Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have long masqueraded as democracies, smothering civil freedoms and mass-murdering political opponents. Despots have always seen even the murmurings of internal revolt as a threat to national security, relying on state intelligence agencies and the military to keep this threat at bay. Arresting and torturing and killing dissidents, including human rights and environmental activists, is in the DNA of such regimes, sometimes escalating to the horrors of a Soviet Union or a Nazi Germany, but more often looking like the repressive military dictatorships so common over the last hundred years, where state violence against citizens has been the norm, although generally not as all-encompassing as in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.
Dictators and pseudo-democrats who do not stifle resistance risk being overthrown. This is why in January 2011 Egyptian security forces killed hundreds and injured thousands to try to put down a popular uprising of pro-democracy marches and labor strikes. And this is partly why, a month later, following the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak after a 29-year reign, other states in the Middle East and beyond resorted to even greater brutality to suppress opponents. Nothing is surprising here. And, going forward, autocrats – from those in China to those in pseudo-democratic Russia – will continue to securitize dissent to retain a tight grip on power.
More surprising perhaps is the securitization of protest over the last decade within states with histories of democracy and civil freedoms, those in Western Europe and North America among them. Unquestionably, these states, in the name of national security, have some nasty records of violence against their own citizens – such as interrogations and arrests and executions of “spies” and “saboteurs” during the Cold War (including the 1950s McCarthy era in the United States). Especially since the terrorist attacks of 2001, however, these states are increasingly treating dissent as a threat to national security – using security forces to stamp out public protests; passing Draconian laws to extend surveillance and restrict freedoms; and pursuing organizers as anarchists and terrorists.
All states are hiding this suppression of activism behind a veil of anti-terrorism rhetoric and laws and inside a labyrinth of top-secret security agencies. Yet, as this chapter shows, unsealed court cases, declassified documents, eyewitness accounts, and access to information requests do offer enough insight to see at least the shadows of what Western governments are doing to muffle civil disobedience.
Anti-globalization protests were gaining strength across Western Europe and North America during the late 1990s. Tension was mounting between protesters and police forces, as we saw in the “Battle in Seattle” during the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial conference. Yet the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11), fundamentally altered how democratic states were seeing and handling mass protests. To an even greater extent, democracies in the wake of 9/11 began to treat anti-capitalist groups and protests as latent sources of terrorism. Intelligence agencies began to track more groups and movements. And police were given license to be more aggressive when handling protestors: to contain, control, and prevent demonstrations.
During the 1960s and 1970s the police and security forces of every democracy were hardly Gandhian in their treatment of civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protesters. Police saw such protests as a threat to public order, unleashing attack-dogs and deploying tear gas and fire hoses. By the beginning of the 1980s, however, many police departments were seeing this model of policing as a “public relations disaster” and were instead taking a “negotiated management” approach, trying, at least initially, to avoid the use of force.1 During the 1980s and most of the 1990s, negotiated management was a common policing strategy throughout North America and Europe. The direct-action tactics of anti-globalization activists, however, first in Europe and then in North America, strained this model of policing. By the time of the Battle in Seattle in 1999, facing more than 50,000 protesters, Seattle police were in no mood to negotiate. They set up barricades and no-protest zones; in full riot gear, they tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed protestors and arrested “troublemakers.”
In the United States, Seattle was the beginning of the end for the negotiated management style of policing for dealing with public protests. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 sealed this, largely ending debates about whether treating protestors as rioters was violating rights. The threat of terrorism justified, for many politicians as well as for much of the American public, the necessity of a “command-and-control” model of policing. Besides a heavy police presence, this model involves, as we document later, laws to increase police powers as well as surveillance of potential protest organizers, with databases of personalities and activities.2
What some call “paramilitary policing” of public protest is increasing in both democracies and authoritarian regimes. Some human rights advocates worry that the Arab Spring which began in late 2010 is causing autocrats to take an even harder line with protests. In 2012 Maina Kiai, UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur, named a long list of states at the UN General Assembly for reportedly or allegedly using excessive force against citizens assembling peacefully, including Angola, China, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malawi, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, the US, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe.3 We could provide hundreds of examples of excessive force against protesters since 9/11. Even a few, however, suffice to illustrate how difficult – even frightening – it has become for activists to take to the streets.
Let’s start in the United States and Canada. Police at the 2004 Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in Miami fired rubber bullets and tear gas at demonstrators, bullying bystanders and arresting “people who simply looked like protesters.”4 Leading up to the conference, police tracked organizers through an elaborate surveillance system; city officials, meanwhile, revised bylaws to shore up police powers. Luis Fernandez, in Policing Dissent, describes how thousands of police, in “full black body armor and gas masks,” were “marching down the streets shouting, ‘Back! … back!’ while beating batons against their shields.” The city of Miami became, in his words, “a militarized sector, closely resembling a war zone.”5
Across the United States police tactics have become more heavy-handed as city police forces acquire military hardware to disperse crowds. Take the case of the Pittsburgh police during the 2009 G20 summit. The Pittsburgh G20 marked the first time that police fired sound cannons – what the military calls long-range acoustic devices, or LRADs – at protesters. The US Navy built high-frequency sound cannons designed to daze and confuse the enemy, yet leave no visible marks (although permanent hearing loss can occur). Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the US National Lawyers Guild, describes the police at the Pittsburgh G20 as “especially brutal” – “a textbook example of unlawful force that violates domestic and international legal norms.”6
Other big-city American police forces have definitely handled protests with more diplomacy and less violence. Still, command-and-control policing remains the norm today, as the containment of Occupy protests in 2011 and 2012 reveals. Police across the United States clubbed, pepper-sprayed, and dragged Occupy protesters into custody. Occupy camps were put under 24-hour surveillance; federal agents interrogated organizers; and undercover officers were sent into protest camps. Police arrested and threatened journalists as well, with many being blocked from witnessing police actions. “Kettling” was common, too, where police corralled and enclosed protestors (as well as bystanders) inside police cordons for hours on end. Sometimes police merely held people like cattle – to unnerve and intimidate and inconvenience. Sometimes police conducted identity checks and then arrested those without sufficient identification. Many protestors and bystanders fled at the mere sight of the telltale signs of kettling, such as orange netting and police barricades.
The Protest and Assembly Rights Project, comprising researchers from seven American law schools (including New York University, Harvard, and Stanford), assessed the degree of force by New York City police against Occupy Wall Street protestors as “aggressive and excessive.” Their conclusion is damning: “US authorities have engaged in a pattern of treatment of Occupy Wall Street that violates international law by unnecessarily and unjustifiably restricting the rights to assembly and expression.”7 One of the lead authors, New York University law professor Sarah Knuckey, adds, “All the case studies we collected show the police are violating basic rights consistently, and the level of impunity is shocking.”8
Up north, although Canadian police forces are less militarized than those in the United States, a command-and-control approach to public protest has nonetheless also become standard since 9/11. Already by 2001, during the Quebec City Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, police were firing rubber bullets, tear gas, and concussion grenades at protestors. By the 2010 Toronto G20, police violence and state suppression was more methodical, when, as activist and bestselling author Naomi Klein says, a security “hysteria” and “arbitrary searches” left many in Toronto living and working in “a bizarre rights-free zone.”9 Canadian security services, with a budget of C$125 million, interrogated activists and put in place surveillance systems to monitor protest groups. During the G20 weekend, Toronto police beat back and pepper-sprayed protestors, kettling them into side streets, and in the end arresting more than a thousand people – the biggest mass arrest in Canadian history.10
Many of the democracies of Europe are securitizing public protests with equal vigor. As in North America, rough tactics to suppress dissent pre-date 9/11. At the July 2001 Genoa G8, for instance, Italian police and paramilitary forces clashed with 200,000 protestors: fifteen police officers and doctors were later convicted of mistreating protesters, although none ended up serving jail time. Nonetheless, since then, as in the US and Canada, European states have been taking an even harder line.
German security forces, for example, tightly controlled the 2007 G8 in the German seaside resort of Heiligendamm. Topped with barbed wire, a 12-kilometer-long wall of steel and cement blocks was put in place around the G8 meeting place. Video monitors and movement sensors gave delegates and politicians additional security. The army was called upon to assist police, bringing along armored vehicles and Tornado jets. During the Heiligendamm G8, German security forces detained hundreds of protestors in holding cells; many would later allege police abuse.
Such security for high-level international meetings is now standard practice. At the 2009 G20 summit in London, a newspaper merchant even died after a constable hit him with a baton and knocked him over. Swift and harsh security restrictions to contain protests against domestic policies are also common across Europe. France, for example, has taken a hard line against immigrant youth protests. So too have Spain and Greece with anti-austerity protests. And so did Britain during student protests against tuition hikes in 2010, with arrests, fingerprinting, beatings, and kettling. British authorities even published the photos of protestors in the media, sending, as Nina Power of Roehampton University points out, a scary message to those who might consider protesting in the future: “if you protest, for any reason, we can and will destroy your future.”11
When hosting an international meeting, governments in the global South also tend to treat protests as a national security threat. Common as well are violent crackdowns to subdue labor unrest and quell opposition to privatization and commercialization of water, land, and forests. Unquestionably, such violence has been a hallmark of imperialism and colonialism and industrialization in both the global South and North. It is worth emphasizing, though, that violence continues to anchor globalization and global capitalism today, especially in the developing world, as states liberalize trade, privatize resources, and placate foreign firms.
One example, among many from which we could choose, is the ruthless suppression of anti-mining protests. Just look at 2012. That year, at the Lonmin Marikana mine in South Africa, police boxed in striking miners with barbed wire and armored vehicles, then opened fire and killed thirty-four and injured seventy-eight. That same year Peruvian police killed five people and injured dozens of others who were protesting an expansion of a gold mine owned by the American company Newmont Mining, and Argentine police injured scores of people after attacking with dogs and riot vehicles and firing rubber bullets and tear gas at protestors who were demonstrating against a Canadian–Swiss mining project. These three examples are only a few among many – and 2012 was in no way an exceptional year. Recent years have seen similar occurrences in Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, among many other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Of course, the killing of picketers and protestors goes back to the very beginning of the first strikes. But noting this does not change the fact that such violence today remains a fundamental part of why human rights, labor, and environmental activism is so perilous. Shootings and beatings not only intimidate labor rights activists but also add to an overall culture of violence against dissidents. The hazards for human rights and environmental activists, moreover, do seem to be climbing – perhaps, some analysts speculate, because power struggles are intensifying for control of the world’s depleting and ever more valuable natural resources.
One sign of the danger for activists is a near doubling between 2009 and 2011 in the number of reported killings of activists and journalists who were investigating or protesting human rights abuses from activities such as logging, mining, poaching, hydropower dams, and land clearing. According to a study by the NGO Global Witness, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and the Philippines were the most unsafe over this time. But murders of activists happened across the global South, and many places could well be even more treacherous, as information from war-torn regions of Africa, for example, is sparse and unreliable. More than 700 environmental activists were reported killed from 2002 to 2011, with more than a hundred killed in the latter year alone. Far more were certainly targeted and killed, however, as many states never report such killings or else bury them as “accidents” or “muggings” or “missing persons.” A “culture of impunity,” claims Global Witness, has meant that police forces rarely conduct credible investigations. And those responsible for the killings are hardly ever convicted of anything.12
More frequent still across the global South is the intimidation, arbitrary detention, and torture of human rights and environmental activists. Colombia is one of the world’s most treacherous places, with, as Professor Todd Gordon of Wilfrid Laurier University notes, “extraordinary levels of military and paramilitary violence” to uphold “privatization, foreign investment and extreme inequalities.”13 In many other places, most notably in the poorest economies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, systemic police violence against activists underpins corporate profitability and national security. As Thomas Friedman once penned with flair, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.”14 In much of the global South protestors face not only riot police armed with rubber bullets, batons, and tear gas but also soldiers and paramilitary police with loaded machine guns, armored tanks, and, on occasion, a license to assassinate. Even in the United States, however, civilian police are increasingly behaving like a military force when responding to mass protests.
A militarization of civilian police forces characterizes the post9/11 securitization of protest, although, as criminologist Peter Kraska documents, this process in countries such as the United States began well before 2001.15 Since 9/11, even more of those with the authority to enforce domestic laws look like soldiers, gaining the capability and political backing to employ military-style force. Police, military, secret service, and intelligence agencies have been cooperating more, and the lines of responsibility for handling public protests have been blurring further.
Police, military, and security agencies are cross-training and sharing intelligence and weapon technologies to fight terrorism and wars on drugs and crime – as well as to put down riots and civil disobedience. As with the overall securitization of protest, once again the US is leading the charge. The Pentagon, for example, has a program to donate surplus military hardware to civilian police, including military-grade M14 and M16 rifles, grenade launchers, tanks, and attack helicopters. In recent years this Pentagon program has been transferring US$3 billion or so in surplus weapons and equipment to local police. Billions of dollars of Homeland Security grants, as well as large security budgets to host international meetings and sporting events, are enabling police departments across the US to upgrade equipment as well as acquire body armor, bazookas, machine guns, sound cannons, and mini-tanks.16
Even small-town America is arming its police with military-grade weapons. In 2002 the town of Jasper, Florida, for example, armed its seven police officers with M16 machine guns through the Pentagon program. At the time, a decade had passed in this town of fewer than 2,000 people without a single murder. The St Petersburg Times newspaper had some fun with its subheading on Jasper’s militarization: “Three Stoplights, Seven M-16s.” County police have also eagerly joined the line for the Pentagon’s surplus military hardware. In 2007 the sheriff of Clayton County, Georgia, got himself an army tank; a year later so did the sheriff of nearby Cobb County, who equipped it with thermal sensors, night vision, and tear-gas launchers. “In these times, you don’t know what you are facing,” mused then Cobb police chief George Hatfield in 2008.17
Arthur Rizer, a former police officer who earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart in Iraq before joining the US Department of Justice, is deeply troubled by the militarization of America’s police forces. So too is Joseph Hartman, a practicing lawyer in Virginia and, as of June 2013, a doctoral candidate at Georgetown. They worry not only about the transfer of military hardware to civilian police forces but equally about the training of police by the military, including the training by special operations commandos of police SWAT units using “special weapons and tactics.” Together, they write: “When police officers are dressed like soldiers, armed like soldiers, and trained like soldiers, it’s not surprising that they are beginning to act like soldiers. And remember: a soldier’s main objective is to kill the enemy.”18
Police acting like soldiers is now the norm during public protests, not just in the United States but in most democracies, as we see with the worldwide military-style police clampdowns on G8/G20 protests and the Occupy Movement. The authors of the 2011 book Shutting Down the Streets agree, seeing the “war zones” put in place to control public protests as a pre-emptive strategy to relegate dissent to a criminal act.19
War zones with police in battle gear and mini-tanks are vivid reminders of the post-9/11 securitization of activism. States are also backstopping this show of force with new laws and policies to limit free speech and assembly – and thus limit the scope and very nature of activism.
Anti-terrorism legislation in the UK, the US, Canada, Russia, Germany, and many other countries is further criminalizing dissent as states extend surveillance and detention powers to a wider range of groups. Expanding the canvas of potential terrorist threats is having a further “chilling effect” on protest and activism alike. As with command-and-control policing of public rallies, state use of courts and surveillance to limit freedom of assembly and constrain dissent is making it harder and harder for activists to challenge the tenets of the capitalist political and economic order.
Since 9/11, cities across Europe and North America have turned to bylaws, codes, and permits to increase control over anti-capitalist and anti-government protests. Just before the 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas meetings in Miami, for example, the Miami City Commission revised its Streets and Sidewalks Ordinance to limit what people could carry as possible weapons (e.g., glass bottles) as well as to make it illegal for two or more people to “parade” and disrupt traffic; even outside, eight or more people could not congregate as a “public assembly” for more than thirty minutes. The ordinance in effect gave police the power to stop, search, and detain anyone protesting, even peacefully.
Miami, seeing it would face multiple legal challenges, passed the ordinance less than a week before the Free Trade Area of the Americas meetings, then rescinded it three months later. Enforcing such a sweeping ordinance would have been impossible. But that was not the point; and no one was ever charged under it. Rather, passing a temporary ordinance was, as Luis Fernandez says, a “strategy” and “new type of legal control” to extend state “powers of surveillance and intimidation.”20
Soon other cities, such as Savannah, Georgia, during the 2004 G8 summit, were using the same “temporary ordinance” strategy to control dissent and protest. Governments are also issuing orders to prevent protest activity in specific areas. Leading up to the 2007 G8 in Heiligendamm, for instance, a general directive was passed to prohibit “protest in the zone immediately outside the security fence.”21 For similar purposes some cities are resurrecting the powers of antiquated laws. In the lead up to the 2010 G20 in Toronto, for example, the provincial government of Ontario enacted Regulation 233/10 to activate the 1939 Public Works Protection Act, a long-dormant Act passed a few days after Canada declared war on Germany to expand state powers to deal with potential sabotage of Ontario’s infrastructure.
Regulation 233/10 gave Toronto police extraordinary power to search and seize and detain and arrest protestors. The regulation also barred protestors from coming within 5 meters of the security fence surrounding the G20 meetings, a rule the government failed to publicize. The Ontario Ombudsman would later investigate and find that Regulation 233/10 “gave police powers that are unfamiliar in a free and democratic society.” Not informing the public of the new police powers, moreover, “operated as a trap for those who relied on their ordinary legal rights.” Regulation 233/10, the Ombudsman concluded, “should never have been enacted” and “was likely unconstitutional.”22
Of the more than 1,000 people arrested during the G20 meetings in Toronto, over 100 were prosecuted. Twenty people were charged under conspiracy laws, among them some of Canada’s better-known social justice activists. As court cases would reveal, for years leading up to the G20 police officers had gone undercover to gather evidence on activists. Bail conditions reflect the securitization of activism in Canada. These include, as Naomi Klein writes, “not being able to speak to any of the other defendants; not being able to go to protests or engage in political organizing; not being able to talk on a cell phone; essentially being under house arrest; [and] in some cases not being able to post to the internet or speak to the media.”23 Reflecting on these arrests and prosecutions, two G20 activists argue that, “beyond justifying the security budget, the extensive police actions had a more important and far-reaching goal: silencing dissent.”24
To limit dissent even more, many municipalities are ticketing, fining, and removing demonstrators for minor bylaw infractions, such as “trespassing” or “jaywalking.” One example is Portland, Oregon, where, after about two months of Occupy protests, police began to enforce city codes that forbid the construction of structures in a park as well as being in a park after midnight. Portland also used its city code to close two “occupied” city “squares for repair and to remediate any remaining safety, health and crime problems.”25
Cities are further using permit fees to deter protestors. The city of Utah, for instance, required a liability insurance policy of more than US$2,500 before issuing a “free expression” permit to a group wanting to march in 2011 to raise awareness of the human rights abuses of climate change. Similarly, many American and Canadian cities are requiring Occupy protestors to purchase insurance before granting a permit. Because “such insurance policies can be prohibitively expensive,” explains Nathalie Des Rosiers of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, they are “effectively negating rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.”26 To keep protestors away from politicians and the public, cities are using permits to close sidewalks and streets near protest sites as well as designating “protest zones” and “free speech zones” in faraway fields and stadiums.
In addition, many governments are putting in place more lasting legal measures to curb dissent. Britain’s Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, which came into force in 2012, is one example. Among just some of the measures to control public protests, the bill prohibits anyone from sleeping or putting up a tent or using a loudspeaker in London’s Parliament Square, with fines of up to £5,000 (more than US$7,500).27 The Canadian province of Quebec, as chapter 1 mentions, took a similarly hardline stance against a 2012 student strike by passing the emergency law Bill 78, which allows for fines for “unauthorized” protesting of up to C$5,000 for individuals and up to C$150,000 for student organizations. Bill 78, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association argues, “drastically limits freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly rights in Quebec.”28
Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, sees Quebec’s Bill 78 as part of an “alarming” trend “to restrict freedom of assembly in many parts of the world.”29 Criminalizing protest in North America and Europe lends support to, and may even encourage, repression elsewhere. In 2012 Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law to criminalize protest further, with stiffer penalties, including fines of up to US$9,000 for individuals and US$30,000 for organizations. When other world leaders criticized the law, Sergey Ivanov, the head of Russia’s presidential administration, defended it, arguing that it follows “best world practices” and pointing to comparable American and British anti-protest laws.30
Anti-terrorism laws since 9/11 pose a grave threat to peaceful activism. The 2001 USA PATRIOT Act is at the forefront, with later legislation – such as annual provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the budget and expenditures of the US Department of Defense – further extending the power of US security forces to spy on, search, and detain activists. Other countries have comparable laws. Canada has passed various bills (C-35, C-36, and C-42) to extend state power to combat terrorism. The UK’s Terrorism Act 2000, meanwhile, has enhanced state power to stop and search people. Author and activist Tony Clarke sees multiple and insidious purposes behind anti-terrorism legislation: for him, “a prime target of the new wave of anti-terrorist legislation is … the movement against corporate globalization itself.”31
Antiterrorist legislation is augmenting state coercive power over civil disobedience. Countries such as France, Germany, Canada, and the US are increasingly treating offences such as “trespassing” and “property damage” as “violent” crimes and possible terrorism. States are also classifying “activists” as “anarchists” and “extremists.” For instance, potential threat categories in the FBI’s Violent Gang and Terrorist Organization File, first set up in 1995 to track criminal gangs, now include categories such as “anarchist,” “radical Islamic extremist,” “white supremacist,” “black extremist,” “environmental extremist,” and “animal rights extremist.”32 Since 9/11, the UK and Canada have made similar changes to their potential-threat categories, with a deeply chilling effect on activism.
Raw state power over alleged anarchists and extremists continues to grow too. In the United States, for example, sections of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007, argues economist Michel Chossudovsky, practically create “a Pinochet style environment for the mass arrest of political dissidents without trial.”33 The 2007 NDAA enhanced the power of the US military to enforce laws and reinstate order in the wake of a “terrorist attack,” “natural disaster,” or “other condition.” And it expanded the American president’s power to execute “martial law” during a “public emergency.”
Section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA, meanwhile, seems to give the US military the right to detain people indefinitely without trial, including American citizens. Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Chris Hedges sued to try to overturn section 1021 (later joined by six co-plaintiffs, among them Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky). Hedges explains his reasons for opposing the “Homeland Battlefield” provisions in the 2012 Act: “In defiance of more than 200 earlier laws of domestic policing, [the NDAA] holds that any member of a group deemed by the state to be a terrorist organization, whether it is a Palestinian charity or a Black Bloc anarchist unit, can be seized and held by the military.”34 Even President Barack Obama, upon signing the bill into law in December 2011, felt the need to add, “I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”
Another example of the mushrooming power of the US state over its citizens is the 2011 Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act (HR 347), or what some call the “anti-protest” bill. Reviving a 1970s trespass law, the Act empowers secret service agents to remove and arrest protestors, authorizing fines and/or jail time of up to ten years for anyone who “knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.” The Act makes “free speech a felony,” argues Judge Andrew Napolitano, allowing “Secret Service agents to decide where there are no Free Speech Zones.”35
Police departments and intelligence agencies are increasingly cooperating to monitor and contain activism. A few days before police evicted Occupy activists across the US in 2011, for example, the Police Executive Research Forum coordinated a conference call with eighteen mayors and police chiefs. The call was, according Portland Mayor Sam Adams, to “share information and advice on how various cities were handling the demonstrations.” Since then evidence has come to light that Homeland Security and the FBI helped to coordinate the Occupy raids. This helps to explain the similarity of raid tactics, including the use of tear gas and rubber bullets as a first measure rather than a last resort.36
Similar partnerships between police departments, armed forces, and intelligence agencies are occurring in Canada and Europe too, including, for instance, for security at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010 and the London Olympics in 2012. One consequence of such cooperation is more all-encompassing surveillance of activist groups.
State surveillance of civil rights, anti-war, labor, social justice, and environmental movements has a long history. Government agents have also long slipped onto planning committees to discredit and expose dissident groups. Particularly infamous in the United States was the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program from 1956 to 1971. Since 9/11, as freedom of information requests and court cases reveal, the FBI, Pentagon, New York Police Department, and other agencies in the US have been spying on hundreds of activist groups. Surveillance involves tapping phones, eavesdropping, recording license plates, monitoring email and Internet traffic, and paying informants – with national databases tracking suspicious activities.37
The Pentagon, as a freedom of information request by the American Civil Liberties Union confirmed in 2006, has maintained a database on peaceful groups and protest activities. This was done through the Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) Report Program in the US Department of Defense (managed by the Counterintelligence Field Activity). TALON began in 2001 as a counterterrorism database of suspicious activity near air force interests. Paul Wolfowitz, as deputy secretary of defense, launched TALON as a department-wide program in 2003 to track suspicious activity or threats near all military facilities in the United States; yet, as the American Civil Liberties Union verified, hundreds of TALON reports concerned anti-war and anti-military demonstrations. Groups profiled included pacifist organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee, the Broward Anti-War Coalition, and Veterans for Peace.38
Following a public outcry, the Defense Department terminated TALON in 2007, apparently leaving data collection on anti-war and anti-military groups to the FBI. Since then, a 2010 US Department of Justice report has criticized the FBI for monitoring and tracking groups in the name of counterterrorism, including Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker Organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers). Following FBI investigations of minor offenses, such as vandalism and trespassing, activists from these groups ended up on travel and law-enforcement watchlists.39
City and state police across the US are also going undercover and tracking activists. In the name of preventing another 9/11, the New York Police Department, for example, monitors websites and email lists and keeps records on anti-war, environmental, and church groups. In 2007 the New York Civil Liberties Union released more than 600 pages of NYPD documents, containing intelligence on hundreds of groups, among them the Sierra Club, Mothers Opposing Bush, Human Rights Campaign, and Planned Parenthood, as well as individual activists across the United States. Undercover NYPD officers are also posing as activists to attend meetings, collect fliers, and videotape rallies.40 The NYPD is definitely not the only police department doing this. Over the last few years at least thirty-six states, plus Washington DC, the American Civil Liberties Union estimates, have put Americans “under surveillance … just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints, and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public.”41
As part of this surveillance, police are filming marches and rallies, taking facial close-ups for later identification. The NYPD, for example, installed a tactical watchtower in Zuccotti Park to monitor the Occupy camp. Surveillance in the United States is especially high, but many other countries are deploying similar tactics. Watchtowers like the one in Zuccotti Park are unnecessary in a country such as the UK, where 4 million or so closed-circuit TV cameras now eye the streets. But, as in the United States, undercover officers are spying on environmental activists in the UK, Canada, and undoubtedly many other countries as well. Undercover officers in Canada, as we now know from subsequent court cases, even helped in the planning of the 2010 G20 protests in Toronto.42
Police films, CCTV footage, and voluminous databases allow agencies such as Britain’s MI5 and MI6 and America’s FBI, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security to access personal backgrounds and histories with record speed and detail – information that prosecutors are increasingly using to prosecute “rioters” and “vandals” and “trespassers.” Such information is equally invaluable for efforts by states and corporate allies to ostracize and cut the funding for “less civil” activist groups.
The assault on radical activism is not confined to streets and courtrooms but is also being waged in the media and funding agencies. Governments and corporations are rewarding cooperative groups and NGO partners with tax breaks, grants, and seats at the decision-making table. The rest are cast in the popular media as threats to economic stability and national security. States are now claiming to “find” terrorists within these nonconformist groups, exacerbating societal anxieties and justifying even greater state power to pursue and prosecute “domestic terrorism.” Suppressing social movements by isolating and delegitimizing groups as extremists and terrorists is a more insidious process of control than mere repression – one that, as many states know well, can be a highly effective way to divide and conquer opposition.43
Since 2001, politicians and state officials in Europe and North America have been increasingly describing and treating activism in disparaging ways. For some readers, Canada, with an international reputation as a moderate middle power, may seem a surprising example. Yet, backed by oil and mining companies, since 2006 the Canadian government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been threatening and auditing nonprofit and charitable organizations that are questioning its environmental record (e.g., on climate change and the oil sands in the Canadian province of Alberta).
Take, for instance, the Harper government’s actions against the social funding organization Tides Canada. Conservative politicians and pro-oil lobbies became annoyed with Tides for funding campaigns against the oil sands and proposed oil pipelines. At least partly in response, in 2011 the Canada Revenue Agency began a full audit of the financial sources and “charitable status” of Tides. While Tides was still undergoing the audit, in January 2012 the federal minister of natural resources, Joe Oliver, wrote an “open letter” to Canadians to resist “environmental and other radical groups” that were using funds from “foreign special interests to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.” He did not hold back on his charges: “These groups,” he wrote, “threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.”44
In March of 2012 the Harper government’s budget increased Canada Revenue Agency funding to audit charities for compliance with the rule that no more than 10 percent of spending can be on “advocacy.” Two months later, federal Environment minister Peter Kent kept up the pressure on uncooperative nonprofit groups, saying some Canadian charitable organizations “have been used to launder off-shore foreign funds.” Political statements and state actions like these are unnerving activists across Canada. In 2012 David Suzuki, the country’s best-known environmental activist, spoke out against the Harper campaign to “marginalize” and “bully” and “silence” Canada’s green movement; he then resigned from the board of directors of the David Suzuki Foundation to ensure that he could still speak up and not leave the foundation vulnerable to charges of conducting political advocacy rather than scientific research.45
Tellingly, the Harper government listed eco-extremists as a threat in its 2012 anti-terrorism strategy. Besides tackling foreign threats, said public safety minister Vic Toews, this strategy would combat domestic “extremism” “based on grievances – real or perceived – revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights, white supremacy, environmentalism and anti-capitalism.” Freedom of information requests by Jeffrey Monaghan of Queen’s University and Kevin Walby of the University of Victoria have since revealed that police and intelligence agencies are watching environmentalists, describing protests as “forms of attack,” and depicting environmental opposition as a threat to national security. As one example, Greenpeace is frequently mentioned as “potentially violent.” Classified government threat assessments also portray aboriginal and anti-capitalist protesters as extremists and potential national security threats.46
Such fear-mongering and vitriolic language by Canada’s political leaders is causing a seismic shift in Canadian public opinion of environmentalism. One in two Canadians, according to a 2012 poll, are now afraid of “an eco-terrorist attack on Canada’s energy infrastructure.” The poll also found widespread support for using the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to “spy on environmental groups as a means of preventing attacks.”47 The Harper government’s attack on environmentalism is especially venomous. But similar rhetoric and shifts in public opinion are occurring in Europe and the United States, too. In the US, animal right activists in particular are experiencing a “Green Scare,” not unlike the “Red Scare” of McCarthyism in the 1950s.
The fur industry and animal research organizations for pharmaceutical, agricultural, and chemical companies have lobbied American politicians to step up efforts to end eco-terrorism. In 2004 the FBI took charge of investigating domestic “eco-extremists” and animal rights “terrorists” in “Operation Backfire.” By 2005, senior FBI agent John Lewis was claiming that “The No.1 domestic terrorism threat is the eco-terrorism, animal-rights movement.” The following year, relying on informants and undercover officers, then Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales charged eleven alleged members of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front with “terrorism.” Damaging property and freeing animals from farms were two of the ostensible acts of terrorism. At the press conference Gonzales sent a strong message to all direct-action activists: “Today’s indictment proves that we will not tolerate any group that terrorizes the American people, no matter its intentions or objectives.” FBI director Robert Mueller then reiterated that “investigating and preventing animal rights and environmental extremism is one of the FBI’s highest domestic terrorism priorities.”48
Later in 2006, to enhance state power to foil animal rights campaigns, the US government passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, amending the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act. Linking acts such as tree-spiking or breaking animal traps to images of 9/11-like terrorism has had a far greater effect than simply empowering the FBI to arrest eco-radicals. More moderate activists have been quick to disassociate from any person or group put under the FBI terrorist spotlight. For activism in the United States, Amory Starr, Luis Fernandez, and Christian Scholl argue that “9/11 and the Green Scare broke ties of generosity and solidarity among organizations.” For more moderate activists, defending or associating with more radical groups “might sully their reputation, frighten their donors, or endanger their ongoing (although much reduced) campaigns and membership.”49
With animal rights activists in jail, in hiding, or on parole, FBI arrests of so-called eco-extremists have subsided since the passing of the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Occasional subpoenas and raids continue to keep activists in check. The full extent of current FBI scrutiny is hard to discern. But some now see a strategy to target anti-war and labor activists. Reporter Paul Wallsten, describing a 2011 FBI raid of seven homes, writes in the Washington Post: “the search was part of a mysterious, ongoing nationwide terrorism investigation with an unusual target: prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers.”50
Doubt and distrust have been instilled into today’s activism across North America and Europe, as activists see supposed friends testifying as informants and undercover officers. And a justified fear exists of any possible link, even rhetorical, to anarchism or extremism or terrorism. “Even the word ‘activist’ is stigmatized,” laments one activist organizer. “People have disgust for what you do. You’re not a committed, responsible citizen.”51
Anti-terrorism rhetoric, surveillance, and arrests are combining to split activists into those who are polite and compliant and those who are troublemakers. “One purpose of policing dissent” in this way, as sociologists Monaghan and Walby tell us, “is to fracture solidarity, dissuade activists from engaging in radical actions, criminalize people who do stand up and resist, and break up camaraderie between various groups that have similar goals but employ different tactics.”52 Surveillance, for example, is having malicious consequences for trust among activists. Recruiting into radical (or even critical) groups is now exceedingly difficult as distrust and the need for secrecy scare people off. Even a single police raid is intimidating: indeed, that is often the point of a raid – to link radicalism to terrorism in the public mind.
The meaning of “civil society,” as political economist David McNally explains, is returning to its roots during the early years of the rise of capitalism, when it was seen as a polite and intellectual place. Participating in civil society is more and more about being civil, as a way, as McNally says, “to invite mainstream respectability” and “avoid being seen as part of the rabble or mob.” Middle-of-the-road activists, striving for acceptance, use safe language and strategies and also join in demonizing militant tactics and radical ideas. “Hoping to be admitted into the inner sanctums of elite discussion and negotiation,” McNally adds, “many NGO and labour leader-ships have sought to prove their respectability by denouncing those who engage in less polite forms of protest.”53 The result is to divide activists further and buttress the language of corporate partnerships and ethical consumption and economic growth.
This is not to romanticize civil society or the freedom for activism before the current war on terrorism. Police in Western democracies were often just as quick to beat and detain – and, indeed, even shoot – protestors during the long marches for peace and civil rights and the endless strikes for higher wages and safer working conditions. The dangers were certainly far greater for those struggling to improve human or civil rights in the totalitarian regimes of Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong. And governments have been sanctioning the murder of environmental activists in the developing world since at least the 1960s.
What is different now is the degree to which states treat social and environmental activism as a threat to national security. Worldwide, not only are police pepper-spraying and tear-gassing and arresting protestors, but state security agencies are also treating them as possible terrorists. Intimidation and arbitrary detention are common everywhere. Protestors continue to be gunned down in the streets in emerging democracies and dictatorships; activists and journalists continue to go missing or are murdered. Meanwhile, to gain some of the coercive powers of authoritarian states, democracies are militarizing police forces and rewriting laws to arrest animal rights activists, kettle demonstrators, and demolish Occupy camps. Protestors in these places confront lines of police in full battle gear, backed by mini-tanks and sound cannons. And security forces in these democracies are spying on activist organizations.
At the same time states are rewarding civil groups willing to cooperate with tax breaks and funding, while treating uncivil groups as saboteurs of prosperity and national security. This strategy is silencing and fracturing social movements. And those willing to embrace corporatization are rising in status and influence. Understandably, fewer activists are willing to risk the state security apparatus declaring them as uncivil, especially when, as social life continues to break down and privatize, more and more people see less and less value in questioning, let alone defying, the capitalist state.