Article from netpol.org that I am going to copy paste in its entirety because it is amazing:
The campaign launched by Netpol last week, which is
seeking to challenge attitudes towards greater protection of protesters’
privacy, has sparked considerable feedback about the ethics of wearing a
face covering or mask.
Some have argued an established position
that protest is fundamentally about making a public stand in support of
individual beliefs. Wearing a face covering therefore removes, not
least in the eyes of the courts, a level of personal accountability for
how you act in support of those beliefs.
Others, notably some anarchists, have insisted the option to ‘mask
up’ is hardly new and there is little evidence to suggest a wider group
of protesters, who have repeatedly resisted ‘black bloc’ solidarity
tactics and are unwilling to actively frustrate oppressive policing,
will suddenly embrace it.
There are merits in both of these positions, but both assume that
face coverings are intrinsically linked to public disorder – either as a
protection against police violence or, conversely, somehow emblematic
of the use of violence by protesters. We think, however, that the growth
of police surveillance has made the need for greater anonymity a much
bigger issue, for everyone who takes part in any protest.
It is certainly true that part of the philosophy of protest is
standing up to be counted – but for many, this is becoming a choice
about whether to risk attending a public protest or not. The increasing
unpredictability of aggressive police tactics and the way mass
surveillance now enables the targeting of individuals within a crowd,
for intelligence-gathering or the prospect of sudden arrest, has
weakened the collective sense of safety and solidarity that a rally or
demonstration provides.
So too has the narrowing of what is deemed ‘acceptable’ protest
(almost always a pre-negotiated march and rarely any forms of direct
action or civil disobedience) and the division of protestors into ‘good’
and ‘bad’, isolating particular groups to make it easier to control
crowd behaviour.
It is important to remember that public order intelligence gathering
by the police is carried out with a deliberate purpose: what some
criminologists have called ‘strategic advantage’ and ‘strategic
incapacitation’.1 Intelligence is used to
understand the structures, sustainability and strengths of protest
groups, in order to develop ways to undermine them.
This is why, in incidents of harassment we have repeatedly highlighted,
so-called ‘domestic extremists’ have faced visits or letters to their
homes. This is why Forward Intelligence Team officers have been known to
follow individuals for hours, even days, sometimes when they are with
their children or families and even to their workplace. This overt
intelligence gathering is undoubtedly also used to identify possible
targets for undercover policing and to help ’embed’ undercover officers.
In the face of concerted attempts to undermine political protest
movements, it is entirely legitimate to actively resist police
surveillance. However, it is also important to remember, in rebuilding
and promoting solidarity between protesters, that anonymity is not just a
way to avoid becoming an entry on the ‘Crimint‘ or National Special Branch Intelligence System databases. There are many other reasons why individuals do not want to face constant surveillance.
We
have spoken to protesters who are international students and who are
worried about the possibility that their participation in a
demonstration might impact on their studies. Education and youth workers
have told us about warnings that their participation in anti-EDL
demonstrations would have a detrimental impact on their careers, or even
lead to dismissal. People awaiting the outcome of asylum claims may not
want immigration services to know they have been politically active
and, for similar reasons, young people (especially young Muslims) may be
understandably wary of unwarranted attention from the government’s
‘Prevent’ programme. Others may have concerns that their faces might end
up on a far-right website. In some cases, people participating in
protest may worry about negative consequences for relatives in their
country of origin (something Congolese protesters told us, for example, in 2011).
Rather than acting as a barrier, anonymity may in fact represent the
main deciding factor for many about whether they are able to ‘stand up
and be counted’ at all.
Whatever the reasons, it remains true that as long as the decision to
cover up is taken only by a tiny minority, wearing a mask as a way of
maintaining some degree of anonymity does increase the risk that the
police will pick people out for arrest (and, on occasion, to try to deliberately fit them up).
Officers do so precisely because they know the courts by default seem
to perceive masked protesters as inherent “troublemakers”.
We want to change this – and we think one of the few ways to do so is
to normalise the wearing of a face covering, so that it no longer
perceived as a symbol of a minority.
If face masks become commonplace at protests, a choice made by an
increasingly larger number of people, this can help make it more
difficult for magistrates and judges to view covering your face as an
aggravating factor, or as a legitimate indicator of impending
disorder. Equally, the more people wear them, especially in ‘peaceful’
circumstances, it becomes harder for the police to justify a mask as
‘reasonable suspicion’ for using stop and search powers.
We have no expectations that this will happen overnight, but we also
see no prospect of change unless we start to shift attitudes within UK
protest movements towards greater concerns about privacy and anonymity –
in ways that protesters elsewhere in the world seem to understand
instinctively.
That is why we are not only crowd funding to produce hundreds of free
face coverings, but also planning to hold a ‘Privacy Bloc’ at a future
demonstration to highlight the issue. We hope it will become the first
of many.
Ultimately, we hope that even the fluffiest, most peaceful
demonstration will involved people covering their faces, often for no
other reason than an act of solidarity with others who have a greater
need for anonymity. We hope protesters will do so not because they are
not prepared to stand up and be counted, but because they are not
prepared to sacrifice their rights to privacy to a growing surveillance
state in order to enjoy fundamental freedoms of assembly and
expression.
January 15 2015 - Peaceful protesters on Martin Luther King day are pepper sprayed by Seattle police. [video]
Dude’s just walking on his phone.
Fuck police. Fuck government.
This happened right in Seattle, that was a teacher from Garfield High School on the phone with his mother. He’s suing the city for $500,000 dollars. This was at the MLK peaceful march against Police brutality. It’s always be and well in Seattle. They actually just arrested an elderly black man in his 70s for walking Down the street using a gold club as a cane. Bitch ass cop said he swung it at her, but they finally released dash cam footage showing he didn’t.
But no, of course the US isn’t a fascist, white-supremacist police state. Cuz you know. Freedom and democracy and stuff.
I SWEAR I saw this coming
Trump on power? Far off right-wingers and fans of extreme liberal economies ALWAYS try to violently stop peaceful protests. I can name a few examples off the top of my hat.
So, wherever you live, if your country has a Trump campaigning for power, remember THIS is what happens when they reach it.
This happened in 2015, under Obama. Democrats are shit too.
On this day, 19 September 1793, during the Haitian Revolution, 600 British soldiers sent from Jamaica landed at Jérémie, Haiti. They were welcomed by the white French property owners, who had signed a secret accommodation with Britain. In exchange for their support, Saint Domingue would become a British colony. Slavery would be reinstated, people of colour would be stripped of citizenship, and the conditions of Britain’s economic policies would favor the colonists. However, fortunately their plan was unsuccessful. This is a detailed history of the revolution: https://libcom.org/library/black-jacobins-toussaint-louverture-san-domingo-revolution
Pictured: a battle during the revolution https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1214160615435753/?type=3
Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self defense,” King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama home as “an arsenal.”
Like King, many ostensibly “nonviolent” civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s.
by Charles E. Cobb Jr.
