Infiltration and incitement
Go on any protest or demonstration and you will be filmed by the police. Those wielding the cameras are FIT (Forward Intelligence Teams). FIT Watch do their best to highlight what FIT are doing.
But they probably already know who you are, what you are doing, where you live, how you think.
Go to any meeting and you will always find at least one individual who does his or her best to disrupt, create negative vibes. People will leave as a result of their behaviour. Then there are others who are gung ho, suggest all sorts of ridiculous actions, which too many people get carried away with, but a moment’s calm reflection shows to be nonsense.
I used to to think these were simply nutters, dysfunctional people lacking in any common sense or social skills. Well now we know they are just as likely to be undercover police officers who are infiltrating, informing on and disrupting green and other activists.
According to Mark Kennedy aka Mark Stone, who spent seven years undercover infiltrating the climate change movement, there are at least 15 police infiltrators.
Mark Kennedy aka Mark Stone was exposed on Indymedia UK last autumn. He became known to the mainstream media who have since gone on a feeding frenzy when the Ratcliffe-on-Soar conspiracy trial collapsed through lack of evidence. We now know that Mark Kennedy had made secret recordings which showed those charged were innocent.
Since then three more have been exposed bringing the list of known police infiltrators to four – Lynn Watson, Mark Jacobs, Jim Boyling.
Lynn Watson posed as an environmental activist for five years, claiming to be a care worker living in Bournemouth.
Mark Jacobs, not thought to be his real name, infiltrated anarchist groups and had an affair with at least one woman. He did a huge amount of damage within Cardiff Anarchist Network where he was known as Marco. He claimed to be a landscape gardener and long-distance lorry driver.
Jim Boyling aka Jim Suttonn married an activist and had two children while working undercover with environmental group Reclaim the Streets! He even persuaded his ex-wife to change her name by deed poll so as not to raise the suspicions of senior officers. It is reported he has been suspended.
Sex was used as a means of obtaining information. Mark Kennedy aka Mark Stone in his interview with the Mail On Sunday last weekend claimed female activists used sex to interest men in the movement. This is something I have never observed or encountered.
A former undercover officer has said infiltrators were required to have sex with activists as part of the job!
Post a report or make a comment on Indymedia UK and your IP address is held in a temporary cache, then lost. This is to protect the ID of those who are posting, in the same way Wikileaks protects its sources. If you are leaking highly sensitive material, you would be advised to do somewhere anonymous where you are not known such as a library or net cafe and use a guest account .
Indymedia UK became suspicious of some posts and comments and so they installed a filter to examine where these were coming from. The posting were found to come from government servers on a secure network!
Police postings came to light following an internal investigation on persistent disinformation being published to Indymedia UK. Technically Indymedia is supposed to safeguard its posters by not logging IP addresses. In actual fact there are IP filters. Although IP addresses are only stored temporarily, those of persistent abusers are kept in order to prevent the site from being overwhelmed. Moderators of Indymedia UK identified the Gateway-303 server as being the source of numerous such posts. A filter was set up to capture the behaviour of the individual(s) who were hiding behind the server.
One IP address so identified was 62.25.109.196 , which correlates with the server gateway303.energis.gsi.gov.uk. There are similar servers, gateway-301 & gateway-302 with IP addresses 62.25.109.194 and 62.25.109.195 respectively. Other servers identified are gateway-101, gateway-202, gateway-201, etc
GSI stands for Government Secure Intranet. It is a network established by the UK Government to allow secure transfer of files across its computers. The Police National Network is separate from it, but can connect to it. Currently GSI is operated by Energis, a UK based internet company now owned by Cable & Wireless.
It is clear from the consistency of the usage of gateway-303 server that the IPs are probably assigned to particular premises or else specific units within the UK Government. One of the purposes of the GSI network is to provide a secure proxy network behind which users can maintain their anonymity. Hence the lack of solid information as to exactly who is behind the postings. However, SchNEWS is gonna take a stab in the dark (if only) as to who they are; in fact some actually signed NETCU. Of course it could be the old double bluff, but given the level of intelligence behind some of the postings even this level of sophistication seems unlikely.
The messages posted were smears and misinformation, incitement to break the law incitement to break up peaceful protests.
"No – stuff that – SHUT the place: Let's not all stand around like lemmings – lets shut the place! Bring ladders and wire cutters. If there are enough of us we can shut it!"
Postings even included personal phone numbers of targets for animal rights activists.
I personally have had direct experience of this when smears and falsehoods were posted on Indymedia UK to discredit certain individuals. What was posted was not true. How did I know? I was with the individuals at the time, thus I knew it was not true. I at the time said that what was being posted was not true, raising a big question mark against those were making these smears and more important what was their motive? They used to be regulars at the Anarchist Book fair in London running a stall.
What is all very odd these operations are run by Acpo, the Association of Chief Police Officers. Odder still is that it is a limited company.
Even PR companies are jumping on the bandwagon, but it is going to take a little more than a few splashes of greenwash to live their clients a clean image.
A couple of years ago CAAT was infiltrated by Martin Hogbin, a guy working for BAE-Systems. He was a nice guy, everyone not only liked him, they trusted him. He made himself indispensable and was soon running everything. I had direct experience of what he was up to. I let him know of something going down. Next thing I knew, there was BAE-Systems heavies everywhere.
Over a decade ago London Greenpeace had more infiltrators than real activists!
This all sounds like something out of Stalinist Russia, KGB infiltration of dissidents. But no, this is England and Wales over the last decade.
Practises that cannot and should not be tolerated in a free and democratic society. If nothing else it puts Wikileaks in context.
There is an urgent need for a full Judicial Inquiry. A facebook group has been formed.
I called for an independent Judicial Inquiry last week. Police State infiltration of activists has no place in a democratic society. The police should uphold the right to protest. It also undermines public confidence in the police. The police should be dealing with crime, not protesters who may at times carry out mild acts of civil disobedience, which has a long and honourable tradition of forcing peaceful democratic change. Infiltration should be of criminal gangs and drug dealers, people traffickers, not activists.
Monday female activists are to protest outside Scotland Yard in what they see as violation of their bodies by the state. [see Abuse of women by police must stop now!]
Tuesday the acting Met commissioner Tim Godwin and Commander Bob Broadhurst who is responsible for public order in London will have to appear before the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee to explain why they lied about undercover policing at the G20 protests in London in 2009.
Also see
Political police infiltration of activists
Eco-terrorism: the non-existent threat we spend millions policing
Undercover police: Officer A named as Lynn Watson
Third undercover police spy unmasked as scale of network emerges
Undercover police: Officer B identified as Mark Jacobs
Undercover policeman married activist he was sent to spy on
Ex-wife of police spy tells how she fell in love and had children with him
Police spy who married activist suspended from duty
Police spies lost in a moral maze
Undercover police cleared ‘to have sex with activists’
How could UKuncut deal with attempts at sabotage?
State infiltration of and attempted disruption of activist websites
Undercover police scandal: why we urgently need a judge-led inquiry
Emily Apple: ‘I can’t forgive Mark Kennedy’s betrayal of activists’
Anger as merger of ‘spy cop’ squads lumps protestors in with terrorists
By keithpp - originally published here on his blog - republished with permission.
this sorry situation was all the more serious in the case of this particular investigation as the evidence of an independent witness contradicted that of the police officers involved. the independent witness observed four metropolitan police officers set-about the two men with batons, as a prelude to flooring the arrestees, restraining them, and detaining them with the assistance of further colleagues - yet the investigating officer, inspector crispin lee, only found that one man had been struck with a baton (twice) by one officer, named pc hawkes. the independent witness could not be precise about how many times each officer hit each man (as the events were so swift), but made a statement to the effect that that officers executed between about two and five blows each, to the body and limbs - however, the investigation report misrepresented the evidence of the witness and claimed that the independent witness had stated that each man was hit to the body exactly five times, and, indeed, it was apparent that other evidence stated indefinitely by the independent witness was also misrepresented as definite by the investigation report. these afore-mentioned discrepancies, along with the fact that the independent witness could not give evidence concerning a confrontation involving two groups of young men and the police officers, due to the independent witness' standpoint and restricted view, were implicitly used to discredit the indepenedent witness' evidence wholesale. in addition, the independent witness is certain that he did not observe any struggle between the police officers and the detainees, nor, from his viewpoint, any struggle between the police and other members of the public, nor any struggles between members of the public themselves - yet the attendant police officers reported that all these things had happened. it was also apparent, from reading the investigation report, that one of the detainees was never interviewed in relation to the complaint against the police, and that two further men were arrested at the scene whose evidence was not sought by the investigating officer - facts which, in themselves, cast doubt as to the accuracy of the invetigation report, and as to whether both victims of the police attack were ever even correctly identified.
furthermore, the independent witness has remarked that the investigation into the complaint was dubiously suppressed and unreasonably delayed (predominately by the actions of ps puttock and pc langman) until after the two men had been tried and convicted for affray in the magistrates court - thus ensuring that the independent witness' evidence would not be submitted in the court-case.
the independent witness is convinced that inspector crispin lee has wilfully failed to investigate properly the circumstances of the arrest, that he has made a clumsy attempt to cover-up a clear incident of police brutality, and that the police officers present at the arrest, namely pc hawkes, ps keogh, pc thind, pc foley, pc driver, and pc tiley, have conspired to give false evidence by means of lying about and omitting vital details in respect of the circumstances of the arrest.