Schedule Chaos Communication Camp 2015

This talk is given by three activists who were all targeted by UK police spy Mark Kennedy and who have direct personal experience of that and other physical surveillance. It will look at experiences of infiltration of social justice movements by the state and private contractors and some of our responses.

Over the past 5 years there has been an avalanche of revelations about the use of undercover agents against political movements: infiltrators that spend decades living and working with us, forming the most intimate relationships and accessing every single part of our lives. Infiltrators have been uncovered within political mobilisations in the UK, Germany, the USA, New Zealand, Spain etc., showing us that understanding offline security is just as vital as making our hardware and software secure. No matter how many layers of encryption we use, if our closest companions are infiltrators, sharing our homes, our lives, and our computers, there is nowhere to hide.

This talk is given by three activists who were all targeted by UK police spy Mark Kennedy and who have direct personal experience of that and other physical surveillance. It will look at experiences of infiltration of social justice movements by the state and private contractors, some of our responses, and how that might relate to digital privacy struggles and resistance to other parts of the surveillance state

In an increasingly murky world of mass surveillance, cross-border cooperation, and political policing in the "war on Terror", these flesh-and-blood undercover agents may be working for the state police or secret services, or come from the increasingly large market of private surveillance contractors. A report on policing published in 2014 in the UK estimated that in that country alone there are currently 1,229 of undercover police officers operating both on and offline.

If you believe that mass surveillance is wrong but targeted surveillance is necessary; if you believe you will not be targeted because you are not a dissident (or you just make tools for dissidents!); if you have ever thought you are too ineffectual to be of interest to the political police, then this talk is for you. This happened to us because we did not imagine the lengths they would go to, and we are speaking out because if people know this is happening they are forewarned and forearmed against it.

BIOS of the speakers:

*'Lily'* has been active in social and environmental justice movements since the mid-1990s and is one of 8 women suing the London Metropolitan Police following the discovery that her partner of two years was in fact a police spy, one of several undercover officers sent to infiltrate groups she was active in. After starting to speak out, at 31c3, about her experiences of years of undercover abuses, human rights violations, and institutionalised police sexism, she began, again, to receive police harassment, and in March 2015, at the CTF in Valencia, found a police GPS/GSM tracking device underneath her car.

contact: atikka at puscii dot nl

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/undercover-with-paul-lewis-and-rob-evans/2015/mar/11/woman-suing-police-over-relationship-with-undercover-spy-finds-tracking-device-in-her-car-reports

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*Jason* has been involved in anti-authoritarian social movements since the late-1980s, and recently discovered that a supposed close friend was actually an undercover police officer who targeted him across European borders for a period of five years. He is making a film, Spied Upon, about activists opposing state repression, and has a strategic analysis of state spying from the times of the Russian Czar, the East German Stasi and the FBIs Cointelpro, that provides a context for understanding his own more personal recent experiences.

contact: jason at blackhelmetproductions dot net

http://SpiedUpon.com

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*Harry Halpin* is a Research Scientist at MIT working on cryptography, open standards, and decentralized social networking. For 5 years he was subjected to constant harassment, including laptop seizures, at borders and airports after he was placed on a 'terrorist'-style watch-list by by a British undercover police officer who was working with the FBI. He is currently fighting in court for the full disclosure of a Freedom of Information Act request detailing the contents of the 7,000+ pages the FBI has admitted they have collected, and fighting the Metropolitan Police in court over their use of 'national security' to violate Data Protection rules.

contact: halpin at csail dot mit dot edu

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*Useful Links*

https://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk
https://people.torproject.org/~ioerror/skunkworks/forensics/valencia-tracking-device/
http://campaignopposingpolicesurveillance.com/2015/04/28/we-are-all-targets-now/
http://www.verfassung-schuetzen.de/

Info

Day: 2015-08-15
Start time: 21:15
Duration: 01:00
Room: Project 2501
Track: Ethics, Society & Politics
Language: en

Links:

• iCalendar
• Spied Upon film project
• Black Helmet Productions

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