Category: Technologies of Control

protests against the roll-out of the ID card scheme & database

Against the impo­si­tion of ID cards on Non-EU stu­dents and mar­riage visa hold­ers.

Fingerprinted barbed wire fence graphicAgainst the impo­si­tion of ID cards on Non-EU stu­dents and mar­riage visa hold­ers.

This is not the first time for­eign nation­als or migrants have been used as guinea pigs to test a law or tech­nol­o­gy. Exam­ples include the Asy­lum Reg­is­tra­tion Cards (ARC), which is a sim­i­lar card that asy­lum seek­ers have been required to car­ry since 2002. Once migrants have been used as a ‘road test’ for the wide­ly opposed ID scheme, the gov­ern­ment will start on the rest of us. From 2010 on, the gov­ern­ment pre­dicts that one mil­lion cards will be hand­ed out every year.

For more back­ground infor­ma­tion on how this ‘drip drip’ approach to impos­ing bio­met­ric ID cards relates to migra­tion man­age­ment and the Home Office’s points sys­tem read:

http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=3147
http://nobordersmanchester.blogspot.com/2008/11/defy-id-cards-no-one-is-illegal.html

==========
No No No ID cardsNewcastle ID cards protest
27th Novem­ber 2008
This evening approx­i­mate­ly 13 activists from No Bor­ders North East hand­ed out 200 anti-ID card leaflets to shop­pers in Cen­tral New­cas­tle. Ban­ners and plac­ards were also held, and a very pos­i­tive response was giv­en from the pub­lic.

Tues­day saw the intro­duc­tion of Iden­ti­ty Cards for non-EU cit­i­zens. No Bor­ders views this as yet anoth­er attempt to vic­tim­ize an often voice­less group, and so has orches­trat­ed a series of protests this week through­out the coun­try.

http://www.noborders.org.uk

.….

This morn­ing, dur­ing the peak rush hour time of 7.30 — 9.00 am, 4 activists from No Bor­ders North East per­formed an anti‑i.d card ban­ner drop from a bridge over one of the city’s busiest inner motor­ways. The largest ban­ner read “No To ID Cards, Free­dom For All!” and was accom­pa­nied by a small­er No Bor­ders ban­ner.

The reac­tion from the dri­vers below was over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive, with many honk­ing horns, wav­ing and giv­ing thumbs up.

Today sees the start of the ID card scheme, with non-EU cit­i­zens apply­ing for, or renew­ing visas for study or mar­riage, being made to car­ry a card and have their details put on the Gov­ern­men­t’s data­base. Immi­gra­tion law already gives the Home Office pow­ers it would like to exert over every­body. Under a cloud of anti-immi­gra­tion hys­te­ria the gov­ern­ment is increas­ing it’s social con­trol and attempt­ing to ush­er in unprece­dent­ed pow­ers of sur­veil­lance over the whole pop­u­la­tion.

The police came along while we were doing it, but did­nt seem to have any prob­lem with it. Inter­est­ing­ly how­ev­er, they said that an anar­chist sym­bol can be deemed offen­sive and thus remov­able under a pub­lic order act (?!). We told them that our No Bor­ders ban­ner with a large anar­chist sym­bol was­n’t in fact anar­chist relat­ed, and they believed us for some rea­son.… 😉
—

York­shire Activists block­ade Sheffield Bor­der Agency Cen­tre

1.12.2008
At 8am this morn­ing a group of York­shire activists block­ad­ed the Sheffield Bor­der Agency Inter­ro­ga­tion Cen­tre at Vul­can House using bicy­cle locks and super­glue to attach them­selves to both entrances. The group are there in response to the intro­duc­tion of com­pul­so­ry ID cards for non-EU peo­ple on stu­dent or mar­riage visas. They are dis­play­ing two ban­ners, one reads “My iden­ti­ty is not your prop­er­ty” and the oth­er “Noth­ing to hide? Every­thing to fear! Defy ID!”

Some appli­cants have been turned away by the Bor­der Agency staff but many were sup­port­ive of the actions the group has tak­en. Speak­ing to a block­ad­er, one appli­cant said that by intro­duc­ing com­pul­so­ry ID cards, the gov­ern­ment have shown that “they just want to con­trol peo­ple”. Bor­der Agency staff have called the police to remove the pro­test­ers but at the time of send­ing (10:30am) the pro­test­ers are still in place.

An activist from Brad­ford (who is cur­rent­ly super­glued to two oth­ers in front of the main entrance) said “The gov­ern­ment are try­ing to intro­duce ID cards through the back door, tar­get­ing some of the most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple in the coun­try.” A Sheffield activist added “If we want to save the peo­ple of Great Britain from ID cards, we must act now!”

Gov­ern­ment leg­is­la­tion has meant that, since 25^th Novem­ber, for­eign spous­es and non-EU stu­dents who apply for, or renew, visas will be forced to attend an inter­ro­ga­tion and be issued with an ID card that will hold their name, pho­to­graph, nation­al­i­ty and immi­gra­tion sta­tus, along with a bio­met­ric chip that will hold their fin­ger­prints and dig­i­tal image. The details will be held indef­i­nite­ly on the UK Iden­ti­ty Ser­vice data­base. Delays meant that the Sheffield Bor­der Agency Cen­tre only began inter­ro­ga­tions from today (1^st Decem­ber).

Update — 11 activists were arrest­ed (sig­nif­i­cant­ly more than were thought to be locked on) after hold­ing the block­ade for more than three hours. All released with with ver­bal cau­tions.

—
Lunar House ID poster
Iden­ti­ty Cards Protest, Lunar House, Croy­don

26.11.2008
On the cor­ner of George Street in Croy­don, Lon­don, a Novem­ber sun was warm­ing the shop­pers and office work­ers on their lunch breaks, but a few hun­dred metres north on Welles­ley Road a bit­ing Siber­ian wind seared the demon­stra­tors out­side Lunar House. It seemed appro­pri­ate that such a freez­ing blast should sur­round the UK head­quar­ters of the Bor­der and Immi­gra­tion Agency and indeed be gen­er­at­ed by its twen­ty sto­ries of the grim ear­ly 1970s office com­plex. After all its rai­son d’être is to give would-be immi­grants and asy­lum seeks an extreme­ly cold recep­tion.

Its bleak anonymi­ty is also a warn­ing of things to come for all of us in a Brave New Britain of state sur­veil­lance and con­trol whose infra­struc­ture is increas­ing­ly with us through secu­ri­ty cam­eras, the inter­cep­tion mobile phone sig­nals and elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions and the planned intro­duc­tion of uni­ver­sal ID cards.

The pick­et, called by Lon­don NoBor­ders http://london.noborders.org.uk and NO2ID http://www.no2id.net/, marked the start of Bio­met­ric ID cards, which are being issued from today, 25 Novem­ber 2008, to all non-EU stu­dents and spous­es apply­ing for, or renew­ing visas for study or mar­riage. The cards will have a pho­to­graph with name, date of birth, nation­al­i­ty, immi­gra­tion sta­tus and bio­met­ric details, includ­ing fin­ger­prints and dig­i­tal facial image will be stored on a chip on the card as well as being held indef­i­nite­ly on the UK Iden­ti­ty Ser­vice data­base.

Soon all for­eign nation­als in the UK will be required to have these cards, which will be rolled out to oth­er groups includ­ing stu­dents who want a stu­dent loan by 2010. And from 2011 you will need to get one – and have your details on that data­base — if you want to renew or get a pass­port.

What wor­ries many of us is not just the use to which our own gov­ern­ment and secu­ri­ty ser­vices might make of such data – link­ing to face recog­ni­tion soft­ware work­ing on images from secu­ri­ty cam­eras and mobile phone data would enable our every move to be tracked – but the cer­tain­ty that it will get into oth­er hands – such as those of our US friends in the CIA, as well as crim­i­nal and com­mer­cial organ­i­sa­tions who will have their own ideas about how such all-per­va­sive data might be used.

Among those at today’s demon­stra­tion was David Mery http://gizmonaut.net/bits/suspect.html a man who has achieved a small per­son­al vic­to­ry against the jug­ger­naut data­base state.

Mery was stopped by police enter­ing South­wark tube sta­tion on 28 July for being “calm on arrival, almost too calm” and hav­ing a lar­gish ruck­sack and a strong French accent. It was three weeks after the Lon­don bomb­ing – and — per­haps luck­i­ly for him, six days after the shoot­ing of Jean Charles de Menezes. This time at least the police didn’t shoot first and ask ques­tions lat­er, but his treat­ment in the months and years fol­low­ing the event can most favourably be described as Kafkaesque. He final­ly (or at least prob­a­bly) suc­ceed­ed in hav­ing both his fin­ger­prints and DNA record removed from the police data­bas­es, but it took over two years of fight­ing. His blog http://gizmonaut.net/ and arti­cles are essen­tial read­ing for any­one who won­ders why civ­il lib­er­ties are impor­tant.

—

Leeds NO2ID have burnt a mock ID card in protest at the intro­duc­tion of the ID card scheme for for­eign nation­als

Video — video/quicktime 13M

Around 20 activists braved the freez­ing tem­per­a­tures and rain to gath­er in Leeds last night on the eve of the intro­duc­tion of ID cards for for­eign nation­als.

The protest was made my burn­ing a mock ID card in pub­lic.

The Protest passed off peace­ful­ly with­out the pres­ence of West York­shire Police.

—

Liv­er­pool anti-ID pick­et: No One Is Ille­gal

20 stu­dents and No Bor­der­s/an­ti-ID cam­paign­ers from Man­ches­ter made their way to Liv­er­pool on 25th Novem­ber, the day that the gov­ern­ment intro­duced ID cards for non-EU nation­als liv­ing in the UK. There they joined a group of 30 Mersey­side activists out­side Reliance House to protest at the intro­duc­tion of com­pul­so­ry ID cards for inter­na­tion­al stu­dents and non-EU spous­es on that day.

Reliance House is where inter­view­ing, pho­tograph­ing and fin­ger­print­ing will take place from 4th Decem­ber before being issued with a bio­met­ric ID card. It is also Liverpool’s report­ing cen­tre where those seek­ing asy­lum have to ‘sign in’ on a reg­u­lar basis while their claims are being processed. If their claims fail they can be held, with­out pri­or notice, in the immi­gra­tion deten­tion facil­i­ty in the same build­ing for up to 7 days.

It is thus imper­a­tive to make the con­nec­tion between ID cards and the assault on the rights of non-EU nation­als want­i­ng to live, work and study in the UK. Peo­ple from Man­ches­ter No Bor­ders had brought along plac­ards and ban­ners pro­claim­ing that “no one is ille­gal”. Where the state rein­forces the divi­sion between legal and ‘ille­gal’ peo­ple our sol­i­dar­i­ty must extend to those most affect­ed by the scheme.

Some men­tion in the news:
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2008/11/25/protests-in-city-over-id-cards-100252–22330184/
http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/news/display.var.2470740.0.Protests_as_first_ID_card_scheme_launched_in_Britain.php
http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2008/11/26/protesters-say-no-to-introduction-of-id-cards-for-foreign-students-64375–22341365/

(Dur­ing the pick­et of Reliance House, some first con­tact was made with indi­vid­ual No Bor­der activists from Liv­er­pool, Mersey­side and North Wales. If you are from this region and want to get active in a No Bor­ders group, please email us, so we can get you in touch)

manchesternoborders@riseup.net
http://www.manchesternoborders.org.uk

—
Cardiff No ID protest
Over 60 peo­ple attend­ed our protest against the intro­duc­tion of Bio­met­ric ID Cards for non-EU stu­dents and spous­es on Tues­day. The demon­stra­tion was held for a cou­ple of hours at mid­day out­side the Cardiff office of the UK Bor­der Agency at 31–33 New­port Road. Peo­ple the gov­ern­ment is forc­ing to car­ry ID cards will have to attend this cen­tre for inter­ro­ga­tion, pho­tograph­ing and fin­ger­print­ing.

We dis­played ban­ners, held plac­ards, waved giant mock ID cards and dis­trib­uted 600 copies of this leaflet — the reac­tion from passers by was com­plete­ly sup­port­ive. Many peo­ple used their lunch­break to join the protest for a short while before return­ing to work or study. This protest was part of a nation­wide day of action out­side UKBA cen­tres by No Bor­ders Net­work who, along with Defy ID, NO2ID and oth­er groups, held protests in Croy­don, Liv­er­pool, Glas­gow, Soli­hull, and New­cas­tle. Though many of these protests around the coun­try got into local news­pa­pers, Welsh media cov­er­age has been min­i­mal.

This protest appears to be just the start of resis­tance to ID Cards, the British Air­line Pilots’ Asso­ci­a­tion (BALPA) has threat­ened indus­tri­al action if the gov­ern­ment goes ahead with it’s plan to impose ID cards on air­port work­ers next year. Tens of thou­sands of peo­ple have signed up to NO2ID’s pledge not to reg­is­ter for a card, even if that means going to prison. No Bor­ders South Wales will be protest­ing out­side the Bor­der agency again, on Wednes­day 10th Decem­ber when the Cardiff office will start to reg­is­ter peo­ple, join us if you can.

“These new ID cards are not only a repres­sive mea­sure against non-EU stu­dents and spous­es, they are the first shot in an attack against everyone’s lib­er­ty. In tar­get­ing a large­ly voice­less migrant group, who have the least chance to com­plain and the most to lose, the gov­ern­ment is fol­low­ing a famil­iar path of repres­sive regimes through­out his­to­ry. Immi­gra­tion law already gives the Home Office pow­ers it would like to exert over every­body. By resist­ing the repres­sion of migrants, we defend the free­dom of every­one!“

For links to leaflet, video and oth­er stuff, see http://noborderswales.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/cardiff-protest-against-id-cards/
—

Soli­hull protest against the impo­si­tion of bio­met­ric ID cards on migrants

26.11.2008
Yes­ter­day Nobor­ders Birm­ing­ham protest­ed against the impo­si­tion of bio­met­ric ID cards at the UK Bor­der Agency Office in Soli­hull. They were met by a puz­zling dis­pro­por­tion­ate police response at Domin­ion Court, 41 Sta­tion Road, Soli­hull — around 12 police offi­cers, includ­ing 3 police vans and an evi­dence gath­er­er. This may have some­thing to do with the polic­ing of a pre­vi­ous protest around the cor­ner at Sand­ford House, the home office report­ing cen­tre, where hun­dreds of Con­golese demon­stra­tors fac­ing mass depor­ta­tion occu­pied the main road http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/birmingham/2007/04/368076.html

A ban­ner pro­claim­ing ‘Free­dom of Move­ment for All’ was held by the entrance of the UK Bor­ders Agency Office. The police offered to ‘facil­i­tate’ our protest by a seem­ing­ly polite offer to arrange for a met­al bar­ri­er to hang our ban­ner from. How­ev­er, we realised that the six foot high hedge in front of the build­ing would make our protest invis­i­ble to almost every­one, so instead we hung our ban­ner by the main road and dis­trib­uted around 600 leaflets to some very inter­est­ed mem­bers of the pub­lic.

Fol­low­ing a con­cerned report from a ded­i­cat­ed com­mu­ni­ty police offi­cer ear­li­er in the day, two equal­ly com­mit­ted coun­cil work­ers from the envi­ron­men­tal and health depart­ment at Soli­hull Coun­cil turned up in their lunch hour to ensure that the lit­er­a­ture being dis­trib­uted was of a polit­i­cal, rather than com­mer­cial, nature and thus would not run afoul of local bye-laws on littering/flyering (no one seemed quite sure). This fol­lows sev­er­al oth­er inci­dents known to us in cen­tral Birm­ing­ham where coun­cil offi­cials have attempt­ed to apply sim­i­lar bye-laws (with accom­pa­ny­ing threats of fines and court appear­ances) to dis­suade peo­ple from hand­ing out polit­i­cal lit­er­a­ture. It has been not­ed before that the par­lia­men­tary leg­is­la­tion which serves as the basis of these bye-laws specif­i­cal­ly exempt­ed mate­ri­als of a polit­i­cal nature. The coun­cil work­ers also showed some inter­est in the ban­ner, rais­ing con­cern over the man­ner of its attach­ment to some local shrubs and some­thing else about pri­vate prop­er­ty, but in the end they seemed to decide that nei­ther the pub­lic nor the shrubs were at any risk (poten­tial, real, or oth­er­wise) and returned to what remained of their lunch hour.

Two stu­dents from Pak­istan informed us that they had to book an appoint­ment to begin the bio­met­ric ID card process and they could­n’t return home until this had been com­plet­ed. They claimed today they were told by staff that they would be required to give blood sam­ples and have iris scans for their bio­met­ric cards so if they com­mit­ted any ‘crimes’ in the UK they could be iden­ti­fied imme­di­ate­ly. It appears that the pri­vate com­pa­ny con­tract­ed to the tune of £5.6 bil­lion, and entrust­ed with sen­si­tive bio­met­ric data, are already doing their best to impress upon appli­cants that ID cards will be effec­tive at ‘fight­ing crime’. Lib­er­ty, the civ­il lib­er­ties and human rights organ­i­sa­tion, have already expressed con­cern about the Government’s abil­i­ty to safe­guard individual’s inti­mate details on the Nation­al Iden­ti­ty Reg­is­ter after Gov­ern­ment depart­ments last year lost 30 mil­lion pieces of per­son­al data, includ­ing those of 25 mil­lion child ben­e­fit claimants. ‘We have ID cards in our coun­try but they aren’t bio­met­ric’ said one of the stu­dents. ‘It feels very dis­crim­i­na­to­ry that we are being tar­get­ed first. Why aren’t they pro­cess­ing UK nation­als first?’ The inter­na­tion­al stu­dents also point­ed out that this was cost­ing them a great deal of mon­ey. Not only did they have to pay exor­bi­tant fees for their cours­es but on top of that they have to pay £300 for their visas and now they have to pay for their bio­met­ric ID cards and they are only per­mit­ted to work 20 hours a week. They also added that these mea­sures would serve to put over­seas stu­dents off study­ing here cit­ing Aus­tralia as a more wel­com­ing alter­na­tive.

The use of for­eign nation­als as guinea pigs for the more wide­spread intro­duc­tion of ID cards is a strat­e­gy to run a test­bed for the tech­nol­o­gy on peo­ple with­out a voice. It has become appar­ent that the gov­ern­ment is like­ly to pick off cer­tain sec­tions of the com­mu­ni­ty in Britain one at a time. This divide and rule strat­e­gy has been used through­out his­to­ry, most notably by the Nazi regime in Ger­many.

When the British gov­ern­ment came for the migrants,
I remained silent;
I was not a migrant.

When they came for the air­line work­ers,
I remained silent;
I was not an air­line work­er.

When they came for the con­victs,
I did not speak out;
I was not a con­vict.

When they came for the health work­ers,
I did not speak out;
I was not a health work­er.

When they came for the stu­dents,
I did not speak out;
I was not a stu­dent.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

nobor­ders-brum @ riseup.net

—

ID demo
http://glasgowanarchists.wordpress.com/

—

Also in the news:

ID ‘read­ing’ machines on Cana­da and Mex­i­co bor­ders
‘Smart’ CCTV in Portsmouth

Mass Tribal Uprising in West Bengal

Novem­ber 18, 2008

What we are wit­ness­ing in the trib­al belt of West Ben­gal is [an] his­tor­i­cal moment. A long oppressed peo­ple have risen up and are dar­ing to con­front their oppres­sors and ques­tion the log­ic of “devel­op­ment” that destroys their lives and liveli­hoods.”

Novem­ber 18, 2008

What we are wit­ness­ing in the trib­al belt of West Ben­gal is [an] his­tor­i­cal moment. A long oppressed peo­ple have risen up and are dar­ing to con­front their oppres­sors and ques­tion the log­ic of “devel­op­ment” that destroys their lives and liveli­hoods.”

In what start­ed out as a protest against police bru­tal­i­ty, on Novem­ber 7 more than ten thou­sand San­thal men and women con­verged in the Indi­an state of West Ben­gal to demand the end to state oppres­sion and the con­stant dis­pos­ses­sion of their lands.

It is an his­toric moment for the trib­al peo­ples in the region — and one so unprece­dent­ed that author­i­ties are not even sure what to do about it.

“Even the polit­i­cal par­ties and civ­il soci­ety are at a loss try­ing to come to terms with what is hap­pen­ing,” says Partho Sarathi Ray, in Sanhati.com. “Noth­ing like this has been wit­nessed in West Ben­gal in liv­ing mem­o­ry.”

The upris­ing report­ed­ly began fol­low­ing a land mine explo­sion on Novem­ber 2, which tar­get­ed the state’s chief min­is­ter as well as the union steel and mines min­is­ter.

The two men were return­ing from the inau­gu­ra­tion of the Jin­dal Steel Works (JSW) spe­cial eco­nom­ic zone (SEZ) in West Mid­na­pore dis­trict. Approx­i­mate­ly 5000 acres of land had been acquired for JSW, the vast major­i­ty of which was sup­posed to be dis­trib­uted amongst the land­less Adi­va­sis (indige­nous peo­ple) in the region. The gov­ern­ment hand­ed it over to the com­pa­ny instead.

The explo­sion was prompt­ly blamed on the Maoist guer­ril­las — how­ev­er, in what has become a com­mon prac­tice in West Ben­gal, the police turned all of their atten­tion to the local indige­nous pop­u­la­tion for being “com­plic­it” in the attack.

Over the next few days, the police set out on a cam­paign to assault, harass and ran­dom­ly arrest any trib­al per­son they want­ed.

But it just wasn’t enough for the police, who hadn’t the slight­est clue who was behind the explo­sion. So, on Novem­ber 6 the police “… led by the offi­cer in charge of Lal­garh police sta­tion… unleashed a reign of ter­ror in 35 vil­lages encom­pass­ing the entire trib­al belt of Lal­garh,” explains Ray. “In raids through­out the night of Novem­ber 6th, women were bru­tal­ly kicked and beat­en up with lath­is and butts of guns. Among the injured, Chi­ta­mani Mur­mu, one of whose eyes was hit by a gun butt, and Pana­mani Hans­da, who was kicked on her chest and suf­fered mul­ti­ple frac­tures, had to [be] hos­pi­tal­ized. Chitamani’s lost her eye because of the injury. Eight oth­er women were bad­ly wound­ed. These police bru­tal­i­ties soon reached a point where the adi­va­sis had no oth­er option but to rise up in revolt,” Ray con­tin­ues.

The next day, “what began as rum­blings of protest took the shape of a spon­ta­neous mass upris­ing [of] ten thou­sand San­thal men and women, armed with tra­di­tion­al weapons, [who] came out and obstruct­ed the roads lead­ing to Lal­garh, dis­con­nect­ing it from Mid­na­pur and Banku­ra. Roads were dug up and tree trunks were placed on the road to obstruct the entry of police vehi­cles, in the same way as it had been done in Nandi­gram.”

Dur­ing the night, “peo­ple also dis­con­nect­ed tele­phone and elec­tric­i­ty lines, vir­tu­al­ly con­vert­ing a vast area into a lib­er­at­ed zone. The apex social orga­ni­za­tion of the San­thals, the Bharat Jakat Majhi Mad­wa Juan Gaon­ta took up the lead­er­ship of the strug­gle, although the leader of the orga­ni­za­tion, the “Disham Majhi” Nityanan­da Hem­bram has him­self admit­ted that the orga­ni­za­tion has no con­trol over the move­ment; rather the move­ment is con­trol­ling the orga­ni­za­tion.”

As for the gov­ern­ment, which has “not dared to respond with overt vio­lence yet”, is help­less in the face of this upsurge. They’ve been try­ing to nego­ti­ate, but the effort has so far been fruit­less due to the demo­c­ra­t­ic and decen­tral­ized nature of the upris­ing. They sim­ply can’t exert any influ­ence over the indige­nous peo­ple.

They way things look right now, the gov­ern­ment may have no choice but to con­cede.

Reports on Sanhati

Mainstream Reports

Remember remember, action security in November… [update: Observer article withdrawn]

Remem­ber to think about secu­ri­ty when plan­ning actions & cam­paigns, every month — there’s been a help­ful reminder in a Sun­day news­pa­per that our aims and the aims of the state are some­what dif­fer­ent!

Though the arti­cle can be tak­en to be a police unit safe­guard­ing their ongo­ing bud­gets and employ­ment — as has hap­pened in the past with sim­i­lar scare arti­cles (from the police & the secu­ri­ty ser­vices) — it’s also a handy reminder of the secu­ri­ty issues we should think about to ensure that our cam­paign­ing remains effec­tive. Check out the back­ground dirt on the journos below…

It Came From the Black Swampy - Eco-Terror!!CCTV camera 1Remem­ber to think about secu­ri­ty when plan­ning actions & cam­paigns, every month — there’s been a help­ful reminder in a Sun­day news­pa­per that our aims and the aims of the state are some­what dif­fer­ent!

Though the arti­cle can be tak­en to be a police unit safe­guard­ing their ongo­ing bud­gets and employ­ment — as has hap­pened in the past with sim­i­lar scare arti­cles (from the police & the secu­ri­ty ser­vices) — it’s also a handy reminder of the secu­ri­ty issues we should think about to ensure that our cam­paign­ing remains effec­tive. Check out the back­ground dirt on the journos below…

See the Activist Secu­ri­ty web­site for a full down­load­able book­let.

Also, try out this selec­tion of links:

Secu­ri­ty, Pri­va­cy, & Anonymi­ty for Auton­o­my…
ELF Press Office’s secu­ri­ty page
Top 100 Net­work Secu­ri­ty Tools

The orig­i­nal news­pa­per arti­cle:

Police warn of grow­ing threat from eco-ter­ror­ists

Fear of dead­ly attack by lone mav­er­ick as offi­cers alert major firms to dan­ger of green extrem­ism

Mark Townsend and Nick Den­ning,
The Observ­er, Sun­day Novem­ber 9 2008

Police have warned of the grow­ing threat of eco-ter­ror­ism after reveal­ing they are inves­ti­gat­ing a group which has sup­port­ers who believe that reduc­ing the Earth­’s pop­u­la­tion by four-fifths will help to pro­tect the plan­et.

Offi­cers from a spe­cial­ist unit ded­i­cat­ed to tack­ling domes­tic ter­ror­ism are mon­i­tor­ing an eco-move­ment called Earth First! which has advo­cates who state that cut­ting the Earth­’s pop­u­la­tion by 80 per cent will ease pres­sure on oth­er species. Offi­cers are con­cerned a ‘lone mav­er­ick’ eco-extrem­ist may attempt a ter­ror­ist attack aimed at killing large num­bers of Britons.

The Nation­al Extrem­ism Tac­ti­cal Co-ordi­na­tion Unit, which col­lates intel­li­gence and advice to police forces, has revealed that eco-activists are research­ing a list of tar­get com­pa­nies which they believe are major pol­luters or are exac­er­bat­ing the threat of cli­mate change.

The unit is cur­rent­ly mon­i­tor­ing blogs and inter­net traf­fic con­nect­ed to a net­work of UK cli­mate camps and rad­i­cal envi­ron­men­tal move­ments under the umbrel­la of Earth First!, which has claimed respon­si­bil­i­ty for a series of crim­i­nal acts in recent months.

A senior source at the unit said it had grow­ing evi­dence of a threat from eco-activists. ‘We have found state­ments that four-fifths of the human pop­u­la­tion has to die for oth­er species in the world to sur­vive.

‘There are a num­ber of very ded­i­cat­ed indi­vid­u­als out there and they could be dan­ger­ous to oth­er peo­ple.’

Earth First! says its mis­sion is ‘about direct action to halt the destruc­tion of the Earth’ and advo­cates ‘civ­il dis­obe­di­ence and mon­key­wrench­ing’, tac­tics that include sab­o­tage and dis­rup­tive behav­iour. The move­ment has links to US envi­ron­men­tal extrem­ists which have waged a cam­paign of vio­lence in Amer­i­ca, includ­ing the fire­bomb­ing of a string of 4x4 car deal­er­ships in Cal­i­for­nia in 2003 and alleged arson attacks on oth­er prop­er­ty.

The anti-extrem­ist unit has already alert­ed a num­ber of major com­pa­nies which have been accused of being car­bon pol­luters with advice on how they can with­stand being tar­get­ed by eco-ter­ror­ists. Com­pa­nies are thought to include air­port oper­a­tor BAA, an inter­na­tion­al min­ing con­glom­er­ate BHP Bil­li­ton and firms con­nect­ed to UK coal-fired pow­er sta­tions.

‘They are doing research of pos­si­ble tar­gets, look­ing at share­hold­ers and financiers. For exam­ple, they could research an air­line and see how many of its air­craft are not envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly,’ said the NETCU source.

Although green extrem­ists have yet to embark on an orches­trat­ed cam­paign of vio­lence in the UK, offi­cers warn that they may be about to launch a cam­paign of intim­i­da­tion and fear aimed at dis­rupt­ing busi­ness­es. ‘For some peo­ple, if they can jus­ti­fy it in their minds, then it’s a noble cause even if it’s a crim­i­nal action. They haven’t start­ed yet, but we believe they will come up with a strat­e­gy and tac­tics,’ said the source at the unit, who described the move­ment as well-fund­ed and organ­ised.

A spate of recent attacks, for which Earth First! sup­port­ers have claimed respon­si­bil­i­ty, has includ­ed van­dal­ism of branch­es of sev­en Ger­man banks such as Deutsche Bank and Allianz AG. The actions were appar­ent­ly because the banks hold shares in UK Coal, which plans to build new coal-fired pow­er sta­tions.

A state­ment on the Earth First! web­site explains the attacks by say­ing: ‘Exploita­tion of the envi­ron­ment and peo­ple by the state and indus­try go hand in hand. They can­not be sep­a­rat­ed and both must be attacked. Social war, not cli­mate chaos.’

Anoth­er attack hit a quar­ry in Stafford­shire which belongs to Bar­don Aggre­gates, a com­pa­ny hat also owns a con­tro­ver­sial quar­ry at Glen­san­da on the north-west coast of Scot­land. The Scot­tish quar­ry is accused of spoil­ing the High­lands envi­ron­ment. The Earth First! web­site states: ‘We slashed tyres, stripped paint jobs, glued locks and trashed con­vey­or belts. All the earth movers were hit and many of the cement and aggre­gate trucks. This action cost us very lit­tle but should cost Bar­don thou­sands.’

Among the net­work of groups under the Earth First! umbrel­la are var­i­ous cli­mate camps. Last August police found a stash of knives and weapons beside one such camp in Kent. Pro­test­ers, how­ev­er, said they had noth­ing to do with the weapons and accused police of launch­ing a ‘smear cam­paign’.

A spokesman for Der­by Earth First! said the move­ment was strict­ly non-vio­lent, if not always law-abid­ing. He said: ‘If some­one does eco­log­i­cal dam­age we would per­haps break the law and pro­tect the ecol­o­gy, but the ecol­o­gy also includes humans.

‘We’re all about com­mu­ni­ties. Cap­i­tal­ism is the prob­lem and we want to return to a more sus­tain­able time. But we are not about reduc­ing the pop­u­la­tion, that is just scare­mon­ger­ing by the police.’

The rise of eco-extrem­ism coin­cides with the fall of the ani­mal rights activist move­ment. Police said the ani­mal rights move­ment was in ‘dis­ar­ray’ and that its ring­lead­ers had either been pros­e­cut­ed or were await­ing pros­e­cu­tion, adding that its ‘crit­i­cal mass’ of hard­core extrem­ists was suf­fi­cient­ly deplet­ed to have halt­ed its effec­tive­ness. Last Thurs­day a promi­nent ani­mal rights activist accused of plant­i­ng petrol bombs at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty was cleared of pos­sess­ing an explo­sive sub­stance with intent.

Reports on the Earth First! Jour­nal web­site, which tells users how to send encrypt­ed emails, reveals con­nec­tions to the Earth Lib­er­a­tion Front (ELF) which has been linked to a series of vio­lent attacks in the US. ELF was clas­si­fied as the top domes­tic ter­ror­ism threat in the US by the FBI in March 2001.

The ELF was found­ed in 1992 in Brighton by mem­bers of the Earth First! move­ment who want­ed to form a break­away group that would use more extreme tac­tics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/eco-terrorism-earth-first-elf

Dirt dug on arti­cle writ­ers:

From: http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/the-guardian-eco-terrorism-and-the-armyexclusive/

THE GUARDIAN ECO-TERRORIST JOURNO IS ARMY INTELLIGENCE OFFICER……..EXCLUSIVE!

Curios­er and Curiouser……I’m check­ing for Nick Den­ning — co-author with Mark Townsend of yesterday’s hilarous Observ­er piece on eco ‑ter­ror­ism. He doesn’t appear to have any pre­vi­ous as a jour­nal­ist. But what’s this?? A piece writ­ten by Townsend in Afghanistan in August 2007 where he’s embed­ded with the Roy­al Anglian Reg­i­ment in Sangin………and shar­ing a heli­copter ride with NICK DENNING — COMMANDER OF 1 PLATOON A COMPANY in the Roy­al Anglian reg­i­ment!!! And less than a year lat­er this Den­ning is pro­vid­ing intel­li­gence to his mate on The Guardian on eco — teror­ism!!! Some expla­na­tions from The Guardian reqired on this one methinks! Watch this space…………

Also see http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/guardian-journalists-police-patsies-yet-again/
And http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/god-bone-youre-a-cunt-the-observer-replies/

Fun­ny & infor­ma­tive.

—OR—

This ‘Nick Den­ning’ is clear­ly not the crick­eter and Ian Bone’s sug­ges­tion that he is an army offi­cer is unlike­ly. It is more like­ly to be the ND who worked at the BBC as a researcher and a bit of work on Google pulls up a num­ber of requests that he has made for infor­ma­tion.

For instance:

http://www.stewartbyfc.co.uk/fusionnews/archive.php?show=month&month=July&year=2004

The most like­ly expla­na­tion is that this is the per­son – that he is a researcher who wants to break into nation­al jour­nal­ism.

——

Schnews arti­cle & quotes from the journo

——

The Observer/Guardian blog on the sub­ject if you want to post some­thing there is http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2008/nov/10/activists-kingsnorth

——
Update:
The read­ers’ edi­tor on … anony­mous sources and claims of eco-ter­ror­ism

The Observ­er, Sun­day Novem­ber 23 2008

You might think The Observer’s con­cern for the envi­ron­ment arose only in the past 20 years as glob­al warm­ing became appar­ent, but it has actu­al­ly been read­ing the signs since 1925. Wal­dorf Astor, then the paper’s for­ward-think­ing own­er, took a keen inter­est in all things envi­ron­men­tal and urged his edi­tor, JL Garvin, to appoint a cor­re­spon­dent to cov­er ecol­o­gy and agri­cul­ture. Step for­ward Sir William Beach Thomas, who became, in effect, the first envi­ron­ment cor­re­spon­dent.

Much lat­er, The Observ­er was to inves­ti­gate and reveal the ‘green­house effect’ and to warn of its pos­si­ble con­se­quences. Thou­sands of words have been devot­ed to the sub­ject ever since, win­ning a loy­al audi­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly among those who are active in the envi­ron­ment move­ment. So there was under­stand­able dis­may at a recent sto­ry which told of a ‘grow­ing threat from eco-ter­ror­ists’.

Police were said to be inves­ti­gat­ing the eco-move­ment Earth First! which, they claimed, had sup­port­ers who believed that reduc­ing the Earth­’s pop­u­la­tion by four-fifths would help pro­tect the plan­et. The Nation­al Extrem­ism Tac­ti­cal Co-ordi­na­tion Unit was con­cerned that a lone mav­er­ick might attempt a ter­ror­ist attack. It had also warned sev­er­al com­pa­nies they were being tar­get­ed as major pol­luters by the group and had offered them advice on how to with­stand attack.

It’s per­fect­ly legit­i­mate to report police secu­ri­ty con­cerns, but none of the state­ments were sub­stan­ti­at­ed. No web­site links were offered, no names were men­tioned, no com­pa­nies iden­ti­fied and no police source would go on the record.

The arti­cle linked Earth First! to cli­mate camps estab­lished last sum­mer, includ­ing one at Kingsnorth pow­er sta­tion, Kent, and at Heathrow.

While the paper had no inten­tion of sug­gest­ing that every activist was a poten­tial ter­ror­ist, sev­er­al cli­mate campers wrote to protest. ‘If a jour­nal­ist is told by a sin­gle anony­mous source that a move­ment of peo­ple has among it indi­vid­u­als who would take the lives of men, women and chil­dren in a ter­ror attack, what stan­dard of evi­dence does that jour­nal­ist require? In this case: no evi­dence what­so­ev­er. The claim itself was the sto­ry.’

We’ve been here before. Oth­er news­pa­pers report­ed on a pre­dict­ed ‘sum­mer of hate’ at cli­mate camps that nev­er mate­ri­alised and the Press Com­plaints Com­mis­sion found against the Evening Stan­dard at cli­mate campers were plan­ning attacks at Heathrow.

Envi­ron­men­tal­ist Kei­th Met­calf explained that Earth First! sup­port­ed direct action against prop­er­ty, but not against peo­ple. He believed that the debate around sus­tain­able pop­u­la­tion size had been twist­ed to imply that envi­ron­men­tal­ists wished to kill peo­ple.

He also repeat­ed the belief of sev­er­al oth­ers that Nec­tu was brief­ing in this man­ner in order to make pros­e­cu­tions eas­i­er and to boost its fund­ing, which is at risk owing to the decline in ani­mal rights cam­paigns. I can’t ver­i­fy that or the fears about mass mur­der because, despite repeat­ed requests, Nec­tu won’t respond. Accord­ing­ly, The Observ­er has decid­ed to with­draw the sto­ry.

Bath Bomb #15 out now

The Bath Bomb
@nti-copyright: copy and dis­trib­ute!
Issue #15
free/donation
Oct 08

Knowl­edge is Pow­er, So Arm Your­self

The Bath Bomb
@nti-copyright: copy and dis­trib­ute!
Issue #15
free/donation
Oct 08

Knowl­edge is Pow­er, So Arm Your­self

Of late, you’d be mis­tak­en for think­ing the end is indeed nigh. With the implo­sion of large chunks of the glob­al econ­o­my, and the fall of banks like Brad­ford and Bin­g­ley and North­ern Rock over here, Lehman Broth­ers, Fan­ny Mae and Fred­die Mac in the States, cap­i­tal­is­m’s days are look­ing num­bered. Far from being an inevitable and effi­cient sys­tem, it seems like the con­stant finan­cial fid­dling and cre­ative math required to meet tar­gets and pro­vide the illu­sion of con­tin­u­al growth, are caus­ing a glob­al cred­it crunch whose sting we’re all feel­ing. But whilst Brown & co donat­ed £25 bil­lion worth of cor­po­rate wel­fare to bail out blun­der­ing North­ern Rock in one day, mon­ey sore­ly need­ed for our pub­lic ser­vices is nowhere to be seen. But are there any oth­er answers? Well, last month saw the Bris­tol Anar­chist Book­fair at St Wer­burghs Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre on Sat­ur­day the 13th Sep­tem­ber pulling in over 400 pun­ters, and on Sat­ur­day the 18th of this month will be the Anar­chist Book­fair in Lon­don. Expect reams of info on social­ly-just eco­nom­ics, alter­na­tive ener­gy and lifestyles, child­care, music, food, talks and work­shops, rad­i­cal the­o­ry and lessons learnt from the past. Cap­i­tal­ism has been fail­ing us now for decades with poor health, over-exploita­tion, over-work, increas­ing author­i­tar­i­an­ism, and a widen­ing pover­ty gap, and it’s high time we tried some­thing new. And if you can’t make it to Lon­don, we now have a new online rad­i­cal lend­ing library in Bath — so, if you fan­cy an inter­est­ing read on the real­ly cheap, check out the blog sec­tion of http://www.myspace.com/bathactivistnetwork.

http://www.anarchistbookfair.org/
www.bristolanarchistbookfair.org/

Labour of Hate

For the first time in decades, the annu­al Labour par­ty con­fer­ence was held out­side of Brighton, the politi­cians instead opt­ing for Man­ches­ter. The change in loca­tion did not bring a change in atti­tude though, and the con­fer­ence saw more of the now famil­iar cosy­ing up to big busi­ness, tired taglines and pro-war, pro-pri­vati­sa­tion rhetoric. Out­side the con­fer­ence how­ev­er, 4,000 cit­i­zens gath­ered to rip the agen­da away from Neo-Labour and their cor­po­rate bud­dies and high­light the grow­ing dis­gust the pop­u­la­tion feels at the con­tempt politi­cians show for the needs and desires of the aver­age per­son. A large part of the demo con­sist­ed of the anar­chist ‘free­dom of move­ment bloc’.

Made up of up to 500 peo­ple, the bloc gath­ered to demand free­dom of move­ment for migrants and an end to nation­al bor­ders, states and war. Before long, our flu­o­ro-jack­et­ed bud­dies from the deeply unpop­u­lar (and taser-hap­py) Man­ches­ter Met­ro­pol­i­tan showed an inter­est in the bloc, div­ing in to arrest activists trea­so­nous enough to don Gor­don Brown masks. After a short, sharp fight how­ev­er, the cops were sent pack­ing with no arrests made. From then on, police tried to make fre­quent incur­sions into the bloc, all of which were repelled, and the least suc­cess­ful end­ing with 15 cops get­ting tak­en pris­on­er and cut off from their bud­dies for a peri­od of 10 min­utes! The most notice­able aspect of the demo was the increased size and promi­nence of anar­chist pol­i­tics on the march, a phe­nom­e­non that has been grow­ing in recent years. While the demo was a most­ly non con­fronta­tion­al affair, it was suc­cess­ful in remind­ing Neo-Labour that while they pri­va­tise our resources, imprison and tor­ture our asy­lum seek­ing broth­ers and sis­ters, enclose us with CCTV and kill us with fuel prices — we are still watch­ing, and we will not be silent.

Lib­er­ate Your Mind at Bub­bling Under

Sun­day 28th Sep­tem­ber saw a return to the month­ly rad­i­cal film show­ings at the Porter Cel­lar Bar in Bath. This month, the line up includ­ed ‘Bombs and Batons’, a short film cov­er­ing Brighton’s Car­ni­val Against the Arms Trade on June 4th. The film gen­er­al­ly showed police offi­cers look­ing total­ly fazed and out of their depth amongst hun­dreds of demon­stra­tors tak­ing a stand against the lucra­tive arms trade (see below for more info). The sec­ond film, ‘Can’t Com­plain’, was made up of footage from a demon­stra­tion in Jan­u­ary out­side Brighton police sta­tion against the oppres­sion faced by those active in oppos­ing EDO/ITT. The third film took view­ers back in time to the tree camps of the 1990s. The film includ­ed dar­ing stunts by activists to halt the build­ing of the infa­mous New­bury Bypass. Whilst view­ers enjoyed the films, they tucked into the Porter’s famous veg­gie roast. Aside from the fab­u­lous food, pre­vi­ous show­ings have been accom­pa­nied by talks from polit­i­cal activists, live debates and work­shops on events such as this year’s Cli­mate Camp. Forth­com­ing events at Bub­bling Under will include films about Cli­mate Camp and cov­er­age of the 1990 poll tax demon­stra­tions. Organ­is­ers always wel­come sug­ges­tions to bathactivistnet@yahoo.co.uk for films, work­shops and debates.

Pigs Might Fly: Or Was He Pushed?

Matisse once said ‘flow­ers are every­where for those who are will­ing to look’. Well, this month, our flow­ers come in the form of the forced res­ig­na­tion of Sir Ian Blair — ex-head hon­cho of the Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan police. Acts dur­ing his time at the top include the cold-blood­ed mur­der of Brazil­ian plumber Jean Charles ‘it’s one of them dark­’uns, sarge’ de Menezes, the res­ig­na­tion of almost every black and asian high rank­ing offi­cer he worked with amid claims of racism and the glee­ful pass­ing of laws to crim­i­nal­ize, beat and arrest legit­i­mate pro­tes­tors. The final turd on the moun­tain­ous steam­er that was Blair’s career came when it emerged that he chan­nelled tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey away from the police and into his mates’ pock­ets. So, good­bye to true scum in its purest form (and hop­ing that more of his bas­tard bud­dies go the same way), and a fond hope that his forced retire­ment ends soon and blood­i­ly with jour­nal­ists report­ing that the shoot­ing was noth­ing more than a trag­ic case of mis­tak­en iden­ti­ty.

Shut ITT, You Slag

Fol­low­ing on from June’s smash­ing Car­ni­val Against the Arms Trade, on Wednes­day the 15th of Octo­ber, activists will con­verge from all round the nation on the EDO/ITT arms fac­to­ry in Brighton, for around 2. Rather than tooth­less­ly appeal­ing to the state’s fic­ti­tious benev­o­lent side to NOT spon­sor cor­po­rate mas­sacres half way across the world and at home, in the case of the ‘Smash EDO’ cam­paign, ordi­nary peo­ple are con­fronting the roots of war — the very man­u­fac­tur­ers of instru­ments of death (Nazi Ger­many-affil­i­at­ed ITT make the Pave­way mis­sile guid­ance sys­tem, used in Iraq and Pales­tine). Not peti­tion­ing them, but forc­ing them to stop, share by share, day by day, with the cam­paign bit­ing down and hold­ing tena­cious­ly on, until these prof­it-obsessed bas­tards are brought down. It’s his­to­ry in the mak­ing, an exam­ple of a focused cam­paign suc­ceed­ing at its aims, even in the face of state, police and media cen­sor­ship and harass­ment. And once ITT has been bank­rupt­ed, which com­pa­ny is next? Fol­low­ing this course, we will even­tu­al­ly have human­i­ty, mutu­al aid, and dare we say it, world peace… even if we have to smash, d‑lock, shout our­selves hoarse, and super­glue our way through every dodgy indus­try and evil mega­lo­ma­ni­ac to get it: be there on the day! The demo starts at 12 noon, meet­ing oppo­site Falmer train sta­tion. For trans­port down, drop us an email at bathactivistnet@yahoo.co.uk.

http://www.smashedo.org.uk/shut-itt.htm

Pos­i­tive’s Not News

It’s come to our atten­tion here at the Bath Bomb of a wor­ry­ing ten­den­cy in the local press. Whilst the same is true of nation­al and region­al papers the UK over, the Bath Chron­ic has tak­en upon itself to ignore pos­i­tive local events and ini­tia­tives which show com­mu­ni­ties organ­is­ing their own needs and doing good for them­selves and their neigh­bours; take for exam­ple, the case of the River­side Com­mu­ni­ty Youth Cen­tre’s open evening on the 26th Sep­tem­ber, where local youth showed off their music tal­ents and staff put on food and high­light­ed to res­i­dents the impor­tant work the cen­tre is doing. Staff were told by the Chron that such pos­i­tive sto­ries, which you might mis­tak­en­ly believe are the fare of local rags all over the land, were not high enough pri­or­i­ty to war­rant a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, nor any more than reluc­tant cov­er­age; per­haps the kids should have been out mug­ging peo­ple like a prop­er hood­ie? Like­wise, worth­while activist events through­out the last six months have been equal­ly cen­sored: ‘Roots of Change’, ‘There is such thing as a free lunch!’, the Bath FreeShop… the list goes on. If these pro­test­ers had lived up to the stereo­type and been busy break­ing stuff, then per­haps that would have shift­ed a cou­ple more papers? So whilst the Chron puts a cyn­i­cal spot­light on the neg­a­tive, the triv­ial, the celeb-obsessed, or fear-mon­ger­ing, is it real­ly the job of the media to decide what its read­ers are per­mit­ted to know or think?

Bath — 2, BNP — 0

Remem­ber last year when Nick Grif­fin, head Nazi of the BNP, tried to come to speak at Bath Uni? Local anti-fas­cists mobilised to first kick him off cam­pus, then out of sev­er­al pubs, then into a field where the cops made him and his bone­head mates go home after a 5‑minute speech on pub­lic safe­ty grounds! Well, it looks like the Nazis may be back. Reports sug­gest that sev­er­al BNP activists were hand­ing out fly­ers at Bath Uni ear­li­er this month. This month also saw a few hun­dred Nazis from across Europe con­verge at the Bun­ga­low Inn in Som­er­set (against the scared own­er’s wish­es) to drunk­en­ly sieg heil their depart­ed fuhrer Ian Stew­art Don­ald­son, singer of fas­cist band Skrew­driv­er, who brave­ly mar­tyred him­self over a decade ago after drunk­en­ly falling in front of a car! While this was a one-off event, the BNP at Bath Uni may not be so, and Bath anti-fas­cists would appre­ci­ate any infor­ma­tion on the sit­u­a­tion there. The BNP are vicious racists who oppose immi­gra­tion and trade unions and have a long his­to­ry of racial vio­lence, Hitler-wor­ship and Holo­caust denial (their leader still denies the Holo­caust, call­ing it the ‘Holo­hoax’, and recent­ly claimed in a speech to Amer­i­can Nazis that he would be hap­py to kill for the white race). We have kicked them out of Bath once, and we can do it again. Any infor­ma­tion will be treat­ed as con­fi­den­tial and can be sent to bathactivistnet@yahoo.co.uk.

Com­put­er Says ‘No… 2ID’

Despite long resis­tance, the racist state will be push­ing in ID cards, this year, start­ing on the 25th Novem­ber with easy tar­gets the immi­grants. Incensed at this, 35 activists from No Bor­ders across South Wales, Bath, Bris­tol and beyond con­verged on the Home Office Iden­ti­ty and Pass­port Office in New­port, on Sat­ur­day the 5th Octo­ber. Despite the driz­zle and minor police intim­i­da­tion, they stayed on for two hours, leaflet­ing the pass­ing pub­lic about this insid­i­ous new (old) scheme. Whilst the cards will reach immi­grants next month, if the scheme does­n’t meet too much oppo­si­tion, it will then be rolled out to work­ers in ‘sen­si­tive’ loca­tions in 2009, and then stu­dents in 2010. Act­ing on flawed ‘intel­li­gence’, bungling cop­pers turned up an hour before­hand to police the demo, and the office itself shut its bar­ri­er after one hour. But what’s all the big deal? Sure­ly if you have noth­ing to hide, you have noth­ing to fear? Man­age­ment of this data­base (the most com­plex in Europe) will be doled out to pri­vate com­pa­nies like PA Con­sult­ing, who already lost 30,000 peo­ple’s records back in August. Will their strug­gling soft­ware be able to han­dle this larg­er strain? We hope so, because with an increas­ing reliance on tech­nol­o­gy, and numer­ous such com­put­er cock-ups, what’s to say that sim­i­lar inci­dents won’t result in oth­er hor­ror sto­ries, with data-loss vic­tims unable to work, unable to pay bills, unable to shop, and unable to access basic ser­vices. But what about ID cards stop­ping crime? Unless the cards or RFID chips (radio fre­quen­cy iden­ti­fi­ca­tion implants) mirac­u­lous­ly address mal­nour­ish­ment, domes­tic abuse or pover­ty cycles, then these cards won’t pre­vent crime. So giv­en that, why is Big Broth­er so intent on build­ing up all this info? As the proverb goes, “First they came for the com­mu­nists, and I did noth­ing because I was not a com­mu­nist. Then they came for the trade union­ists, and I did noth­ing because I was not a trade union­ist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did noth­ing because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to help me.”

http://current.com/topics/88831947_data_loss
http://www.no2id.net/
http://noborderswales.wordpress.com

Your Gov­ern­ment Wants You Dead!

A dra­mat­ic head­line? We at Bath Bomb are known for our occa­sion­al sen­sa­tion­al­ism, but on this occa­sion, we are being ‘dead­ly’ seri­ous. Recent fig­ures sug­gest that 1/3 of the pop­u­la­tion is going to be forced into a choice between suf­fi­cient fuel or suf­fi­cient food this win­ter. By encour­ag­ing price hikes in the pri­vate fuel sec­tor and choos­ing to sup­port fail­ing busi­ness rather than aver­age peo­ple, the gov­ern­ment of this coun­try will lit­er­al­ly be respon­si­ble for thou­sands of deaths this win­ter. Let’s put this in per­spec­tive — the gov­ern­ment is per­fect­ly will­ing to shell out hun­dreds of mil­lions of OUR mon­ey to slow the inevitable col­lapse of cap­i­tal­ism, while just down the road in Swin­don, 69% of coun­cil house res­i­dents were recent­ly dis­cov­ered to be liv­ing well below the pover­ty line. There is plen­ty to be angry at the gov­ern­ment over that we spend much time focus­ing on — the war on the Iraqi peo­ple and sur­veil­lance soci­ety being a cou­ple of exam­ples, but it is about time we start to resist the bru­tal­i­ty that the state dish­es out to us all on a dai­ly basis; the fuel pover­ty, the cuts to NHS, edu­ca­tion and job­seek­ers, the mea­gre sup­port for low income fam­i­lies. The gov­ern­ment has shown that it stands on the side of busi­ness above the needs of the peo­ple. The class war, this epic social bat­tle between the haves and the have-nots was not start­ed by us, it was start­ed by a rul­ing class who care more for prof­it and preser­va­tion of the sta­tus quo than the lives of its cit­i­zens. We have had war declared on us by the polit­i­cal class and we need to begin ask­ing ‘how will we respond to the assault of busi­ness and gov­ern­ment on our lives’ and how can we organ­ise to take back what is ours, our basic rights to warmth, food, afford­able hous­ing, enjoy­ment and an end to wage slav­ery? How will we organ­ise to win the class war?

Mini Bar-stards

Just a quick­ie: on Fri­day 26th Sep­tem­ber, activists from Bath Ani­mal Action and BAN did a short, sharp demo against foie gras sell­er Mini Bar on John Street, who have tak­en it upon them­selves to sell the stuff. See every oth­er issue of Bath Bomb for more on foie gras and the cam­paign. As per usu­al, BAA will be back again and again, until Mini Bar sees sense.

EVENTS

Mon­days — Bath Hunt Sabs Meet­ing, 8pm, Bell
Wednes­days — Lon­don Rd Food Co-op, River­side Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre, 4–7pm
Sat­ur­days — Bath Stop The War Vig­il, Abbey Court­yard, 11.30–12.30
Weds 15th Oct — Smash ITT, Falmer Sta­tion, Brighton, 12noon
Fri 17th Oct — Chris Baines’ green spaces in cities talk, Guild­hall, 7pm £6
Sat 18th Oct — Lon­don Anar­chist Book­fair www.anarchistbookfair.org
Fri 24th Oct — Bath Mad­hat­ters Birth­day Par­ty, Man­vers St Bap­tist Church, 3–6pm
Fri 24th Oct — anti-foie gras demo, against Mini­bar, John St, 7–9
Sat 25th Oct — ben­e­fit gig, the White Hart, Eas­t­on, 6pm, £7 entry
Sun 26th Oct — Bub­bling Under, Porter Cel­lar Bar, 1–4pm
Mon 27th Oct — Block the Builders, Alder­mas­ton AWE block­ade
Weds 29th Oct — Bath Bomb ben­e­fit gig, the Junc­tion, Stokes Croft, Bris­tol, 8‑late
Sat 1st Nov — Bath FreeShop, Stall Street, 12–3pm
Weds 5th Nov — Bath Ani­mal Action meet­ing, back­room of Bell, 7.30–8.30
Thurs 6th Nov — BAN meet­ing, down­stairs Hob­gob­lin, 7.30–9
Sat 22 Nov — Bath Veg­an Fayre, Per­cy Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre 12–4pm

And now, to the dis­claimer: As any­one is free to con­tribute, the opin­ions expressed in each arti­cle are not nec­es­sar­i­ly reflec­tive of each con­trib­u­tor. Nat­u­ral­ly, any right-wing or cor­po­rate bull­shit will be binned and spat on. Need­less to say, the opin­ions of the author of this dis­claimer does not nec­es­sar­i­ly rep­re­sent the views of any oth­er con­trib­u­tor…

For fur­ther info on any of our sto­ries see www.myspace.com/bathbomb

Q: Who Are Bath Activist Net­work? A: A local umbrel­la group cam­paign­ing on issues as diverse as devel­op­ment, envi­ron­men­tal­ism, anti-war, ani­mal rights, work­ers’ rights and more. Help­ing to pro­duce The Bath Bomb, we are open to any­one, and our mem­bers range from trade union­ists to anar­chists, lib­er­als to greens, and peo­ple who just want to change Bath for the bet­ter. For details on meet­ings, demos, or just to get in touch, ring us on 07949 611912, email bathactivistnet@yahoo.co.uk, or see our web­site: www.myspace.com/bathactivistnetwork

GOT A STORY? WANT TO RECEIVE THE BATH BOMB BY EMAIL? HOPING TO SUE? Con­tact us by e‑mailing bathbombpress@yahoo.co.uk. Large print e‑versions avail­able on request.

Bath Bomb 14 hits the streets

Anoth­er issue of Bath’s should-be award win­ning grass­roots pub­li­ca­tion…

anti-cop, right? copy and dis­trib­ute
The Bath Bomb
Issue #14
“All the news the Chron did­n’t Use!”

free/donation

Sept ‘08

Reds, Shite And Booze

Bath Bomb logoAnoth­er issue of Bath’s should-be award win­ning grass­roots pub­li­ca­tion…

anti-cop, right? copy and dis­trib­ute
The Bath Bomb
Issue #14
“All the news the Chron did­n’t Use!”

free/donation

Sept ‘08

Reds, Shite And Booze

Sat­ur­day the 16th of August was to be the sec­ond annu­al Red, White and Blue Fes­ti­val of the BNP, a so-called fam­i­ly event, held on the farm of for­mer Tory coun­cil­lor Alan Warn­er, in Den­by, Der­byshire. Though pitch­ing them­selves as the media-friend­ly ‘Nazi-Lite’ face of mod­ern nation­al­ism, Nick Griffin’s par­ty still can’t quite drag itself away from its hard­line right-wing roots, as betrayed in the pro­gram’s high­lights: talks on ‘her­itage and cul­ture’, night-time nav­i­ga­tion and sur­vival skills, kooky Mor­ris-style danc­ing around a horse skull, stalls sell­ing Union Jack attired gol­li­wogs, and let’s not for­get the Hitler Youth-esque kids’ camp, teach­ing 12-year-olds live ammo marks­man­ship, knife-fight­ing, tech­niques for deal­ing with ‘Marx­ist teach­ers,’ and how to make ‘Dutch arrow’ throw­ing spears (erm.. that does­n’t sound very British). How­ev­er, this insan­i­ty isn’t the sort of shit that ordi­nary peo­ple stand for and, whilst res­i­dents and local activists have been mak­ing plans to shut it down, nation­al­ly, Antifa and the organ­ised Left con­verged.

Though the pow­ers-that-be have no issue with the fas­cist nature of the event, as soon as they realised the storm of resis­tance that was build­ing, police banned the fes­ti­val’s music and liquor licens­es — but did­n’t sub­ject the fes­ti­val to even a mod­icum of the has­sle they did with Cli­mate Camp. Their true colours shined even more so on the day, releas­ing hood­ied-up agents provo­ca­teurs into the 400-strong SWP, UAF, TUC-dom­i­nat­ed march and ral­ly, and Mersey­side cops out­did them­selves by phon­ing and attempt­ing to fit up known anti-fas­cist activists by offer­ing sup­posed lifts to the demo. Whilst the marchers were engag­ing in token pushy-shovey and chant­i­ng with the police line (a lip ser­vice ges­ture to demo­c­ra­t­ic free­dom was made in the form of 30 pro­test­ers escort­ed to the entrance to the fes­ti­val for an insult­ing 15 min­utes, against a hail of BNP abuse), Antifa made their own plans. That morn­ing, 80 masked up and made their way through the under­growth to con­front the fash direct­ly, intend­ing to set up a sys­tem of road­blocks and sab­o­tage. How­ev­er, fol­low­ing the first bar­ri­cade, police vio­lence forced them back and into a string of run­ning bat­tles — cul­mi­nat­ing in more than 30 arrests and one injured cop.

So unfor­tu­nate­ly, RWB was­n’t crashed, but was sur­round­ed by chaos (as well as drunk­en sieg-heils) and vil­lagers are now plead­ing with the BNP not to come back; to add your voice to this request, con­tact Alan Warn­er (The Bun­ga­low, Cod­nor Den­by Lane, Den­by Vil­lage, Der­byshire, DE5 8PT, 01773 748129/ 07810 383595, or alan.warner@w3z.co.uk) or organ­is­er David Shap­cott (6 The Spin­ney, Burn­ley, Lan­cashire, BB12 0PB, 07871 029681). But Antifa’s antics do bring up seri­ous ques­tions — con­sid­er­ing the strate­gic impor­tance of the BNP’s RWB, why did so few oppo­nents put in an appear­ance? And how did small, yet admit­ted­ly rabid, clus­ters of cops put supe­ri­or num­bers of deter­mined mil­i­tants to rout and infight­ing, with thrown bricks occa­sion­al­ly hit­ting their own? Beyond talk of machis­mo, organ­i­sa­tion and vio­lence, per­haps more activists need to focus on their own per­son­al lim­its and be hon­est with them­selves over what threats they are pre­pared to face… Not only for the suc­cess of indi­vid­ual actions and the move­ments’ cred­i­bil­i­ty, but also in terms of both our own safe­ty and that of our com­rades And next year, let’s real­ly stop them!

http://www.antifa.org.uk/
http://bristol.indymedia.org/article/688740
http://netcu.wordpress.com
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2008/09/03/bnp…22309

Sainsbury’s And Tesco — Destroy­ing Com­mu­ni­ties All Over The World

While Tesco threat­ens to infest Bath with crap­py ‘food’ and depress­ing, repet­i­tive jobs under patron­iz­ing boss­es who don’t care about you, Sainsbury’s look set to crawl their way into Odd Down. The site pro­posed by Store­gap Com­mer­cial and Odd Down Devel­op­ments would be the same size as Bath’s Mor­risons. If you’re in favour of good qual­i­ty food prod­ucts made with a regard to ani­mal wel­fare and envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty, work­er’s rights and the fair dis­tri­b­u­tions of wealth — or if you sim­ply hate being rushed around as if you were in a chaot­ic cat­tle mar­ket every time you go out to buy gro­ceries, while being blind­ed by arti­fi­cial light­ing — we’d love to have you on board our cam­paign, aimed at resist­ing super­mar­ket expan­sion and cre­at­ing viable alter­na­tives. Email bathactivistnet@yahoo.co.uk for more details.

A brief update on the Tesco Express on Bath­wick Hill — orig­i­nal­ly due to open ear­ly this year, now, due to the actions of local com­mu­ni­ty and activists, it’s still yet to open its doors due to the enforce­ment of the con­di­tions they tried to weasel out of com­plet­ing.

Watching/Smashing Up The Watch­ers

Your faith­ful, yet para­noid jour­nal­ists here at Bath Bomb tow­ers have giv­en many col­umn inch­es over the past few months to the increas­ing sur­veil­lance we are sub­ject­ed to nowa­days. Britain is now the most sur­veil­lance-heavy coun­try in the world, nar­row­ly best­ing notable com­peti­tors such as Chi­na and the good ol’ US of A. Indus­try insid­ers have agreed that CCTV is almost use­less in deal­ing with real crimes, such as rape and mur­der, and only real­ly comes in use­ful when deal­ing with those things that only politi­cians and the rich count as crimes, such as shoplift­ing. Tak­ing into account their inef­fi­cien­cy at solv­ing seri­ous crime, it can be sen­si­bly assumed that the prime func­tion of CCTV (on which our per­vy gov­ern­ment spends mil­lions each year) is social con­trol; of spread­ing the idea that you can­not step out of line because you are always being watched. Well, now, final­ly, we have a chance to strike back! Octo­ber the 11th is an inter­na­tion­al day of protest and decen­tralised action against CCTV and sur­veil­lance. Want to be part of the fun? A plas­tic bag or well aimed spray can blast can tem­porar­i­ly dis­able a CCTV cam­era, while ham­mers and screw­drivers can do a much less sub­tle, yet longer last­ing job! Won­der­ing how to access those cam­eras in hard to reach places? A paint­brush tied to a bam­boo stick does the trick! There are lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of legal and ille­gal ways we can strike back against big broth­er, so let’s use the 11th as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to show the state we can live out­side of their con­trol, laws, author­i­ty and oppres­sion. If noth­ing else, use the day as a chance to look a CCTV cam­era (or com­mu­ni­ty sup­port offi­cer) dead in the eye, flip a fin­ger and defi­ant­ly shout (safe in the knowl­edge that thou­sands across the globe are doing the same thing) ‘stop look­ing at me fun­ni­ly you weirdos!’.

CCTV News Part Deux

The Bath Bomb can exclu­sive­ly reveal that Big Broth­er (as in 1984, not that real­i­ty TV farce of squawk­ing, ego­ma­ni­a­cal lobot­o­my-cas­es) is chang­ing the way it inter­feres with The Peo­ple and scape­goats the young. Pre­vi­ous­ly obvi­ous CCTV instal­la­tions are now being gut­ted into redun­dant bluff cam­eras, with the real cam­era place­ments being hid­den near­by in tiny black case­ments, though their lens will still need to be exposed to the light of day. And, it’s also recent­ly emerged that sin­is­ter sci­en­tists at Bath Uni have been spy­ing on Blue­tooth users in the city for the last three years, with­out con­sent, with ‘City­ware’ scan­ners fol­low­ing around 3,000 devices every week­end, fol­low­ing cit­i­zens’ move­ments and shop­ping pat­terns. Tar­get­ed mar­ket­ing, or mark­ing tar­gets? We’ve heard it all. Stay out of trou­ble kids!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jul/21/civilliberties…yfull

The­o­ry Cor­ner Part A: Are All Cops Real­ly Bas­tards?

After read­ing the The­o­ry Cor­ner: ‘Are All Cops Bas­tards?’ arti­cle in July’s issue 12, I got the per­mis­sion of said arti­cle’s author to have my say on this com­plex issue. Yes, the police have devolved from your friend­ly neigh­bour­hood bob­by; the one who made you feel a bit safer, who gave you direc­tions and popped round for a cup of tea (how wrong can you go with old TV pro­grammes as your barom­e­ter for real­i­ty?) They’ve gone from this to a mind­less mass automa­ton who go on pow­er trips and think that any­one who finds them­selves at a demon­stra­tion of any sort, be they strong or not so strong, young or not so young, deserves to at best be spo­ken to in a patron­iz­ing man­ner and at worst be man­han­dled away and arrest­ed for no good rea­son.

BUT, and this is a big but. Tak­ing it as read that the ulti­mate goal of ‘chang­ing the world’ is, in fact, to make that world a bet­ter place for every­one, then we have to realise that cops are in fact human, despite the lengths they can go to try to hide this fact. Take away the uni­form, the weapons, the smug above-you atti­tude and you will find some­one with the same basic needs and desires as every­one else. I’m sure the answer is not to engage in this cat-and-mouse rela­tion­ship with them, slag­ging them off (though they often have no qualms about doing the same to us — for exam­ple the sick­en­ing com­ments on the ‘Police Inspec­tor’s Blog’), just as that is not the way to go with the Rich, though that is anoth­er arti­cle. This, to me, seems a lazy way of going about things that will just enable the sta­tus quo to be kept; we get to make our jokes about PC Plod and nev­er have to come to terms with the fact that they will be part of this new soci­ety.

I don’t know what the way for­ward is, I think it is a slow path, where we get out of our cosy activist cor­ners and mix with peo­ple of all walks of life, even those who make us feel ill with what they’re doing to the world. We wel­come peo­ple and talk to them about our way of life, with­out judg­ing or forc­ing any­one to see it our way. Some will come over to our side. Some will resist, but we nev­er know what effect our view­point is hav­ing on them. It is hard to change, and won’t hap­pen over night. But only with these small vic­to­ries and grad­ual changes will any real and last­ing change ever come about. To describe a group of peo­ple as large­ly irre­deemable, will cause defen­sive­ness — we have to believe in the pos­si­bil­i­ty in peo­ple to change, whether they show us any proof of this or not. You can do so much more with peace and wel­come than you can with vio­lence, judge­ment and iso­la­tion — isn’t that what ‘our side’ is all about? After all, this oth­er way’s been tried so many times before, in fact it’s all we as a human race has ever done, and has it ever worked? With this dis­mis­sive atti­tude we con­demn our­selves to a lim­it­ed suc­cess, when with all our skills, ener­gy, ideas and com­pas­sion, we can achieve so much more.

http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/young‑m…n‑go/ (police inspec­tor’s blog)
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&…34851 (newslet­ter issue 12)

Stop The Wars, Stop The Walls & Stop Wall Street

Despite what the Dai­ly Mail would have us believe, we are all now a wit­ness to an unprece­dent­ed rise in bor­der man­age­ment and social con­trol. Neo-Labour is at the fore­front of this squeeze, and are hold­ing their annu­al par­ty con­fer­ence in Man­ches­ter this month. Coin­cid­ing with this, with vio­lence peak­ing in Afghanistan, drag­ging on in Iraq, and break­ing in Geor­gia, Stop The War have called for a ‘Troops Out’ march on Sat­ur­day the 20th at 12 mid­day, and the UK No Bor­ders net­work have also jumped in — anti-author­i­tar­i­ans and all oth­ers against bor­ders, states and war can con­sid­er them­selves humbly invit­ed to join the ‘Free­dom of Move­ment’ bloc, assem­bling at the north end of Albert Square — fol­low the red and black flags!

http://www.manchesternoborders.org.uk
http://www.stopwar.org.uk
http://www.acbar.org
http://www.bathstopwar.org.uk/

Racist BIAs­tards Feel The Heat In Bris­tol

In oth­er immi­gra­tion-relat­ed news, No Bor­ders activists recent­ly paid a vis­it to the British Immi­gra­tion Author­i­ty offices in Por­tishead. BIA round up failed immi­gra­tion appli­cants for forced depor­ta­tion. Favourite tac­tics include ‘dawn raids’, intend­ed to round up the whole fam­i­ly before the kids can get to school. Recent brave deeds by our jack­boot­ed friends have includ­ed the forced removal of a Columbian sin­gle moth­er from the Bris­tol area, her 7‑year-old son send­ing a let­ter to his class mates from a deten­tion cen­tre read­ing ‘I don’t know why I am here, they have put me in prison, but I promise I haven’t done any­thing wrong’. When activists arrived at the Por­tishead BIA cen­tre, from which Bath and Bris­tol dawn raids are launched, the build­ings’ locks were glued, the entire fleet of vehi­cles used for dawn raids were destroyed with span­ners, etch­ing flu­id and paint strip­per and the slo­gan ‘racist thugs work here’ was daubed over walls for all to see. BIA rep­re­sent the sharp end of the state’s racist war on asy­lum seek­ers, who, hav­ing fled per­se­cu­tion, ter­ror and tor­ture, ask only for a safe place to live, and not to be deport­ed to cer­tain death and impris­on­ment. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the major­i­ty find out the hard way that gov­ern­ment the world over is a bru­tal mech­a­nism for the repres­sion and incar­cer­a­tion of ordi­nary peo­ple. We must stand side by side with oth­er oppressed peo­ples strug­gling for a decent stan­dard of life, and like the BIA sabo­teurs, fight for a world with­out bor­ders or gov­ern­ments, and respond by any means nec­es­sary to the vio­lent and destruc­tive forces of state and cap­i­tal.

Frothy Cin­e­mat­ic Under­cur­rents

After the sum­mer break, the Bub­bling Under series of rad­i­cal film lunch­es will return to the big[ish]screen at the Porter Cel­lar, start­ing again on Sun­day the 28th Sep­tem­ber, from 1 til 4pm, free entry. This month, we will be show­ing a cou­ple of film­lets — one about the recent Camp for Cli­mate Action in Kent, and the oth­er about the upcom­ing Shut I.T.T./Smash EDO day of action in Brighton, fol­low­ing up on June’s suc­cess­ful Car­ni­val Against the Arms Trade. Come along for great grub, food for thought, and mediocre com­pa­ny! Drop us a line if you have any ideas for upcom­ing films, to show on the third Sun­day of the month.

http://www.smashedo.org.uk/shut-itt.htm
http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/

The­o­ry Cor­ner Part B: Meta­mor­pho­sis and Lib­er­a­tion

It’s all too easy to feel help­less in the face of the state, like a tiny cog in a tow­er­ing machine. Reli­gion and tele­vi­sion preach the impor­tance of “find­ing your­self” and “stay­ing true” to that self once you’ve found it. But we should­n’t feel trapped and lim­it­ed by our genes and the expe­ri­ences and con­di­tion­ing soci­ety has giv­en us — we have no true self and life should be about cre­at­ing it, not find­ing it! As human beings we have a vast poten­tial for self-change. The aware­ness of the abil­i­ty you pos­sess to change your­self can be extreme­ly lib­er­at­ing. It’s impor­tant to start small — choose a habit at ran­dom you wish to adopt or elim­i­nate. At first, this should be some­thing so sim­ple you can’t fail at it, like hav­ing an extra sug­ar in your tea each morn­ing. Keep the same goal for two or three weeks, and scrib­ble it on a post-it note and stick it to the fridge, if this helps you remem­ber. There are all sorts of self-hyp­no­sis tech­niques that can help. Focus­ing intent­ly on your goal while in an altered state of con­scious­ness accessed by med­i­ta­tion, danc­ing, drum­ming, chant­i­ng, orgasm, art… (try star­ing intent­ly at your­self in a mir­ror while try­ing not to let your eyes dis­tort the image) are all ways to do this. Remem­ber to ground after­wards! Laugh­ter helps.

It’s impor­tant to set a new tar­get once you’re done with the old one. Start small and your con­fi­dence and self-dis­ci­pline will grow so long as you make willed self-change a habit. Work up to big­ger goals and you’ll realise that things you thought you could­n’t do are total­ly pos­si­ble — con­fronting a pho­bia, going veg­an, tak­ing direct action. Elim­i­nat­ing fears and smash­ing taboos (eat­ing food from skips, act­ing odd­ly in pub­lic) can be so empow­er­ing and widen your range of pos­si­ble expe­ri­ences.

http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/rites/beyondwa.…html

EVENTS

Mon­days
Bath Hunt Sabs Meet­ing, 8pm, Bell
Wednes­days
Lon­don Rd Food Co-op, River­side Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre, 4–7pm
Sat­ur­days
Bath Stop The War Vig­il, Abbey Court­yard, 11.30–12.30
Sat­ur­day 20th Sept
No Wars No Bor­ders, All Saints Park, Man­ches­ter, 12.30
Fri­day 26th Sept
Anti-foie gras demo, out­side Mini­bar, John St, 7–9pm
Sun­day 28th Sept
Bub­bling Under, the Porter Cel­lar Bar 1–4pm
Wednes­day 1st Oct
Bath Ani­mal Action meet­ing, back room of the Bell, 7.30–8.30pm
Thurs­day 2nd Oct
Bath Activist Net­work meet­ing, Hob­gob­lin, down­stairs 7.30–9pm
Fri­day & Sat­ur­day 3–4th Oct
No Bor­ders Fest, TJs, New­port
Sat­ur­day 11th Octo­ber
Day of action against sur­veil­lance
Sat­ur­day 11th Oct
West­side Cli­mate Camp Gath­er­ing, Wind­mill Hill City Farm, Bris­tol, 10–5
Sat­ur­day 11th Oct
Bath Freeshop, Stall St, 12–3pm
Wednes­day 15th Oct
Smash I.T.T, opp Falmer Sta­tion, Brighton, meet 12noon

For fur­ther info on any of our sto­ries see www.myspace.com/bathbomb

And now, to the dis­claimer: As any­one is free to con­tribute, the opin­ions expressed in each arti­cle are not nec­es­sar­i­ly reflec­tive of each con­trib­u­tor. Nat­u­ral­ly, any right-wing or cor­po­rate bull­shit will be binned and spat on. Need­less to say, the opin­ions of the author of this dis­claimer does not nec­es­sar­i­ly rep­re­sent the views of any oth­er con­trib­u­tor…

Q: Who Are Bath Activist Net­work? A: A local umbrel­la group cam­paign­ing on issues as diverse as devel­op­ment, envi­ron­men­tal­ism, anti-war, ani­mal rights, work­ers’ rights and more. Help­ing to pro­duce The Bath Bomb, we are open to any­one, and our mem­bers range from trade union­ists to anar­chists, lib­er­als to greens, and peo­ple who just want to change Bath for the bet­ter. For details on meet­ings, demos, or just to get in touch, ring us on 07949 611912, email bathactivistnet@yahoo.co.uk, or see our web­site: www.myspace.com/bathactivistnetwork

GOT A STORY? WANT TO RECEIVE THE BATH BOMB BY EMAIL? HOPING TO SUE?

Con­tact us by e‑mailing bathbombpress@yahoo.co.uk. Large print e‑versions avail­able on request.

11th October day of action against surveillance — Freedom not Fear + ANPR news for car drivers

Call to mass action Sat­ur­day 11th Octo­ber against the sur­veil­lance state in sol­i­dar­i­ty with activists around the world http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/content/view/242/144/

Freedom not Fear banner logoCall to mass action Sat­ur­day 11th Octo­ber against the sur­veil­lance state in sol­i­dar­i­ty with activists around the world http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/content/view/242/144/

A broad move­ment of cam­paign­ers and orga­ni­za­tions is call­ing on every­body to join action against exces­sive sur­veil­lance by gov­ern­ments and busi­ness­es. On 11 Octo­ber 2008, con­cerned peo­ple in many coun­tries will take to the streets, the mot­to being “Free­dom not fear 2008”. Peace­ful and cre­ative action, from protest march­es to par­ties, will take place in many cap­i­tal cities.

—————

Sur­veil­lance mania is spread­ing. Gov­ern­ments and busi­ness­es reg­is­ter, mon­i­tor and con­trol our behav­iour ever more thor­ough­ly. No mat­ter what we do, who we phone and talk to, where we go, whom we are friends with, what our inter­ests are, which groups we par­tic­i­pate in — “big broth­er” gov­ern­ment and “lit­tle broth­ers” in busi­ness know it more and more thor­ough­ly. The result­ing lack of pri­va­cy and con­fi­den­tial­i­ty is putting at risk the free­dom of con­fes­sion, the free­dom of speech as well as the work of doc­tors, helplines, lawyers and jour­nal­ists.

The man­i­fold agen­da of secu­ri­ty sec­tor reform encom­pass­es the con­ver­gence of police, intel­li­gence agen­cies and the mil­i­tary, threat­en­ing to melt down the divi­sion and bal­ance of pow­ers. Using meth­ods of mass sur­veil­lance, the bor­der­less coop­er­a­tion of the mil­i­tary, intel­li­gence ser­vices and police author­i­ties is lead­ing towards the con­struc­tion of “Fortress­es” in Europe and on oth­er con­ti­nents, direct­ed against refugees and dif­fer­ent-look­ing peo­ple but also affect­ing, for exam­ple, polit­i­cal activists, the poor and under-priv­iledged, and sports fans.

Peo­ple who con­stant­ly feel watched and under sur­veil­lance can­not freely and coura­geous­ly stand up for their rights and for a just soci­ety. Mass sur­veil­lance is there­by threat­en­ing the fab­ric of a demo­c­ra­t­ic and open soci­ety. Mass sur­veil­lance is also endan­ger­ing the work and com­mit­ment of civ­il soci­ety orga­ni­za­tions.

Sur­veil­lance, dis­trust and fear are grad­u­al­ly trans­form­ing our soci­ety into one of uncrit­i­cal con­sumers who have “noth­ing to hide” and — in a vain attempt to achieve total secu­ri­ty — are pre­pared to give up their free­doms. We do not want to live in such a soci­ety!

We believe the respect for our pri­va­cy to be an impor­tant part of our human dig­ni­ty. A free and open soci­ety can­not exist with­out uncon­di­tion­al­ly pri­vate spaces and com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

The increas­ing elec­tron­ic reg­is­tra­tion and sur­veil­lance of the entire pop­u­la­tion does not make us any safer from crime, costs mil­lions of Euros and puts the pri­va­cy of inno­cent cit­i­zens at risk. Under the reign of fear and blind action­ism, tar­get­ed and sus­tained secu­ri­ty mea­sures fall by the way­side, as well as tack­ling peo­ples’ actu­al dai­ly prob­lems such as unem­ploy­ment and pover­ty.

In order to protest against secu­ri­ty mania and exces­sive sur­veil­lance we will take to the streets in cap­i­tal cities in many coun­tries on 11 Octo­ber 2008. We call on every­body to join our peace­ful protest. Politi­cians are to see that we are will­ing to take to the streets for the pro­tec­tion of our lib­er­ties!

There are plans for a demo with music and noise at New Scot­land Yard. Are oth­ers else­where up for doing demos else­where in the UK at oth­er police sta­tions?

Wiki for info and dis­cus­sion re Lon­don / UK actions
at http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Freedom_Not_Fear_2008/London
and http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Diskussion:Freedom_Not_Fear_2008/London

It would be good to have a con­ver­sa­tion about this as we need to get some­thing good start­ed. Octo­ber 11th Vid-Fly­er http://www.ecln.org

———–

Vehi­cle spy-cam data to be held for five years

Author­i­ties will store details of car jour­neys sur­veilled by the new nation­al Auto­mat­ic Num­ber Plate Recog­ni­tion (ANPR) sys­tem for five years, the Home Office has revealed.

Senior police offi­cer had said the data on mil­lions of vehi­cles would only be kept for two years, the Guardian reports. The Infor­ma­tion Com­mis­sion­er’s Office (ICO) is exam­in­ing a com­plaint by Pri­va­cy Inter­na­tion­al over the extend­ed reten­tion peri­od. The pri­va­cy advo­ca­cy group described it as “unnec­es­sary and dis­pro­por­tion­ate”.

The ICO said: “Pro­longed reten­tion would need to be clear­ly jus­ti­fied based on con­tin­u­ing val­ue not on the mere chance it may come in use­ful.”

The ANPR sys­tem, head­quar­tered in Hen­don, north Lon­don, will be ful­ly oper­a­tional in the new year. Half of Eng­lish and Welsh police are already sup­ply­ing it with data from their upgrad­ed CCTV net­works.

Forces are being encour­aged to “ful­ly and strate­gi­cal­ly exploit” its poten­tial for track­ing sus­pects and vehi­cles by the Asso­ci­a­tion of Chief Police Offi­cers. It’s envis­aged that ANPR will be used as part of “main­stream polic­ing”, rang­ing from clamp­ing down on unin­sured dri­vers to counter-ter­ror oper­a­tions.

Cam­paign­ers have called for the gov­ern­ment to more clear­ly define which oth­er agen­cies will be allowed to inter­ro­gate the data­base and for what rea­sons.

Aldermaston Big Blockade October 27 & Oct. 4th: “No Missile Defence at Menwith Hill & Derby Trident 22nd September

Help dis­rupt ille­gal work on WMD at Britain’s nuclear bomb fac­to­ry

Help dis­rupt ille­gal work on WMD at Britain’s nuclear bomb fac­to­ry

In 2006/7, Faslane 365 saw well over 1000 arrests dur­ing a year-long block­ade of the Tri­dent sub­ma­rine base in Scot­land . Last East­er, AWE Alder­mas­ton saw its biggest demon­stra­tion in two decades as 5000 peo­ple sur­round­ed the base to mark the 50th anniver­sary of the first Alder­mas­ton march. Tri­dent Ploughshares now invite you to a major block­ade of the Berk­shire nuke fac­to­ry, where bil­lions of pounds are cur­rent­ly being spent devel­op­ing new war­head facil­i­ties that will scup­per nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment for anoth­er 50 years. Help us uphold inter­na­tion­al law by blockad­ing this fac­to­ry of death in what promis­es to be a colour­ful cel­e­bra­tion of life and peo­ple pow­er. There is a role for every­one. This event is sup­port­ed by CND.

For fur­ther details, see:
http://blockawe.blogspot.com
and
http://www.tridentploughshares.org

Tri­dent Ploughshares is a cam­paign to dis­arm the UK Tri­dent nuclear weapons sys­tem in a non-vio­lent, open, peace­ful and ful­ly account­able man­ner.

“Non-vio­lence is stronger than any weapon. If human­i­ty does not end the atom bomb I do not think the human species can last.” — Gand­hi, speak­ing on the day of his assas­si­na­tion

–

There will be a week­end work­shop of Tri­dent Ploughshares non­vi­o­lence train­ing, focussing on prepa­ra­tion for the Octo­ber 27 Alder­mas­ton Big Block­ade at Waltham­stow Friend’s Meet­ing House, 1a Jew­el Road, off Hoe Street, Waltham­stow, Lon­don E17 4QU on Sat­ur­day and Sun­day 20th and 21st Sep­tem­ber.

The full week­end is pri­mar­i­ly for peo­ple think­ing of becom­ing mem­bers of Tri­dent Ploughshares and mak­ing an ongo­ing com­mit­ment. Peo­ple just wish­ing to pre­pare for the block­ade are wel­come to attend for the full week­end, but may also choose to attend on the SATURDAY ONLY.
There is no charge for the work­shop, but par­tic­i­pants are asked to con­tribute towards expens­es if they are able to.

Con­tact Ali­son to reg­is­ter and for more details:
E‑mail: alison.crane [at] ntlworld.com
Tel: 01785 611 768 or 0845 4588 362 or 07886 972 319

——-

Show your strength of feel­ing against Amer­i­can Mis­sile Defense by com­ing to Men­with Hill near Har­ro­gate. This US sys­tem, which Brown qui­et­ly said yes to in 2007, is mak­ing huge waves in East­ern Europe: Poland has agreed to mis­siles and the Czech Repub­lic, despite a major­i­ty of its peo­ple against, has agreed to the US radar com­po­nent for MD. Rus­sia is already com­par­ing these plans to the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis…

CAAB holds an annu­al July 4th protest: Inde­pen­dence FROM Amer­i­ca, and an autumn protest: Keep Space for Peace week. We also have week­ly protests on Tues­day nights and have clocked up hun­dreds of arrests over the years!

START = This time we start in Ket­tlesing Lay­by HG3 2LP (oppo­site the Black Bull on the A59). TIME = 12 noon til 5‑ish.

*** SO WHOSE COMING TO THIS IMPORTANT DEMONSTRATION ? (APART FROM LOTS OF PEOPLE !!!)

Musi­cians = * Lion Sound * Local group * Karl Dal­las * Ylem www.myspace.com/ylemfolk * Mon­key Wrenchers * Peace Artistes www.peaceartistes.org.uk

Speak­ers = Col­in Challen (Labour MP Mor­ley and Roth­well)

Rebec­ca John­son (Acronym Insti­tute for Dis­ar­ma­ment Diplo­ma­cy)

Food = Lunch O’Lils

.……and much more

Have fun! Bring your friends!

http://www.caab.org.uk/

———

tri­dent nuclear protest rolls royce raynesway der­by 10.am 22/9/08

hope you’ll join us bring musi­cal instru­ments or cir­cus acts wel­come a611 der­by ring road nuclear plant demo

month­ly anti nuclear .demo 10.am mon­day 22/9/18 hope you’ll all come rolls royce make parts for tri­dent nuclear weapons 4 mass destruc­tion used in wars this is ille­gal ..any per­son wish­ing to come to this worth­while cause are more than wel­come .we need musi­cians cir­cus acts .anti nuclear ban­ners, rolls royce keep ura­ni­um tita­ni­un and many more sub­stances con­nect­ed with the man­u­fac­ture of weapons off mass destruc­tion .we believe also the swans on the riv­er at rear are car­ry­ing radio active traces from cool­ing process from reac­tors i live a mile away .my fish­ponds loose oxy­gen through acid rain either from celanese chem­i­cal plant or rolls royce .the area sur­round­ing these to plants have the high­est leukemia deaths in the uk .why ..its not uncom­mon for me to find wildlife dying in this ares why i myself feed all wildlife .i boast the most birds in my gar­den in area .then next minute they die ..defra claim it is legal for these indus­tries to poi­son ani­mals / to stop them get­ting in to what they pro­duce .celanese make cig­a­rette tips .which help kill man any way .so why kill wildlife ..when the things they go in destroy life any­way .mon­ey mon­ey mon­ey and wealth .any per­son trav­el­ling .can get off the train at spon­don sta­tion .1 mile away and get picked up /or even der­by sta­tion . i’ve a 7 seater .or if trav­el­ling by car .park in my pri­vate lane out of police view ill run you down post­code de21 7bs .email tigger1946@fsmail.net .or 07727226032

Earth First! gathering — programme and travel directions

Earth First! Sum­mer Gath­er­ing
Eco­log­i­cal Direct Action with­out Com­pro­mise
27 Aug — 1 Sept 2008, Nor­folk
Join us for 5 days of work­shops and plan­ning actions

Trav­el direc­tions:

Earth First! Gathering 2008 - print sizeEarth First! Sum­mer Gath­er­ing
Eco­log­i­cal Direct Action with­out Com­pro­mise
27 Aug — 1 Sept 2008, Nor­folk
Join us for 5 days of work­shops and plan­ning actions

Trav­el direc­tions:
The gath­er­ing this year will be held at Woolsey­bridge Farm — a love­ly site in Nor­folk with lots of trees and a lit­tle stream. It’s approx­i­mate­ly 1.5 miles NNE of Diss. Diss has reg­u­lar train ser­vices and a whole­food shop. The Grid Ref­er­ence of the site is TM130819. The post code is IP22 5SY.

The site is eas­i­ly acces­si­ble by pub­lic trans­port, you can get the train either to Diss or Nor­wich and then catch the bus route no 1 (Sim­monds) from Diss to Nor­wich or vice ver­sa — this route goes right past the site and we’ll be ask­ing the local bus com­pa­ny if they will stop right out­side the site on request. Or you could walk or cycle — it’s only 1.5miles away from Diss train sta­tion. Please come by pub­lic trans­port if at all pos­si­ble! .
We will run pick-ups from the train sta­tion for any­body who can’t use the bus ser­vice or for larg­er groups of peo­ple. If you need a lift please let us know well in advance (and not in the mid­dle of the night, when you’re at a train sta­tion some­where!). Ring the Gath­er­ing mobile on 07789 331857

For a map and fur­ther details on trav­el includ­ing bus times and direc­tions for dri­vers check out http://earthfirstgathering.org.uk/2008/where.html

Pro­gramme
This year’s pro­gramme focuss­es on info and plan­ning for actions, direct action skills as well as spaces to dis­cuss how we can respond to and deal with the widen­ing eco­log­i­cal, eco­nom­ic and soci­etal crises. We hope there’s some­thing for every­one.
We rec­om­mend that you arrive Tue evening, as work­shops will start on Wednes­day morn­ing and run until Sun­day evening

For more info about the gath­er­ing check out our web­site or email us (though we won’t be able to answer email after 21 Aug, as we’ll be on site set­ting up)

http://www.earthfirst.org.uk, sum­mer­gath­er­ing _ AT _ earthfirst.org.uk

The work­shops

Wednes­day

12:00
Intro­duc­tion to Earth First! and the gath­er­ing
Deal­ing with the main­stream media — how to get your mes­sage across
Basic electrics — for squats and homes.
Cap­i­tal­ism and cli­mate change — how to make the links vis­i­ble in actions
Queer net­work­ing ses­sion

2:30
Self-defence — mixed prac­tise ses­sion
Squat­ting FAQ — shar­ing tips and tricks
Action Recon­nais­sance for begin­ners
Intro­duc­tion to the root caus­es of eco­log­i­cal destruc­tion and an explo­ration of alter­na­tives
Advanced Nav­i­ga­tion

4:30
Sav­ing Ice­land — Intro­duc­tion to the cam­paign
Nuclear waste and nuclear weapons
Con­sen­sus Deci­sion-mak­ing
Intro­duc­tion to Ecol­o­gy
Con­fronting Abu­sive Behav­iours with­in our Com­mu­ni­ties — with­out the police/prison.

6:00
Library Space: Nego­ti­at­ing Safer Sex: tips on putting the the­o­ry into prac­tice, and mak­ing your sex life more fun as well as safer!

8:00
Cin­e­ma: Talk with video on resist­ing rain­for­est destruc­tion in Tas­ma­nia

Thurs­day

10:30
Deal­ing with Pub­lic Order sit­u­a­tions — under­stand­ing police tac­tics and how we can deal with to them/turn them to our advan­tage (runs until lunch)
State and cor­po­rate oppres­sion of the Aus­tralian Abo­rig­ines
Action recon­nais­sance — advanced skill­share, share your most clever tips and tricks for get­ting info for actions
Prac­ti­cal plant iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (begin­ners)
Activist trau­ma and recov­ery

12:00
Sav­ing Ice­land — an eval­u­a­tion of the camp this sum­mer
Secu­ri­ty for Activists Part I: Do’s and don’ts of organ­is­ing action, from arrang­ing to meet, plan­ning and what hap­pens after
Arrest sup­port for actions — how to pro­vide sup­port for your affin­i­ty group, medi­um sized actions or mega camps and gath­er­ings.
Intro­duc­tion to Earth First! and the sum­mer gath­er­ing

2:30
Wom­en’s self-defence — intro­duc­to­ry ses­sion
Food and Cli­mate Action: info for action
How to plan an action
Police liai­son for actions — what it is, its uses and lim­i­ta­tions and how to make it work.
Chang­ing light bulbs or smash­ing the sys­tem. Shar­ing +/- expe­ri­ences of work­ing within/outside the sys­tem

4:30
Oppos­ing nuclear expan­sion: plan­ning for action
How to plan and run a suc­cess­ful medi­um to long-term cam­paign
Night time skills Part I: intro­duc­tion (fol­lowed by prac­tise ses­sion at 8.30pm)
Legal and arrest work­shop
Intro­duc­tion to anar­chist history/potted anar­chist his­to­ries

6:00
Library space: open dis­cus­sion ?Direct action or pub­lic­i­ty stunt??
8:00

Cin­e­ma: Seashep­herd film and talk
8:30

Night time skills Part II — prac­tice your skills in the field.

Fri­day

10:30
Blockad­ing tac­tics
Cli­mate Camp debrief: a crit­i­cal look at the cli­mate camp, its achieve­ments and pol­i­tics
Intro­duc­tion to Earth First! And the sum­mer gath­er­ing
Com­put­er Secu­ri­ty for the non-tech­ni­cal
Prison Abo­li­tion: what’s wrong with prison? what do we mean by abo­li­tion and how can we make it hap­pen?

12:00
Food and cli­mate change: action and cam­paign plan­ning
Self-defence mixed prac­tise ses­sion
Squat­ting to resist — occu­pa­tions to resist the pow­ers of dark­ness
His­to­ry of Earth First!

2:30
The Earth First! Action Update and web­site: feed­back and get­ting involved
Resist­ing agro­fu­els — update on the sit­u­a­tion and action plan­ning
Sea Shep­herd — an intro to its cam­paigns and how to support/get involved.
Grow your own food — share you skills and expe­ri­ence
Queer Activist Forum: Rad­i­cal queers organ­ise for the future!

4:30
Queer Self-Defence: an intro to basic self-defence skills (ver­bal and phys­i­cal)
Set­ting up new direct action groups
Sav­ing Ice­land ? plan­ning actions for the com­ing year
Tech­no-fix­es and cli­mate change ? report by Cor­po­rate Watch
Urban self-reliance and self-suf­fi­cien­cy

7:30
Library: Pris­on­er Sup­port — An infor­mal get togeth­er to dis­cuss the state of pris­on­er sup­port in our move­ments, find out news and get advice on writ­ing to pris­on­ers, as well as mak­ing and writ­ing cards to send to pris­on­ers.

8:00
Cin­e­ma: A talk and film by a trib­al activist from Oris­sa oppos­ing min­ing

Sat­ur­day

10:30
Cam­paigns and Actions Round-up: UK and inter­na­tion­al news (no oth­er work­shops)

12:00
Wom­en’s self-defence prac­tise ses­sion plus run­ning along­side — intro­duc­tion to wom­en’s self-defence
Stop­ping GM test fields — dis­cus­sion on future campaign/actions
Research and destroy — how to research cor­po­ra­tions
Future mod­els of soci­ety — find­ing a path to sus­tain­able liv­ing
Intro­duc­tion to Earth First! and the sum­mer gath­er­ing
Using tripods for blockad­ing

2:30
Leave it in the ground — build­ing resis­tance to new coal min­ing and pow­er sta­tions
Facil­i­ta­tion of meet­ings
Activist Secu­ri­ty Part III: doing actions with­out leav­ing traces
Restora­tion Ecol­o­gy
Cre­at­ing safer spaces
Vis­it to Burston Strike School

4:30
Region­al meet­ings and action plan­ning (no oth­er work­shops)

6:00
Library Space: Work­ing with­out lead­ers — dis­cus­sion about core val­ues of anar­chism

8:00
Cin­e­ma: Smash Edo film and talk

Sun­day
11:00
Self defence mixed prac­tice ses­sion
Sort­ing out ways of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with­in EF!
Using radios on actions
Intro­duc­tion to Earth First! And the sum­mer gath­er­ing
Fences: get­ting over them/taking them down

12:15
The sum­mer gath­er­ing: feed­back on this year’s and get­ting involved in organ­is­ing the next one

2:30
Con­doms, cap­i­tal­ism and cli­mate change
Smash Edo
Intro­duc­tion to nav­i­ga­tion
What’s new in the world of law?
Fem­i­nist Health
Climb­ing trees, lamp posts and any­thing else

4:30
Rad­i­cal pol­i­tics in the age of col­lapse
The Roy­al Bank of Scot­land and Fos­sil Fuel Financ­ing
Get­ting your elec­tric­i­ty from solar pow­er and wind
Rad­i­cal Par­ent­ing
Look­ing after our men­tal health — shar­ing ideas and expe­ri­ences

8:00
Cin­e­ma: films — cli­mate camp footage, ready steady skip etc

Mon­day
Take-down: please stay for a day or two to help take down the site. If you’ve got access to a vehicle/van, it’d be great if you could help trans­port­ing mar­quees, recy­cling etc to the places they need to go. Cheers!

More info about the Earth First! Sum­mer Gath­er­ing
EF! is about direct action to halt the destruc­tion of the Earth. It’s about doing it your­self rather than rely­ing on lead­ers, gov­ern­ments or indus­try.
Direct action is at the heart of it, whether you’re stand­ing in front of a bull­doz­er, shut­ting down an open-cast mine or rip­ping up a field of GM crops.
We’re a loose net­work of peo­ple, groups and cam­paigns com­ing togeth­er for eco­log­i­cal direct action.
Join us for 5 days of work­shops, net­work­ing and plan­ning actions, run with­out lead­ers by every­one who comes along. The gath­er­ing is also a prac­ti­cal exam­ple of low-impact eco-liv­ing and non-hier­ar­chi­cal organ­is­ing.

http://www.earthfirst.org.uk, sum­mer­gath­er­ing _ AT _ earthfirst.org.uk

Spirit of Freedom (August 2008)

Pro­duced by EARTH LIBERATION PRISONERS SUPPORT NETWORK

“The whole expe­ri­ence has been tough, but all the kind and strength­en­ing words
and wise thoughts from strangers made it much eas­i­er!” (For­mer Swedish Ani­mal Rights Pris­on­er)

Pro­duced by EARTH LIBERATION PRISONERS SUPPORT NETWORK

“The whole expe­ri­ence has been tough, but all the kind and strength­en­ing words
and wise thoughts from strangers made it much eas­i­er!” (For­mer Swedish Ani­mal Rights Pris­on­er)

Wel­come to the August 2008 edi­tion of Spir­it of Free­dom. As peo­ple will soon see, ELP’s pris­on­er lists have grown yet again. If we exclude the Geek anar­chist, Vagge­lis Botzatzis, and the two Amer­i­cans Richard Sills and Michael Sykes (all of whom are list­ed by ELP as ‘Oth­er Pris­on­ers’), there are now 40 list­ed ani­mal & earth lib­er­a­tion pris­on­ers in Europe & Amer­i­ca.
There are also a num­ber of non-list­ed pris­on­ers, who are not list­ed either by their own choice, or because they betrayed their fel­low activists and became infor­mants. And remem­ber these num­bers do not include those peo­ple who are either under House Arrest or on Bail pend­ing Tri­al. Nor do they include the activists whose loca­tions are cur­rent­ly unknown and who are described by the police as “on the run”. See­ing so many good peo­ple removed from their fam­i­lies & loved ones for mere­ly act­ing out of com­pas­sion and a desire to stop envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion and ani­mal abuse is heart­break­ing.
Some of the pris­on­ers ELP lists are very well known, oth­ers are less well known. How­ev­er ALL of them deserve our love and sup­port. ALL of the list­ed pris­on­ers wel­come let­ters of sup­port. Even if it’s just a card say­ing “Hi. I’m think­ing of you”. So please, no mat­ter where you are in the world, sup­port the eco-pris­on­ers. And no com­pro­mise in defence of Moth­er Earth.

ECO-DEFENCE PRISONERS

Tre Arrow, SWIS #640393, Mult­nom­ah Coun­ty Deten­tion Cen­ter, 1120 S.W. 3rd Avenue, Port­land, Ore­gon 97206, USA. Await­ing sen­tenc­ing of six and a half years impris­on­ment hav­ing reached a non-coop­er­a­tion plea-bar­gain with the author­i­ties who accuse him of involve­ment in two arsons. 1) an arson on log­ging trucks 2) an arson on vehi­cles owned by a sand & grav­el com­pa­ny. (Tre is a raw ener­gy veg­an — He has asked that his let­ters of sup­port are writ­ten on scrap paper or tree-free paper).

Grant Barnes #137563, San Car­los Cor­rec­tion­al Facil­i­ty, PO Box 3, Pueblo, CO 81002, USA. Serv­ing 12 years for set­ting fire to a num­ber of SUV vehi­cles. The let­ters ELF were spray paint­ed onto all of the vehi­cles. (Grant is a veg­an).

Nathan Block, #36359–086, FCI Lom­poc, Fed­er­al Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tu­tion, 3600 Guard Road, Lom­poc, CA 93436, USA. Serv­ing 7 years & 8 months for an ELF arson against a Poplar Tree Farm and an ELF arson against an SUV deal­er­ship. Also admit­ted his role in an ELF/ALF con­spir­a­cy. (Diet unknown).

Mar­co Camenisch, Post­fach 3143, CH-8105 Regens­dorf, Switzer­land. Serv­ing 18 years. 1) Ten years for using explo­sives to destroy elec­tric­i­ty pylons lead­ing from nuclear pow­er sta­tions. 2) Eight years for the mur­der of a Swiss Board­er Guard whilst on the run. In ’02 Mar­co com­plet­ed a 12-year sen­tence in Italy for destroy­ing elec­tric­i­ty pylons in Italy. (Mar­co is a meat eater who encour­ages organ­ic liv­ing).

Daniele Casali­ni, Casa Cir­con­dar­i­ale, Via Burla 59, 43100 Par­ma, Italy. Il Sil­vestre activist await­ing tri­al accused of using explo­sives to dam­age an elec­tric­i­ty pylon in protest at nuclear ener­gy. (Daniele is a veg­an).

Rod Coro­n­a­do — See details in Ani­mal Lib­er­a­tion Pris­on­ers List.

Francesco Gioia, C.C. Sol­lic­ciano, Via Giro­lamo Min­ervi­ni 2/R, 50142 Firen­ze Sol­lic­ciano (FI), Italy. Il Sil­vestre activist await­ing tri­al accused of using explo­sives to dam­age an elec­tric­i­ty pylon in protest at nuclear ener­gy. (Francesco is a veg­e­tar­i­an and Straight Edge).

Pao­la Gori, Via delle Mac­chie 9, 57124 Livorno, Italy. Il Sil­vestre activist await­ing tri­al accused of allow­ing her house to be used to plan ille­gal activ­i­ty. (Pao­la is a veg­an).

Bryan Lefey #38664–086, FDC SeaT­ac, Fed­er­al Deten­tion Cen­ter, P.O. Box 13900, Seat­tle, WA 98198, USA. On remand accused of an ELF action that saw the dam­ag­ing of GM trees and the dam­ag­ing of US Forestry Ser­vice vehi­cles. (Diet unknown).

Jef­frey Luers, # 13797671, CRCI, 9111 NE Sun­der­land Ave, Port­land, OR 97211–1708, USA. Serv­ing 10 years for arson on a SUV deal­er­ship & the attempt­ed arson of an oil truck. The orig­i­nal sen­tence was 22 years & 8 months, but was reduced on appeal. (Diet unknown).

Eric McDavid, 16209–097. FCI Vic­torville Medi­um II, PO BOX 5700, Ade­lan­to, CA 92301, USA. Serv­ing 19 years & 7 months for plan­ning to destroy the prop­er­ty of the U.S. Forestry Ser­vice, mobile phone masts and pow­er plants. At the point of his arrest no crim­i­nal dam­age has actu­al­ly occurred. (Eric is a veg­an).

Daniel McGowan, #63794–053, FCI Terre Haute, Fed­er­al Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tu­tion, P.O. Box 33, Terre Haute, IN 47808, USA. Serv­ing 7 years for an ELF arson against a Poplar Tree Farm and an ELF arson against an old growth log­ging cor­po­ra­tion. Also admit­ted his role in an ELF/ALF con­spir­a­cy. At the moment Daniel is in tran­sit as he has been ordered to appear before some Grand Juries. Daniel is refus­ing to answer the Grand Jury ques­tions and is gain­ing addi­tion­al prison time because of this (Daniel is a veg­e­tar­i­an).

Jonathan Paul — See details in Ani­mal Lib­er­a­tion Pris­on­ers List.

Bri­ana Waters, 36432–086, FDC — Seat­ac, Fed­er­al Deten­tion Cen­ter, P.O. Box 13900, Seat­tle, WA 98198, USA. Serv­ing six years for involve­ment in an ELF arson on a Uni­ver­si­ty. (Diet unknown).

Joy­an­na Zach­er, #36360–086, FCI Dublin, 5700 8th St.- Camp Parks- Unit F, Dublin, CA 94568, USA. Serv­ing 7 years & 8 months for an ELF arson against a Poplar Tree Farm and an ELF arson against an SUV deal­er­ship. Also admit­ted her role in an ELF/ALF con­spir­a­cy. (Diet unknown).

ANIMAL LIBERATION PRISONERS
(All Ani­mal Lib­er­a­tion Pris­on­ers fol­low a min­i­mum veg­e­tar­i­an diet and most are veg­an).

Jon Able­white TB4885, HMP Lowd­ham Grange, Lowd­ham, Not­ting­ham, NG14 7DA, Eng­land. Serv­ing 12 years for attempt­ing to black­mail a farmer who sup­plied guinea pigs for vivi­sec­tion. (Jon is a veg­an).

Dan Amos VN7818, HMP Exeter, 30 New North Road, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4EX, Eng­land. On remand hav­ing plead­ed guilty to con­spir­a­cy to black­mail Hunt­ing­don Life Sci­ences. (Dan is a veg­an)

Gregg Avery TA7450, HMP Win­ches­ter, Rom­sey Road, Win­ches­ter, SO22 5DF, Eng­land. On remand hav­ing plead­ed guilty to con­spir­a­cy to black­mail Hunt­ing­don Life Sci­ences. (Gregg is a veg­an).

Natasha Avery NR8987, HMP Bronze­field, Woodthor­pe Road, Ash­ford, Mid­dx. TW15 3JZ, Eng­land. On remand hav­ing plead­ed guilty to con­spir­a­cy to black­mail Hunt­ing­don Life Sci­ences. (Nat is a veg­an).

Mel Broughton TN9138, HMP Wood­hill, Tat­ten­hoe Street, Mil­ton Keynes, Bucks MK4 4DA, Eng­land. On remand accused of involve­ment with an arson and black­mail cam­paign against an Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty vivi­sec­tion estab­lish­ment.
(Mel is a veg­an).

Mar­tin Bal­luch, (JA Josef­s­tadt), Jus­ti­zanstalt Wr. Neustadt, Max­i­m­il­iang. 3, 2700 Wr. Neustadt, Aus­tria. One of ten Aus­tri­an’s held on remand accused of var­i­ous ani­mal rights actions. (Mar­tin is a veg­an)

Christoph, Anti­rep 2008, Post­fach 101, 1070, Vien­na, Aus­tria. One of ten Aus­tri­an’s held on remand accused of var­i­ous ani­mal rights actions. At the moment Christo­pher does not wish to have his full name pub­lished. (Christoph is a veg­an).

Jacob Con­roy #93501–011, FCI Vic­torville Medi­um I Fed­er­al Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tu­tion, P.O. Box 5300, Ade­lan­to, CA 92301, USA. Serv­ing 48 months impris­on­ment for help­ing organ­ise the SHAC-USA cam­paign. (Jake is a veg­an).

Rod­ney Coro­n­a­do #03895–000, FCI El Reno, PO Box 1500, El Reno, OK 73036, USA. Serv­ing one-year impris­on­ment after he informed peo­ple how to make an incen­di­ary device dur­ing a speech at an ani­mal rights gath­er­ing. (Rod is a veg­e­tar­i­an).

Don­ald Cur­rie A3660AA, HMP Parkhurst, New­port, Isle of Wight, PO30 5NX, Eng­land. Serv­ing an Inde­ter­mi­nate Sen­tence, of not less than six actu­al years, for car­ry­ing out arsons against tar­gets asso­ci­at­ed the vivi­sec­tion indus­try includ­ing HLS. (Don is a veg­an).

Jür­gen Faul­mann, Jus­ti­zanstalt Wr. Neustadt, Max­i­m­il­iang. 3, 2700 Wr. Neustadt, Aus­tria. One of ten Aus­tri­an’s held on remand accused of var­i­ous ani­mal rights actions. (Jur­gen is a veg­an).

Lau­ren Gaz­zo­la #93497–011, FCI Dan­bury, Fed­er­al Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tu­tion, Route #37Danbury, CT 06811, USA. Serv­ing 54 months impris­on­ment for help­ing organ­ise the SHAC-USA cam­paign. (Lau­ren is a veg­an).

Joshua Harp­er #29429–086, FCI Sheri­dan Fed­er­al Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tu­tion, P.O. Box 5000, Sheri­dan, OR 97378 USA. Serv­ing 36 months impris­on­ment for help­ing organ­ise the SHAC-USA cam­paign. (Josh is a veg­an).

Felix Hnat (JA Eisen­stadt), Jus­ti­zanstalt Wr. Neustadt, Max­i­m­il­iang. 3, 2700 Wr. Neustadt, Aus­tria. One of ten Aus­tri­an’s held on remand accused of var­i­ous ani­mal rights actions. (Felix is a veg­an).

Jan, Anti­rep 2008, Post­fach 101, 1070, Vien­na, Aus­tria. One of ten Aus­tri­an’s held on remand accused of var­i­ous ani­mal rights actions. At the moment Jan does not wish to have his full name pub­lished. (Jan is a veg­an).

Kevin Kroem­mer, Anti­rep 2008, Post­fach 101, 1070, Vien­na, Aus­tria. One of ten Aus­tri­an’s held on remand accused of var­i­ous ani­mal rights actions. (Kevin is a veg­an)

Sean Kirt­ley WC 6977, HM Prison Blak­en­hurst, Hewell Lane, Red­ditch, B97 6QS, Eng­land. Serv­ing four and a half years for run­ning an anti-vivi­sec­tion cam­paign web­site. (Sean is a veg­an).

Kevin Kjon­aas #93502–011, FCI Sand­stone, PO Box 1000, Sand­stone, MN 55072 USA. Serv­ing 72 months impris­on­ment for help­ing organ­ise the SHAC-USA cam­paign. (Kevin is a veg­an).

Leo, Anti­rep 2008, Post­fach 101, 1070, Vien­na, Aus­tria. One of ten Aus­tri­an’s held on remand accused of var­i­ous ani­mal rights actions. At the moment Leo does not wish to have his full name pub­lished. (Leo is a veg­an).

Daniel McGowan — See details in Eco Defence Pris­on­ers List.

Chris­t­ian Moser, Jus­ti­zanstalt Wr. Neustadt, Max­i­m­il­iang. 3, 2700 Wr. Neustadt, Aus­tria. One of ten Aus­tri­an’s held on remand accused of var­i­ous ani­mal rights actions. (Chris­t­ian is a veg­an).

Heather Nichol­son VM4859, HMP Bronze­field, Woodthor­pe Road, Ash­ford, Mid­dx. TW15 3JZ, Eng­land. On remand accused of con­spir­a­cy to black­mail, in rela­tion to her involve­ment with the SHAC cam­paign. (Heather is a veg­an).

Jonathan Paul, #07167–085, FCI Phoenix, Fed­er­al Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tu­tion, 37910 N 45th Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85086, USA. Sen­tenced to 51 months for an ALF arson on a horse meat plant. Also admit­ted his role in an ELF/ALF con­spir­a­cy. (Jonathan is a veg­an).

Sabine, Anti­rep 2008, Post­fach 101, 1070, Vien­na, Aus­tria. One of ten Aus­tri­an’s held on remand accused of var­i­ous ani­mal rights actions. At the moment Sabine does not wish to have their full name pub­lished. (Sabine is a veg­an).

Andrew Stepan­ian #26399–050, USP Mar­i­on, P.O. Box 1000 Mar­i­on, IL 62959, USA. Serv­ing 36 months for help­ing organ­ise the SHAC-USA cam­paign. (Andrew is a veg­an).

Elmar Völkl (JA Eisen­stadt), Jus­ti­zanstalt Wr. Neustadt, Max­i­m­il­iang. 3, 2700 Wr. Neustadt, Aus­tria. One of ten Aus­tri­an’s held on remand accused of var­i­ous ani­mal rights actions. (Elmar is a veg­an).

Ker­ry Whit­burn TB4886, HMP Lowd­ham Grange, Lowd­ham, Not­ting­ham, NG14 7DA, Eng­land. Serv­ing 12 years for attempt­ing to black­mail a farmer who sup­plied guinea pigs for vivi­sec­tion. (Ker­ry is a veg­an).

Sarah White­head, VM7684, HMP Bronze­field, Woodthor­pe Road, Ash­ford, Mid­dx, TW15 3JZ, Eng­land. Serv­ing two years for: 1) res­cu­ing a pup­py from hor­rif­ic con­di­tions. 2) res­cu­ing over 100 ani­mals from a pet breed­er who was lat­er pros­e­cut­ed for ani­mal abuse. Also await­ing tri­al for SHAC activ­i­ty. (Sarah is a veg­an)

PLOUGHSHARES PRISONERS

Helen Wood­son, 03231–045, FMC Car­swell — Admin. Max. Unit, POB 27137, Ft. Worth, TX 76127, USA. Serv­ing 8 years 10 months for actions that focused on the inter­re­la­tion­ship of war & the destruc­tion of the nat­ur­al world. The actions includ­ed pour­ing red paint over the secu­ri­ty desk of a fed­er­al court and mak­ing threat­en­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Pre­vi­ous­ly Helen had served 20½ years for: 1) Using a ham­mer to dis­arm a nuclear mis­sile silo. 2) Burn­ing $25,000 on the floor of a bank whilst denounc­ing war, envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion & eco­nom­ic injus­tice. 3) Mail­ing warn­ing let­ters with bul­lets attached to Gov­ern­ment & cor­po­rate offi­cials. (Diet unknown).

THE LECCE FIVE
The Lec­ce Five have been charged with “sub­ver­sive asso­ci­a­tion” accused of dam­ag­ing Esso petrol pumps to oppose the War on Iraq; sab­o­tag­ing the cash machines of a bank which funds an immi­gra­tion cen­tre; and tar­get­ing the multi­na­tion­al com­pa­ny Benet­ton in sup­port of Mapuche land rights activists in Chile. All of the defen­dants are cur­rent­ly either under house arrest or released on bail.

ANTIFA PRISONERS

Vah­tang Devitlidze, ul. Libbedo­va 42, UO 68/2, otryad 14, briga­da 142, g. Hagyshen­sk, Krasnodarskiy Kray, 352680 Rus­sia. Serv­ing 2½ years for stab­bing a neo-nazi in the leg whilst defend­ing him­self from attack. (Diet unknown).

Augustin Kraus, Vazeb­ni veznice, PP‑1, Lit­o­merice, 41 201, Czech Repub­lic.
Serv­ing 14 months for his par­tic­i­pa­tion in attacks against local neo-nazis. His charge was “bod­i­ly harm”. He speaks Czech, Slo­vak and Pol­ish. You can also write him short post­cards in Eng­lish. (Diet unknown).

Fabio Milan, C.C. via Pianez­za 300, 10151 Tori­no, Italy. On remand accused of fight­ing with the police after an anti-fas­cist protest. (Diet unknown).

Andrea Neff, Bnr: 746/07/2, Jus­tizvol­lzugsanstalt fur Frauen in Berlin, Arkonas­trasse 56, 13189 Berlin, Ger­many. Serv­ing 14 months for anti-fas­cist activ­i­ty. (Diet unknown).

Chris­t­ian Süm­mer­mann, Bnr: 441/08/5, JVA Plötzensee, Lehrter­str. 61, 10557 Berlin, Ger­many. Serv­ing 40 months for breach­ing the peace whilst serv­ing a sus­pend­ed sen­tence issued for anti-fas­cist activ­i­ties. (Diet unknown).

Tomasz Wiloszews­ki, Zak­lad Karny, Orze­chowa 5, 98–200 Sier­adz, Poland.
Serv­ing 15 years for acci­den­tal­ly killing a neo-nazi whilst defend­ing him­self. (Tomasz is a veg­e­tar­i­an).

Yuri Yure­vich Milevskiy, SIZO #7 kam­era 38, g. Brest, ul. Kar­la Mark­sa 86, 224000 Belarus. On remand for fight­ing with neo-nazis. (Diet unknown).

OTHER PRISONERS

Olga Alek­san­drov­na Nevskaya, UU163/5, 7 Otryad, pos. Dzerzhin­skiy, Mozhaysk 140090 Moskovskaya oblast, Rus­sia. Eco-activist serv­ing 6 years for arson, crim­i­nal dam­age and caus­ing explo­sions in protest at the war in Chech­nya. Due for release in 2009. (Diet unknown).

Vagge­lis Botzatzis, Komo­ti­ni Juridi­cal Prison (“Dikastikes Fylakes Komo­ti­nis”), T.K. 69100, Greece. On remand accused of set­ting fire to two com­pa­ny cars owned by a energy/power com­pa­ny. It is believed that the per­son or per­sons unknown who car­ried out the arson did so in protest at the destruc­tion of the nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment and in sup­port of two work­ers who died at the pow­er plant. Vagge­lis is also accused of set­ting fire to a bank and start­ing a fire inside a car yard. (Meat Eater).

Richard Sills (Address Unknown, USA). Serv­ing 15 months for bomb hoax­ing a Uni­ver­si­ty say­ing they would be tar­get­ed by the ALF if they did­n’t stop their ani­mal exper­i­ments. (Diet unknown).

Michael W. Sykes, 100 East 2nd St, Mon­roe, Michi­gan 48161, USA. Youth held on remand accused of anti-sprawl arsons, crim­i­nal dam­age, spray-paint­ing an anar­chist sign and burn­ing the Amer­i­can flag. (Diet unknown)

Fran Thomp­son, #1090915 HU 1C, WERDCC, PO Box 300, Van­dalia, MO 63382, USA.
Serv­ing Life for killing, in self-defence, a stalk­er who had bro­ken into her home. Before her impris­on­ment Fran was an eco, ani­mal & anti-nuke cam­paign­er. (Fran is a veg­an).

MOVE
MOVE is an eco-rev­o­lu­tion­ary group who car­ried out protests in defence of all life. All move pris­on­ers describe them­selves as veg­e­tar­i­ans. There are cur­rent­ly eight MOVE activists in prison each serv­ing 100 years after been framed for the mur­der of a cop in 1979. 9th defen­dant, Mer­le Africa, died in prison in 1998.

Deb­bie Simms Africa (006307), Janet Hol­loway Africa (006308) and Janine Philips Africa (006309) all at: SCI Cam­bridge Springs, 451 Fuller­ton Ave, Cam­bridge Springs, PA 16403–1238, USA.

Michael Davis Africa (AM4973) and Charles Simms Africa (AM4975) both at SCI Grater­ford, PO Box 244, Grater­ford, PA 19426–0244, USA.

Edward Good­man Africa (AM4974), SCI Mahanoy, 301 Morea Rd, Frackville, PA 17932, USA.

William Philips Africa (AM4984) and Del­bert Orr Africa (AM4985) both at SCI Dal­las Draw­er K, Dal­las, PA 18612, USA.

Mumia Abu Jamal, (AM8335), SCI Greene, 175 Progress Dri­ve, Way­nes­burg PA 15370, USA. In 1981 Mumia, for­mer Black Pan­ther and vocal sup­port­er of MOVE, was framed for the mur­der of a cop. He was orig­i­nal­ly sen­tenced to death but is cur­rent­ly await­ing re-sen­tenc­ing fol­low­ing a court hear­ing in 2001.

STATEMENT ON VIOLENCE
Some peo­ple list­ed in this newslet­ter have car­ried out vio­lent actions. ‘Spir­it of Free­dom’ does not con­done vio­lence. But we are also against cen­sor­ship & believe peo­ple can decide for them­selves who they wish to sup­port.

ABOUT E.L.P. SUPPORT NETWORK
ELP is an inter­na­tion­al eco-pris­on­er sup­port net­work found­ed, in Britain, in 1993 to sup­port jailed eco-activists. We sup­port the pris­on­ers by pro­duc­ing var­i­ous reg­u­lar pris­on­er lists:

Spir­it of Free­dom is ELP’s inter­na­tion­al month­ly pris­on­er list­ing which is cir­cu­lat­ed by e‑mail.

Urgent ELP! Bul­letin is an e‑mail ser­vice that dis­trib­utes the names of any new eco-pris­on­er as soon as ELP gets their details. For more info e‑mail ELP4321@hotmail.com

On-Line Newslet­ters — ELP has a num­ber of web­sites that pro­vide news, pris­on­er lists and addi­tion­al info about ELP & the pris­on­ers.

Eng­lish lan­guage ELP Web­site
www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk

Greek lan­guage ELP Web­site
http://greekelp.blogspot.com

North Amer­i­can ELP Web­site
www.ecoprisoners.org

Turk­ish lan­guage ELP Web­site
www.geocities.com/yesilanarsi/elp.htm

ELP Extra is an e‑mail group that cir­cu­lates the details of polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, ELP learns about, who do not fall with­in the remit for sup­port by ELP. To sub­scribe to the list e‑mail ELP4321@Hotmail.com

Aus­tralian ELP.SN is our Aus­tralian con­tact. For more info e‑mail elp4321@hotmail.com

Bel­gium ELP.SN is our Bel­gium con­tact. For more info e‑mail elp_bel@hotmail.com

Ger­man ELP.SN is a pris­on­er led ini­tia­tive run by eco-pris­on­er Mar­co Camenisch. For more info con­tact Mar­co Camenisch, Post­fach 3143, CH-8105 Regens­dorf, Switzer­land.

Greek ELP.SN is our Greek con­tact. For more info e‑mail greekelp@yahoo.gr

North Amer­i­can ELP is our North Amer­i­can con­tact. For more infor­ma­tion e‑mail naelpsn@mutualaid.org

Turkey ELP.SN is our Turk­ish con­tact. For more info e‑mail yesilanarsi@yahoo.com

Sitting on piles of coal, revolting peasants, trashing things & fixing other things together, it’s the latest EF! Action Update

Smelters smelt­ed and wood­chip­pers chipped, pro­tes­tors around the world have been busy again tak­ing action against the plan­et-trash­ers — read all about it in the lat­est quar­ter­ly EF! Action Update.

This EF!AU is jam packed with excit­ing actions, plus fea­tures on inter­na­tion­al resis­tance against coal in time for this year’s Camp for Cli­mate Action, a resur­gence of anti-genet­ics cam­paign­ing, and pro­pos­als for a rolling block­ade next year of Kingsnorth. You’ll be inspired to Taste the Waste, Leave it in the Ground and who knows what else!

EF! mine rest planets later logoSmelters smelt­ed and wood­chip­pers chipped, pro­tes­tors around the world have been busy again tak­ing action against the plan­et-trash­ers — read all about it in the lat­est quar­ter­ly EF! Action Update.

This EF!AU is jam packed with excit­ing actions, plus fea­tures on inter­na­tion­al resis­tance against coal in time for this year’s Camp for Cli­mate Action, a resur­gence of anti-genet­ics cam­paign­ing, and pro­pos­als for a rolling block­ade next year of Kingsnorth. You’ll be inspired to Taste the Waste, Leave it in the Ground and who knows what else!

With sto­ries of green­wash laid bare, guer­ril­la-gar­den­ing, revolt­ing peas­ants, protest camps against coal mines and air­ports, build­ings burnt down, con­vey­ors and trains stopped, tires deflat­ed, GM fields lib­er­at­ed & ‘tri­als’ decon­t­a­m­i­nat­ed, despite tear-gas, jail threats, and fortress-like field pro­tec­tion, con­tin­u­ing resis­tance in Mayo & Ice­land, and cam­paign suc­cess­es, the diverse uses of super­glue just become mun­dane. Got a bro­ken tea cup or an incin­er­a­tor to shut down? You know what to use!

And if smash­ing green­hous­es or hang­ing about 60 metres up seems wierd, read on…

Also includes full lists of eco­log­i­cal direct action groups, protest camps & sup­port groups. Bat­ter­ies not includ­ed.

Pick up your copy at the Camp for Cli­mate Action or at your near­est social cen­tre. Or drop us a line at actionup­date AT earthfirst.org.uk and we’ll post you as many as you like for dis­trib­ut­ing around town and at events.

Down­load the lat­est EF!AU to share with oth­ers, sub­scribe or check out some past issues. The next issue will come out at the begin­ning of Novem­ber.

And of course, this year’s EF! Sum­mer Gath­er­ing (click here for lat­est news) is from Wednes­day 27th August to Mon­day 1st Sep­tem­ber 2008, if you want to plot & plan, and laugh & chat with old friends & new.