Category: Technologies of Control

ID cards, injunc­tions, CCTV with voice acti­vat­ed alerts, nation­al license plate mon­i­tor­ing, face recog­ni­tion, direc­tion­al micro­phones, net­work pro­fil­ing, DNA data­bas­es, key­log­ging, phone tap­ing, bug­ging and track­ing, these are just some of the tools of repres­sion being used against those bat­tling to save the world from total dom­i­na­tion and destruc­tion.

This mes­sage will self destruct in 10 sec­onds.… 9.. 8.. 6.. 5.. 4.. 3.. 2..

One might think that this is some cloak and dag­ger spy thriller, or orwellian distopia — but todays world is one of overt and covert sur­veil­lance and repres­sion. The likes of you and me are the tar­get and this is no para­noid delus­sion — they real­ly are out to get us.

This was the stark real­i­ty pre­sent­ed at a top secret con­fer­ence on activist secu­ri­ty that took place this month. Meet­ing in a quite loca­tion some­where near the coast, dozens of cam­paign­ers from around the coun­try came togeth­er to learn about the tech­nol­o­gy and tech­niques being used by the author­i­ties and pri­vate agen­cies as they attempt to gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion and dis­rupt and destroy cam­paigns.

The aim of the gath­er­ing how­ev­er was not to make every­one para­noid and feel help­less in the face of the tech­no­log­i­cal assaults on our pri­va­cy, but rather to equipe peo­ple with the aware­ness and knowl­edge to enable them to take steps to reduce the risk to them­selves and those they asso­ciate with.

The two day con­fer­ence involved a wide vari­ety of work­shops, some dis­cus­sion-based, some prac­ti­cal or com­put­er-based. Lessons learned by those attend­ing includ­ed the impor­tance of ‘need to know’, the now proven fact that switch­ing off a mobile phone is not enough to pre­vent it being remote­ly acti­vat­ed as a bug or track­ing device. Also dis­cussed was how to spot and loss a tail, how to trap and expose infil­tra­tors, issues of secu­ri­ty for cam­paign groups and their offices such as main­tain­ing a secure con­tacts data­base. Com­put­er based skills cov­ered includ­ed encryp­tion of stored data and elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and ways to use the inter­net for research etc with­out leav­ing a trace.

Mush of the infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed dur­ing the work­shops came from the doc­u­ment ‘Prac­ti­cal Secu­ri­ty Advice for Cam­paigns and Activists’ and this, along with the expe­ri­ences and ideas con­tributed by the par­tic­i­pants of the gath­er­ing are appar­ent­ly going to be put togeth­er as a print­ed book­let for dis­tru­bu­tion next year. Addi­tion­al­ly there are plans for a ‘walls have ears’ style poster out­lin­ing basic pre­cau­tions which can be dis­place in meet­ing spaces and social cen­tres etc to remind peo­ple of the need to con­sid­er secu­ri­ty.

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