinforced side banner took a position at the front, left corner of the march, and it rapidly escalated into a confrontation. After side cops began pushing the banner and banner holders refused to yield, cops ended up squeezed against a low terrasse wall. They began striking people with batons. One demo participants’ flagpole was used to strike a cop in the head from behind the banner. Unfortunately, the position of the side banner at the front made it easy to cut it off from the rest of the crowd, and with enough pepper spray and baton blows, the group around the side banner had to disperse in a chaotic melee that flipped several tables on a terrasse and led to two arrests.  

The decision to not move the reinforced banner with more fluidity led to entrenched positions by both anarchists, on one side of the banner, and police, on the other. A tug of war ensued. In such a stubborn situation, one side will be pushed back and have their position compromised. It may have been possible to flank the police on all sides as cops concentrated their forces on pushing back the banner. But without the determination, numbers, or abilities to use entrenched positions to our advantage, we will often benefit much more from encouraging a reinforced banner to move with more freedom, not committed to any specific place in the demonstration (especially the front or back where it is the most isolated). This approach complements one of the main advantages of street fighters versus an enemy as powerful as the police – the ability for militants to attack and retreat, to use the element of surprise, dispersing and reforming.

A Headless March

The SPVM might have hoped that the attack on the front of the march would result in the whole crowd dispersing, but they had a long night still ahead of them. More experienced protesters improvised a new front banner team, encouraged the crowd to stick together, and quickly looped back onto Sainte-Catherine.

It was evident that the SPVM wanted to avoid the PR nightmare of tear-gassing crowds of party-goers in the Gay Village during Pride. Since these crowds were heavily concentrated on Sainte-Catherine, the demo was able to avoid dispersal by staying on that street. On multiple occasions, riot cops formed lines blocking our way forward and to the south; each time, rather than turn north off Sainte-Catherine, the demo turned on its heels and reversed, with multiple banners able to swap in as the new lead.

This game of ping-pong gave demonstrators multiple occasions to take action against the handful of targets along our route. Windows were smashed at RBC, BMO, a Remax office, and Starbucks. The latter was attacked repeatedly on at least three separate passes of the crowd. After the early clash, it took the cops close to half an hour to re-establish flanking side units, showing us that an openly confrontational element in the crowd can function as a diversion, creating space and time for groups oriented more towards destruction.

As the night went on, the vibe became increasingly more festive. Towards 11pm, the demo had become a dance party of still over a hundred people, as a line of fully-geared riot police looked on. Making a laughingstock of the authorities is a calling card of successful mass resistance movements throughout history, and we certainly shouldn’t write off the potential of making the SPVM in particular look ridiculous. The night’s victory was topped off when the riot cops retreated and returned to their vans, and the crowd sang “We Are the Champions”. 

This type of conclusion is simply extremely rare for destructive demonstrations in this city. It is the result first and foremost of the determination and fearlessness of participants.

Toronto Police Approaching People to be Confidential Informants

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Jul 132024
 

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

In case you missed it, Toronto Police have recently been attempting an old tactic against Palestinian solidarity organizers: soliciting arrestees to become confidential informants.

While this isn’t a new tactic, the blatant and concerted attempt to conjure informants in community organizing spaces is.

Writing this, I know of at least four separate individuals approached by police.

Each approach has been similar: the individual is arrested, charged, and then prior to being released, approached by a detective from Toronto Police’s Hate Crimes & Extremism Unit (HCEU).

Many major municipal police forces in so-called southern Ontario have a HCEU, usually nested within their “Intelligence Division”. These are the units that track and gather intel on protests, organizers, and mobilizers. The municipal units together form a provincial network – the Hate Crime Extremism Investigation Team (HCEIT) – which attend trainings together, document and share intel in various ways, and work closely with provincial and federal intelligence bodies.*

The detective’s approach is very straightforward: they inquire whether the individual knows what a “confidential informant” or “CI” is. The detective suggests that perhaps the individual has concerns about the actions of some of their comrades, and they tell the arrestee that if they have information to share it doesn’t need to happen through their lawyer. In some cases there’s an insinuation that the detective could talk to the crown on their behalf if were to provide information, but without promising anything.

It’s worth noting that we have seen police make informational approaches to individuals in the GTHA area before.

In Hamilton during the height of Landback Lane we saw the OPP approach an individual, suggesting they may be concerned about what people they knew were up to. Likewise, Hamilton Police have previously coerced people in to coming to the police station under the guise that they were being charged. Instead they were solicited for information, then released. As well, during escalating anti-line 9 organizing, at least one individual in the Waterloo region was approached by an intelligence body to inform on people.

In each of these cases – as well as the recent Toronto examples – the individuals being approached were “newer” or peripheral to organizing (at least locally). Police intentionally choose to approach these individuals because they believe:

  • The individual may not have the support of others at that time, and out of duress (real or imagined) may give information
  • The individual has yet to develop core politics of the struggle (i.e. ACAB/Don’t talk to cops)
  • The individual may not have developed attachment to the people or struggle they’re being asked to inform on, and more likely to give up information as a result

While police may most often approach folks new to the scene, this isn’t good reason to exclude those new enthusiastic folks from our spaces or movements – but it is a good reason we need to take the time to get to know folks coming in to our scenes and circles as often as possible. Building genuine relational movements means people are better supported (not just in moments of repression, but especially then), and more likely to move us towards building movements that can grow in both size and risk-taking, while resisting repression.

Remember: Don’t talk to cops!

A Mini Primer on Informants

People might agree to inform because of:

  1. Fear/Isolation
    • This could be fear of their legal predicament, or something police have done to covertly or overtly threaten them, or both. Especially fear in isolation/without support.
  2. Attention, self-importance
    • Making themselves important to someone, even if it’s a fucking pig.
  3. Conflict/Bad Politics
    • They don’t have ACAB politics – they believe police will solve whatever issue they have with whomever or whatever, or they’re pissed at someone (in combo with bad politics)

Which leaves us with: What can WE do, collectively, to dissuade or render CI’s useless?

  1. Have and continue building good security culture and OpSec practises
  2. Create opportunities in movements (especially) for people to question and understand anti-cop politics, even if it’s via an anonymous zine library or reading group. Learn to have hard conversations.
  3. Actively & proactively counter fear of repression by discussing it, creating opportunities for connection and relationship building with others experiencing it or likely to experience it – both in private groups and larger ones.
  4. Build a culture of support, debrief, openness & transparency about repression, police & police approaches
  5. Build skills, spaces, and support for conflict resolution in community. Police are adept in creating or inflaming controversy, and it’s only leaning in to hard conversations that will move us clearly through those moments.

Other Things to Remember:

  1. Police don’t need to arrest someone to approach them to be a CI
  2. We give police intel in many other ways – work on things in your control. Security culture. Operational security. Tech security. Be cognizant of everything you’re doing on frontlines while under surveillance: Are you taking photos on your phone and immediately posting to a key social media account? Are you always talking to the same few people right before a big decision is announced?
  3. Someone disagreeing with you, your ideas, or your politics does not mean they’re a cop, informant, infiltrator, or disruptor. This type of thinking can paralyze us, and is ignorant. Large movements attract a huge number of people with difference backgrounds, experiences, ideas, all at varying moments in their political development. Your differences may mean you need to have some conversations or even reconsider collaborating – but that can usually be done amicably.

And finally, some affirmation: Police making a concerted effort to flip people means they want information – which means they don’t have the information they’re hoping to have. This is good news, and in some ways may even indicate that reasonable security practises are already working. Keep at it!

* Further notes on Hate Crime Extremism Units

The following police department HCEU’s form the provincial Hate Crime Extremism Investigation Team (HCEIT): Guelph, Hamilton, London, Ottawa, Waterloo, Durham, Halton, Oxford, Toronto, York Region, Peel Region, Stratford, Brantford, Niagara.

HCEIT works with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Criminal Investigation Services Ontario (CISO), Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS) & Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

It’s worth noting that there have been recent and continuous federal, provincial funding being given to municipal hate crime units to investigate “antisemitism” and anti-muslim incidents. Antisemitism is in quotes because the state and some Jewish bodies sees all pro-Palestinian action as antisemitism, not because there have not been instances of such since October – and prior. Regardless, my point is that we are in a moment of heightened state surveillance & repression around pro-Palestinian organizing with some level of joint national and provincial directives happening. Act like it – but keep f*cking shit up!

More Notes on June 6, 2024

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Jul 032024
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

A summary of events

At around 4 PM, student protesters entered the James administration building of McGill University and disrupted the Board of Governors’ (BoG) meeting to oppose its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. The BoG is the highest instance of the university and decides in which companies its endowment fund is invested, including Israeli, Zionist and arms companies. Hundreds of protesters formed a support rally around the building, with some creating makeshift barricades with fences and furniture. An hour later, on the administration’s request, a strong police presence arrived on campus, including several dozen riot cops. The latter took control of the walkway east of the building and prevented protesters from protecting the north (back) entrance, thus confining them to the south (front) side of the building.

At around 6:30 PM, cops entered the building through the back entrance. They would soon begin arresting the protesters inside, who had tried to barricade the room they were in as best as they could. Simultaneously, cops brutally assaulted the support rally, using their batons, pepper spray and tear gas to disperse the protesters, who did not go out without a fight.

One particularly funny moment captured here is Deep Saini hiding from his students, cowering behind admin staff ushered out

The level of violence from the police surprised some demonstrators, with cops aiming tear gas or rubber bullet guns at people’s heads and intentionally shooting people with tear gas canisters, in addition to using huge quantities of chemical irritants.

At 7:15 PM, a demo started marching from the UQAM (another university) encampment towards McGill. The march symbolized the end of said encampment and had been announced several days prior; it was therefore not in direct reaction to the James building occupation, though its path might have been rerouted for the occasion. Protesters meandered through the Milton-Parc neighborhood to try to reach the administration building, but their attempts were thwarted by police following them and blocking streets. The demo finally tried to break through the police line on Milton street, just a mere hundred metres east of the James building. Protesters were then met with the violence and pepper spray of bike cops, backed up by riot police. In the disorientation that ensued, the protesters ran away and, one way or another, reached the Lower Field.

The UQAM crowd slowly regrouped there, joining forces with the McGill one. Those who were still good to go started marching again, unabated by the torrential rain. The demo meandered through the streets, with riot cops clearly blocking any road that might lead to the James. Once on Sherbrooke, a Scotiabank window was shattered. The protest continued wandering through Milton-Parc and went east, eventually disbanding on St-Laurent.

Some thoughts

The author of these reflections applauds everyone who partook in the occupation or the demos, and hopes the following thoughts are not taken as negative criticisms, but as things to think about, discuss and debate moving forward.

1. On communication: publicly announcing the BoG meeting on social media would have made the James occupation impossible, as the administration would have called the cops beforehand or moved the meeting online. However, I still think it would have been useful if McGill folks had shared the information with trusted UQAM folks. For one, this could have allowed the latter to advance their demo time and thus join the support rally. This would also have facilitated the exchange of knowledge and material, namely rope to allow the occupiers to escape through the windows and things to block the back entrance. On the last point, I think more intel should have been done to make sure every entrance had been dealt with.

2. On meteorological conditions: the heavy rain created unique conditions with some payoffs. While it might have discouraged more people from attending the demo, it somewhat mitigated the spread of pepper spray and tear gas and provided a good reason to bring umbrellas. Of course, goggles and masks still proved useful that day. The wind also made its presence known: there is footage of riot cops teargassing themselves because of it. Weather conditions and terrain geography (elevation, obstacles) still seem to be relatively unexplored areas of demo planning.

3. On objectives: both the march from UQAM and the subsequent one from Lower Field apparently had the goal of reaching the James. Other than its symbolic significance, this objective makes little sense in my opinion, since the cops had already entered the building before the first march was on its way. Also, the long meandering paths taken did not help reach the destination, as the cops could always see where we were headed. Nevertheless, the persistence and temerity of the protesters is worth acknowledging and commending. Older comrades even said the demo reminded them of combative night demos from 2012.

4. On demo formations: the UQAM demo had a few standoffs with the police, who were adamant on preventing it from getting to the James. As explained in the previous point, I still have difficulty understanding that objective. However, there might come a point in time where similar ones prove crucial in achieving wider goals. I will thus share my two cents on two noteworthy standoffs:

– The first one happened with bike cops preventing further advancing on Prince-Arthur street. After stopping for a brief while, protesters started marching again towards the cops, yelling “Bouge!” (Move!) to give them a taste of their own medicine. Some rocks were also thrown (albeit not very powerfully). Despite the comedic value of the whole scene, the cops did not cede, with some deploying pepper spray and others threatening the crowd with their bikes. The demo thus chose to turn away. In my opinion, the demo did not charge fast enough to instill psychological fear in the cops. It is somewhat understandable though, since the protesters didn’t have much in the way of equipment to neutralize the bicycles.

– The second standoff occurred on Milton street, where police vans were spread throughout the street and reduced mobility for both sides. Once again, the protesters faced bike cops, but this time, they made contact, as their resolve had hardened. The first three rows respectively held the following items: banner – umbrellas – flagpoles. The protesters held the line for a while, but fell into disarray after the cops made liberal use of pepper spray and riot cops arrived on the scene. I think that with more training, discipline and experience, the demo could have stayed grouped while the medics attended to those who had gotten sprayed. This would have prevented the ensuing disorganized and individualistic retreat. I also think that expanding the demo onto the sidewalks and attacking by the flanks (while still leaving an escape route for the cops) would have proven strategic.

Another tactic worth thinking about when cops deny entry to an area is the splitting of the demo into two or more groups,  provided that they remain big enough. Each would take a different road to try and spread the police force thin. This allows the protesters to increase their surface area, i.e. the number of people directly facing the cops instead of waiting in the middle of a crowd. Needless to say, the successful execution of such maneuvers would require prior training and constant communication between the groups.

5. Be like water: our force stems from our ability to be anywhere and everywhere, whether it be at a protest or other actions. According to many comrades, the riot cops’ priority seemed to be to guard the James building. This limited their range of motion, and other types of cops seemed more interested in following the demo than protecting other potential targets, like the Scotiabank. On a broader level, the events illustrate an asymmetry between the people and state forces: the former, like steppe cavalry, have a harder time defending places, but are more agile; the latter, like heavy infantry, are stronger in direct confrontations (unless at a significant numerical disadvantage), but less mobile. While the police has various vehicles at their disposition, they can be slowed down by dragging objects into the street. Now, I am well aware that habit gets a bad rep because it doesn’t really slow down riot cops and can constitute a tripping hazard for ourselves. That being said, in narrower streets, it proved useful in creating some distance from bike cops and vans and giving protesters some time to regroup after a rout.

Immigrant Detained and Abused at CISSS de Laval

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Jun 102024
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Our friend Juba Mahiou, an immigrant to Canada, has been locked up for over six months at Centre Intégré de Santé et de Services Sociaux de Laval. After an argument where police were called, they detained him under the guise of ‘mental health treatment,’ and have been forcing him to take drugs that are destroying his mind and body.

Judge Louis Charette noted that Juba was at risk of hypoglycemia and Parkinsons from drugs he was forced to take, but just ordered the doctors to also give him Parkinsons drugs ‘if needed.’

There are no charges of wrongdoing that the court can even get to stick to Juba – but every time he goes through their processes, they simply say that he’s “just lying to get out of the hospital,” an unprovable and unbeatable charge, and they also call him psychotic for talking about xenophobia he has dealt with.

Doctor Ali Jaber is assaulting Juba with forced injections of Invega Sustenna and has the power to choose to stop and let him go at any point. Right now the only info we have for trying to contact Jaber is the general unit number. We welcome more info about Jaber anyone can find, at friendsofjuba at proton dot me.

Juba has so far gotten one disability rights group to take note of his situation and post about it – albeit in a very limited scope – at https://mindfreedom.org/front-page/jubamahiou.

“Cops Off Campus” Anarchists Attack McGill

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Apr 052024
 
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Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Police were invited to campus last week by McGill and pressured to charge someone by the administration just for some graffiti.

When cops are invited onto campus they police and ruin young people’s lives. Universities need to be made places of sanctuary. Denunciations and the lessons of history have not worked so far.

Yesterday, at night, we anarchists, armed with tools that anyone can find, committed our first acts of revenge, leaving our marks on the McGill administration building.

We wait for no one to act.

For liberation from all authority.

Cops off campus!

DNA you say? Burn everything to burn longer: a guide to leaving no traces

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Apr 012024
 

From No Trace Project

[READ] [WEB] [PRINT]

Note from the No Trace Project:

We hope that this translation will help English-speaking anarchists to better understand and protect themselves against the dangers of DNA.

We added many footnotes, either to add information or to explain our disagreements with the original text, especially in the section “A protocol for two“. Our footnotes are preceded by “N.T.P. note”, whereas the original footnotes are not.

We did not include the original appendix which listed French forensic police laboratories and their suppliers, because we didn’t think it was relevant to an international audience.

Contents