Monkeyfist.com: States of Surveillance

This is a police state! -- Anonymous.

I heard this cry of outrage on the streets of Philadelphia, in response to some new or newly egregious violation by police of protesters' civil rights (like equal access to public space, protection and service from the police, humane treatment in jail, and so on). I also heard it when the Philly police were practicing surveillance. No one wants to be subjected to politically-motivated State surveillance, which threatens both the dignity of persons and the very existence of public space.

While there are lots of bad things about police states, I examine here the police state of surveillance, and its relation to larger trends: the contraction of public space; the concomitant expansion of corporate-State-police space; the systematic contraction of spheres of individual privacy; the expansion of workplace surveillance. The commingling of these trends is more threatening than the dystopic visions of Orwell, in which an all-seeing entity controls the lives of citizens. Rather than facing a single Big Brother, we face legions of little brothers, each determined to control us -- but without, so far, a clear winner.

What forms of surveillance did the police -- which means here all law enforcement (or regulatory; think FEMA) agencies, not simply local Philadelphia police forces -- use against protesters in Philadelphia? A partial list includes

video and photographic surveillance of individuals and groups;
group tracking;
media co-optation (i.e., the media using police helicopters to film protests, accepting police input at the most fundamental and vulnerable stages of news coverage);
at least two kinds of infiltration: hard and soft;
visual surveillance, by street cops, car, and helicopter;
over-arresting, bail and arrest procedure;
jail monitoring;
direct interrogation; and
stop-and-frisks.

Video and Photographic Surveillance

The most common form of surveillance in Philly was police photography of protesters, which was so common that it inspired a kind of gallows humor among the protesters. But it's a serious abuse of the right of political expression, since it dissuades citizens on the margins from exercising their rights -- the "chilling effect." Citizens ought to be free to inhabit the boundaries of freedom of expression. All forms of surveillance comprise a countervailing, oppressive force that inhibits the appropriate exploration of those limits.

One reason that local activists were hesitant to join protests in Philly and LA may have been that the costs of protest were for them unacceptably high. Already targeted by Philly police and the District Attorney, local activists cannot necessarily afford the additional oppressive attention participation in city-wide protests may bring. It's reasonable to assumes that photographic and video surveillance is meant to track local activists moreso than others and intended to dissuade them from participating at all. After the political conventions and out-of-town protesters leave, local activists in Philly have to continue to survive brutal police forces, now armed with photographic evidence of their transgressions.

Group Monitoring

Another form of surveillance in Philly was group monitoring: documenting and tracking which groups, either formal or informal, protesters were active in the city. I saw group tracking directly when I joined an impromptu INFACT protest.

The protest consisted of a clever bit of street theater targeted at Phillip Morris's massive contributions to the RNC. We stood outside the Hard Rock Cafe on Market Street holding "Phillip Morris for President" signs. We had a giant cigarette-man puppet. It was a legal, benignly confrontational protest. Predictably, uniformed police immediately swarmed around us. We were engaged in political expression; the Young Republicans outside the Hard Rock Cafe were engaged in political expression. But the police demanded information about us, what our issue was, and other impertinent, irrelevant details.

When pressed, they admitted we had no obligation to reveal, and they had no right to demand, such information. I refused on principle. The INFACT leader eventually gave the information to the cops. I shrugged that off as not my concern. He hadn't supplied information about me or members of my affinity group. Soon after a Detective Harrell (Badge Number 3906) arrived and asked for the same information. Same drill, new cop, and this time he was asking me.

"Why are you asking? We're within our rights here, we've broken no laws and intend to break none," I said to Harrell.

"It's for my report."

"What report?"

"I fill out a report on the people and groups involved in every protest I encounter," he answered.

"Why are you doing that? Why do the police want that information?"

"Don't you think it's a good idea for us to keep tabs on radical organizations at work in our city?"

"No, I don't. I think it's a terrible idea and an obstacle to my rights as a citizen. What's your name and badge number?"

I witnessed the same pas de deux repeatedly. Philadelphia tracked protest and activist groups as a matter of policy. They shared this information with god-knows what other law enforcement or government agencies.

Infiltration

While Philly denies all claims of police infiltration, this denial is worthless (as has since become clear in the affadavit filed on behalf of a Philly police search warrant; the legal ruse they employed was to use PA State Troopers as infiltrators, but of course these relayed information to Philly police). LAPD, operating on another frequency entirely, brags about infiltrators, calling them, generously, "scouts." Police infiltration was rampant in Philly; and it came in two forms: soft and hard infiltration.

Soft infiltration is an attempt to gather information on some protest or protester activity in a way that allows, upon confrontation, the police officer simply to leave or reposition him or herself. For example, while spending three days of jail solidarity outside the Roundhouse in JFK Park, I saw dozens of soft infiltrations. A cop would dress casually, come to the park, hang around a bit, try unsuccessfully to blend in, with the general purpose of picking up any information, rumor, opinion, or mood they could overhear or elicit. Everyone knew these cops were cops. They fooled only the foolish, the careless, and the talkative.

The real point of soft infiltration isn't to gather information by deceit. It's to maintain a non-escalatory presence among protesters -- non-escalatory because they are not uniformed. The real harm of soft infiltration, from the citizen's point of view, and the real value, from the cop's point of view, is to wear us down. Dealing with soft infiltrators for two or three weeks requires mental resources that are best applied elsewhere, as the cops understand.

Hard infiltration is different. Agents provacateurs are hard infiltrators. So too are cops who, posing as protesters, commit federal offenses by tagging anarchist symbols on abandoned federal property. Hard infiltration is the attempt to disrupt, subvert, provoke, prevent or otherwise interfere with a citizen's right to protest, including nonviolent civil disobedience. Hard infiltration also includes police attempts from "the inside" to arrest those who are engaged in or are planning to engage in protest. These cops attempt to pass themselves off as serious protesters, perhaps as protest leaders. One difference between hard and soft infiltration is that when challenged hard infiltrators typically do not retreat as readily as soft infiltrators are willing to do. They usually shift locations, deny that they are cops, etc. They have invested more in infiltrating, aim at a more ambitious goal, and so are less willing to retreat.

By employing a simple trust model, the protest movement is supposed to be immune from serious hard infiltration: Only talk about protest plans with people you know very well or with people who've been vouchsafed by others you know very well. In other words, only trust people whom you trust or the people they trust. That's pretty simple. It didn't work in Philadelphia.

It gets subverted in many ways, not least by the pressures of planning mass direct actions, in which the directions of vouching, and the webs of trust, become entangled and unclear. It gets subverted by the honesty and transparency with which protesters plan their protests and direct actions. All spokescouncil meetings, for example, were open to the public (though corporate media were asked that the meetings be off-the-record, and law enforcement folks were asked to leave). Protest culture, in the context of hostile and determined police forces, works against the protesters. Lastly, it gets subverted by the police themselves, who are willing to pressure known activists, perhaps facing jail time, to vouch for cops, thus introducing hard infiltrators directly into the protest dynamic. I witnessed this in Philly, and it led to the entrapping, pre-emptive, and, I believe, unconstitutional arrest of nearly 20 members of my affinity group.

Both forms of infiltration have a secondary chilling effect. Protesters, understandably wary of the dangers of infiltration, become increasingly suspicious of one another. Some people who were active in Philadelphia have reported a kind of psychological burden of being suspected of being a police infiltrator. Some have reported a similar burden from being suspicious of others. Since for most people protest is a marginal activity, whatever increases its costs decreases the likelihood they will continue participating in it. Many of those most often suspected are particular kinds of white men, those who look more or less like they could be policemen. It may seem stereotypical, but there just aren't that many police officers with righteous dreads, multiple piercings and tattoos, and who are intimately familiar with the works of Chomsky or Bakunin or bell hooks.

Resisting Atopia

The young man apologized very politely for having awakened K., introduced himself as the son of the Castle steward and said: "This village is Castle property, anybody residing or spending the night here is effectively residing or spending the night at the Castle. Nobody may do so without permission from the Count. But you have no such permission or at least you haven't shown it yet." -- Franz Kafka, The Castle

The other forms of surveillance are mostly self-explanatory. Each contributes to an atmosphere hostile to and oppressive of the expression of dissenting political opinion. Each contracts the public space within which dissenting political opinion may be expressed without undue concern about its costs: violence, reprisals, legal entanglements. When public space contracts, something fills the void it leaves; in the present American context, the void is filled by corporate will-to-dominance, commodified cultural expression, and emboldened (and increasingly militarized) forms of police aggressiveness.

At the present time, the battle over public space is as significant as the particular social justice engagements that constitute it. It is public space, together with the will of ordinary people to fill it with their bodies and voices, that serves as a condition of possibility for mass social struggle. Without such public space, without public space free of the panopticonesque eyes of State and corporate surveillance, mass movements and popular social struggles literally have no place within which to work.

Undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression. -- Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent School District, 1969.

While the courts have shown too little interest in protecting the workplace from corporate surveillance, and legislatures have shown no such interest, the good news is that in public space, the people have at least the prima facie support of the Constitution. That's not everything, but it's not nothing. Our real chance for victory lies in our willingness to occupy public space, even at the risk of violence, reprisals, and legal entanglements, a willingness that is absolutely crucial to our continued ability to resist and refuse oppression and injustice.

A chief goal of a police state of surveillance is to contract public space so that mass movements literally have no place in which to work. The goal is not to achieve utopia or dystopia but atopia, that is, a place that is no place. The police state of surveillance, unless it is opposed by unyielding popular, mass-based struggle, will so contract public space, make the expression of dissenting political opinion so costly and rare, that there will be no such thing as public space. We will inhabit an atopia, a space without space.

In an atopian America, the most effective tool of social justice will be pointless, for it will lack the very conditions of its possibility. In that atopia, the greedy few will run ever more roughshod over the yearning many. I have read recently that the protests in Philly and LA were a failure because they were disorganized and presented no single message; because the corporate media refused to cover them appropriately; because the police were too brutal and aggressive; because Ralph Nader wasn't visible enough; because the conventions weren't shutdown, etc.

These are irrelevant, even if they were true. They betray a fundamental misapprehension of just how far we've devolved in America. The protests in Philly and LA were successful because they resisted and refused the contraction of public space and, thus, hindered for a time the concomitant expansion of corporate-State-police space. If they accomplished nothing else, and I believe they did, the protests and protesters acted as a bulwark against the further contraction of the only place within which popular movements for social justice may operate.

And that alone in this season of protest is grounds for hope.