 For the next talk, it's called resisting surveillance. It's not just about the metadata and it's not it's about the people the people that come out so Lily Harry and Jason will tell you how it is to be that people Please an applause Thanks very much. I'm sure people here know about Surveillance what we often hear in the mainstream press in the last few years is about Edward Snowden and metadata and spying and computer spying so on unfortunately the three of us have Seen a more intense version of state surveillance. I think we've been Targeted by undercover police that have come into the most intimate spheres of our lives and you'll hear about that but I want to talk a little bit about an Undercover policing and the history of it. It's not just a new phenomenon. Of course, we all know that and Some of it goes back quite a ways. You see here a book on the upper right hand It's called what everyone should know about state repression. It's written in 1921 by Victor Serge and After the Russian Revolution, they did it an analysis they found a bunch of papers of the Russian czar and his spying from the 1890s and so on and Undercover policing tactics go back and it's documented at least as far as the 1890s what we've what this book says is that The czar sent his private intelligence his undercover police into movements that oppose the czar With some tactics specific tactics that we see today for example going into a social movement a popular movement and Dividing and conquering or spreading lies causing diversion doing whatever they could to neutralize these threats to their power and That's something that concerns me a lot that the use of undercover police has been a project in political policing Not really criminal policing and that's that's what's happened the case that we're going to talk about tonight Kind of started for us with the outing of a British undercover cop called Mark Kennedy in 2010 2011 the book in the middle undercover is a very good prize winning book in England That came out a couple of years ago about that case if you want to read more about the case We're going to talk about read undercover My personal case as as an activist being targeted Within my broader circles goes back to 1989 the first year I became an activist was with environmental groups and in this year 1989 It came out that the FBI had done a big project operation project called operation thermcon where they sent an undercover activist into environmental groups a group From earth first and this person had intimate sexual relations with an activist They were selling LSD to activists to gain trust that worked for them and There's a book here on the bottom left if you want more info because I'm I'm jumping over these themes I'm giving you some places to read later. Spitzel is a German book with a lot of different chapters about different topics of spying It's a very good book on the upper left green is the new red that one does a really good synopsis of the USA spying on social movements starting in their 60s and so with the counter intelligence program of the FBI Co and tell pro going up to 2000 2006 with the efforts to smash or silent Silence radical environmental movements on the bottom right is a great book called secret maneuvers in the dark It's about corporate spying. We're gonna talk about that a little bit too because the person who targeted us What was also involved in that? Yeah, so that's me Jason and as an activist. I've done a lot of different things protest writing writing articles In my small town in California. I was a vice mayor and a kind of radical Activist detown for four years. That's interesting guy for four years. I actually was in a position to kind of be a boss of the police so that's helped me to Come out and speak against police. So anyways, I'm I'm making a film now called spider pond You're gonna see me filming a little bit here and you can look at more of my website I can give you cards later, but yes, I'm directing this film because I think that I don't want to be silenced I'm not gonna be silenced about what happened to me. And so I'm in the middle of this film Also, we're looking for financing if you have leads for financing that'd be great. And the next up is The film club is the film clip ready go for it. It is and here's a clip from the upcoming film spider pond Mark and I were very Love was the word we ended up using felt about each other It's a very strange thing feeling all your organs move around as somebody with the opposite of what you thought they were We have the words of deal agreement and grief and stuff like that because that happens to everybody This country happens to almost no one It's a betrayal, but it's also very much that you've lost this person But it leaves with agreement. You know, you had a time of his own. That's real with this number was real British energy companies have been demanding that the government crack down on climate change protesters and Mark Kenney It's about to head into one of his most delicate undercover operations one plan with those who have become as close as friends This is Raccoon sort of coal fire power station. We knew that to deal with the massive threat of climate change Yeah, we had to stop burning coal in the government's planning new generation and places like this So the big fact is that cooling towers putting out the steam that comes out from it But the large one is the chimney. That's the smoke from burning coal That's one of largest point sources of carbon in the country and people were going to shut down the plant I don't know the chimney was cool get up there And time up winning off the region stay there for a week and then drop a banner that would have a rolling count Of how many tons of carbon I've been saved because this place wasn't in action anymore We knew it wasn't risking a new energy supply to do this Yeah, it's in a national grid system so the power station can go off and on all the time There's rising and falling demand all the time they used to this happening So we know that when that was off a gas fire power station somewhere else would come on instead So they could reduce carbon emissions, but it's not threatening everyone's energy supply. There's no data to anyone Pleased with saying that this threatens hospitals is threatened for all the people threatens your granny Said the guy from the Association Chief Police officers who run the unit Mark Kennedy was in and they know it's in a grid system They know as they say it's not true. They know they're trying to scare people Give it this didn't threaten anybody's welfare at all It's peculiar they put the resources of hundreds of police officers and months of planning and earn a cover office And the shape of my county into the planning group right from the beginning to try and stop this But he wasn't gonna hurt anyone at all could hurt anyone at all And so it proves that they're not actually only after threats against life on it That's right to corporate profit is just a series to them. We don't know It's beyond pressure the police to do this helpless. They were working We do know from other cases that the corporation's higher private detectives to come into this and it's an exchange of information Two ways between police and those private eyes. And so it came together with us. It was a hundred and fourteen of us planning to come and shut this down and Because one of those 130 activists plus Mark Kennedy who's in the room and we were rated by police preemptively and all of us were arrested it's the largest preemptive political arrest in English history as far as we know How much further we've got I did not have Mark Kennedy in it ruining it We wouldn't go further and it's going to be a major difference because of what those police officers did Footwords and people's mind because a whole species are gonna get down in that difference Okay, so thanks Jason for that absolutely amazing film I wish Merrick who Was also of course infiltrated by Mark Kennedy could be here with us Unfortunately instead of getting Merrick you got me a Minor bureaucrat of cyberspace as many of you know me with a side interest in cryptography but actually the reason I do the work I do is because it's just another terrain of struggle and Just like protesting the streets is a terrain of struggle or fighting Mark Kennedy and undercover police in general in the courts Is a terrain of struggle? I was organizing and protesting for many years The anti-globalization movement against the centralization of political and financial power and neoliberal capitalism and then the climate change movement to fight catastrophic climate chaos During these protests, you know, sometimes they would go wrong and after they went wrong We would get together and have a meeting and be like well. What went wrong? And at one of these meetings. I was introduced Julian Coupa who is a French revolutionary introduced me to Mark Kennedy And Mark Kennedy I'd seen around the scene for a while You know, of course the reason why the protests had gone wrong is because we had an undercover cop running all the logistics That's not our fault. We didn't know and Then we said well, it'd be great if we could go and spread this conversation about the future of protest movements outside of just mass mobilizations to the United States So, you know, I went to United States We hung out with great people there many people who later became involved in movements like Occupy Although it did not occur to us that the guy my guy Fox mass was going to get big and that Sitting in the sitting down a tent was going to get really popular just didn't occur to us really but at the same time Mark Kennedy then followed me to the United States and That is when I got put on a terrorist watch list or something more or less equivalent to that So when I came into the United States, there would be a FBI agent who would say look buddy You know your friends. You're a domestic terrorist. You're going to jail and you know, I'd be like, hey What's the evidence and there was there's no crime. There's no evidence, but you know, they would basically Seize my computer hold me for multiple hours And it was just intolerable. So at the advice of my lawyer Ron Cooby. I left the United States Went back to Great Britain where I decided I was gonna finish. I was finishing my PhD and when I got to Great Britain The undercover police were harassing my PhD advisor and harassing my school And when my friends left the UK, they would be asked, you know about You know me and when I left the UK the police would say we know you know Tell us what you know about domestic extremism and I would say well that you know the large Cold burning power plants there ran by extremists who wanted to destroy our civilization And they weren't very happy with that and they would have forced my DNA out of me And then at some point I was like this is too dangerous I'm a threat to my friends and I left the UK and I landed up in Germany Where was revealed we were also spied upon Later and I was organizing Helping work with organizing a protest against global climate change the cop in Copenhagen and In the cop and cop in Hagan I was targeted for arrests and beaten so I couldn't see or walk and at that moment I decided that I was no longer going to do a street protest. It was just too dangerous I didn't know that the cause of all of this was Mark Kennedy Undercover police officer who we thought was a friend. I Personally got out kind of light Julian and nine other French people are on charges for terrorism. They spoke at Congress last year on Google Other friends I have are on no-fly lists and they're still on no-fly lists And I would basically just sort of say that You know you learn a lot being on a terrorist watch list. I think everyone should do it at least once Hi. Wow. I can't actually see any of you So I've been dreading making this introduction I'm one of eight women who are bringing a case in the UK right now against the Metropolitan Police for Assault and deceit and abuse of our human rights I'm in the program as Lily and any of you who might have read about the case or some of the articles that have appeared in Germany and Britain about it Would know me as Lily in 2003 I met this man Mark Stone at a meeting for the mobilization against the G8 summit in 2005 in Scotland He was Charming and disarming and he shared my interests and he shared my passion for the political things that we were doing And he told me lots of his most intimate stories and secrets. We became very close We spent two years living together as lovers He became very close to my parents. He spent many nights in their home. He attended my grandmother's 90th birthday party he met my entire extended family and We remained friends for many years after that very close friends until 2010 when I received a phone call from friends in the UK who told me that this man Mark Stone Who I shared my life with never existed and The impact of that I think Merrick describes it very well the the grief and the Paranoia and the sense of shame Really paralyzed me for a very very long time Because of the personal nature of the case that we're bringing our anonymity has actually been protected by the court and that Privacy and anonymity was very very dear to me and I've spoken out before but always under a pseudonym I've avoided being videoed But over the last five years There's been a lot more revelations about these undercover police officers and I now know that between 1998 and 2010 At least six people that I knew and worked with and some of whom I considered friends were actually undercover police officers and this year I went to the circumvention tech festival in Valencia and After a pretty weird Control by the police we found this GPS tracker stuck under my car so So much for my privacy And finding the GPS tracker was a bit of a wake-up call. They've basically been Targeting me for the last 17 years And that happened in part because I Didn't believe that they would sink so low. I didn't believe that I was doing anything that would be interesting enough And so I think that people need to know that this happens to real people and I've started to feel like the anonymity Is a bit like a gagging order and so I've decided to give it up So Hi, that's me Wow that feels weird So I wanted to talk a little bit about the reasons why we're bringing this court case and you can get rid of that screen now thank you and Yeah, the the first reason is really personal like the Knowledge about Mark not being who I thought he was was kind of like a computer virus It corrupted all my memories of those times and it affects all my relationships that I've had since and Trying to fight back bringing this case against the police was a way of taking back control of the story of my life and It's been a really powerful experience because we're a group of women who've been through similar things over a 30-year period like the first relationships happened sometime in the early 80s and they continued right up to 2010 and so one of the things that we've learned through talking to each other is that that these like what happened between Mark and me was not a personal betrayal it was Systematic abuse by an institutionally sexist organization that's been doing it for decades and People say to us and and even the police have actually said as part of the court case that I you know people lie in relationships all the time Which I think is a pretty depressing way of understanding human relationships But it's also really not what was happening here and Like Mark came into my life with fake ID and he'd been through a whole load of training programs He was paid overtime for the nights that he spent with me There was a back room that was tracking his movements that was monitoring our communications And there was a command structure that was deciding if I was going to have dinner with my boyfriend that night and one of the things that we found from talking to the other women is that There was a psychological and emotional manipulation going on So I think I said Mark like told me lots of stories about how he was abandoned by his father when he was a kid and his unhappy childhood Actually, his parents are still together and and I've read letters from other officers that were supposedly written at From his mother's funeral Very very painful letters actually his mother is still alive and when all of these officers left the The relationships and the missions that they were on the the infiltrations They had emotional breakdowns and they disappeared leaving notes that suggested that they might be thinking of suicide and Leaving their partners absolutely distraught and these we now know are tactics that they're specifically trained in in order to manipulate us and so another of the things that We're really interested in is getting to the truth And I guess I kind of naively believed that if we accused the police of something they would have to you know Defend themselves and provide us with information about what was really happening Actually, of course, what's happened is we've had the full might of the police legal department and the Huge amounts of public funds being dedicated to making sure they don't have to give any information out at all and One of the things that they are now saying is that they have a Supposed policy of neither confirming nor denying anything to do with undercover policing It hasn't been a policy up until now But now now they're claiming it's a policy and they've actually tried to get entire cases thrown out of court because They don't want to answer the questions that they're being asked and then in my case They've tried to have the whole case sent to the investigatory powers tribunal If you're involved in campaigning around surveillance or privacy or human rights in the UK You've probably heard of the investigatory powers tribunal. It's basically a secret Court that was set up just to hear Cases brought against the secret state for abuse of human rights after the human rights act came in in 2000 in the UK they realized that actually a lot of the activities of the secret state would be Violating people's rights and so they brought in a legal framework and a secret court to make sure that Nobody had any recourse essentially for that Pass the slide In our case where we're trying to get our case out of the IPT This is actually what the judge said that Parliament clearly intended to override fundamental human rights by bringing that law in So we can't complain that our human rights are being violated And our claim for human rights claim is sitting in the IPT still waiting for trial so I've had to reveal a lot about my personal life and intimate Details to the court and to the police in order to bring this case and This is the kind of shit that we're getting in return Nevertheless over the last five years a lot of information has come out and we we're running over time already I think and I don't can't really go into it in detail But I want to do a big shout out to some of the people who are doing the research the undercover research group and state watch Have been digging for years and they they've got really good websites with loads of information about this the journalists Paul Lewis and Rob Evans and all of their sources that have been giving Giving us this information and putting it out there and then all of the other groups and individuals who were affected by these Operations and particularly the ones that are involved in the cobs campaign who are keeping the pressure on to To keep this information coming out and to keep them having to answer questions And where we've got so far Actually, it's a kind of specifically weird and British thing But you can measure how uncomfortable the British state feels about stuff that's going on by the number of Investigations and inquiries and reports that are being produced about it and on this issue of undercover cops There's actually been I think it's 18 different inquiries that have been started or investigations that have been started and When all else fails what they do is they call for a public inquiry and and that's what they've just done It's starting now. It's gonna take three years and Microphone, okay. Yeah, thanks Private spying. This is also getting to be a bigger problem We talked about Right private private spying is a big problem and and also the next slide will talk about the the inquiry more so It's been entering pop culture even a couple years ago There was a Hollywood film called the East about private spying On the left you see a slide for a group called global open. That's a private security from from the UK We know that they've been spying at least on animal rights groups and Mark Kennedy after Mark Kennedy stopped working for the police Well, I met him in 2005 when I was a g8 activist and that's when he entered my life He was a police officer at that time, but by the time he was outed actually Mark Kennedy was a private spy He said before Parliament that he worked for global open He also kept his fake name and kept hanging out with his activist friends with the name Mark stone He went to an animal rights meeting in Italy. He was planning on coming to an animal rights meeting in late 2010 when he was outed While working for this company and you know Technically undercover cops are supposed to be somehow accountable if they're undercover police actually they're not always We see from this lawsuit and so on but as a private private security company They're really not accountable and private security companies are not and Mark Kennedy was working for that company There was also Stratfor the global intelligence group from the USA their Emails and so were hacked by anonymous. It was made public so we know from their leaks that Mark Kennedy even applied to work for Stratfor I'm I'm gonna go I'm just gonna jump on to the next slide because I'm gonna give a talk on this specific topic At the just back at the concern protest conference in Berlin There's a one-day conference about when companies manage protests. That's a that's a problem, too Because companies have actually tried to totally set the agenda They they call it agenda setting they get undercover cops They ride on chat groups and they totally try to change the focus of protests So go to that conference if you want to hear more the German situation as it relates to Mark Kennedy and undercover policing Well, it's not just Mark Kennedy that was in in Germany. We're worried about just after Mark was outed in 2010 late 2010 Simon with a fake name Brinner. His real name was Broma. He was outed in Heidelberg After activists campaigning for the last like five years. They're finally bringing this case to court case to court They were targeted by Broma. There's also a demonstration Heidelberg this month Iris plat was an undercover cop in Hamburg. She also had intimate affairs personal relationships with activists They're campaigning on that and the pitchfork inquiry what we heard about the the Inquiry in the UK that's coming up now It says it includes only England and Wales it excludes Scotland Which means like all of us hung out with with Mark Kennedy in Scotland and they're excluding that because of the G8 protest 2005 and So a couple of us are a campaigning that we need we want to know what Mark Kennedy was doing in Germany and in the last two weeks Members of Parliament Hans Christian Strobler and Andre Hunko have made statements There have been articles if you Google their names and Mark Kennedy blah blah Then you will see that they are demanding that the Mark Kennedy case in Germany be a part of this British inquiry because they say The case is not solved in Germany Mark Kennedy committed three crimes here including an arson in Berlin And he gave a fake name his fake name mark stone to a judge. That's that's all illegal. That has to be clarified Myself and and others we are applying for what they call in England core participant status This means when they pitch for does this inquiry they've actually said that people targeted by undercover cops Are allowed to sit there and and be a part of the inquiry. So I'm applying to be there I think these other folks on stage with me are applying because we want to direct this inquiry We had enough without enough the cops covering up. They get paid to cover up. They lie I've interviewed for my film members of Parliament in England who said the police have been dishonest to them And we want to get to the bottom of it And if we're trying to get core participants status so we can we can fight to make sure the truth comes out on the last topic I've met with a German member of Parliament from the Indian Auschwitz the Interior Committee who says that actually for private undercover cops, they're not specially regulated So if like I said a undercover cop should buy a buy buy some laws But the private undercovers can come here and do whatever they want. It's still it's totally unregulated in Germany Move on to Harry. Okay, so I'm going to speak about the wonderful logic of the discovery of dissidents domestic extremists and terrorists using Social network infiltration, which is what mark handy was a specialist at so his job was to go to a meeting of people who Maybe wanted to protest Did it seem to really care about exactly what? But his job was to map the social network and to discover the top influencer and I just want to quickly say this is a FBI analysis ran by a piece of relatively bad graphical software called tartan which was used by strat for against Occupy Oakland and Solidarity with Jeremy Hammond. We would not have this had strat for not been hacked And last little thing like like, you know, the undercover thing is is is huge And so, you know power the people but fuck the secret police particularly Sabu like that shit kill that guy metaphorically not not literally So what they're doing is that they are trying to discover who knows who and the problem with this is that by that logic You know, I'm in rooms with lots of people I actually told my story about being a terrorist watch list first to the OECD in Paris on their big data and privacy Meeting and the US representative got me lunch was very nice of him and he apologized because I'm obviously You know, I don't consider myself a terrorist. I Have not been charged with a crime. I don't actually think I've committed a crime But, you know, nonetheless by virtue of my political beliefs I've been somehow put on this watch list and then people I know then would get put on particularly if they met Mark Kennedy or hung out with him a bit and Essentially, you know by that logic everyone I know is a potential terrorist and everyone in this room is therefore a potential terrorist And that obviously as a guy is a PhD in machine learning. That's a whole lot of false positives, right? So it's not like whatever the police are trying to do with undercover cops like Mark Kennedy It's not gonna really get you any good data. Okay next slide. So so, you know, when you realize I'm on this list What should I do? Well, one thing you should do and laws are different data protection Europe in the US you have for information acts You should file a foyer. You should get a really good lawyer. I love Ron Kuby. He's a great lawyer He's the lawyer the dude asked for in the Big Lebowski. It's totally down guy He did a foyer quest and a year later. Like yeah, we got 7,624 pages on you I was like, oh man, I carried a burner laptop with me. How did you get my email? I don't know what it's watch all of that six thousand seven thousand six hundred and twenty four pages So, you know, they say I was gonna take us a while to redact this da da da da and then you get some of the stuff and then you get Great files like this one or everything is redacted but the dates, but you realize there's an investigation going on Called a harry helping at Al At Ali and others my lawyer says, you know, you want to be an at Al, right? So that's something was going on. We don't know precisely what still don't know to this day and Give me on the next one and then you also like learn a lot about like how the FBI work by looking at your files So you learn that that by are talking to a lot of people about you Some people are saying things that you don't know because of various exclusions like b6 and b7c And one thing that definitely happened when Mark Kennedy provoked a lot of various undercover police provoked a lot of FBI Attention particularly New York City where the grand jury was apparently running out of is that a lot of people freak out? It's like, oh man, like, you know You told me you were harassed at the airport and you know, you know, like somehow you know some police and this is terrible So you say, oh, maybe maybe you're an undercover cop and oh, you just really isolating people Who are being under threat is is really dangerous? And actually, you know at least with undercover police like Mark candy. I can like understand Why they try to destroy social movements because they're paid to do it When you see people who are part of social movements destroy their own social movements by snitch jacketing Going totally paranoid calling people police all this sort of stuff happened a lot in New York I'm not gonna name any names, but you were doing the job of the police and not even being paid for it So fuck those people. However, you also learn that a lot of people are great people You know people make mistakes. I've made mistakes trying to figure out what was going on Who is the source of this data? What evidence do the police have me on me? But you also see a lot of people that really were put under severe pressure by the FBI and Resist and a lot of these people or I would assume Ordinary people family friends employers and I was just like the big thank you to all the people who have not folded Under tremendous pressure from the secret police and then you're just like, oh man like You know mark Kennedy he said oh, you know, I was mentally unstable they didn't give me a psychoanalyst I just kind of made stuff up because you know, it was a great job and You're like wow, well, that's wrong you just really screwed with my life for many many years and I still get hassled at the UK border and going into shingan and would it be great to get off this list or at least find out why I'm on and You know, you have a UN human rights act which basically says you shouldn't do this unless there's a real Reason and some due process and things that come from the Magna Carta We've been fighting for like a thousand years and you also have particularly in Europe You have personal data where a person they must be processed fairly and you have the right to have it rectified if it's wrong however, when you ask I'm known undercover, please and put on a watch list how to get rectified you get something more or less like this You get a national security exemption So like well, why do we release people like Mark Kennedy? Well, we leave people like marketing and these undercover cops into the world because there is terrorist everywhere So all this you know due process and enlightened man It's thrown out the window instantly area enter what a garment calls a state of Exception where the application of law is completely arbitrary and anyone can be labeled a terrorist at any time You just have to look at how the European Council defines terrorism to unduly constrain public authorities or an International organization, which I guess could be any multinational company to perform or to refrain from performing any action So that means like, you know fry heights dot angster. Maybe I don't know boycotting McDonald's that could all be terrorism So it's pretty vague at best He's working So the other reason why we brought the case was to try and make sure it didn't happen again In the beginning what it shouldn't happen again meant to me was that no other women should be abused in the way that we were But it's got a lot broader than that over time and I think now the thing that So now the thing that we that that I really feel is important. I mean I've said I I'm lost sorry, so I Want my files. I want to know I want them to fill in the gaps for all of those things that I don't know what was happening in my life But they're not giving us that information and they the reasons why and these national security exemptions They're all about saying that this kind of undercover policing is somehow legitimate And we have examples from history and I was in Berlin before I came here and That's somewhere where they they actually decided that what happened what the undercover police were doing was not legitimate and And everybody was given access to their files and I would really like to see that change of attitude happening there is no Circumstances there is nothing that people could be doing that I think justifies this kind of political policing and and Then the other thing that I think is now really important is I want Reaper and the IPT gone and I think Yeah, basically I think it's important to say here because lots of people are involved in campaigning around Around issues that can touch on that and basically I would just like to say kick those bastards every time you get the chance Smash Reaper smash the IPT like they're they're they're fucked up, and we want them gone Another thing I just want to bring up is the the issue of What's called pervasive surveillance or targeted? Surveillance and these are often viewed as a dichotomy So you sort of say so I work with like lots of engineers are like Microsoft and Google these places And they're really nice people for the most part. They're a little angry at mass surveillance They feel violated and it's kind of freaky thinking. Oh, and I say he's spying on everyone in the planet And so they're like, oh, we have to stop pervasive surveillance that pervasive surveillance is a threat But there's this like myth that basis. Well, you know, maybe the police might need a back door because there's like a legitimate target and you know there's certain people that we should target that guy right there for example and It's basically targeted surveillance The point of mass surveillance is targeted surveillance and target surveillance for the most part and my experience at least targets people who are activists who are trying to change the world for a better place and Under the incredibly vague way that terrorism cases and social network analysis all stuff is run and big data God help us when they start doing real stats You know targeted analysis could target anyone in this room and anyone on the planet at any time So you have to be a hundred percent Against targeted surveillance and you need an international response one of the reasons to do focus on Indian crypto and anatomy systems It's because ultimately changing these laws. It's gonna be really hard may not ever happen But at the same point we have to do something and I really feel like The way that hackers can help social movements by building systems They can do that can prevent not only pervasive surveillance But also prevent targeted surveillance because ultimately any you know, I believe everything I believe before I met Mark Kennedy You know, I believe it even even more, you know capitalism It's totally ending. It's gonna be a dead social order in the next few decades climate change is a global threat to humanity and You know the financial system screwed It's like if young people can't go into the streets without being victims of targeted surveillance and undercover police We're never gonna change and get the world. We want And I think it's really important to say that I mean Obviously my story is pretty horrible and the stuff that we're talking about is pretty horrible and I don't want to send people out of here traumatized and scared and not wanting to To take action and I think it's important that people know that this stuff is happening But I think it's also important to say that this stuff happened to us because we were doing something right And yeah, like don't don't stop don't be scared by what we're saying be aware but Yeah, and if you are German or in Germany, then there are things you can do here We didn't talk about this problem so much at the European Union level But actually there have been questions at the European Union like How can all of these things happen these human rights violations and these kind of things have to be addressed at the European Union? You can you can make pressure there you can make pressure in the in the German Parliament You can take to the streets you can help support my film or if you're in Germany You can help to get rid of Germany's political police the ferfassung shoots When I asked the the German police the Baker Elka for my file about Mark Kennedy They gave me nothing but when I asked the ferfassung shoots I had a list of 31 things that have been on my file like Jason gave a political protest a Lecture a political lecture about the g8 whatever all this political stuff. None of it was illegal 31 things in my ferfassung shoots file none of which were illegal at all. They were all about public things, so you can Support these folks. I'm gonna give a talk also next next month in Berlin and we are active We weren't intimidated and we hope that you will stand with us and fight and help us find justice. Thank you very much And Last little note I forgot about this, but if any of you have been targeted by undercover police I mean Mark Kenny would be great, but there's many many others. I think you should probably Either give those documents to a lawyer if maybe you can give them my lawyers I have to give you their info or you could leak those documents somehow and that I also want to say this to the police Officers watching the video. We have lots of documents. So really all this lying. You're not gonna win Is that on can you hear me? Yeah, so as you can see now, we have time a lot of time for questions So we start you see two microphones one is there one is here. So if you want cue up And we start with you in the blue shirt question Yes, thanks for you talk it really great to see that some people fight back and If everyone here they have the idea or interest to get also files from the Bka or the fast and short There's tomorrow Workshop how to get your file from the geheimdienst at the BL in the dome at 12 o'clock Yeah, it's a beer Join the workshop Do you want the next question? Thank you very much for a really excellent talk and I think I say on behalf of probably everyone here incredible condolences and solidarity to You guys and everyone else who's being targeted by these undercover's I Think one of the most interesting things which has come out of these revelations Which was I guess maybe not really intended at all It seems to me from having been involved in various activist circles for the past couple of years Certainly, I got involved just as the Mark Kennedy thing was really it was really blowing up and it seems like we're really being afflicted by this incredible culture now of paranoia and so I hear things like You know as soon as anyone sticks their head above the pulpit either because they're very experienced or because they're very knowledgeable or just because they're very good at what they do and very effective Or as soon as there's an interpersonal disagreement with with with someone the accusations start flying Oh, do you see that guy with the with with the camera? He's definitely an undercover. Why is he filming for the rest of you? I'm pointing at one of the ccc camera operators Or oh, do you know I hear it was on on CNN The other day was on BBC. They have really small drones They're the size of your fingernails and they can fly anywhere and land anywhere even in a hurricane and and follow you or your rounds This is what the Mark Kennedy thing was all about of course. I have heard this So I guess my question is Where do we go from here? Like have you? experienced this kind of like Paranoia really almost unreasonable paranoia Yourselves if so, how did you respond and how do you think we in the activist community? Can respond to this kind of environment which has been totally inadvertently arisen. Thank you Okay, it's a it's a really good question in my case, I think I wasn't paranoid enough so I But I also In some ways, I'm kind of glad that I wasn't paranoid enough and I spoke to another woman who was friends with Mark after After he was found out and one of the things she said was well I guess I'm not as good at judging people as I thought but who wants to go around judging people all the time and I think The the thing is that you you do have to be careful But you also have to kind of be serious about it actually Long before Mark Kennedy was undercover that was uncovered the activist movements lived with this culture of paranoia and a lot of the time we do Paranoid stuff that is pointless and damaging and and I mean the stuff that Harry was talking about from New York and and then We don't actually we're not sensible about it. We don't do the sensible stuff. So what I would say is If you think somebody's an undercover cop don't whisper about it You know, don't don't spread rumors. Don't try and trash that person personally Actually, you know, try and find out You know the undercover cops that have been uncovered Are people that people have suspected and they've looked they've looked for birth certificates They you know, they've they've actually seriously tried to find out and I think it's important to say that actually the people who turned out to be Undercover cops We're not the people you didn't like so much You know that the weirdo in the corner who doesn't have any friends and everyone goes Oh, I think that guy's probably a cop because he makes me feel uncomfortable They were our closest friends I've done actions in affinity groups where there were only two of us and one of the members of that affinity group was an undercover cop and When people actually started to suspect and started to investigate You were investigating your close friends and it was something that was very painful to do and people took very very seriously it wasn't something that you did as a kind of Gossipy rumoury thing that and I and I think that's really important like Don't Be sensitive we can also get it wrong. Don't say you think someone's a cop unless you know don't and Yeah, like try to Also try to be careful about What really really really has to be kept secret and what actually people can be included in even if maybe that means undercover cops are involved because otherwise we end up shutting ourselves down and Becoming more and more paranoid and more and less and less effective A good level of transparency in your group can help it along ways and in some of the books that I mentioned There's advice for example. There's a great book in you from the USA called war at home covert surveillance against us American activists and what we can do about it that book has great advice and If you're paranoid, you're in a certain group and you you can't deal with well There's a million ways that you can be active you can pass out flyers You can cook food you can do a million things and the thing that I think is sad on occasion is when someone is Paranoid and they step out and they in their activism What we need is a way to think about how we can have a life-long way of being active and continuing to be active and Incorporating that activism into our everyday life and to keep on going All right the next question, please Thanks for your talk. I am so angry when I hear what happened to you. I'm amazed at how dignified you are in facing this in the UK for a lot of the time when the Mark Kennedy case came up and then when you started bringing your case and You know, so there were there were judges talking about Disgusting judges talking about this like it was some James Bond fantasy police chiefs talking about how lying is a part of every relationship and You know, they brought up small cases where having sex with activists was clearly seen as a perk of the job and you know while While wishing every personal unhappiness That can be you know one from such attitudes. I Wondered if you could talk a bit more about the case you're bringing with institutional sexism and How that's going and how you're arguing that it's a tough one. I mean the the issue with with institutional sexism is one of the things that is Significant about the the decades of undercover police that have been inside the political movements in the UK is that while there have been cases of relationships of sexual encounters with men The these kind of long-term relationships where I mean, I think effectively we were used as part of their cover story Only really happened to women and I think I mean I dread to think what the the cafeteria culture must have been like within those undercover units like That's one of the things that keeps me awake at night and I think Getting I mean getting that message across I don't really know how to answer the question like it's something that we just have to keep saying one of the problems with the institutional sexism of the Metropolitan Police is that it's embedded in the institutional sexism of the British legal system and within the said generalized sexism in our society and so It's a kind of it's a something we have to fight on a lot of different levels, but What we've been doing is by bringing these cases together and and showing that you know This is not they tried to say in the beginning that it was just one like lunatic and that Mark Kennedy had done this But that that nobody else did and then some other cases came up and they kind of said yeah Well, you know There's this this unit that was the special demonstration squad and they were totally out of control and we shut them down and we brought in the regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and everything is now fine and and then more cases have come up since the regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and I think it's just a case of Showing that that this is systematic. This is something that they've been doing. This is part of their operational tactics and Yeah, we need more whistleblowers for sure and that would be really great. So For those undercover cops who are watching the video or sitting in the room like Sorry We have time for another question, please So in New York City for about a decade the NYPD New York Police Department Intelligence Division was The demographics unit was surveilling Muslims and mass So there was a lawsuit about this two years ago And one of the judges arguments in defense of this was that actual damage happened was through the revelations of the surveillance itself And not the surveillance itself So I'm curious, you know as you talk exposing at different policing tactics. What is your response to? What the damages are and why surveillance in itself is the damage So, I mean surveillance creates a Culture of fear and paranoia and you have a large-scale complex society like ours that is in desperate need of social change By attempting to destroy the creativity and the power of people to self-organize You are actually Committing large-scale social suicide to your entire society. That's incredibly damaging You will never change the society by creating a police state even a one which is supposedly justified by terrorism So one of the arguments around why shouldn't you know, we release more Indian crypto One of the arguments is well, well, how do we find the terrorists? Well, you know this Indian crypto and other technologies which effectively Make targeted and mass surveillance harder is a public good in the same way that Roads for example are public goods right so effectively, you know terrorist drive-on roads They have they go on airplanes do we ban airplanes and stop building roads and destroy the ones we have no We don't make them illegal, you know the same with crypto and that the culture of surveillance is trying to hold back Innovation and building anonymizing systems and building privacy enhancing technologies is really Possibly going to destroy one of the few things that actually will help defend our rights when our legal structure is pretty clear with the what the case is that Kate's been in and you know, I'm in and Jason and whatnot is that you know the legal infrastructure Needs the technological Guarantees because the legal structure is being undermined Completely by this total nonsense of surveillance Okay, I checked with my supervisor and he said we have another question the last one, please It's not a really a question. It's just a comment all of these the police surveillance be surveilling people and activists already happened in South America in the in the years of the disaparicidos and You did a great work because the outcome of that experience was that many of the persons that were infiltrates in the in the activism after some years became some sort of political center and They were actually the people that were got elected and get out in the hierarchy even of the states so you always a big you did very well because you actually They didn't have the opportunity to become more important and have a more influence in the society that was One little comment, which is that the the data protection regulations and all these regulations were set in the place After World War two in order to prevent the rise of a massive secret police address because people knew how bad that had gone Right by undermining those laws and of course holding back technological progress We've made it easier for these sorts of large-scale Surveillance to come back, but the fact that matters. I'm pretty lucky. I'm like, you know, this white dude. I work at MIT You know, I'm not dead. I'm not in Guantanamo, right? You know and the fact of matter is many people who are put on these lists, you know dirty war for example by Jeremy Scanhol goes it does Excel analysis these people if they're in Pakistan if they're in Iraq if they're in Africa if they're in many countries, they are killed Right, so this is a big difference But that the same point that means we have to fight really hard to show it can be defeated because a lot of these killings are coming From European and American governments and Western governments That's why you really have to fight really hard as someone who lives in these countries as well for also preventing this from happening all over the globe Alright a big. Thank you for this really interesting talk a lot of applause for Kate Harry and Jason. Thank you so much That's for you guys really good job