Category: Technologies of Control

Polish ecologists still under surveillance…

A let­ter, sent to all Pol­ish police head­quar­ters about an order to inves­ti­gate and gath­er infor­ma­tion about oppo­nents of build­ing the bypass through Rospu­da Val­ley has already been cir­cu­lat­ed around the Inter­net.

A let­ter, sent to all Pol­ish police head­quar­ters about an order to inves­ti­gate and gath­er infor­ma­tion about oppo­nents of build­ing the bypass through Rospu­da Val­ley has already been cir­cu­lat­ed around the Inter­net.

Although every­body laughs at the fact that the police are wast­ing their time keep­ing ecol­o­gists under sur­veil­lance the case is quite seri­ous because the pur­pose of this police action is defined as: “to gath­er infor­ma­tion about pos­si­ble dan­gers to pub­lic order and ille­gal sab­o­tage acts from orga­ni­za­tions which show their aver­sion to gov­ern­men­tal enter­prise”.

For the time being, it is not entire­ly obvi­ous what they are look­ing for and how this infor­ma­tion is going to be used by them but most prob­a­bly jour­nal­ists from www.zieloni.org.pl will also be under police sur­veil­lance (although we do not have any sab­o­tage plans, we show our “aver­sion” to gov­ern­men­tal project) that is why we’re going to observe con­stant­ly their plans and inform you sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly. Below you can read the let­ter to the police head­quar­ters.

The same let­ter was sent to all police head­quar­ters in Poland (a copy of the let­ter is avail­able from the web­site http://adamwajrak.blox.pl)

From: The Crime Divi­sion of The Police Head­quar­ters in Jele­nia Góra
To: The Police Head­quar­ters in Jele­nia Góra

TELEGRAM nr MJ-B-5421/38/07

On account of the orders includ­ed in doc­u­ment no WK II 146/06 from the Chief of the Police Sta­tion, Kon­rad Kor­na­tows­ki, dat­ed 19 Feb 2007 about the plans for build­ing the Augusów bypass (Pod­lask­ie province) I would like to ask to order sub­or­di­nate police­men to direct work of per­son­al sources of infor­ma­tion (and to recruit new ones) to gath­er infor­ma­tion about pos­si­ble dan­gers to pub­lic order and ille­gal sab­o­tage acts from orga­ni­za­tions which show their aver­sion to gov­ern­men­tal enter­prise.

All the infor­ma­tion should be sent to SMI WWK KWP in Wrocław (with “Rospu­da” in the sub­ject of the report) and The Crime Divi­sion from The Police Head­quar­ters in Jele­nia Góra should be informed at the same time.

One copy was made.

(sent via fax)

Writ­ten by JL

VICE GOVERNOR
of the Crime Divi­sion
The Police Head­quar­ters in Jele­nia Góra

Chief Inspec­tor Artur KRAWCZYK

[a com­ment by the author of the post] I am not sure what it sup­posed to be: is it a joke or should I start to pan­ic that we are under sur­veil­lance. I won­der what they are going to do with this infor­ma­tion and for what and where they are look­ing… It’s mad­ness! So far I count on free flow of infor­ma­tion and that they will restrain them­selves when they see that every­body has read these let­ters.

New ‘Writing To Prisoners’ Leaflet

Leeds ABC have pro­duced a new ‘Writ­ing To Pris­on­ers’ laflet. Basic text fol­lows, and it can also be down­loaded as a PDF, or a hard copy can be obtained by send­ing an SAE to Leeds ABC at the address below.

Leeds ABC have pro­duced a new ‘Writ­ing To Pris­on­ers’ laflet. Basic text fol­lows, and it can also be down­loaded as a PDF, or a hard copy can be obtained by send­ing an SAE to Leeds ABC at the address below.

Leaflet — pdf 109K

WRITING TO PRISONERS

Prob­a­bly the eas­i­est and arguably most impor­tant aspect of sup­port­ing pris­on­ers is writ­ing to them. One of the hard­est things for many pris­on­ers to cope with is the feel­ing of iso­la­tion – being cut off from friends and fam­i­ly and every­thing they know in their nor­mal lives. A let­ter or post­card from the real world, even from a com­plete stranger, helps to main­tain a con­nec­tion with the out­side, relieves the infer­nal tedi­um of a regime that often involves spend­ing 23 hours of the day in the same cell. For a first-time pris­on­er, espe­cial­ly in the ear­ly stages of a sen­tence, this type of sup­port can make a huge dif­fer­ence, help­ing them cope with the unfa­mil­iar and often intim­i­dat­ing sur­round­ings. For polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, vic­tims of mis­car­riages of jus­tice and those fight­ing back from with­in, it’s a sim­ple mes­sage of sol­i­dar­i­ty – you’re not on your own.

In many cas­es, con­tact from the out­side lets the prison author­i­ties know that there are peo­ple on the out­side who care and are mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion. For exam­ple, spe­cial dietary require­ments (veg­an etc) are more like­ly to be adhered to if an inmate is obvi­ous­ly not for­got­ten.

Please be aware that this isn’t meant to be a list of rules – we’re just try­ing to hon­est­ly answer some of the queries we get asked. And of course, the com­ments about prison pro­ce­dure only apply to UK pris­ons.

WHERE DO I FIND A PRISONER FROM?

Well, there’s cur­rent­ly around 80,000 to choose from in the UK alone but if you want to nar­row that down slight­ly the eas­i­est way is to con­tact one of the many anar­chist / ani­mal rights / pris­on­er sup­port groups you can find online. Be aware that pris­on­ers are often moved and mail not always for­ward­ed so if in doubt email or write to check details are up to date. You can con­tact Leeds ABC at the address below for a list of the pris­on­ers we cur­rent­ly sup­port both in the UK and fur­ther afield.

SO WHAT DO I WRITE THEN?

Ok this is the bit that trips most peo­ple up. You’re wor­ried about what you write might sound stu­pid, or make the pris­on­er feel worse or you sim­ply can’t think of any­thing. Of course if the pris­on­er is your mate then this bit is easy but what about a total stranger, some­one you know noth­ing about apart from their names, charges and sen­tence? Well, there’s no for­mu­la here but for the first let­ter you should intro­duce your­self. Tell them about your­self, what you do, what you’re into, where you got their address and so on. This breaks the ice and also makes a reply eas­i­er. Apart from that, just fill a side of A4 of what­ev­er you can think of – crap jokes, rem­i­nis­cences, what you did last Fri­day night after 10 pints etcetera. One for­mer inmate com­ment­ed to us that some of the best let­ters he received were an ongo­ing debate about the mer­its of var­i­ous Iron Maid­en songs which might seem inane but put a great big smile on his face once a week! Here’s a few point­ers that we’d like to remind you of:

1. Every let­ter is read by screws (the­o­ret­i­cal­ly at least) so don’t write any­thing that might incrim­i­nate your­self or oth­ers in any­thing dubi­ous. The rule of thumb here is don’t put any­thing in a let­ter that you would­n’t say to a cop­per’s face.

2. If the pris­on­er is in for a polit­i­cal charge you should obvi­ous­ly let them know you sup­port their actions but don’t start prais­ing them as some sort of hero to the cause. Rhetoric to the effect of “I’m in awe of your great sac­ri­fice blah, blah…” is frankly cringe­wor­thy. If some­one is banged up for a polit­i­cal action they don’t (or should­n’t!) want to be seen as mar­tyrs – they’re just nor­mal peo­ple unlucky enough to get caught, so write to them like nor­mal peo­ple rather than fawn­ing!

3. A lot of peo­ple seem wary of telling pris­on­ers about ‘fun’ stuff, think­ing it will depress them or make them feel home­sick hear­ing about peo­ple hav­ing a laugh on the out­side. This is rub­bish! They’ll already be home­sick and it’s just reas­sur­ing to hear nor­mal life is going on so don’t feel coy about men­tion­ing gigs, par­ties and rau­cous nights down the booz­er.

4. Always ask a few ques­tions like how they’re doing, plans they have for the future, what their inter­ests are, etc. but try to keep it gen­er­al and don’t make it sound like you’re being nosey. Bear­ing in mind that they might be reply­ing to a total stranger, it makes writ­ing a response a lot eas­i­er.

5. Sim­i­lar­ly, some back­ground about your­self, even seem­ing­ly triv­ial things like favourite bands, foot­ball teams etc, can make writ­ing a reply that bit eas­i­er…

6. Don’t EVER promise things you can’t deliv­er. If you build some­one’s hopes up about say vis­it­ing them, send­ing things into them, etc then you let them down, that’s well out of order and hard­ly con­sis­tent with sup­port­ing them.

7. Polit­i­cal lit­er­a­ture – be care­ful! Unless the pris­on­er asks for it avoid send­ing any over­ly con­tentious polit­i­cal mate­r­i­al in as it can poten­tial­ly cause them grief. Depend­ing on the pris­on­er’s sit­u­a­tion and how they “choose to do their time” unso­licit­ed sub­scrip­tions to lefty news­pa­pers for instance may cause unwant­ed has­sle with prison author­i­ties and oth­er inmates. In some cas­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly abroad, polit­i­cal lit­er­a­ture to remand­ed pris­on­ers may even be used against them at tri­al. There’s no prob­lem send­ing this kind of thing as long as you ask the pris­on­er first and always respect their wish­es.

8. Avoid turgid left­ie-isms! Phras­es like “my com­rades and I have resolved to pass a motion of sol­i­dar­i­ty” sound pompous and imper­son­al how­ev­er well mean­ing they might be. “We hope you’re doing ok” is a lot more friend­ly!

I’M NOT SURE I CAN MANAGE A FULL LETTER…

That’s fine. A quick mes­sage of sup­port on a post­card can still real­ly bright­en up some­one’s day or what about tak­ing a card to a gig or the pub and get­ting a few peo­ple to sign it?

HOW DO I MAKE SURE MY LETTER GETS IN?

Well the cor­rect postage would be a start (you’d be sur­prised!) and the cor­rect address ensur­ing the pris­on­er’s full name and prison num­ber are includ­ed. Put your name and address at the top of the let­ter and on the back of the enve­lope. These don’t have to be ‘real’ if you’ve got any reser­va­tions but bear in mind this is what the pris­on­er will see if they’re going to write you a reply. Some pris­ons will refuse to accept let­ters with ‘care of’ or PO Box address­es so it’s best to use a street address. Some pris­ons have rules for­bid­ding cer­tain imagery (e.g. gang sym­bols being banned from U.S pris­ons) and this may encom­pass polit­i­cal sym­bols as well so cir­cled A’s, scrawled all over the enve­lope may not be a good idea! Some­times hand-made cards with a pic­ture glued to the front may be refused or defaced in case any­thing’s con­cealed under­neath. If you want to make sure a pris­on­er gets a let­ter, you can send it by record­ed deliv­ery – then you can check with the Post Office whether the prison received it; and all record­ed mail is only sup­posed to be opened in the pris­on­er’s pres­ence.

WHAT ABOUT GETTING A REPLY?

Bear in mind that you’re doing this to sup­port the pris­on­er not to acquire a new pen-pal although the two might go hand in hand. You may not get a reply for sev­er­al rea­sons: obvi­ous­ly the pris­on­er might not have received your let­ter or they might be get­ting a lot of post if they’re for­tu­nate enough so might not have time to reply to all cor­re­spon­dence. They may be lim­it­ed in the num­ber of let­ters they can write by the prison author­i­ties and pre­fer to pri­ori­tise friends and fam­i­ly. They may not have access to suf­fi­cient writ­ing mate­ri­als or stamps, they may have been moved, or they may sim­ply not be very good at writ­ing let­ters. Regard­less, don’t be put out if there’s no reply and don’t let this deter you from con­tin­u­ing to write.

CAN I SEND ANYTHING ELSE IN?

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the file in a choco­late cake rou­tine isn’t going to work. The gold­en rule here is to ask the pris­on­er if you’ve got any doubts. You can always try con­tact­ing the prison, but they are noto­ri­ous­ly elu­sive, so you could spend ages try­ing to get through – for instance HMP Arm­ley has one phone line to cov­er 1250+ inmates. More to the point, screws have a habit of lying through their teeth, so don’t assume that the first answer you get will be any­thing close to the truth! The rules vary wide­ly between dif­fer­ent pris­ons and are some­times baf­fling. Food and toi­letries are not per­mit­ted in any pris­ons for obvi­ous rea­sons but some­times appar­ent­ly innocu­ous items are denied, for instance pho­tographs with the pris­on­ers face on them (actu­al­ly to stop pris­on­ers forg­ing ID cards!). If you send any­thing in, clear­ly write at the top of your let­ter what you’ve enclosed as this lessens the chances of light-fin­gered screws hav­ing off with it. Some things you might con­sid­er send­ing in are:

Books – you may be able to send used copies in but many pris­ons will only accept books from a recog­nised shop, dis­trib­u­tor or pub­lish­er so check first. It’s pos­si­ble to get round this in some cas­es if you know a sym­pa­thet­ic sec­ond-hand book­shop who will pack­age a used book with an offi­cial look­ingre­ceipt.. Screws may with­hold some lit­er­a­ture on the grounds of con­tent but this can gen­er­al­ly be dis­put­ed by the pris­on­er, cit­ing Human Rights leg­is­la­tion. Books and mag­a­zines are only meant to be cen­sored or refused if they’re racial­ly abu­sive, iden­ti­fy indi­vid­ual screws by name, or threat­en “good order and dis­ci­pline” (how­ev­er you choose to inter­pret that!). If you’ve any doubts again ask the pris­on­er.

Mag­a­zines – again the pol­i­cy varies so as above check first. Sur­pris­ing­ly, wide­ly avail­able pub­li­ca­tions are more like­ly to be refused while obscure zines may get through okay. This is because most pris­ons have an appoint­ed local newsagent which you have to use for ‘off the shelf’ pub­li­ca­tions. You pay for a mag­a­zine, news­pa­per or puz­zle book at the shop and give them the inmate’s prison num­ber and this is for­ward­ed to them. It’s even pos­si­ble to set up a sub­scrip­tion to a dai­ly news­pa­per this way.

Stamps – pol­i­cy varies (can you spot a pat­tern here?). Stamps are gold dust for pris­on­ers, if they can receive them, not only for send­ing let­ters but also as cur­ren­cy. Many pris­ons will not allow stamps and obvi­ous­ly screws will often pock­et them. UK pris­ons should all allow stamped-addressed envelopes in, which obvi­ous­ly makes it eas­i­er for a pris­on­er to reply. These are the safest bet (after all it’s hard­ly a huge out­lay) but write your address in pen­cil so the pris­on­er can remove it if they have a more impor­tant let­ter to send. If you want a reply, an SAE is real­ly a mat­ter of cour­tesy.

Cash – while the amount most pris­on­ers can spend on a week­ly basis is lim­it­ed, their actu­al income to spend on “lux­u­ries” such as usable razors, tobac­co, paper, phone cards etc is often micro­scop­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly if they are refus­ing work. On top of this, Ara­mark, the pri­vate com­pa­ny who run prison can­teens, only sell expen­sive brand-named prod­ucts, and incred­i­bly get away with sell­ing it at more than high-street prices! Funds from the out­side can there­fore be vital, but cash is not used in pris­ons and inmates have an ‘account’ with a cer­tain amount freed up each week as ‘spends’. Obvi­ous­ly if you’re send­ing more than a cou­ple of quid it’s worth check­ing first, but as a gen­er­al guide funds should only be sent as postal orders made payable to “The Gov­er­nor, HMP [prison name]”. It is imper­a­tive that the pris­on­er’s full name and prison num­ber is writ­ten clear­ly on the back, or they won’t get it.

Phone cards – a myth. Not that you can buy them now any­way but even when you could, phone cards from the out­side did­n’t work on prison phones! If you want to help some­one with the cost of calls to friends and fam­i­ly send them a postal order as they’ll have to buy cred­it inside.

Music, footwear, radios and oth­er mis­cel­la­neous goods – this varies so wide­ly that you have to check. Some pris­ons will accept almost any­thing, oth­ers will flat­ly refuse every­thing, often because pris­on­ers are made to save up their spends and buy goods from ‘approved’ mail-order retail­ers such as Argos instead.

BUT… THEY’RE CRIMINALS!

One con­cern that is often voiced to us is that that the peo­ple you are writ­ing to will be ‘dodgy’ in some way. After all, the media bom­bards us with the notion that every­one in prison is a smack-addict­ed, child-molest­ing ben­e­fit-scroung­ing can­ni­bal, and it’s only to be expect­ed that many peo­ple who have no per­son­al expe­ri­ence of prison are wary of con­tact­ing those inside. The sim­ple answer is that pris­on­ers are human, and of course there may be a small chance of encoun­ter­ing idiots – about the same sta­tis­ti­cal chance of encoun­ter­ing idiots any­where! If you are not com­fort­able about writ­ing to a par­tic­u­lar pris­on­er for what­ev­er rea­son, sim­ply end con­tact – we have heard of iso­lat­ed cas­es of peo­ple pos­ing as polit­i­cal pris­on­ers to draw in sup­port and let­ters, but these instances are so scarce that it real­ly is not worth wor­ry­ing about, and you can be assured that any pris­on­ers sup­port­ed by organ­i­sa­tions like the ABC would be dropped like hot bricks if there was any con­cern about their integri­ty.

USEFUL CONTACTS

The inter­net is a gold-mine of infor­ma­tion about prison resis­tance, but be aware that many sites aren’t updat­ed very reg­u­lar­ly, so some details can be inac­cu­rate. We’d rec­om­mend the fol­low­ing sites as good places to start:

BRIGHTON ABC — www.brightonabc.org.uk

Brighton’s Anar­chist Black Cross group keep a good web­site with up-to-date news and details of pris­on­ers, as well as links to oth­er groups.

NO MORE PRISONS — www.alternatives2prison.ik.com

This infor­ma­tive site cam­paigns for prison abo­li­tion.

HAVEN DISTRIBUTION — www.havendistribution.org.uk

Haven is a reg­is­tered char­i­ty who run an invalu­able ser­vice pro­vid­ing UK pris­on­ers with free books and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als.

GET IN TOUCH WITH US

If you want any fur­ther infor­ma­tion, please con­tact us. We do a reg­u­lar e‑mail bul­letin with updates on prison issues and a list of anar­chist pris­on­ers – let us know if you want to be added to this. We also do a dis­tro and pub­lish pam­phlets relat­ing to the prison strug­gle – get in touch for a full list. If you are writ­ing to us, please try to enclose a stamped addressed enve­lope or Inter­na­tion­al Reply Coupon if you want a reply.

Leeds ABC, PO Box 53, Leeds, LS8 4WP, Eng­land
LeedsABC@riseup.net
http://www.myspace.com/leedsabc

ID-DAY — National Day of Action against ID CARDS 26/3/07

DEFY ID CARDS & THE DATABASE STATE

TAKE BIG BROTHER DOWN

ID-DAY

Is a nation­al day of autonomous action against ID cards and the Data­base state.
Across the coun­try peo­ple will be protest­ing against the open­ing of the new ID ‘enrol­ment’ cen­tres.

DEFY ID CARDS & THE DATABASE STATE

TAKE BIG BROTHER DOWN

ID-DAY

Is a nation­al day of autonomous action against ID cards and the Data­base state.
Across the coun­try peo­ple will be protest­ing against the open­ing of the new ID ‘enrol­ment’ cen­tres.

Call for workshops at the Earth First! Summer Gathering 2007

This year’s gath­er­ing is from 18 — 22 July in Nor­folk, near a main­line rail­way sta­tion.

The focus is on prac­ti­cal skills, but there will also be many of the reg­u­lar diverse and inter­est­ing work­shops.

EF! summer gathering 2007 logoThis year’s gath­er­ing is from 18 — 22 July in Nor­folk, near a main­line rail­way sta­tion.

The focus is on prac­ti­cal skills, but there will also be many of the reg­u­lar diverse and inter­est­ing work­shops.

The idea is to have mul­ti­ple work­shop ses­sions, e.g. four two-hour slots spread over four days build­ing up skills in a par­tic­u­lar area, so peo­ple can learn the basic skills to actu­al­ly do the job at oth­er mobil­i­sa­tions, events like the cli­mate camp — or wher­ev­er. For exam­ple plumb­ing, elec­tri­cal skills, medics…and what­ev­er else peo­ple want to do… It’s not just about the prac­ti­cal skills but also about get­ting to know each oth­er and start­ing to work togeth­er.

If you would like to offer a work­shop please write to:
martinshaw64@riseup.net

Thanks — the EF! sum­mer gath­er­ing col­lect­ing
Gen­er­al con­tact details etc at http://www.earthfirstgathering.org.uk/

please for­ward to peo­ple you think would be inter­est­ed.

The Campaign Against Prison Slavery

The Cam­paign Against Prison Slav­ery is a group set up to try to expose the real­i­ty of prison labour, how lit­tle of it teach­es skills that can be used after release and which could help reduce the chances of re-offend­ing.

The Cam­paign Against Prison Slav­ery is a group set up to try to expose the real­i­ty of prison labour, how lit­tle of it teach­es skills that can be used after release and which could help reduce the chances of re-offend­ing.

We also seek to expose the pri­vate com­pa­nies that have con­tracts with pris­ons that are mak­ing huge prof­its using pris­on­er labour while the pris­on­ers are paid pen­nies an hour, any los­es incurred by the prison indus­tries con­tracts are cov­ered by the tax pay­er.

CAPS now has a new web­site www.againstprisonslavery.org and the con­tact details are:

Cam­paign Against Prison Slav­ery
P.O. Box 74
Brighton
BN1 4ZQ
E‑mail: againstprisonslavery@riseup.net

Invitation to the Biovision 2007 counter-summit

This mes­sage is adressed to all peo­ple in Europe who want to resist active­ly GMO’s, cloning, nano-tech­nolo­gies, bio­met­rics, DNA reg­is­tra­tion, indus­tri­al exper­i­ments upon ani­mals, BioPatent and more gen­er­al­ly agro­chem­i­cal multi­na­tion­al pol­i­cy.

This mes­sage is adressed to all peo­ple in Europe who want to resist active­ly GMO’s, cloning, nano-tech­nolo­gies, bio­met­rics, DNA reg­is­tra­tion, indus­tri­al exper­i­ments upon ani­mals, BioPatent and more gen­er­al­ly agro­chem­i­cal multi­na­tion­al pol­i­cy.

If it is pos­si­ble for you to take a few days off between the 9th and the 14th of March, 2007 and if you have the means to come to Lyon (France), we invite you to take part in our Sum­mit against Biovision/Biosquare.

The Biovision/Biosquare Forum is the biggest Euro­pean Forum and one of the three biggest world­wide on Biotech­nolo­gies. This Forum takes place every odd year in Lyon. On the one hand it is an instru­ment of pro­pa­gan­da (Bio­vi­sion) in favour of biotech­nolo­gies and on the oth­er a mar­ket (Biosquare) where sci­en­tists pro­pose to sell indus­tri­al appli­ca­tions to com­pa­nies of the sec­tor.

The oth­er years Biosquare is held in a Swiss city (Gene­va in 2006, Basle in 2004, Zurich in 2002) while Bio­vi­sion is held from now on in a large town of a coun­try of the south (in 2006 in Alexan­dria, Egypt).

By the time, this Forum has become a full-time lob­by­ing machin­ery in favour of biotech­nolo­gies. It aims to the cre­ation of jobs with high incomes in the area and to decide our future.

If you choose to oppose to biotech­nolo­gies as we do, we invite you to con­tact ( nonabiovision@no-log.org) and to join us.

We will be able to accom­mo­date a cer­tain num­ber of peo­ple, but it can be more pleas­ant for you to pay hotel rooms if you can or to stay at a friend’s house.

It will be pos­si­ble to park car­a­vans or bus­es. Also we would appre­ci­ate all kind of help, for instance if you could come one week in advance.

If you can­not come, watch out : a cyber-action is already being planned.

See more…
www.rebellyon.info/spikini/biopognon/PagePrincipale

nonabiovision@no-log.org

Why suppress Biovision/Biosquare? — 11–14th March, Lyon, France

From the 11th to the 14th of March 2007, the fifth edi­tion of Biovision/Biosquare Forum is going to take place in Lyon. These meet­ings are now con­sid­ered to be the biggest meet­ing in the world on biotech­nolo­gies. Stop Bio­vi­sion!

From the 11th to the 14th of March 2007, the fifth edi­tion of Biovision/Biosquare Forum is going to take place in Lyon. These meet­ings are now con­sid­ered to be the biggest meet­ing in the world on biotech­nolo­gies. Stop Bio­vi­sion!

Accord­ing to the orga­niz­ers :
« Bio­vi­sion : the world forum of life-sci­ences is an inter­na­tion­al plat­form for dia­logue, debate and con­struc­tive pro­pos­als for action, bring­ing togeth­er equal num­bers of rep­re­sen­ta­tives of civ­il soci­ety, sci­en­tists, indus­tri­al­ists and politi­cians on glob­al top­ics about health, food and envi­ron­ment. »
For 2007 the « mil­len­ni­um objec­tives for devel­op­ment » are announced as the major top­ic of the forum. These objec­tives include reduc­ing the extreme pover­ty on the plan­et by half, pro­vid­ing pri­ma­ry edu­ca­tion for all chil­dren and stop­ping the spread of the aids virus.

Behind this seduc­tive show­case lurks a pro­pa­gan­da tool to pro­mote accep­tance of biotech­nolo­gies, and a mar­ket­place where con­tracts are signed between research cen­ters and indus­tries (Biosquare), every­thing being of course spon­sored by big agri­cul­tur­al, chem­i­cal and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­tries.
Those firms, you know them : for exam­ple, Pfiz­er and Sanofi-Aven­tis (respec­tive­ly n°1 and n°3 in health care ), Bay­er (n°1 in the world in phy­tosan­i­tary prod­ucts) or, near Lyon, Rhone-Poulenc and Bio­merieux.

Where­as the eco­log­i­cal dev­as­ta­tion direct­ly relat­ed to these indus­tries is more and more oppres­sive (cli­mat­ic warm­ing, deplet­ing the reserves of drink­able water, men­ac­ing the diver­si­ty of species, mul­ti­ply­ing dan­ger­ous­ly pol­lut­ed sites…) Where­as GMO seeds trap farm­ers in depen­dence on multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies Where­as patents on mol­e­cules hin­der access to vac­ci­na­tions and treat­ments for the most vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tions fac­ing most seri­ous health risks Where­as less than 10% of com­mer­cialised chem­i­cal prod­ucts have been test­ed for poten­tial risk (cf Green­peace) and at the same time can­cer has increased 60% in France in the last twen­ty years Where­as those com­pa­nies have already been respon­si­ble for many scan­dals (Zyk­lon B, Roundup, Gau­cho, AZF, Bhopal, Sévéso …) Where­as the sci­en­tif­ic basis of genet­ic ther­a­py has not been estab­lished and research in this field is lit­tle more than tin­ker­ing.

Why would com­pa­nies that are respon­si­ble to a large degree for the cat­a­stroph­ic sit­u­a­tion in coun­tries of the south­ern hemi­sphere, sud­den­ly turn around and pay to allay the suf­fer­ings of the pop­u­la­tions of those same coun­tries ?

It is pri­mar­i­ly for them a way to cap­ture new inter­na­tion­al mass mar­kets for vac­cines, med­i­cines, seeds, chem­i­cals for agri­cul­ture and to appear phil­an­thropic at the same time. Thus they can con­tin­ue the pil­lage and eco­log­i­cal destruc­tion of the south­ern coun­tries while being sup­port­ed by the politi­cians of the rich ones.

It is impor­tant to empha­size that our elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives are active­ly sup­port­ing this meet­ing. The city of Lyon, the depart­ment of the Rhone, and the Region of Rhone-Alps are con­tribut­ing 2 532 000 euros to this event.

If the Bio­vi­sion Forum is tak­ing place in Lyon it is not an acci­dent but the result of eco­nom­ic inter­ests and the polit­i­cal deter­mi­na­tion (those meet­ings have been cre­at­ed by Ray­mond Barre, ex may­or of Lyon and are direct­ed by Phillipe Demarescaux, ex direc­tor of Rhone-Poulenc, and pres­i­dent of The sci­en­tif­ic foun­da­tion of Lyon ) of the Region of Rhone Alps to become the Euro­pean cen­ter for biotech­nolo­gies (Lyon) and nan­otech­nolo­gies (Greno­ble).

Where­as the Rhone-Alps Region declared itself a « non-GMO region » (dec­la­ra­tion n°04.00.193 of 28th and 29th of April 2004) and the major­i­ty of its pop­u­la­tion is against the spread of GMO.
Those polit­i­cal choic­es— so con­trary to the ideals of democ­ra­cy and the com­mon inter­ests of the people—are intol­er­a­ble. The pol­i­cy of always more « progress » for more and more prof­its has to stop now !

It is OUR future that is at stake. We want to decide by our­selves inde­pen­dent from the impe­ri­al­ism of big firms. We are invit­ing every­one to a mobil­i­sa­tion against this Forum of 2007, and to do all that we can to insure that it will be the last.

Col­lec­tif des resis­tances et des alter­na­tives de Lyon.
con­tact :  nonabiovision@no-log.org

GAGGED! #15 — South Wales Anarchist Newsletter

GAGGED! #15 Jan/Feb 07 anti-copy­right
South Wales Anar­chist Newslet­ter • southwalesanarchists.org • PO Box 70, New­port NP20 5XX
Much pret­ti­er here (with pics etc) on pdf —  http://lists.riseup.net/www/d_read/gagged/gagged15.pdf

GAGGED! #15 Jan/Feb 07 anti-copy­right
South Wales Anar­chist Newslet­ter • southwalesanarchists.org • PO Box 70, New­port NP20 5XX
Much pret­ti­er here (with pics etc) on pdf —  http://lists.riseup.net/www/d_read/gagged/gagged15.pdf

Star-buck­ing the con­sumer trend
Cof­fee Not Bombs hits New­port!!
Armed with only Zap­atista cof­fee, soya milk, sug­ar, a gas burn­er & a load of paper cups lib­er­at­ed from a near­by tourist attrac­tion, South Wales anar­chists took on the might of con­sumer cap­i­tal­ism in New­port town cen­tre on Sat­ur­day 16 Decem­ber 2006.
Sport­ing bad hang­overs & an inter­est­ing line in black San­ta hats (Bah Hum­bug! Save the Plan­et!), activists dis­trib­uted free cof­fee, leaflets & issues of Gagged! to bemused passers-by, many of whom stopped for grate­ful­ly-received cup­pa & a chat.
The action, which took place out­side a local out­let of cor­po­rate cof­fee whores Star­bucks, also fea­tured live music (thank­ful­ly drown­ing out the Sal­va­tion Army Brass Band up the road), & a large group of mosh­ing youths.
Cof­fee, after oil, is the sec­ond largest export in the world; with a turnover of about 10 bil­lion dol­lars, Its pro­duc­tion employs 25 mil­lion peo­ple in the south­ern hemi­sphere. While Star­bucks enjoys record prof­its, its cof­fee farm­ers can’t even afford to ade­quate­ly feed their chil­dren on the 2–50¢/lb they are paid for cof­fee that sells for at least $10/lb. The Zap­atis­tas are a rev­o­lu­tion­ary anti-cor­po­rate social move­ment from Chi­a­pas, Mex­i­co, who are fight­ing for the auton­o­my of the indige­nous pop­u­la­tion as a solu­tion to their immense pover­ty. Their organ­ic cof­fees rais­es mon­ey direct­ly for the autonomous com­mu­ni­ties that pro­duced it.
Accord­ing to Cred­it Action, the total amount of UK per­son­al debt has exceed­ed £1 tril­lion. With con­sumerism being used as a buy-off to stop us whing­ing about unpop­u­lar neo-colo­nial wars fought in our name, why not organ­ise a Food/Coffee not Bombs demo of your own?
All it takes is a lit­tle bit of inge­nu­ity & culi­nary nous. You can then bring the bat­tle to your local high street, engage with the com­mu­ni­ty & intro­duce peo­ple to a non-con­sumer take on their cof­fee break.
Check out: www.foodnotbombs.net

PIPELINE TO DISASTER
Resis­tance from local peo­ple & cli­mate action groups is con­tin­u­ing against the con­tro­ver­sial gas pipeline being carved across South Wales. The Liq­uid Nat­ur­al Gas (LNG) pipeline will run 115 miles from Mil­ford Haven to Glouces­ter­shire car­ry­ing gas from the Mid­dle East. It is the high­est pres­sure pipeline ever to have been attempt­ed in Europe. It’s builders, Nation­al Grid (for­mer­ly TRANSCO) have pub­licly admit­ted they have no expe­ri­ence of run­ning a 48â€? pipeline at 94bar pres­sure.
Many res­i­dents along the route of the pipeline feel they haven’t been prop­er­ly con­sult­ed, some feel bul­lied & deceived, with some peo­ple hav­ing their homes com­pul­so­ri­ly pur­chased. There have been many safe­ty con­cerns as the pipe is being laid across the only earth­quake zone in Britain, parts of it on land deemed too unsta­ble for hous­es. The gas is odour­less so peo­ple wouldn’t know if there was a leak yet the Health & Safe­ty Exec­u­tive have guar­an­teed that a hole will appear in the pipeline with­in 30 years. In Tre­banos, near Swansea, the land was deemed too unsta­ble for mains gas to the vil­lage; now they’re build­ing Europe’s biggest gas pipeline! Mil­ford Haven cam­paign group Safe Haven has tried to chal­lenge the devel­op­ment through the courts, but could­n’t even get a decent hear­ing.
On 12th Novem­ber activists set up camp on the route, a 60ft sec­tion of pipeline was occu­pied for over a week halt­ing all build­ing work in the area. They explained: “We’ve tak­en this direct action, in part­ner­ship with local res­i­dents, to active­ly stop this project because we believe that non-renew­able ener­gy belongs in the past & we need to look to a future of renew­able sources or we’ll have no future at all!â€?. The protest suc­cess­ful­ly got the Depart­ment of Trade & Indus­try to revoke the per­mis­sion to blast with explo­sives as Nation­al Grid orig­i­nal­ly planned. How­ev­er there is still con­cern about avalanch­es, sim­i­lar to those of Aber­fan & Pan­teg, as the pipe cross­es old mine work­ings.
On 16th Novem­ber a protest site was start­ed along a sec­tion of the Pem­brokeshire Coastal Path in the shad­ow of the LNG ter­mi­nals, cut­ting across the route of con­nect­ing pipelines. Nation­al Grid had­n’t both­ered to apply for the pub­lic access­way to be closed for con­struc­tion work so locals in the Mil­ford Haven area, inspired by the protest camp in Tre­banos, took their chance. Tra­cy Mor­ris, a mem­ber of the Safe Haven Net­work & local moth­er of three, plant­ed a tent direct­ly across the foot­path, & Nation­al Grid were oblig­ed to put a fence around it. The camp per­sists, manned by a small but deter­mined band of locals, some of pen­sion­able age. “Some peo­ple think we’re crazy, but I don’t care any­more” says Tra­cy. “I’ll fight them to the bit­ter end.”
Things just seem to be going from bad to worse for Nation­al Grid. In Novem­ber they received huge con­dem­na­tion after some of their 4x4 vehi­cles tore up an untouched upland bog near Myny­dd Myddfai in the Bre­con Bea­cons. The nation­al park author­i­ty said “the frag­ile nature of the area makes it almost impos­si­ble to put right any dam­ageâ€? & went on to release a 67 page doc­u­ment con­demn­ing the pipeline & its “huge envi­ron­men­tal impactâ€?.
Pres­sure against con­trac­tors con­tin­ued with a demon­stra­tion out­side British Gas HQ in Cardiff. Ban­ners were held & leaflets dis­trib­uted amongst the work­ers. A British Gas spokesper­son claimed they have noth­ing to do with the pipeline. Fun­ny that because the project is the brain child of Cen­tri­ca (who own British Gas). British Gas joint­ly own Drag­on LNG & have a 50% stake in the com­pa­ny trans­port­ing the gas to the Mil­ford Haven.
On 8th Jan­u­ary a new site was set up in Tre­banos under the cov­er of dark­ness at 4am whilst the secu­ri­ty slept! The site is on pub­lic foot­paths lead­ing into the con­struc­tion site off Glyn Meirch road, & is block­ing vehi­cles from gain­ing access.
Activists & locals have vowed to con­tin­ue the fight against the pipeline. We are being thrown head first in to cli­mate chaos & our gov­ern­ments are still build­ing infra­struc­ture for non renew­able fos­sil fuels. What we need is renew­able ener­gy & we need it now, not in 20 years!
The pipeline is already well over sched­ule & mas­sive­ly over bud­get. We demand that this pipeline project is scrapped.
Peo­ple are urgent­ly need­ed to help occu­py the sites.
Get in con­tact for direc­tions.
Mil­ford Haven camp: Tra­cy Mor­ris 07752698489 or Jim Dunck­ley 07933082239
Tre­banos camp: Site Phone 07733190958 or Rachel Evans 07790450747
or set up a protest camp along the route your­self!

ANOTHER DEATH IN CUSTODY
On 29th Decem­ber a 58 year woman died in cus­tody at Swansea Cen­tral Police sta­tion. She (unnamed at this time) was arrest­ed for a dri­ving offense. para­medics were called but could not revive her. The cause of death is unknown or how long she had been held. The case is to be inves­ti­gat­ed by Inde­pen­dent Police Com­plaints Com­mis­sion. But just like the over 1,000 deaths in police cus­tody it is unlike­ly any­one will be held respon­si­ble. Only 3 police offi­cers have been in over 10 years.

Chant­i­ng Ban?!
In GAGGED 14 we brought you the news that the Met want to bring in in new laws that ban the wear­ing of masks at protests & to make the burn­ing of flags a crim­i­nal offense. Now they want to out­law ‘offensive chants’.
Met Assis­tant Com­mis­sion­er, Tarique Ghaf­fur wants pow­ers to pro­scribe protest chants & slo­gans on plac­ards, ban­ners & head­bands. The call comes as part of a review of the pow­ers to police protests prompt­ed by recent protests by Islam­ic extrem­ists, but clear­ly such pow­ers could also be used against pro­test­ers such as ani­mal rights & anti-glob­al­i­sa­tion activists. The civ­il rights group Lib­er­ty said the pow­ers would make the police “cen­sors in chief”.
Chuf­fer of the Met stat­ed, “What we are see­ing in effect is a rise in the politi­ci­sa­tion of mid­dle Eng­landâ€?. Again the State seem to be tak­ing the approach of sti­fling pub­lic dis­sent rather than tack­ling the issues that give rise to the politi­ci­sa­tion in the first place.
At the moment ‘causing offense’ is not against the law. Who would be the judge of what would be classed as caus­ing offense? Clear­ly what offends one will not nec­es­sar­i­ly offend anoth­er. Such pro­posed pow­ers would clash with arti­cle 10 of the Euro­pean Con­ven­tion on Human Rights, which pro­tects free­dom of expres­sion.
These new demands for curbs on the right to protest come as the Lords rule that police had act­ed unlaw­ful­ly in detain­ing a bus full of Iraq war pro­test­ers head­ing for a demon­stra­tion at RAF Fair­ford in March 2003 & forcibly turn­ing them back. Clear­ly the police are unable to keep a lid on protest with exist­ing laws, so rather than being “Tough on the caus­es of crimeâ€?, Tony Blair’s mantra from the 1997 elec­tion, they think it eas­i­er to invent new laws to fur­ther erode civ­il lib­er­ty in this coun­try.

STOCK TRANSFER
WHAT THEY ARE NOT TELLING US
Coun­cil ten­ants are being asked by Tor­faen Coun­cil to vote for stock trans­fer of our homes to a reg­is­tered social land­lord (Bron Afon Com­mu­ni­ty Hous­ing). What we are not being told is what oth­er Coun­cil assets will be trans­ferred to Bron Afon Com­mu­ni­ty Hous­ing in the process.
In a let­ter of reply to a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion request, Tor­fean Coun­cil stat­ed that:
“no deci­sion has been made about what oth­er assets would trans­fer. This is a deci­sion that will be made by nego­ti­a­tion between Bron Afon Com­mu­ni­ty Hous­ing and Tor­fean Coun­ty Bor­ough Coun­cil after the ten­ants’ bal­lot, if ten­ants vote in favour of transfer.â€?
If stock trans­fer goes ahead we could see com­mu­ni­ty owned assets such as play­ing fields, parks, green spaces, allot­ments, local shop­ping cen­tres, car parks, etc hand­ed over to Bron Afon Com­mu­ni­ty Hous­ing Trust.
The deci­sion on whether to trans­fer these assets will affect all the res­i­dents of Tor­faen who have paid for these over the years, not just coun­cil ten­ants.
The peo­ple of Tor­fean should be very con­cerned and demand to know all the facts con­cern­ing stock trans­fer before any bal­lot is held.
See the case against stock trans­fer: www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk

Oh to be a migrant
You could leave your fam­i­ly, friends, home. Risk your life in search of a bet­ter one. You could sur­vive, unlike the 1000s that die cross­ing oceans & bor­ders around the world every year. You could enter the UK.
You could be impris­oned in one of its 12 pri­vate­ly run deten­tion cen­tres, where you could be sub­ject to phys­i­cal, men­tal, & racist abuse.
You could be deport­ed back ‘home’ where you could face war, tor­ture, rape, repres­sion, impris­on­ment — all of which you could have been flee­ing in the first place.
You could be work­ing in degrad­ing con­di­tions on the black mar­ket — clean­ing, pros­ti­tu­tion, wait­ing… liv­ing a pre­car­i­ous, invis­i­ble exis­tence, hid­ing in the shad­ows, nev­er sure, nev­er know­ing when you might be seen & sent back.
You could final­ly have your sto­ry believed & allowed to live in the UK. You could then be sub­ject to racist harass­ment from nar­row mind­ed big­ots & a racist mass media.
You could won­der whether it is pos­si­ble for any­one to live a free & dig­ni­fied life in a world order run for the rich by the rich.
You could say enough! Join all those who oppose immi­gra­tion con­trols, deten­tion cen­tres & depor­ta­tions. You could fight for a world were peo­ple & plan­et are placed before prof­it!
A demon­stra­tion has been called by No Bor­ders Lon­don out­side Har­mondsworth & Colnbrook deten­tion cen­tres — 11.30 am Sat­ur­day 10 Feb­ru­ary 2007. www.barbedwirebritain.org.uk

JUST A MINUTE
2006 her­ald­ed a new era for CAN, fol­low­ing the genius idea that min­utes be tak­en at the meet­ings & then sub­se­quent­ly post­ed on the inter­web. Apart from being an effi­cient way of inform­ing inter­est­ed peo­ple of what is going on, it is also an excel­lent oppor­tu­ni­ty to obtain cheap laughs at the expense of friends, com­rades & forced acquain­tances. The lat­ter has actu­al­ly become the rai­son d’etre of the whole scheme, but if one reads between the lines, it is in fact still pos­si­ble to find out about actions & events, both local­ly & world-wide.
It has also been a form of out­reach to peo­ple who don’t feel com­fort­able /don’t like/are too busy to come to meet­ings, a fact all too eas­i­ly for­got­ten by us meet­ing junkies.
The meet­ings are sup­posed to be facil­i­tat­ed on a hor­i­zon­tal, every­one-gets-a-say, no-one hogs the lime­light basis, with a foun­da­tion of calm effi­cien­cy. This hasn’t ever hap­pened. The style so far has wan­dered between aggres­sive ruth­less­ness & uncon­scious­ness, result­ing in an atmos­phere of res­ig­na­tion & dread. It real­ly is some­thing to see & we’re sure that if you came to a meet­ing it would be some­thing you could talk about for years to come.
The four main top­ics that we dis­cuss are, (in no par­tic­u­lar order), Anti-Mil­i­tarism, G8, ID Cards & Cli­mate Change. There’s always room for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of oth­er sub­jects after these though. Sub­jects cov­ered so far have includ­ed free par­ties, bats, badges, local author­i­ty hous­ing, film nights, the web site & home-made wine. Sure­ly some­thing there for every­one.
The last sec­tion of the meet­ing is extreme­ly rigid in its struc­ture, & takes the form of the ques­tion “Where are we going for a pint then?â€?. We adjourn to a near­by pub for an increase in bel­ly laughs & to com­plain about the how the meet­ing we were just at was. Come to the dark side…
To have a look/chuckle at the min­utes, go to cardiff.revolt.org/about%20us/minutes.htm

Racist Cardiff cops in fake air­port ter­ror alert
Under Sched­ule 7 of the Ter­ror­ism Act 2000, a police offi­cer has pow­ers to detain for up to 9 hours ‘whether or not he has grounds for sus­pect­ing that a per­son’ is a ter­ror­ist. Yes, you did read that right. If a plod doesn’t like the look of you, he can keep you locked up for hours on end, even if he hasn’t got any real rea­son for it. This is what hap­pened to Aisha Pritchard & her Pales­tin­ian hus­band Sadi Elhaloul when they were due to fly to Dubai for a 4 day break on 14th Decem­ber. After going through the usu­al secu­ri­ty pro­ce­dures, just before they board­ed the plane they were hauled off for ‘questioning’ by some bone­head­ed spe­cial-branch red­neck. After being released with­out charge they’d missed their flight, & were left with 2 expen­sive non-refund­able tick­ets. Ms Pritchard, from Cardiff, said:
“Why was the lug­gage for­ward­ed to the aero­plane, our e‑tickets issued & our names put through the com­put­er with no prob­lems? Why was it only when we went to the board­ing gate & they looked at Sadi’s pass­port, were we ques­tioned & detained?
Why, if we were a risk, was our lug­gage tak­en off the plane one hour & 45 min­utes after it had been put on? We feel we were delib­er­ate­ly stopped from board­ing the plane, that it was racist & because we are Mus­lims. As I am white, British & this is the coun­try of all my ances­tors, I feel I am pay­ing a price for mar­ry­ing a for­eign­er. What hap­pened to free­dom & rights?â€?
The answer is sim­ple. Free­dom & rights go out the win­dow when blood-thirsty, ambi­tious, mass-mur­der­ing politi­cians pass dra­con­ian anti-ter­ror laws that give more & more pow­ers to small-mind­ed racist local pigs who know they can get away with shit­ty abus­es of pow­er like this on a day-to-day basis with­out reproach. We’re edg­ing towards a police state one nasty lit­tle bit of leg­is­la­tion at a time, & what free­dom we ever had is being erod­ed more & more in the name of fake ‘democracy’ & ‘security’.

From our cor­re­spon­dent in… Pales­tine
Israel occu­pied the Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries of the West Bank & the Gaza strip in the war of 1967 between Israel & the Arab states. Since then Israel has main­tained its’ mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion, sub­ject­ing Pales­tini­ans to Israeli mil­i­tary law (far harsh­er than civil­ian law) & estab­lish­ing set­tle­ments to take more land for Israeli use thus frag­ment­ing the ter­ri­to­ry of any future Pales­tin­ian state, effec­tive­ly mak­ing it unwork­able.
The occu­pa­tion costs $12 bil­lion annu­al­ly. It would not be sus­tain­able with­out inter­na­tion­al sup­port for Israel. 80% of US for­eign aid goes to Israel — $8 bil­lion per year. In 2005 Israeli PM Ariel Sharon orches­trat­ed the ‘dis­en­gage­ment’ — with­draw­al of all 9,000 Israeli set­tlers who lived in Gaza. But since then, more than that num­ber of new set­tlers have moved into the West Bank, & the absence of Israelis liv­ing in Gaza has left the Israeli army free to con­duct inva­sions & airstrikes, dev­as­tat­ing Pales­tin­ian infra­struc­ture & killing peo­ple dai­ly.
In 2003 Israel start­ed build­ing its’ ‘sep­a­ra­tion bar­ri­er’ (or ‘apartheid wall’) between Israel & the West Bank. It cuts 25 kilo­me­tres into the West Bank in some places, stretch­ing around most set­tle­ments, steal­ing land & water sources & sep­a­rat­ing Pales­tin­ian vil­lages from each oth­er or their land. Some, like Azzoun Atme, are com­plete­ly sur­round­ed by the wall with res­i­dents only able to leave & enter their vil­lage by pass­ing through a ter­mi­nal manned by Israeli sol­diers who turn them back at whim. Vis­it­ing there was like vis­it­ing a prison — being searched & scru­ti­nised by sol­diers behind bul­let­proof glass. Israel jus­ti­fies this wall, like all the oth­er bru­tal­i­ties & humil­i­a­tions it sub­jects Pales­tini­ans to, as nec­es­sary to pro­tect Israel against sui­cide bomb­ings & attacks by home-made ‘Qas­sam’ rock­ets. But it was obvi­ous to me that the dai­ly cru­el­ty & vio­lence towards Pales­tini­ans is much more like­ly to cre­ate frus­tra­tion & rage which lead to vio­lence. This log­ic of pre­vent­ing ‘ter­ror­ism’ also fails to account for the route of the wall, steal­ing Pales­tin­ian land & resources at every turn.
Much of my time in Pales­tine was dur­ing the olive har­vest. Olives are Palestine’s largest prod­uct. Many farm­ers have trou­ble access­ing their land. It could be on the ‘wrong’ side of the wall, or close to an Israeli set­tle­ment. Israeli & for­eign vol­un­teers accom­pa­ny farm­ers to doc­u­ment & inter­vene in attacks by Israeli set­tlers or harass­ment by the army. I saw sol­diers chas­ing a fam­i­ly off their land close to an Israeli check­point. Anoth­er vol­un­teer was with a fam­i­ly who had a group of young Israeli set­tlers throw rocks at them while sol­diers stood by. This is typ­i­cal dur­ing olive har­vest sea­son.
I saw in Pales­tine a soci­ety crip­pled by forty years of increas­ing­ly bru­tal Israeli occu­pa­tion, & now fur­ther suf­fer­ing due to the severe eco­nom­ic cri­sis caused by with­draw­al of inter­na­tion­al aid to the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty since Hamas was elect­ed in Jan­u­ary (moral of that sto­ry: democ­ra­cy is great, as long as you elect who the USA & the EU want). Hope is in short sup­ply, as every­one strug­gles to sur­vive. Activism con­tin­ues, but many have learned that demon­strat­ing very often leads to vio­lent reprisals by the Israeli army, & lit­tle if any pos­i­tive change. But as our neigh­bour Issa point­ed out, in Pales­tine, dai­ly life IS resis­tance, & as long as he is there, he has hope.
If you can see the injus­tice of this sit­u­a­tion get informed & involved! Info: eisoj.livejournal.com or  eisoj@care2.com
Check out: www.breakingthesilence.co.il www.palsolidarity.org & www.iwps.info

NHS: Not Free for All
While the NHS was set up to pro­vide health care for all based on need & not an abil­i­ty to pay, this is not the case for us all.
In April 2004 the Gov­ern­ment tight­ened up restric­tions on free health care to ‘overseas vis­i­tors’, in response to the per­ceived threat to the NHS of peo­ple com­ing to the UK specif­i­cal­ly for free med­ical treat­ment. In fact, as point­ed out by a 2006 Refugee Coun­cil report, there is no evi­dence to indi­cate the scale of such ‘health touris­m’ & no spe­cif­ic exam­ples of peo­ple migrat­ing to the UK specif­i­cal­ly for free health care. Accord­ing to the Refugee Coun­cil, the main fac­tors affect­ing the choice of coun­try where indi­vid­u­als seek asy­lum is their lan­guage, fam­i­ly con­nec­tions or his­tor­i­cal con­nec­tions between their coun­try & the UK. Also, many asy­lum seek­ers sim­ply do not have a choice of where they go as increas­ing­ly tighter bor­der con­trols mean they may be smug­gled into a coun­try. It there­fore seems ridicu­lous to sug­gest that asy­lum seek­ers come to the UK to receive free health care, when what it is they have come for is to escape war, tor­ture & per­se­cu­tion.
Under Gov­ern­ment leg­is­la­tion, refused asy­lum seek­ers are not gen­er­al­ly eli­gi­ble for free hos­pi­tal treat­ment. While imme­di­ate­ly nec­es­sary treat­ment in order to save life can be giv­en, the recov­ery of the charge will be pur­sued as far as pos­si­ble via invoic­es, threat­en­ing let­ters & even debt col­lec­tion agen­cies. For exam­ple, a failed asy­lum seek­er from Roma­nia who had stom­ach can­cer was billed £1085 for an oper­a­tion & was refused radio­ther­a­py until he could pay. Failed asy­lum seek­ers have to pay for things like treat­ments for can­cer, dia­betes & HIV & mater­ni­ty care.
With such leg­is­la­tion, the UK Gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues its bar­bar­ic treat­ment of those seek­ing asy­lum & uses them as scape­goats for its own fail­ings.

no id cards!
Are you inter­est­ed in being part of a group of peo­ple in the Swansea/Carmarthen area com­mit­ted to resist­ing the nation­al ID data­base? As part of the nation­al iden­ti­ty scheme, Swansea is set to be one of the sites for an ID inter­ro­ga­tion cen­tre, where peo­ple in the area will need to report to in order to be inter­viewed, fin­ger-print­ed & iris-scanned as part of reg­is­tra­tion for the nation­al ID data­base. One of the first things the group can do is raise objec­tions to the ID cen­tre through the plan­ning sys­tem. Going for­ward, the group can work on direct action strate­gies for how best to sup­port the resis­tance to the nation­al ID data­base, in con­junc­tion with the work of oth­er Defy-ID groups & the cam­paigns organ­ised by No2ID. If you are inter­est­ed, please con­tact Dominic on  dfrancocci2@yahoo.co.uk or 07718 968835.

BURBERRY CLOSURE
It was a mis­er­able Christ­mas for the three hun­dred work­ers at the Burber­ry fac­to­ry in Tre­orchy, Rhond­da. Not only are they about to lose their jobs, but boss Eve­lyn Suszko (respon­si­ble for Lau­ra Ashley’s igno­min­ious with­draw­al from Wales) rubbed salt into wounds by award­ing work­ers a scarf & £30 vouch­ers to spend in the local Burber­ry shop, which hap­pens to be in Lon­don. Clo­sure is set for the end of March 2007 due to Burberry’s deci­sion to move pro­duc­tion to Chi­na where they can cut costs from £10 a polo shirt to £2 whilst main­tain­ing a retail price of £80. Gar­ments have been man­u­fac­tured at the fac­to­ry for sev­en­ty years. Demon­stra­tions have been held out­side Burberry’s Lon­don out­let. As Burber­ry pre­pares to announce increased prof­its of £200 mil­lion, a union offi­cial has come up with an idea: rather than rip up the £30 vouch­ers, he’s urged the work­force to spend them in the Lon­don store & then burn any pur­chas­es out­side the shop as a mark of protest. Per­haps set­ting fire to scarves & hats inside the shop would be more effec­tive?

In the ear­ly hours of Sun­day 19th Novem­ber, items were stolen from a police van that was parked on Bryn Road, Swansea. The police had been called to a large par­ty after com­plaints about noise lev­els were made by neigh­bours . When the police went in to break up the fun they left their van doors unlocked, allow­ing peo­ple to get inside & steal a police coat & a police note­book! What hap­pened to“Keep it Safe Keep it Hid­den Keep it Lockedâ€? boys?

south wales Hunt Sabo­teurs Update
Since the start of main sea­son South Wales Sabo­teurs have been pay­ing vis­its to the Cotswold Vale (our old favourites), & as nor­mal found them hunt­ing ille­gal­ly, the bleat­ing hunt were soon on the phone to the cops & again as nor­mal it was like old friends meet­ing, “what! the antis are in the area? We’ll be there now so you can car­ry on killing”.
South Wales Sabs have also had away days with the Ted­worth, (who were kept on the run all-day & packed up ear­ly), South Here­ford­shire, Mon­mouthshire, Curre & the Pen­trych on Box­ing day.
Despite the cry­ing & bleat­ing by the Coun­try­side Alliance two years ago, & to the sur­prise of mil­lions of com­pas­sion­ate peo­ple (not), noth­ing has changed! because they’re all still hunt­ing as nor­mal, so don’t be fooled (as if you could!), by media lies, get off your back­side & do some­thing about it because the boys in blue sure aren’t!!

Gagged! can be found in all sorts of strange places around south wales as well as every social cen­tre & rad­i­cal book­shop in the UK. If there’s not a pile of gagged in the cor­ner of your favourite pub, club, cafe, hair­dressers, tat­tooists, record, book, head or any­thing else shop, get in touch so you can take a pile in your­self! If you want to sub­scribe to the e‑version send an email to  gagged-subscribe@lists.riseup.net. More info online at lists.riseup.net/www/info/gagged. 5000 copies are print­ed per issue plus sev­er­al thou­sand are read online. We’re always in need of more help in pro­duc­tion & dis­tri­b­u­tion. Send any arti­cles, pic­tures, reports, diary dates or offers to help to  gwentanarchists@yahoo.co.uk

Cardiff Anar­chist Net­work (CAN) is a col­lec­tive of peo­ple who want to pur­sue polit­i­cal demon­stra­tions through direct action. There is no mem­ber­ship, no lead­ers, just like mind­ed indi­vid­u­als. Email:  cardiffanarchists@riseup.net

Gwent Anar­chists are like-mind­ed indi­vid­u­als believ­ing in auton­o­my, respect & jus­tice; against all forms of exploita­tion & big­otry. Aim­ing to increase the knowl­edge of & cre­ate a resis­tance to gov­ern­ments & big busi­ness abus­ing peo­ple & the earth. Email:  gwentanarchists@yahoo.co.uk

RCT Anar­chists is an autonomous group of free-think­ing indi­vid­u­als who reject cap­i­tal­ism & resist state con­trol through non-vio­lent direct action. We work towards the cre­ation of a world based on jus­tice & free­dom. Email:  rctanarchists@riseup.net

No Bor­ders South Wales organ­is­es on migra­tion issues & acts to break down bound­aries; racial, cul­tur­al, gen­der, sex­u­al, class & polit­i­cal that divide us. Email:  noborderswales@riseup.net

South Wales Against the G8 (SWAG8) is a coali­tion of groups wish­ing to mobilise against this year’s G8 Sum­mit both in Ger­many & in the UK. Email:  swageight@yahoo.co.uk

Peo­ples Autonomous Des­ti­na­tion (PAD) aims to cre­ate phys­i­cal space in Cardiff for groups & indi­vid­u­als who can­not or will not work with­in the con­straints of gov­ern­men­tal or cor­po­rate con­trol. Email:  thepad@riseup.net Phone: 07910973876 Web: www.thepad.org.uk

Cardiff Ris­ing Tide is a grass­roots group com­mit­ted to tak­ing action & build­ing a move­ment against cli­mate change. Email:  Cardiffclimateaction@hotmail.com

South Wales Ani­mal Rights Net­work (SWARN) work­ing for ani­mal lib­er­a­tion Email:  swarn@yahoo.co.uk Phone: 07903677111

South Wales Hunt Sabs sav­ing ani­mal­s’ lives now, active­ly sab­o­tag­ing blood­sports. New­port Post: PO Box 70, New­port NP20 5XX . Phone: 0770815642 Swansea Email:  swansea_ar@webtribe.net Post: PO Box 7, Swansea, SA9 2YE Phone: 01792475092

Keep up to date with news from all over the world like the sort you find in Gagged! online at a vari­ety of web­sites. Here are a few that we’d rec­om­mend: www.schnews.org.uk www.indymedia.org.uk www.libcom.org www.anarkismo.net . www.infoshop.org

Diary Dates

Jan­u­ary

13th – Launch/Benefit for RCT (Rhond­da Cynon Taff) Anar­chists — KilnAboy, Tracey Cur­tis, Kyshera & Cos­mo at Clwb Y Bont, 85a Stryd Taf, Ponypridd. 7.30pm, veg­an buf­fet. £3
13th – 14th — Camp for Cli­mate Action Nation­al Gath­er­ing — to plan the next Cli­mate Camp. At the Com­mon Place, 23–25 Wharf Street, Leeds, LS2 7EQ. www.climatecamp.org.uk
15th – CAN meet­ing. Upstairs in the Glam­or­gan Staff Club, West­gate Street, Cardiff (oppo­site Gate 3 of the Mil­len­ni­um Sta­di­um). Fort­night­ly.
19th — 20th — Ris­ing Tide Nation­al Meet­ing. Lon­don. www.risingtide.org.uk
22nd — Gwent Anar­chists meet­ing. 8.30pm in The Murenger, High Street, New­port (in the snug). Fort­night­ly.
27th — Social Cen­tres Gath­er­ing. 1in12 Club, Albion Street, off Ful­ton Street, Brad­ford, BD1 www.1in12.com
28th — G8 Mobil­i­sa­tion Meet­ing. Sumac Cen­tre, 245 Glad­stone Street, Not­ting­ham NG76HX www.dissent.org.uk
29th — Phone In Sick Day — Prof. Cliff Arnall of Cardiff Uni­ver­si­ty says this is the most depress­ing day of the year! phone in sick! www.thesicknote.com
29th — CAN meet­ing.

FEBRUARY
5th — 2 local activists report back their expe­ri­ences in Pales­tine, plus films, & food. River­side Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre. 7–10pm
5th – Gwent Anar­chists meet­ing.
9th-11th — G8 plan­ning meet­ing, War­saw.
10th — Demo to Close All Deten­tion Cen­tres & Stop Depor­ta­tions. 11.30am Har­mondsworth & Colnbrook Deten­tion Cen­tres. noborderslondon.blogspot.com
11th — David Rovics & Atti­la The Stock­bro­ker. Dempseys, Cas­tle Street, Cardiff A ben­e­fit for the Pales­tine Sol­i­dar­i­ty Cam­paign £5
12th – CAN meet­ing.
15th — Screen­ing of ‘Iraq for Sale’ 8.00pm Chap­ter Arts Cen­tre
19th – Gwent Anar­chists meet­ing.
24th — No Tri­dent / Troops Out of Iraq Nation­al Demon­stra­tion. 12 noon — cen­tral Lon­don www.cnduk.org
26th — CAN meet­ing.

MARCH
3rd – Anar­chist Book­fair, the Teach­ers Club, 36 Par­nell square, Dublin. www.wsm.ie/anarchistbookfair
5th – Gwent Anar­chists meet­ing.
19th — Glob­al Day Of Action against the “War On Ter­rorâ€?, on the 4th anniver­sary of the inva­sion of Iraq.

gwentanarchists@yahoo.co.uk
http://southwalesanarchists.org

Privacy, Email and Activism — a brief intro

Recent­ly there was a con­fer­ence for activists inter­est­ed in secu­ri­ty issues — obvi­ous­ly some­thing that any activist should be inter­est­ed in. Notes from the gath­er­ing are being com­piled along with pre­vi­ous doc­u­ments into a print­ed book­let for activists which is expect­ed to be dis­trib­uted next year.

Recent­ly there was a con­fer­ence for activists inter­est­ed in secu­ri­ty issues — obvi­ous­ly some­thing that any activist should be inter­est­ed in. Notes from the gath­er­ing are being com­piled along with pre­vi­ous doc­u­ments into a print­ed book­let for activists which is expect­ed to be dis­trib­uted next year.
In the mean­time I’ve been doing a lit­tle addi­tion­al research on solu­tions spe­cif­ic to secur­ing email com­mu­ni­ca­tion…

Emails and pass­words used by activists are vuner­a­ble to snoop­ing from both the state and from pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tion. Even seem­ing­ly unim­por­tant infor­ma­tion gath­ered from emails can help build a pro­file on a per­son and their asso­ciates. Per­son­al infor­ma­tion might pro­vide your ene­mies with lever­age to turn some­body you know into a grass or make it eas­i­er to place an infil­tra­tor in a posi­tion of trust.

What most peo­ple do not realise is that by default, the vast major­i­ty of email and even pass­words are sent over the inter­net in plain text that can be rmon­i­tored by any­one. Sit down at a com­put­er in a library, col­lege or inter­net cafe and any­one else on that net­work can eas­i­ly read the emails you send and receive, not to men­tion steal your pass­word. There are sev­er­al ways to avoid this depend­ing on how you access your mail.

Most activists tend to use web based mail these days so we’ll start with those.

If you look in the address bar on your web brows­er you will see that most address­es start with the let­ters http:// but some­times you will see https://. The ‘s’ indi­cates that the con­nec­tion is using SSL, a secure encrypt­ed link between your brows­er and the web serv­er. Most browsers also dis­play a locked pad­lock sym­bol some­where to pro­vide a visu­al con­fir­ma­tion that the con­nec­tion is secure. When you are view­ing web­pages over a SSL con­nec­tion (such as on Indy­media), the data being trans­fered is no longer in plain text and can not be read by peo­ple attempt­ing to mon­i­tor you. This pro­tec­tion also applies to infor­ma­tion you sub­mit in web forms, such as user­names and pass­words when check­ing web­mail.

In oth­er words, the most basic and essen­tial thing to do to secure your email is use SSL con­nec­tions if you use web­mail. For exam­ple, if you use rise­up web­mail you should go to https://mail.riseup.net rather than http://mail.riseup.net

We should now brei­fly look at the use of POP and SMTP for those not using web­mail. If you don’t know what these are, don’t wor­ry, they are two of the most com­mon pro­to­cols used for down­load­ing and upload­ing mes­sages using an email client installed on your own com­put­er. Exam­ples of email clients include Out­look, Eudo­ra, Pega­sus and Thun­der­bird. Again, the prob­lem you need to be aware of is that these pro­to­cols are by default not secure and all emails and pass­words are sent as plain text. You need to con­fig­ure your account set­tings with­in your email client to use a secure authen­ti­cat­ed con­nec­tion such as SSL. It’s beyond the scope of this arti­cle to explain how but the help func­tion of your client plus the help pages for your email provider will pro­vide specifics.

It’s obvi­ous­ly essen­tial to use SSL (or sim­i­lar) to pro­tect your email pass­word. How­ev­er, when you send an email it will still trav­el over the inter­net in plain text as SSL only pro­tects the con­nec­tion between your com­put­er and the serv­er. To pro­tect the con­tents of the email for the entire trip it will need to be encrypt­ed so that only the intend­ed recip­i­ent can read it.

You may have heard of PGP ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy), a com­put­er pro­gram that encrypts (scram­bles) and decrypts (unscram­bles) doc­u­ments and emails. The ini­tials stand for pret­ty good pri­va­cy and like it says, it’s pret­ty good! Some peo­ple claim that the worlds most pow­er­ful com­put­ers could use brute force to break the encryp­tion in a mater of just a few hun­dred of years while oth­er put the time required at longer than the age of the uni­verse. Of course, com­put­ers get faster all the time so either way the time frame might even­tu­al­ly be reduced to with­in a human life­time but even so, it’s like­ly that by the time any­one broke the encryp­tion the con­tent would no longer be valu­able. ( http://axion.physics.ubc.ca/pgp-attack.html)

I will not go into detail how PGP works as there is plen­ty of infor­ma­tion about it on the web. More impor­tant is how to use it. The trou­ble with PGP has tra­di­tion­al­ly been that peo­ple not to con­fi­dent using com­put­ers have been unable to use it effec­tive­ly. How­ev­er, over the years it has become much eas­i­er to use as it has been pro­vid­ed with a sim­ply graph­i­cal point and click inter­face and also inter­grat­ed into email clients. Once installed and con­fig­ured cor­rect­ly, it’s now a sim­ple mater of click decrypt or encrypt plus typ­ing your passphrase.

There is the say­ing that a lit­tle knowl­edge is a dan­ger­ous thing and that is cer­tain­ly true of encyrp­tion tech­nol­o­gy. PGP uses Pub­lic Key Cryp­tog­ra­phy and it is vuner­a­ble to what is known as a man in the mid­dle attack. This vuner­a­bil­i­ty exists only dur­ing the exchange of pub­lic keys required to ini­ti­ate exchange of encrypt­ed mes­sages. Again, it is beyond the scope of this arti­cle to describe the attack and you can eas­i­ly look up the infor­ma­tion else­where. The impor­tant thing is that if these keys can not be exchanged in per­son then it is vital to con­firm that the keys have not been sub­sti­tut­ed on route. This is done by com­par­ing the keys ‘fin­ger­print’ by read­ing them out on the phone etc.

Final­ly. They say mis­ery likes com­pa­ny and so, iron­i­caly, does pri­va­cy. The more peo­ple who rou­tine­ly encrypt their com­mu­ni­ca­tions the more secure every­one becomes. If you were the only one using encryp­tion then it might draw atten­tion to you and any­one you com­mu­ni­cate with. If you only use encryp­tion for ‘dodgy’ emails then this might also attract atten­tion. Once you have the soft­ware installed and con­fig­ured it makes sence to use it when­ev­er pos­si­ble regard­less of the con­tents of the email.

Fur­ther read­ing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E‑mail_privacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_Encryption
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
http://www.andrebacard.com/pgp.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Privacy_Guard

Soft­ware
http://www.pgpi.org
http://www.gnupg.org/ (also known as gpg, open source ver­sion of pgp)
http://www.gpg4win.org/ (gpg installer for win­dows)
http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/ (Mac OSX port of GnuPG)

Addi­tion­al soft­ware sug­ges­tions

Don’t have your own com­put­er or don’t take it with you every­where you go? Well there are inter­est­ing options avail­able now util­is­ing USB mem­o­ry sticks. These have got real­ly cheap recent­ly and you can get a 1gb dri­ve for under 20 pounds. That’s a lot of space and it fits in your pock­et.

Peo­ple have been devel­op­ing what are called portable appli­ca­tions ( http://portableapps.com/). These run from the USB stick rather than need­ing to be actu­al­ly installed on a spe­cif­ic com­put­er. More impor­tant­ly they are con­fig­ured so that tem­po­rary files ect are store on the stick so as not to leave a trace on the com­put­er they are run­ning on.

With one of these sticks and the right soft­ware you can walk into a library etc and use a pub­lic com­put­er to run your own soft­ware and access your own files. It is a very use­ful way to have access to your mail etc and the data on the stick can be encrypt­ed using soft­ware such as True­Crypt.

Any­way, in the con­text of the arti­cle above I want­ed to men­tion a cou­ple of specifc portable appli­ca­tions. Both are portable email clients based on Thun­der­bird.

One is called Mobil­i­ty Email and it includes OpenPGP and S/MIME encryp­tion. It sup­ports IMAP, POP, SMTP and web based email. It is designed to from any loca­tion with no instal­la­tion or con­fig­u­ra­tion, allow­ing access your email and con­tacts on mul­ti­ple machines. Most impor­tant­ly, no per­son­al data is left behind once the appli­ca­tion is closed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobility_Email
http://www.mobilityemail.net/

There is also the offi­cial Mozil­la Thun­der­bird Portable Edi­tion (for­mer­ly Portable Thun­der­bird). There are two pack­ages avail­able, one with GPG and Enig­mail pre­con­fig­ured to encrypt and sign your email.
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/thunderbird_portable

Note. Those npeo­ple who don’t require porta­bil­i­ty may well be inter­est­ed in using the ori­nary Thun­der­bird email client plus openPGP and the Enig­mail exten­sion to pro­vide an easy to use and ful­ly interi­grat­ed email encryp­tion sys­tem. It’s cross plat­form, free and has a large com­mu­ni­ty of user and devel­op­ers. You can even use it with the Web­mail exten­sions to access yahoo, hot­mail and gmail accounts etc.
http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

——————————————————————————–

Rise­up users and PGP

It’s a lit­tle known fact but rise­up users can use PGP from with­in their web­mail accounts. I only dis­cov­ered this recent­ly and as far as I can tell it’s only been an option since rise­up upgrad­ed to ver­sion 4 of IMP in late 2005.

Only the IMP web­mail has the PGP fea­ture, not Squir­rel­mail which I guess most rise­up peo­ple use sim­ply because it’s at the top of the login page. How­ev­er, you can swap between the two with­out prob­lem if you’ve already been using Squir­rel.

The PGP fea­tures are not enabled by default and it’s a bit hid­den away which might explain why I’ve nev­er heard men­tion of it. The rise­ups doc­u­men­ta­tion on secu­ri­ty makes no men­tion of the fea­ture, not even in their PGP page. I checked on google for any­thing about pgp on rise­up but could­n’t find any­thing either so I decid­ed to write a ‘how to’.

HOW TO SET UP PGP IN RISEUP

To enable the fea­ture you have to login to the IMP web­mail (obvi­ous­ly make sure you are using a secure con­nec­tion https:// as described in the arti­cle above). When logged in you click options from the top nav­i­ga­tion menu then click ‘PGP Options’ under oth­er options on the right hand side.

Now you tick ‘Enable PGP func­tion­al­i­ty?’ then click ‘Save Options’ and the page refresh­es and you have a bunch more options. I sug­gest you don’t tick ”Should your PGP pub­lic key to be attached to your mes­sages by default?’ but you prob­a­bly should click ‘Should the body of text/plain mes­sages be scanned for PGP data?’

Fur­ther down the page you have two more sec­tions which weren’t there until you enabled PGP. One of these is ‘Your PGP Public/Private Keys’. If you already have a PGP keys then you will need to upload them here by click­ing upload and either copy and past­ing the appro­bri­ate key or brows­ing the file on your machine and attach­ing it.

How­ev­er, if you don’t have a PGP key pair then you can actu­al­ly cre­ate them now from with­in IMP. Per­son­al­ly I feel this is a bit of a secu­ri­ty risk as it requires you to trust rise­up, but then again you have to trust rise­up if you are plan­ning on using web­mail with your email in the first place. Cre­at­ing a key pair using IMP is easy, just fol­low the instruc­tions.

Once you have you keys cre­at­ed or uploaded you need to enable the address book. This is per­haps the most illog­i­cal part of the con­fig­u­ra­tion. There is a line on the page where the words ‘PGP Options’ appears on the left and the fol­low­ing on the right ’ Address Books | S/MIME Options »’

Click on the link to Address Books and then on the new page you will see a pull down menu towards the bot­tom with the words ‘Choose the address book to use when adding address­es’ writ­ten above. Change the selec­tion from ‘None’ to ‘My Address Book’ with­in the drop down menu and then click ‘Save Options’ at the very bot­tom of the page.

You can now return to the PGP Options page and upload your friends PGP pub­lic keys to the new­ly enabled address book. It’s just a mat­ter of cut and past­ing the key block from an email etc.

That should be it… click ‘Save Options’ again just incase and then return to your Inbox

USING PGP ON RISEUP

When you cre­ate a new mes­sage you will find new options below the text body, just below the Send Mes­sage but­ton. These are a drop down menu from which you can choose to sign and/or encrypt your mes­sage with PGP, and also a tick box enabling you to send a copy of your PGP pub­lic key with your mes­sage. When you click Send Mes­sage you will be asked for your passphrase in a seper­ate box and then you click Send Mes­sage again.

! It’s worth point­ing out that if you have pop­up fil­ter­ing acti­vat­ed (and you should), then you must con­fig­ure it to allow pop­ups from tern.riseup.net and petrel.riseup.net oth­er­wise you won’t get the enter passphrase win­dow appear­ing and you won’t be able to encrypt or decrypt any­thing.

When you recieve a PGP encrypt­ed mes­sage you will find a box that reads “This mes­sage has been encrypt­ed with PGP. You must enter the passphrase for your PGP pri­vate key to view this mes­sage.” (again, pop­ups must be enabled or it won’t work). Obvi­ous­ly you type your passphrase and you get to read your mes­sage.

! Don’t for­get to log out when you have fin­ished or some­body else might come along and con­tin­ue using your web­mail ses­sion with the passphrase still cached so be able to read your encyrpt­ed mes­sages!

That cov­ers it all I think. For the best secu­ri­ty it would be prefer­able to use PGP local­ly on your own machine which you are sure is secure. How­ev­er, the PGP option with rise­up is still very very use­ful. DONT FORGET.. YOU MUST USE A SECURE SSL CONNECTION TO HTTPS://RISEUP.NET

Final­ly, a few quick notes on choos­ing a PGP passphrase.

Do not use the same pass­word as you use for your email or any oth­er pur­pose. .
Do not write it down but obvi­ous­ly choose some­thing you can remem­ber.
Avoid dic­tio­nary words and names of your fam­i­ly or pets.
Aim for at least 12 to 16 char­ac­ters
Mix uper case and low­er case let­ters, num­bers and punc­tu­a­tion for the strongest passphrase.

——————————————————————————–

Use secure email providers

Fol­low­ing the link to rise­ups pages on secu­ri­ty I found this infor­ma­tion which is quite inter­est­ing. Basi­cal­ly it’s about a pro­to­cal which mail servers can use to talk to each oth­er secure­ly so that emails are passed from source to des­ti­na­tion and not be read on route. Not all mail servers offer this ser­vice but rise­up does and it lists oth­er activist tech col­lec­tives that pro­vide such mail mail servers. Obvi­ous­ly it would be bet­ter to encrypt all mail using PGP etc but that’s not cur­rent­ly real­is­tic so for those mes­sages that still go as plain text it is a very good idea to be using a mail ser­vice that pro­vides Start­TLS.

(tak­en from rise­up…)

What is Start­TLS?

There are many gov­ern­ments and cor­po­ra­tions which are sniff­ing gen­er­al traf­fic on the inter­net. Even if you use a secure con­nec­tion to check and send your email, the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between mail servers is almost always inse­cure and out in the open.

For­tu­nate­ly, there is a solu­tion! Start­TLS is a fan­cy name for a very impor­tant idea: Start­TLS allows mail servers to talk to each oth­er in a secure way.

If you and your friends use only email providers which use Start­TLS, then all the mail traf­fic among you will be encrypt­ed while in trans­port. If both sender and recip­i­ent also use secure con­nec­tions while talk­ing to the mail servers, then your com­mu­ni­ca­tions are like­ly secure over its entire life­time.

We will repeat that because it is impor­tant: to gain any ben­e­fit from Start­TLS, both sender and recip­i­ent must be using Start­TLS enabled email providers. For mail­ing lists, the list provider and each and every list sub­scriber must use Start­TLS.

Which email providers use Start­TLS?
Cur­rent­ly, these tech col­lec­tives are known to use Start­TLS:

* riseup.net
* resist.ca
* mutualaid.org
* autistici.org/inventati.org
* aktivix.org
* boum.org
* squat.net
* tao.ca
* indymedia.org
* eggplantmedia.com
* so36.net

We rec­om­mend that you and all your friends get email accounts with these tech col­lec­tives!

Addi­tion­al­ly, these email providers often have Start­TLS enabled:

* uni­ver­si­ties: berkeley.edu, johnhopkins.edu, hampshire.edu, evergreen.edu, ucsc.edu, reed.edu, oberlin.edu, pdx.edu, usc.edu, bc.edu, uoregon.edu, vassar.edu, temple.edu, ucsf.edu, ucdavis.edu, wisc.edu, rutgers.edu, ucr.edu, umb.edu, simmons.edu.
* orga­ni­za­tions: action-mail.org, no-log.org
* com­pa­nies: speakeasy.net, easystreet.com, runbox.com, hushmail.com, dreamhost.com, frognet.net, frontbridge.com, freenet.de, blarg.net, green­net (gn.apc.org)

What are the advan­tages of Start­TLS?

This com­bi­na­tion of secure email providers and secure con­nec­tions has many advan­tages:

* It is very easy to use! No spe­cial soft­ware is need­ed. No spe­cial behav­ior is need­ed, oth­er than to make sure you are using secure con­nec­tions.
* It pre­vents any­one from cre­at­ing a map of whom you are com­mu­ni­cat­ing with and who is com­mu­ni­cat­ing with you (so long as both par­ties use Start­TLS).
* It ensures that your com­mu­ni­ca­tion is pret­ty well pro­tect­ed.
* It pro­motes the alter­na­tive mail providers which use Start­TLS. The goal is to cre­ate a healthy ecol­o­gy of activist providers–which can only hap­pen if peo­ple show these providers strong sup­port. Many of these alter­na­tive providers also also incor­po­rate many oth­er impor­tant secu­ri­ty mea­sures such as lim­it­ed log­ging and encrypt­ed stor­age.

What are the lim­i­ta­tions of Start­TLS?

How­ev­er, there are some notable lim­i­ta­tions:

* Your com­put­er is a weak link: your com­put­er can be stolen, hacked into, have key­log­ging soft­ware or hard­ware installed.
* It is dif­fi­cult to ver­i­fy: for a par­tic­u­lar mes­sage to be secure, both the ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion mail providers must use Start­TLS (and both the sender and recip­i­ent must use encrypt­ed con­nec­tions). Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it is dif­fi­cult to con­firm that all of this hap­pened. For this, you need pub­lic key encryp­tion (see below).
Start­TLS

——————————————————————————–

512 bit encryp­tion bro­ken in less than a sec­ond

The prob­lem with tech­nol­o­gy as a means for secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion is it’s own advance­ment. What is secure today may not be secure tomor­row. And peo­ple who think they’re safe, using PGP or whathavey­ou, then share infor­ma­tion over email that should only be shared face-to-face.

source: http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2006/November/theworld_November597.xml§ion=theworld
crypt broke

————-
“The report’s authors, Onur Aci­icmez, Cetin Kaya Koc and Jean-Pierre Seifert depict a con­crete attack on OpenSSL on a Pen­tium 4 proces­sor, albeit using a key that would be con­sid­ered quite short by today’s stan­dards (512 bit).”

Hmmm.. What is described requires the attack­er to be run­ning hiden soft­ware on the machine per­form­ing the encryp­tion oper­a­tion — in oth­er words it requires that attack­er to have installed soft­ware either with phys­i­cal access to a machine or remote access. Now cer­tain­ly, if you are using an inse­cure oper­at­ing sys­tem like win­dows then it would be a risk, how­ev­er a far eas­i­er attack in this case would be to use a key­log­ger, either soft­ware or hard­ware.

In oth­er words, Seifert and his col­leagues dis­cov­ery is unim­por­tant in rela­tion to email secu­ri­ty since much eas­i­er and more prac­ti­cal exploits exist already.

Blog­gers writ­ting about the new tech­nique have sug­gest­ed it it is the secu­ri­ty of appli­ca­tions using Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment (DRM) most like­ly to be threat­ened by such tech­niques. For exam­ple, user might use the tech­nique to remove the license pro­tec­tion on WMA audio files they pur­chase so that they can share them with friends. In this sit­u­a­tion they would obvi­ous­ly be well placed to install the spy process­es required in the attack.

You attempt to dis­cour­age peo­ple from using the tech­nol­o­gy employed by finan­cial and gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions etc is a waste of time. The weak point in all these secu­ri­ty mea­sures is the peo­ple using them. Obvi­ous­ly there is a lot to be said for low tech ‘cold war’ solu­tions like going to meet some­body face to face but it’s a lie to sug­gest they are them­selves are with­out sig­nif­i­cant risk.

Mobile phones, the stealth ID card, bug and tracking device in your pocket.

Ear­li­er this month it emerged that the FBI had been remote­ly acti­vat­ing a mobile phone’s micro­phone and using it to eaves­drop on near­by con­ver­sa­tions. The sur­veil­lance tech­nique, which “func­tioned whether the phone was pow­ered on or off.” came to light as a result of a rul­ing by U.S. Dis­trict Judge Lewis Kaplan on the legal­i­ty of the “rov­ing bug”. It had been approved by U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice offi­cials for use against mem­bers of a New York orga­nized crime fam­i­ly who were wary of con­ven­tion­al sur­veil­lance tech­niques such as tail­ing a sus­pect or wire­tap­ping. Cell phones owned by two alleged mob­sters, John Ardi­to and his attor­ney Peter Pelu­so, were used by the FBI to lis­ten in on near­by con­ver­sa­tions.

Ear­li­er this month it emerged that the FBI had been remote­ly acti­vat­ing a mobile phone’s micro­phone and using it to eaves­drop on near­by con­ver­sa­tions. The sur­veil­lance tech­nique, which “func­tioned whether the phone was pow­ered on or off.” came to light as a result of a rul­ing by U.S. Dis­trict Judge Lewis Kaplan on the legal­i­ty of the “rov­ing bug”. It had been approved by U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice offi­cials for use against mem­bers of a New York orga­nized crime fam­i­ly who were wary of con­ven­tion­al sur­veil­lance tech­niques such as tail­ing a sus­pect or wire­tap­ping. Cell phones owned by two alleged mob­sters, John Ardi­to and his attor­ney Peter Pelu­so, were used by the FBI to lis­ten in on near­by con­ver­sa­tions.

The news that the FBI had been remote­ly acti­vat­ing mobile phones as eaves drop­ping devices con­firms what many activists have been say­ing for years.

“A cel­lu­lar tele­phone can be turned into a micro­phone and trans­mit­ter for the pur­pose of lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sa­tions in the vicin­i­ty of the phone. This is done by trans­mit­ting to the cell phone a main­te­nance com­mand on the con­trol chan­nel. This com­mand places the cel­lu­lar tele­phone in the ‘diag­nos­tic mode.’ When this is done, con­ver­sa­tions in the imme­di­ate area of the tele­phone can be mon­i­tored over the voice chan­nel.” — Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Orga­ni­za­tion newsletter,1997.

As long as I can remem­ber there has been a kind of unspo­ken rule among activists about tak­ing bat­ter­ies out of mobile phones dur­ing meet­ings to pre­vent bug­ging — along with occa­sion­al argu­ments about it being para­noid. While it has long been know to be a the­o­ret­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty, the mafia court case con­firms it is actu­al­ly a prac­ti­cal tech­nique and is being used.

It is not clear exact­ly how the FBI achieve their remote acti­va­tion but it is known that it is pos­si­ble to update the soft­ware on a mobile phone by send­ing an unno­tice­able SMS mes­sage to a par­tic­u­lar cell phone. Changes to the phones soft­ware than make it pos­si­ble to spy on the user around the clock, as long as the phone has pow­er. All SMS mes­sages can be read and all calls and con­ver­sa­tions can be lis­tened to, includ­ing those tak­ing place in the vacin­i­ty of the phone. It would also be pos­si­ble to access and copy address books and oth­er infor­ma­tion stored on the phone.

It should be fair­ly obvi­ous to any­one that sim­ply ‘switch­ing off’ a mobile phone could not pre­vent the soft­ware from reac­ti­vat­ing the phone at will. Like most com­put­ers, the on/off switch on a mobile phone is sim­ply a but­ton that requests the soft­ware to do some­thing, ie.. turn the phone on or off — or more acturate­ly, switch the phone between stand­by and nor­mal oper­a­tions. Many have an alarm fea­ture which can oper­ate when the phone is appar­ent­ly ‘switched off’.

Some of the vuner­a­bil­i­ties of mobile phones may only be exploitable by the state or pri­vate inter­ests with finan­cial mus­cle to obtain access to the records of mobile phone net­works. Oth­ers how­ev­er are much eas­i­er to exploit and well with­in the capa­bil­i­ties of pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tors. One exam­ple is the abil­i­ty to read mobile phone num­bers from all phones in a room as those phone rou­tine­ly poll and com­mu­ni­cate with the near­est cell phone repeater.

And lets not for­get the abil­i­ty to track cell phones (again, poten­tial­ly even when they are turned off). With the data reten­tion laws requir­ing mobile phone net­works to keep this data for a year or so, it is easy for the author­i­ties (or pri­vate agen­cies with influ­ence) to not only mon­i­tor some­bod­ies move­ments but also cross ref­er­ence that with oth­er peo­ple and build up acturate pic­tures of net­works of asso­ci­a­tion.

As repres­sion on dis­sent increas­es, it is vital that we are all aware of the infor­ma­tion we pro­vide our ene­mies and what steps we can take to lim­it the dam­age.

What advice might you con­sid­er?

Don’t take any mobile phone to a meet­ing and if you must, remove the bat­tery.
Don’t take your per­son­al mobile phone with you on actions.
Remove the bat­tery if mak­ing jour­neys oth­ers should not know about.
Bet­ter yet, don’t take the phone or send it out on a walk in the park with a friend.
Don’t pow­er up you ‘clean’ action phone in any build­ing you don’t want asso­cait­ed with an action.
Nev­er use ‘clean’ action phones to call com­rades per­son­al phone num­bers.
Don’t call a ‘clean’ action phone from any ‘non clean’ phone.
Don’t con­tin­ue to use the same set of action phones on future actions.
Only pay cash for phone cred­it and don’t not from places with CCTV (dif­fi­cult).

Fur­ther read­ing…

FBI sto­ry:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100–1035_22-6140191.html http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=18443
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061203–8343.html

Back­ground:
http://www.wasc.noaa.gov/wrso/security_guide/cellular.htm

Some exam­ples…

Clear­ly the police are using the loca­tion records of phones to link peo­ple to actions, some recent exam­ples:

“A GANG of trav­ellers are fac­ing jail for a series of vio­lent ram-raids, rob­beries and bur­glar­ies after they were linked to the crimes through mobile phone records.”

“Mr Farmer said mobile phone records had been cru­cial in secur­ing guilty pleas and con­vic­tions…”

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/ely/2006/12/13/80f9ff15-a536-4d01-9e77-743d900618d6.lpf

“At a press con­fer­ence this morn­ing Mr Gull said that offi­cers were look­ing at mobile phone calls made and received by the girls and were also analysing DNA, but refused to go into more detail.”

“When asked about Anneli and the oth­er wom­en’s mobile phone records, Mr Gull said: “I don’t want to go into details, it’s very sen­si­tive, but it’s some­thing we’re look­ing at.â€?

http://new.edp24.co.uk/content/news/story.aspx?brand=EDPOnline&category=News&tBrand=EDPOnline&tCategory=news&itemid=NOED16%20Dec%202006%2015%3A37%3A43%3A720

“THE EADT has now filed an offi­cial com­plaint against Suf­folk police after its most senior detec­tive obtained the pri­vate mobile phone records of a jour­nal­ist in a bid to dis­cov­er his sources.”

“Edi­tor Ter­ry Hunt has request­ed a full expla­na­tion for the action tak­en by Det Supt Roy Lam­bert in a let­ter sent yes­ter­day to Chief Con­sta­ble Alas­tair McWhirter.”

“As revealed in yes­ter­day’s EADT, con­fi­den­tial mobile phone records of reporter Mark Bul­strode were obtained by Mr Lam­bert so he could find out who he had been speak­ing to.”

“The move was tak­en after the jour­nal­ist approached the force with infor­ma­tion about the reopen­ing of an his­toric inves­ti­ga­tion.”

http://www.eadt.co.uk/content/eadt/news/story.aspx?brand=EADOnline&category=News&tBrand=EADOnline&tCategory=news&itemid=IPED01%20Dec%202006%2019%3A35%3A22%3A490

A the pieces are now in place for the elec­tron­ic police state.