“One can lack any of the qualities of an organizer—with one exception—and still be effective and successful. That exception is the art of communication. It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event you are not even a failure. You’re just not there.”
—Saul Alinsky1
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
—Malcolm X
GREEK TELEVISION TAKEOVER
It’s December 2008. In Greece, a revolt is underway. Economic collapse and government austerity have fueled rising political agitation and radical organizing. But it is the police murder of a fifteen-year-old named Alexis that triggers an uprising. His death is the match that ignites fuel accumulated over decades of political action and repression.2
First, there are protests—and a few major riots—around the country. Then anarchists, radical leftists, and antiauthoritarians take over schools and squares. In some places, police stations and government buildings are attacked. Capitalism is a target as hundreds of luxury stores are destroyed. The occupied schools and government buildings become social and political hubs for distributing radical information.
But the media is still dominated by the propaganda of the government and the capitalists who caused the economic crisis in the first place. So Greek resisters decide to stage a takeover of a national television station so they can bring their message directly to a mass audience.
A group of artists, actors, documentarians, and anarchists spend a week in a basement planning the action. They decide to take over the three o’clock news (prime time in a country where most people take a midafternoon break).
They make huge maps of the station building and memorize them. Sympathetic insiders from the television industry work with them to prepare. They split the group into three teams to target the control room and studio, the master signal room, and the office of the station president. Each target is on a different floor, but must be reached at exactly the right time to ensure the takeover. They rehearse the plan until they have memorized every corner of the map; they time each step to the second.
The action happens on Tuesday, December 16.3 To bypass security at the main door and avoid raising suspicion, they sneak people in through a side door a few at a time, over two hours, until all fifty activists are inside. They dress the part in suits and formal clothing; each person carries a prop for their cover story, like a file folder or a handful of mail.
They enter their target rooms at the appointed time. In the master signal room they call out instructions; in the control room, they take over the seats of the corporate control staff. They act as friendly as possible, and reassure the staff that they will only be there a few minutes.
When the prime minister is in the middle of a live speech from parliament, they switch the video feed to the occupied studio. Those in the studio hold up enormous banners. “Don’t just watch us. Everyone get out in the streets!” one reads. Another says “Freedom to the Prisoners of the Insurrection” while a third adds “Freedom to Everyone.”
They stay on the air for a couple of minutes before another control room (which they didn’t know about) cuts off the signal. They thank the employees and politely begin their escape, taking the stairs rather than the elevators (so they can’t be trapped). They rendezvous at ground level and leave the building as a group.
As they leave they encounter police. But the police do not try to arrest the departing activists. In a time when insurgents are attacking police stations directly, the cops are relieved to see an action that is not violent, and so the successful radicals leave unimpeded.4
Without communication there can be no resistance. Communication is what allows isolated dissidents to join up, understand their situation, and plan for action. It is what allows a resistance group to break its isolation to become part of a movement, rooted in larger society.
Resisters need to communicate to strategize, analyze, mobilize, and act, especially under repressive surveillance states. Good communication is a prerequisite to successful recruiting, fundraising, and movement-building in general.
And conversely, it is the corporate media and other official channels of communication that allow the government to control the popular narrative and imagination, to smear or deceive resisters, to divide dissidents against each other, even to obscure or erase struggles for justice from collective memory. So it’s no surprise—with so much at stake—that effective resisters fight to reach out and communicate.
Rarely is that as dramatic as the takeover of a TV station in the middle of a parliamentary broadcast. Communication through less fantastic methods (giving interviews, making websites, and sharing pamphlets) is no less important. Effective communication doesn’t have to be a spectacle (and the drive to make it a spectacle can be a trap the mass media use to distort movements).
I’m not going to tell you here how to make a zine or write a press release; those practicalities are handled in more detail elsewhere. I’m going to address bigger questions that are discussed less often: How do resistance movements communicate externally to reach sympathizers and supporters? How do they deal with the power and contradictions of the mass media? How do they communicate internally to build a shared culture and organize action? And how do they maintain safe communication—especially in underground groups—when dealing with repressive states and pervasive surveillance?
Jo Freeman (who wrote about the tyranny of structurelessness) argued that resistance movements need a specific kind of communications network: “Masses alone don’t form movements, however discontented they may be.”5 Small informal groups may form spontaneously, she explains, but “if they are not linked in some manner, the protest does not become generalized: it remains a local irritant or dissolves completely. If a movement is to spread rapidly, the communications network must already exist.”6
The existence of a friendly communication network determines how—and how quickly—a movement will be able to grow and develop. And that form of that communications network may determine the form of the movement.
Communication and organization go hand in hand. According to Freeman, the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s could be divided into two branches: a well-established liberal “reform” branch, and a newer “radical” branch. The reform branch was formally organized—with boards and bylaws—while the radical branch consisted of small groups with few intergroup connections.7
The newer branch, she wrote, “prides itself on its lack of organization. From its radical roots, it inherited the idea that structures were always conservative and confining, and leaders, isolated and elitist. Thus, eschewing structure and damning the idea of leadership, it has carried the concept of ‘everyone doing her own thing’ to the point where communication is haphazard and coordination is almost nonexistent. Thousands of sister chapters around the country are virtually independent of each other, linked only by numerous underground papers, journals, newsletters, and cross-country travelers.”8
Freeman explains: “The different structures . . . have . . . largely determined the strategy of the two branches, irrespective of any conscious intentions of the participants.” Or to put it another way, strategy follows structure.
That’s not necessarily bad, assuming the different parts of the movement can work together, as Freeman notes: “Intramovement differences are often perceived by the participants as conflicting, but it is their essential complementarity which has been one of the strengths of the movement.”9
Freeman argues that in the 1960s a series of crises mobilized feminists, and organizing efforts were able “to weld spontaneous groups together into a movement.”10 But, she warns, this wouldn’t have happened without a pre-existing communications network that was amenable to feminist ideas.
Those lessons apply to any movement that wants to win. A communications network must be built (or an existing one repurposed). Otherwise groups will remain fragmented and isolated.
And something must happen to trigger larger action. Freeman notes that “a crisis will only catalyze a well-formed communications network.” If that communications network isn’t there, then crises will pass and opportunities for real change will be missed. Freeman argues that “people must be organized. Social movements do not simply occur.”11
If a movement is unable or unwilling to build its own communications channels—especially to those outside the movement—then someone else may take on that role. The mass media will have a communication monopoly, and depict that movement in a way that suits its own purposes.
RESISTANCE AND THE MASS MEDIA
“There is no such thing, at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an independent press,” said New York Times journalist and chief editorial writer John Swinton, upon winning an award from his peers. “There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.” And he laughed at the idea of an independent press—the owners of the papers are in charge, not the editors. “We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance.”12
That was in 1880. Corporate control has only gotten stronger.
If you’ve tried to get press coverage for radical action before, you already know this: the news isn’t made by intrepid individual reporters and editors driven by the drive to spread “the truth.” It’s made by a media-industrial complex, mostly owned and controlled by a handful of companies. Those companies compete for public attention and advertising dollars.
Despite the perpetual assertion by conservative pundits that the media has a left-wing bias, this corporate ownership structure produces precisely the opposite. As Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky pointed out in their classic book Manufacturing Consent, only the wealthy (and their companies) can afford to own large and expensive media infrastructure on a mass scale. Those who own huge printing presses, sprawling television studios, and satellite distribution networks are already wealthy, and they have the attitudes of the affluent class.
That doesn’t mean that all news media are the same, or that there aren’t individual people who want genuinely good and fair news, or that the rise of the internet hasn’t complicated the situation. Individual reporters are sometimes very friendly to dissidents. But the structural bias of the mass media is against radicals and revolutionaries. This doesn’t take a degree in media studies to grasp—radical activists figure it out for themselves when they are smeared or ignored in the media.
For these reasons, many radicals have become deeply cynical or even antagonistic toward the media, to the point of refusing to engage with them in any way. In 2002 I joined an anti-poverty march to set up a protest squat. The organizers seized an abandoned building, and the rest of us set up camp in a perimeter around the building to protect them. After night fell, a TV crew arrived and started asking if anyone wanted to do an interview. A group of punks started yelling curses and insults at the TV crew. After a few minutes of this, the TV crew left, shouting that we would be on our own if the police decided to raid and beat us all up. In another city at a public rally in front of a courthouse, I saw some people try to spray-paint the camera lens of a different TV crew, apparently out of spite.13
I can understand—especially given the media’s claims to inform and enlighten—why people get angry when the mass media lie, ignore, or hide the truth. I get angry, too. And I can respect if individuals or groups choose not to engage with the corporate media.
As individuals we can make those choices. But that’s not an option for movements.
Obscurity can be comfortable, especially if the press is already biased against your radical politics. But for aboveground movements, obscurity is fatal. Militant suffragists like the Pankhursts knew this, which is why they escalated to civil disobedience and property destruction. Trevor Lloyd writes: “Sympathy was worth having, but it was not enough. . . . The Pankhursts . . . knew that to make progress they had to arouse public opinion and make people interested in the question. They may have realised that this would arouse hostility, but hostility was more useful than indifference.”14
Those in power don’t have to like us—nor do the majority of people have to love us—but they can’t ignore us if we are going to win. Our worst enemy is apathy.
If a movement has any impact on the power structure, it will get covered in the mass media, whether it wants to or not. The effects of that mass-media coverage are profound. They will alter the structure and tactics of the movement.
And let’s be clear, the mass media have been essential to the success of many social movements and resistance movements in history. If footage of the Freedom Rides had not made the evening news so consistently, popular sentiment may not have turned against segregation the way it did, and the Freedom Rides may have ended in obscure defeat (and with many more casualties).
But measuring success by mass-media coverage is dangerous. It allows the press to set the agenda; it twists and distorts movements in predictable ways. Jules Boykoff writes: “Mass-media coverage—or a lack thereof—influences the nature, form, and development of social movements, as well as the ability of these movements to reach their goals. Understanding the role of the mass media is crucial to comprehending how social movements coalesce, build, and maintain themselves, as well as how they decide to frame their dissident messages.”15
If we want to be successful resisters, it’s not enough just to despise the corporate media. We need some understanding of how they work, how they alter movements, when they can be used effectively, and how we can avoid their traps. If we understand those things, then we can decide for ourselves when and how we want to engage with them, and when it is better to use and develop our own channels of communication.
How the mass media depict and distort resistance movements
Scholars and analysts have identified recurring patterns in the way that news is created and framed. I’ll use examples mostly from US media here, partly to develop a coherent picture and partly because of the dominance of US media companies. But these patterns occur around the world. Depiction of resistance movements is driven by a number of factors:
Sensationalization, dramatization, and novelty-seeking. Even if they are sympathetic to a resistance movement, media corporations are competing for audience attention. They get attention by emphasizing the most sensationalist, spectacular, or novel aspects of any story. They zero in on aspects of a social movement that appear most exciting or controversial, usually at the expense of covering underlying issues or grievances.
Framing, marginalization, and trivialization. Paradoxically, although the mass media want new images and events, they also want to frame that material in a way that is familiar—even formulaic—for the audience. Frames are news shortcuts. Journalistic clichés. Story stereotypes. William Gamson and Andre Modigliani write that a frame is “a central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events, weaving a connection among them. The frame suggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue.”16
This is not always meant to be deceptive; it’s a function of how news works. A typical book might be 100,000 words long. A typical newspaper article is a thousand words or fewer. The narration of a typical television news story comprises fewer than one hundred words. That leaves very little room for thoughtful context, nuance, or subtlety. (And thoughtfulness doesn’t make for good spectacle.)
Frames allow journalists to simplify (or oversimplify) a complex issue by presenting it in a set formula from the headlines on. They pick and choose their facts or quotes, selecting those that fit their frame and ignoring those that don’t. News reporting a protest against an international summit like the G20 will usually ignore issues of global inequity and focus on more sensational frames.17
Consider the violence frame, in which reporters ignore root issues in order to obsess about whether there will be “violence” and how police are preparing for it. A typical headline with this framing might read “Police warn violent protesters in advance of summit” or, more indirectly, “Hospitals prepare for G20 casualties.” This framing begins in advance of a protest date; it is less about actual events than about setting expectations.
The disruption frame also disregards the issues to focus on stories about how “regular people” are disrupted. Typical headlines might read: “G20 turning downtown Toronto into a ghost town” or “City on lockdown” or “Small businesses press government for compensation.”
Another frame centers on protesters’ “absurd ineffectuality.” Yet another is the “freak frame,” which again ignores issues and emphasizes protesters’ appearance or clothing, and marginalizes activists by “showing demonstrators to be deviant or unrepresentative” as Todd Gitlin puts it.18
One damaging frame emphasizes internal conflict: the “good protesters” versus the “bad protesters.”
Frames don’t have to be explicitly stated, and usually aren’t. Rather, they are invoked by the use of specific words and phrases, images, and the structure and emphasis of news coverage. Media frames consistently reinforce existing biases and prejudice. Remember that, after the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, Black people were depicted as “looting” stores while white people doing the same thing were “finding supplies.”
Framing has major effects on how resistance movements are perceived and how well they are able to mobilize support. Environmental campaigner Chris Rose argues that such frames “not only make everything sound familiar but also, when added together, suggest that problems are either insoluble or certainly out of reach for ordinary people.”19 Because the same set of frames is constantly used, the implicit statement is that the outcome, too, will repeat, and that nothing can ever change.
A media obsession with violence framing also serves as a way of intimidating people who might consider attending protests.20 Media framing can shift who shows up for an event and the sorts of recruits available for social movements.21
Sara Falconer warns that this tendency to oversimplify has worsened in recent years as online news sources rush to be “first” even if their reports are simplistic, misinformed, or simple hoaxes. We’ve seen not only the rise of exaggerated “clickbait” stories but also simply fake news.
If individual corporate journalists deviate from the desired framing and sensationalism, they will either be drowned out by the mass-media cacophony or forced to fall in line by their superiors.
False balance and deference to authority. Though the mass media claims to be “objective,” it often uses false balance to undermine social movements and progressives. For example, an anti-war protest with 100,000 might be treated as equal in relevance to a counterprotest with one thousand attendees, when it is obviously not.22 In the global warming “debate” in the mass media, thousands of actual climate scientists are given equal time to right-wing talking heads with no credentials in climate science whatsoever. The implicit assumption is that the two arguments have equal weight, and that the truth lies somewhere in between.
False balance isn’t just about giving air time to reactionaries, but about comparing liberatory radicals with so-called “equivalent extremists” on the other side. So the Deacons for Defense or the American Indian Movement could be framed as extremists and—just as COINTELPRO wanted—as racial hate groups akin to the KKK. Never mind that one side was trying to prevent lynchings while the other was trying to commit them.
This phony objectivity also shows in quote sources. A news article about a group opposed to a G20 gathering will almost always include “official” quotes undermining the dissident message and reinforcing the dominant talking points. This is included for reasons of “balance.” But the reverse is unlikely—when official statements are made about a meeting or government policy, it’s rare for reporters to get a balancing quote from someone outside of the political establishment. In any case, authority always gets the last word.
Disregard and undercounting. In an extension of authority getting the last word, protest attendance is routinely undercounted, with “official” police counts used over third-party tallies or counts by protest organizers. This has been documented in anti-war protests from Vietnam to Iraq.23
Sometimes massive protests are simply ignored by the media. This undermines the ability of social movements to succeed using nonviolence and makes it easier for police to crack down on protesters.
This disregard makes it especially important for movements to have their own means of communication, and some movements would have withered without it. During the civil rights sit-ins, organizers relied on direct contact to share information and support each other, since local media might refuse to cover civil rights actions.
Demonization. Framing dissidents as freaks is one option. If that doesn’t work, the next step is to frame them as dangerous, either by equating them with a criminal element or some other enemy.
Framing resisters as criminals is a classic (and often effective) tactic, because it delegitimizes resistance struggles and makes the public accept the use of police violence and imprisonment. After all, that’s what police do to the bad guys, right? Almost every time there is a large-scale protest against war or against a summit, the media obligingly stoke fears of “mob violence” while airing police press conferences with tables of “seized weapons” like books, water bottles, or cigarette lighters.24
One of the most effective ways of demonizing domestic political groups is to associate them in the media with some foreign enemy, what Jules Boykoff calls “bi-level demonization.” He explains: “Once an individual or group has been demonized through linkage to an external enemy, further suppression can occur with fewer objections from the general population.”25
This is an old trick for the state. Around the time of World War I, the Wobblies and other radicals had made significant gains, so the state claimed that they were associated with the “German menace.” Members were arrested, and the state and media made vague claims about German money funding a labor conspiracy meant to undermine American industry through strikes, in order to weaken the war effort. At the same time, the government shut down many radical publications, claiming that their pro-peace stance was “treasonous.” Concrete evidence was not required—the goal was to disparage the moral character of labor radicals while justifying repression against them.26
In Canada during both World War I and World War II, large numbers of labor organizers and other radicals were interned in prison camps, because of ancestry in “enemy” European countries.
After World War II and the defeat of Germany, the era of McCarthyism brought a new foreign enemy, the USSR.27 And so Communism became the excuse to crack down, smear, or blacklist domestic radicals. When the United States invaded Vietnam, the state and media propaganda shifted its focus. The media emphasized the presence of Vietnamese flags in peace marches as a sign that anti-war protesters were traitors in league with foreign enemies.28
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Communism has been replaced by terrorism as the main “enemy” for use in bi-level demonization. Especially since 9/11, terrorism has proved an incredibly effective means of demonizing enemies. Without a clear and concrete enemy, and without any limits or end date to “the war on terror,” the smear of terrorism can be used widely against almost any internal enemy.
The breadth of application is remarkable. Boykoff quotes a statement from the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center: “You can almost argue that a protest against (a war ostensibly against international terrorism) is a terrorist act,” said a spokesperson. “I’ve heard terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic impact, and shutting down a port certainly would have some impact. Terrorism isn’t just bombs going off and killing people.”29
The specter of terrorism has been invoked against everything from anti-war movements to Indigenous groups to immigrant movements. It’s been especially useful in the Green Scare, against the Earth Liberation Front, the Animal Liberation Front, and Stop Huntingdon’s Animal Cruelty.
Direct media manipulation: story implantation, media ownership, journalist strong-arming, censorship. If business as usual in the corporate mass media doesn’t produce the “correct” results, those in power will intervene directly in the mass media to get what they want. Boykoff argues that direct strong-arming is rare, not because those in power would find it unethical, but because it is usually unnecessary. The existing frames and norms of power serve them well.30
Nonetheless, history is replete with examples of direct state intervention in the mass media. As part of COINTELPRO, the FBI and their puppets frequently made direct revisions to major news reports or simply wrote whole articles from scratch. This wasn’t always subtle; during the 1960s, US President Lyndon B. Johnson would call newscasters and network bosses (from Dan Rather up to the President of CBS) in the middle of news broadcasts to argue, curse, intimidate or threaten them. It worked, and the tone of coverage shifted.31 Nixon continued this approach, using the FBI and the CIA to wiretap and threaten journalists, warning that they would yank broadcast licenses if there was coverage unfriendly to the administration.32
Direct media manipulation hasn’t stopped, of course. The Bush administration paid journalists directly—often hundreds of thousands of dollars per person—for positive coverage.33 The use of embedded reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan also changed the dynamic, with reporters being forced to rely on US troops for their information and—often—for their lives.34 (That’s not just a turn of phrase: many independent and non-embedded reporters were killed by the US army, such as on April 8, 2003, when a US tank fired a shell into the Palestine Hotel, killing two journalists and injuring others in a hotel with a reputation for hosting reporters.)
Sometimes the manipulation comes not from the state, but from corporate elites who own broadcast companies. Of course, much of the news at the best of times consists merely of repackaged corporate press releases and talking points.
The Consequences
All of these media functions—whether deliberate or incidental—have massive effects on movements. A key function of this media treatment, is, as always, divide and conquer. An emphasis on sensationalism and internal conflict—combined with systematic forms of counterintelligence and repression I’ll come back to later—splits social movements into easily manageable parts. At mass protests, this means the “good protesters” and the “bad protesters,” those who follow police rules and those who don’t. The “good protesters” will disperse on police order, and the “bad protesters” can be dealt with using riot cops, tear gas, and violence, often with the tacit consent of the good protesters. On a larger scale, it means splitting movements into co-opted moderates who don’t threaten the institutions of power and isolated radicals who can be attacked more freely. These effects twist the tactical priorities of moderates and militants.
Todd Gitlin gives a clear illustration of how this played out for the anti-war organizers during the US invasion of Vietnam. The mass media fed a belief among anti-war leaders that “one more dramatic mass action, and then one more, one more, one more . . . might really stop the war, might really convince the more rational bloc of the foreign policy elite that the political costs of continuing the war were simply too high to bear. But this euphoria could not be sustained.”35
Gitlin explains: “For however much it appeared to be militant revolt, each action actually amounted to a form of petitioning: large numbers of people were required to locate their bodies on a given spot and get counted. Many in the movement, half-recognizing this fact and doubting that their petitions were getting anywhere, were driven toward despair. The feeling of powerlessness in the movement fueled its revolutionary turn and inflated its rhetoric.”36
Not only were most protests a form of lobbying—which requires very large numbers of people—but the media demands on novelty. If ten thousand people marched one month, it might take fifteen thousand to make the evening news next time. And then twenty thousand. Leaders were trapped in an expanding cycle of escalating rhetoric, in which they constantly had to increase their claims and promises to get more people, just to maintain the same level of media coverage.
One way to compensate for limited numbers is to increase the amount of disruption and militancy of a smaller group, as Students for a Democratic Society did. But letting the media set the agenda is a dangerous game, especially when that means ratcheting up militancy faster than a movement’s base can support or sustain it.
Street combat wasn’t the only way to get media attention. Some, like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman (founders of the Yippies) appealed to the mass media’s desire for strangeness and novelty. At a rally in 1967, Hoffman tried to levitate the Pentagon while Allen Ginsberg led Tibetan chants. (The crowd was eventually attacked and driven back by the army.) Gitlin discusses how Rubin started to dress up in strange costumes, as in 1968 when he posed for cameras “in a confused uniform of Indian war paint, hippie beads, Vietnamese sandals, and a toy machine gun—a living emblem of the confusion of iconographic realms . . . and of the counterculture’s insensitive, mechanical appropriation of the insignia of oppressed people.”37 They got attention, but their stunts came across to some as bizarre and unrelated to deeper issues like the draft, poverty, or racism. Gitlin argues that Rubin was driven by his ego and “acquired a following instead of a face-to-face political base.”38 After his following collapsed, Rubin became a stockbroker and cheerleader for capitalism.39
Mass-media portrayals also change who is recruited into movements. Media coverage of Students for a Democratic Society focused on violence and street battles, attracting a new and more combative group of recruits. Gitlin: “The media helped recruit into SDS new members and backers who expected to find there what they saw on television or read in the papers. The flood of new members tended to be different from the first SDS generation—less intellectual, more activist, more deeply estranged from the dominant institutions. Politically, many of them cared more about anti-war activity than about the broad-gauged, long-haul, multi-issued politics of the earlier SDS. They were only partially assimilated into the existing organization; they viewed the SDS leaders, the remnants of the founding generation, with suspicion.”40
Some of these—the so-called Prairie Power people—had a different political development than the old guard. “Coming from more conservative regions, Texas and the Great Plains primarily, many of the new generation had become radical quickly, because even mild rebellion against right-wing authority—hair grown slightly long, language grown obscene, or the like—provoked repression. If one were to be punished for small things, it was only a small step to declaring oneself an outlaw in earnest, a communist, a revolutionary: as soon to be hanged for a sheep as for a goat.”41 Many of those new recruits were uninterested in working with less militant groups.
On the other hand, those who did play to the mass media could become counterculture celebrities. But their celebrity status also isolated them from their movements. Gitlin argues: “Narcissistic motives, once negligible or contained, inevitably flourished, fattened by rewards, while more cooperative impulses withered. The celebrities lost much of whatever active, reciprocal relations they had sustained with their constituency; this loss hurled them back into the world of the spectacle. But it is those densely lived back-and-forth relations that keep political strategy alive to actual social possibilities. Sealed off from the possibility of experienced social observation, the celebrities became inferior strategists.”42 No leader or organizer can be effective if they are sealed off from their movement and surrounded by yes-men; strategic progress requires that we interact with people who will give us new ideas and constructively challenge us.
Another function of this new celebrity was an increase in horizontal hostility. With a limited supply of mass-media attention, even minor fame could provoke jealousy, backbiting, and competition.43
Some leaders, Gitlin explains, abdicated their positions rather than fall into the celebrity trap.44 “The abdicators refused to be the victims of the conflicting demands made upon them; to save themselves from the dissociated of the looking glass, they removed themselves from leadership altogether. And then the movement suffered from the loss of its more sensitive leaders: the field was left to those less vulnerable to peer criticism, less accountable to base.”45 This is an unfortunate side effect of the radical left’s habit of trashing those in visible positions—it drives out the people who actually listen and care.
Although the militancy of these anti-war organizations had some success, Gitlin argues, “the movement’s inflated rhetoric and militancy, its theatrics and bravado, also did great damage to the movement’s ability to survive, to grow, to mature, and to adapt to a more repressive political climate.”46
Gitlin lists three specific consequences of the media dynamic and extremist portrayal for the movement. “First,” he explains, “the movement was isolated—and isolated itself—politically, just at a time when anti-war sentiment was growing fast and, if unified, could have multiplied its political weight.”47
“Second, face-to-face organizing dried up.”48 Some leaders abandoned the slow and difficult work of grassroots organizing for the immediate rewards of mass-media attention. The spectacle grew at the expense of radical community. (In the words of one leader: “Organizing is just another word for going slow.”49)
“And third, there arose—with no small assist from the media—a moderate alternative to the movement.”50 Partly because—especially after the Tet Offensive—it looked like the United States was losing the war, many mainstream moderates and Democrats began to oppose the war.51 What the media wanted “was conflict between moderates and radicals. The moderates were undoubtedly on the move and undoubtedly had a vast popular base and high-level political support in Congress.”52
Any kind of movement—liberal, radical, militant, moderate—can be distorted, undermined, or even destroyed if it falls prey to these mass-media trends. So how can radical movements communicate in a way that will actually strengthen their movements and communicate their moral positions and their truths?
COMMUNICATION FOR RADICALS
We can’t rely on the mass media to do our job for us. We can use the mass media as a tool, but it’s only one tool among many, and we have to understand its capabilities and limitations.
Given that, we can come up with our own communication strategies for our groups and our campaigns—strategies that draw on real-world experience and underlying principles of communication. Because there are underlying principles of effective communication, whether you are making your own zines or posting on Tumblr or giving an interview to the New York Times.
While researching this book I scoured resistance movement resources for examples of effective outreach and communication. I found a lot of them, but I also found a lot of not-so-great material. To bluntly generalize, radical propaganda of recent years is too often vague and abstract, overly long, and filled with jargon that would be impenetrable to outsiders. Messaging often emphasizes the importance of vast systems of control beyond the human scale, which can be difficult to mobilize people around. (Even terms like “capitalism”—which I use all the time—don’t have a consistently clear meaning across different audiences and can seem overwhelming.)
More liberal propaganda tends to emphasize the need for education and dialogue with those in power, a comforting routine that rarely challenges, motivates, or mobilizes people.
Few dissidents seem to follow Saul Alinsky’s simple advice: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
I learned a lot about communication for radicals by speaking to Sara Falconer. Sara is one of the organizers behind the Certain Days political prisoner calendar and 4strugglemag, an online and print zine for prisoners and their supporters. She was educated in communications and media studies, and now specializes in digital and social strategy for NGOs. She’s the perfect person to explain how radicals can use effective communications principles without compromising their political principles.
We sat down for breakfast in Toronto, and I asked her about how activists can communicate more effectively. She told me that radicals can benefit from learning the communications principles used by professionals, even if we find PR objectionable: “It’s an any-means-necessary sort of thing. I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t use what we know about communications to reach people’s hearts and minds about the things that are most important. The government and corporations are using these tools against people to convince them that their way is right. There’s no reason we shouldn’t fight back in the same way.”
She encourages radicals to realize “people have been conditioned to expect being communicated to in a certain way. If you don’t speak to people in a way that resonates with them, then they’re not listening to you. You’re competing against countless slick messages and images, whether it’s in their Facebook feed or on a table of literature. You can’t compete by offering forty-page manifestos, photocopied seventy times and full of typos. It has to be something that looks appealing, that has emotional appeal, with short pieces of information people can grasp quickly.”
Between my discussion with Sara, and tips in other radical communications resources, some principles for radical communication started to become clear.
Understand your goal. Decide beforehand what you want to communicate to whom and why. What do you want to get across? What do you want people to do? What is a successful outcome?
Do you want to challenge an official perspective? Get people to come to an event? Build a relationship with the audience? Are you trying to mobilize people to action? To inform people? To make them more sympathetic or even recruit them? To send a message to your opposition that you are a force to be reckoned with? There is a big difference between trying to change minds and trying to evoke existing ideas and values, but both approaches have their place.
Resisters always need a clear goal to make the most of their limited resources. If you’re quoted in a newspaper article or TV news report, you might only have thirty words to get your point across. Know what you want to accomplish to use them effectively. (Also, without a goal, you’ll be unable to assess whether you are communicating successfully.)
Greenpeace organizer Chris Rose suggests: “Never start by saying ‘let’s have a video,’ or ‘so we need a press release,’ or commissioning a report, and then trying to construct the campaign to make use of it. This is a classic ‘communications amateur’ error, and can be very expensive.”53
Not all resistance movements seek favorable press coverage. Animal rights group SHAC had a very different approach, as Rolling Thunder magazine explained: “SHAC activists differed from participants in most other social movements in that they neither perceived themselves to need positive press coverage nor regarded negative press coverage as a bad thing. Their goal was to terrify corporations out of doing business with [animal-testing company Huntingdon Life Sciences], not to win converts to the animal rights movement. The more fearsome and crazy they appeared in the media, the easier it was to intimidate potential investors and business partners. Activists in other circles feared that the terrorism scare would make it easy for the government to isolate them by portraying them as dangerous extremists; for SHAC, the more dangerous and extreme they appeared, the better.”54 (We’ll come back to SHAC in chapter 11.)
Know your audience; have a conversation in terms that resonate with them. Chris Rose explains: “In most campaigning, it’s best to abide by the marketing dictum ‘Start from where your audience is,’ and find a way to lead to the action you want people to take, or the conclusion you need them to reach, by starting from something they are already interested in, or concerned about. Campaigners who project their concerns and perspectives onto others . . . rather than research audience perceptions, tend to fail.”55
Most of the time people are not motivated by facts or arguments, he adds, but how the issue is framed, “whether it meets the psychological needs of an audience, and whether factors such as the channel, messenger or context are right. Effective campaigning [i.e., mobilization] . . . results from identifying key audiences for change and then finding out what will motivate them. Neither ‘education’ nor ‘changing minds’ often come into it.”56
Sara similarly advises: “Think about the audience. What level are they at? How should you speak to them? What is going to touch them? Understand that there are different audiences. You wouldn’t talk to a younger demographic, brand new to activism, the same way you would to people who’ve been around for 40 years. The same messaging isn’t going to work for both people.”
There is often a difference between what a communicator wants to say and what will draw people in. Sara suggests to start with a hook, and then draw people in to discuss what you think is important. “You can’t just talk to them as if you’ve already won the argument.”
As an example for improvement, she tells me about press releases she and colleagues put out during a prisoner hunger strike, saying: It’s our duty to support these people. There’s a hunger strike on. We have a responsibility to stand up for these prisoners. She muses: “Who is that message for? People who already believe that? Because you don’t really need to be talking to them in that same way. If it’s for people who don’t know that we have a responsibility to support prisoners, people who don’t understand why this is an important part of our struggle, then you have to start with introductory stuff to bring people along with you.”
Radicals too often start as if they have won the argument already, Sara observes. “We have to try really hard to break that habit.” We have to ask: “Who is this for? What do we need to start this conversation? Conversation is what people want now. They want to feel that you are listening to them.”
She notes that asking a question when posting online increases shareability dramatically. “‘Have you experienced anything like this?’ ‘Have you ever written to a prisoner?’ People like being asked their opinion.”
Chris Rose similarly advises: “Forget old saws such as ‘getting your message across’. Campaigners who focus on ‘sending [a] message’ will never succeed: they will persuade no one but themselves.” Successful communication is two-way. “If someone does not want to receive your message, they won’t. Would-be communicators therefore need to understand the motivations of their audience. All too often, communication is treated as a technical, one-way process beautifully designed to reflect the views of the sender, unsullied by the need to be effective with the receiver.”57
Jargon is a big obstacle to effective communication. If you want to speak clearly, speak in the language that people understand rather than trying to argue with them about definitions and orthodoxy.
Make it personal. Sister Helen Prejean, an anti–death penalty advocate, explains: “Personal encounter, however it happens, is what gets us involved in deep issues that change our lives forever. It’s always involved, in some way or another, in meeting people. You can only look at movies, and read books, and hear speakers so long, but somewhere in there we have got to get our hands in there, and get directly involved with people, because that’s where the passion happens, and that is where the life-changing experiences happen.”58
Sara adds: “People connect with personal stories, versus numbers or facts or arguments. If you can tell them about a particular person, or share somebody’s voice with them, it’s so much more effective.”
Am I not a man and a brother? This 1787 image was intended to humanize enslaved people as part of a campaign against the slave trade. It became one of the most widely used antislavery graphics in history, and even became a fashion statement, reproduced countless times for use on medallions, posters, bracelets, hairpins, pottery, pipes, and snuffboxes. But the supplicant posture of the man shown had an unintended consequence: “its ultimate effect was to underscore the perception of Black inferiority.”59
Be specific, concise, direct. Then repeat. You have very little time to get your message across. That means you have to keep your key points simple and clear.
Sara explains: “That doesn’t mean dumbing things down. You just have to understand people’s attention spans, given the medium. If you’re writing something online, especially, it needs to be short and engaging. People look at a web page for an average of thirty seconds. That is not a lot of time to communicate information. So don’t waste it; have a focused point or a way to reach them right away.”
Chris Rose quotes Des Wilson: The bigger the audience, the simpler the message. Rose observes that “with public media, messages need to become simpler, compared with the complexities you can deal with in conversations at home or in the office.”60
You can still use context, as Sara Falconer notes: “We’re trying to tell more personal stories. We’re trying to speak to people in understandable chunks. That doesn’t mean we can’t run long pieces, but they need introductions, they need to be broken up to be readable and understandable, and to avoid jargon.”
Messages need to be clear and direct so they aren’t distorted, especially in the media. Chris Rose advises framing issues in terms of either/or. “A yes/no, ‘binary,’ presence/absence, black/white, either/or type of proposition is more compelling than a matter of degree, such as a how-much or a bit-less. It is more useful and robust, invulnerable to differing perceptions of ‘how much is enough.’ . . . A supporter can see there can be a clear end point.”61 Polarization, here, is an effective way to mobilize and communicate.
“Stop the mega-quarry” is a clear, either/or proposition. Such arguments are hard to water down or distort, and harder for those in power to co-opt. Rose writes: “They are also news-proof. News polarizes, reduces, clarifies, crystallizes, sensationalizes. Remember the old news dictum: first simplify, then exaggerate. Put grey stuff into the news machine and it comes out black and white. Put a qualified, gradualist or multi-component campaign proposition into the news” and it will be rendered incomprehensible.62
Highly sophisticated and nuanced arguments don’t translate well to mass media or general outreach. Rose suggests: “Focus on the small part that is unacceptable to most.”63 In a campaign against patriarchy, “stop rape culture” would be a good example.
Rose also suggests that activists “present only one problem at a time. Too many injustices at one time are indigestible. They can induce a state of denial, a mental and moral retreat . . . because of the impossibility of taking action on them. In fund-raising, the usual rule is only to offer one action, at several different levels: typically three ways of doing the same thing. Too many options can induce indecision.”64
In a campaign it is ideal to have a clear antagonist. And, as Alinsky advises, the best antagonist is a person or a few people, rather than an abstract system or a bureaucracy. Zeroing in on people rather than systems makes it hard for the people responsible to diffuse responsibility, and easier to concentrate pressure.
Once you have clear points, repeat them over and over in different ways. In interviews it is more effective to repeat key ideas than to have a rambling conversation, bogged down in detail and diversions.
Silence = Death. This iconic graphic used by ACT UP was effective because of its simplicity and visual appeal.65 It is eye-catching on its surface because of its readable white text and bright pink triangle against a black background. The simplicity also made it easy to use on posters, T-shirts, and buttons. But the simple graphic contains deep connotations. The pink triangle, used by the Nazis to mark gay people in the concentration camps, reminds us of the human cost of complacency in the face of horror.
Engage your audience with emotional and visual appeal. A hundred years ago, newspaper advertisements often listed the benefits of a product in large blocks of text. But successful advertisers learned that rational arguments were rarely as important as making an emotional impact on the audience, appealing to them at a deeper level. A lot of radical propaganda hasn’t caught up with this lesson.66
Visual slickness can make a big difference, as Sara explains: “At a book fair with a sea of literature in front of you, people go for the things that look nice and that appeal to them visually and emotionally right away. That’s not coldly advertising for revolution; it’s recognizing that people have been conditioned to like certain things.”
Chris Rose suggests: “Almost every campaign is best conducted visually. Visuals give reach, accessibility and impact; modern technology has created an increasingly visual media world, and seeing, generally, is believing, because most people have an inbuilt preference for receiving information visually. . . . If you need to choose one medium, then it should be visual.”67
He also suggests crafting campaigns and messages with big, strong, dramatic outcomes. These messages resonate in the mass media and they are better at mobilizing communities. People are more willing to make real sacrifices when the outcomes are larger.
He suggests that campaigns be inspiring or even heroic: “Drama holds our attention. . . . Yet so many campaigns are quite unlike that. Many seem unambitious, or simply an extended form of complaint: unexciting, uninspiring. Does your campaign excite you? If not, stop it and rework it until it does. Select your campaign from among the things that excite you, not the ones that you feel you ought to be seen to work on.”68
Plan Colombia. Detail from an enormous poster by the Beehive Collective (beehivecollective.org). The impressive full-sized poster depicts neocolonialism and resistance in Latin America, using living creatures as stand-ins for resistance fighters, community organizers and consumers, among other things. An incredible level of detail allows Beehive Collective posters to serve as propaganda and educational tools as well as works of art.
Build trust and credibility. Often who says something is more important than what is said or how. Building a genuinely authentic and credible relationship with your audience is key.
Sara explains: “If you’re doing things in a genuine way, from a place of personal belief, and a very real way of talking, people are much more likely to listen. People are increasingly savvy about marketing-talk and can see through it.”
An important way to build credibility is to make sure that the people most affected by your campaign are included. It’s a key principle for the calendar and magazine Sara works on that the projects be prisoner-led. “Especially in terms of messaging for a campaign, you can’t be talking about prisoners or for prisoners without including them.” It’s not just a tokenistic inclusion, but actual collaboration.
Sara also emphasized to me that unique perspectives and personal stories from those people are critical. Voices that people haven’t heard before—or don’t usually hear—are both informative and more likely to attract listeners.
Repeated messages are also important in building trust and an ongoing relationship. Someone reading a newsletter or a blog online might not act on it right away. But steady contact over time will make people more likely to act in the end, Sara explains. (And repetition is at the core of any propaganda, good or bad.)
Respect for the audience is also key. If you are contemptuous of your audience and their concerns that will show, and it will drive them away. If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.
You can also build credibility with an appropriate level of professionalism and good conduct. (That doesn’t mean dressing in business casual; if your campaign is about farm issues, someone wearing overalls might seem more credible than someone in a suit.) And if you want to be taken seriously, Sara strongly suggests editing for grammar and spelling: “If I can’t proofread, I don’t want to be part of your revolution!”
Set your own frames; don’t argue on the adversary’s terms. Since frames are “story shortcuts,” triggering a well-worn frame can make the audience mentally jump to the end of an argument.
Sometimes this is good; if you see a news story about a dispute between an aging grandmother and a big bank, you may mentally side with the grandmother immediately. This response can help rally people against injustice. As Chris Rose writes, that mobilization “rarely involves changing minds. More often, it works through new applications of existing beliefs, perceptions and motivations.”69
Very often, though, such media tropes are an obstacle to change. Reporters often frame protests using an overemotional-crowd-vs-rational-people-in-suits framing. And once that is in play, many audience members will discount anything protesters say in interviews.
Rose argues: “Triggering the frame is more important than defining a particular message or argument. Once a frame is established—for example in an interview or other communications episode—attempts to argue against it are doomed.”70
Instead of rational-vs-emotional, struggles for justice are better served by a fair-vs-unfair or ethical-vs-unethical frame.
Rose explains: “To succeed you usually need to win hearts as well as minds. The usual failure is not winning hearts. Many campaigns about the ethics of public good are disabled by a common strategy of the public affairs industry, which is to invoke the ‘rational-not-emotional’ frame, and so avoid the ‘ethical-or-unethical’ frame.”71
Consider a hypothetical TV debate on oil pipelines:
Note how they invoked the frame of “rational” vs “knee-jerk” emotional response. The bounds of this argument are so tight that the “alternatives” are not wind or solar energy, but railroad tankers of oil. We could respond by arguing within that frame, using facts to challenge this “rational” high ground:
Now, that may all be true, but if that’s everything we have to offer, we’ve lost the argument. Instead of mobilizing a powerful opposition movement, we’re going to be sidetracked into the territory of “experts”—a discussion of metallurgy and maintenance schedules that is well within the comfort zone of our “rational” opponent.
Instead we should short-circuit this frame, and confront them on the moral ground, where we have the advantage:
Facts plus feelings will get us where we want to go.
Pyramid of Capitalist System. Another classic IWW poster shows the pyramid of capitalism on a wedding-cake-style pyramid. It’s visually appealing and clear. Succinct text at each layer makes relationships clear from top down: “We rule you. / We fool you. / We shoot at you. / We eat for you. / We work for all. / We feed all.”
Mobilize for action. The end goal of resistance outreach isn’t to spread yet another ideological monologue. It’s to get people to do things. Chris Rose: “Campaigning involves stimulating action, best achieved by narrowing the focus and eliminating distractions. . . . Education leads to confusion. Campaigning leads to action.”72
Sara explains: “There should always be a call to action. There should be a call to action in pretty much everything you do online. If you’re sharing a piece of information, share what you want people to do about it. If you just want them to share it, say that. Sometimes just saying that is enough to get people to share it.”
Even if you are in the preliminary stages of a campaign and just want to get attention, rather than to disrupt, holding an action or event is a great way to do that. Some campaigns I’ve worked on have bought advertising space. But events are usually better than arguments alone, and news coverage of an interesting event is cheaper and more credible than advertising.
Liberate Oakland and shut down the 1%. This powerful and succinct 2012 poster from Occupy Oakland has a lot going for it. Its red-and-black design is sharp and eye-catching. In a single graphic it evokes liberating raised fists and—through the handcuffs with dollar sign chain—the repression of capitalism. The classic style reminds viewers of mass mobilizations of the past. It avoids the “wall of text” political poster problem, in favor of highly economical text: only twelve words (a fraction of the length of a Twitter message). And it has a date for its call to action.
Measure success. So you’ve identified your goal, you’ve put out your posters and zines and TV interviews. Now ask: is it working?
If you have the resources, Chris Rose suggests getting professionals involved: “Done well by experienced moderators, qualitative research is expensive but well worth it. Cheap qualitative research, however, tends to be useless or, worse, misleading.”73 The problem, he notes, is that most people don’t have a good conscious understanding of their own motivations, but a moderator with experience helps members of an audience to tease out why they are responding—or not—to your communications.
If you don’t have the resources for that, it’s still valuable to ask the questions. Sara says: “Every once in a while step back and ask ‘are we doing this effectively enough?’ Right now I would argue that we aren’t, for the most part.
“[But n]ot just in communications. We generally need to do a better job of looking at the big picture and figuring out what our strategies are. If you think about demonstrations now, have our strategies really changed or gotten smarter or improved based on learning in the past ten years? Do we still go to demos exactly the same way as we did ten, twenty, or thirty years ago? I think that’s part of why I’m not drawn to going to demos; I don’t find them particularly effective. It’s theater.”
Sara argues that we shouldn’t get swept up in fads or change everything at once, but that we do need “to try new tactics and new strategies, and then really evaluate whether they are working.”
PRACTICAL OUTREACH AND THE MEDIA
When preparing for a campaign or major action, consider your communications strategy. What is your communications objective? Who is your audience, what will resonate with them, and what do you want them to know, feel, or do? How will you reach them, and with what messages or content?
You can start by drafting a simple set of talking points or messages that can be applied across different media and used repeatedly. You can also draw on them in interviews or tabling or regular conversation. Not all your messages should be text, of course. Chris Rose suggests that a successful media campaign is one where the winning outcome could be expressed as an image or photograph.
Your talking points might include:
- Headline: The central message of your campaign (What would you want to see as a newspaper headline or on a placard?)
- Three or four arguments for your main point (along with a fact or two to back each one up)
- Some supporting anecdotes or stories.74
Remember that there’s a difference between your communications strategy and your group’s internal strategic goals or reasons for action. Maybe your ultimate goal is to abolish capitalism or the prison-industrial complex, but that’s probably not your communications headline for a particular action or campaign. You want to find the points of leverage that will engage people so you can bring them along for your campaign and build an ongoing relationship.
In the first volume of this book I wrote about our campaign to keep farming programs open at prisons in Canada. Our emphasis changed through the campaign, but the main talking points could be boiled down like this:
- Headline: Prison farms should stay open because they benefit our communities.
- Argument 1: The farms benefit prisoners and our communities. (Fact: Former prisoners tell us that working with animals helped them cope with prison and to adjust to daily life once they were released.)
- Argument 2: Prison farms help our community to feed itself. (Facts: The prison farm in Kingston is the largest urban farm in North America, and with rising oil and food costs we need to protect that farmland.)
- Argument 3: The federal government is ignoring public opinion and democracy. (Facts: Public opinion surveys are strongly in favor of the farm. The ruling Conservative Party has been censured for lying about budget issues already.)
- Argument 4: The prison farms are being closed to usher in an American-style system of mega-prisons. (Fact: Mega-prisons and “tough on crime” legislation will funnel millions of taxpayer dollars into private hands, and will make our communities less safe.)
That last argument is an important example. Appealing to a community identity—in opposition to an antagonist—is a very effective way to galvanize people. Canadians are often sensitive to being overrun by aggressive American culture, so reminding them of values thought to be Canadian as opposed to American is one way to invoke existing frames and attitudes in a helpful way.
Interviews or face-to-face conversations present different challenges. Memorize your talking points so that you can fall back on them regardless of what happens. Remember that interviews are often edited down quite a bit, so you may only get a sentence or two in a final broadcast or article. Make your key points as soon as possible, and repeat or reinforce them in different ways. If you give the interviewer extraneous material or digressions, they might use that instead of what you want them to use. Stay on message: Don’t give them the option of selecting off-topic or less-than-ideal quotes.
Common advice says that in an interview you should answer the question you want to get, rather than whatever the reporter asks you. This is fine, but try to bridge smoothly from the actual question to the answer you want to give so you seem more composed and professional.
In addition to bridging, practice reframing the issue, and try to anticipate the kinds of questions you’ll get. Consider the common frames journalists use and the frames that your antagonists use, and be ready to change them. In his book How Nonviolence Protects the State, Peter Gelderloos gives a typical example of an activist accepting dominant frames (and being defensive) in an interview:
Instead, Gelderloos argues that interviewees should reframe while going on the offensive, like this:
Stay focused on what you want to communicate to your actual audience—the interview is ultimately a conversation with them, not with the reporter. Reframe questions, but avoid debates, arguments, or digressions. It’s almost impossible to win debates because the reporter always has the last word and can edit your statements to make you appear antagonistic or unreasonable.
It’s normal to be a bit nervous about giving interviews, even if you have experience. Practice and preparation is the best way to deal with this. (See sidebar.)
If you want to use the mass media effectively, don’t just send out press releases. Develop relationships with actual journalists. The number of journalists working for the corporate press continues to dwindle, but they exist—and so do a large number of independent journalists using the internet to reach a large audience. When you develop relationships with journalists they are more likely to give you press when you need it, and they develop a better understanding of the issues, so they may present your story in a more nuanced or sympathetic manner. (But—especially if you don’t know them—don’t assume that a sympathetic journalist will end up producing a sympathetic report once it is churned through the machine of producers, editors, and de facto corporate censors.) Journalists can also be sources of information for you.
Understand what you can and can’t get out of the mass media. Remember that, as a resistance group, those in power (which includes those who own and run the corporate media) are not your friends. They understand that. Getting neutral news coverage (as opposed to smear pieces) is often the best you can hope for. (That said, consider what P. T. Barnum said: there’s no such thing as bad publicity.)
In making a communications strategy, you’ll probably want to pick and choose from the channels available to accomplish your goal. Every kind of media has its own benefits and drawbacks for organizing:
- How much emotional impact does it have? Personal and visual communications usually have the most emotional impact on the audience. That’s necessary to make a strong, visceral connection, and to mobilize people to take action.
- How informative is it? Some media channels are inherently good at carrying large amounts of information—longer text, direct conversation, and to some degree the internet. Posters or videos are better off carrying small amounts of information, broadcast or repeated more widely.
- Is the framing friendly? You can reach a lot of people in the New York Times or on CNN, but the story probably won’t be framed in a way that’s friendly to resistance. Media with less friendly framing are best when the goal is to get a simple, less corruptible message to a large number of people. Friendly framing can be ensured when your group makes the material—or when you have the conversation—directly.
- How large is the audience? One-on-one conversation is a slow way to make the revolution. Sometimes you need a larger audience size to reach out to, depending on your goal. Even the corporate media can be used to drive people in a larger audience to your own channels of communication.
- Do you need quick and timely communication? Books are lovely if you want to be very informative but don’t mind waiting a year or two for your message to hit the printing press. Actually organizing and mobilizing people usually calls for more timely methods (including email, social media, and personal contact).
- What’s the resource cost? Having a conversation or a small meeting is basically free, much like texting or sending an email. Commissioning an entire film is expensive. What do you have the resource budget for?
- What is the potential for community building? You don’t want to just transmit a message. If you want to build an effective movement you need to get new people and form them into communities of resistance. This means potential for two-way conversation, emotional impact, and the ability to bring people together for action and discussion (even if just for a book club).
In figure 7-1 I’ve charted (in very approximate terms) the general potential each kind of media has to realize each of these criteria.
Certain modes of communication are good for certain things. Face-toface communications are key for building strong ties and core communities, especially early on when a group has limited resources. The particular way you communicate messages depends on your immediate goals. Do you want to reach a bunch of people quickly and cheaply? Use a phone tree or electronic message. Do you need to make an emotional impact on more than a handful of people? Consider photography or a YouTube video.
7-1: Communications methods at a glance
I believe face-to-face relationships are the root of all organizing. We can use electronic communications for organizing and mobilization, but to supplement personal and community relationships, not to replace them.
Mass broadcast communications like TV are alluring because of their enormous audiences, their spectacular and slick appeal. But—Greek uprisings aside—television channels are controlled by large corporations unfriendly to resistance. And they can twist our message and our movements.
In a Resistance School I taught with my colleagues Pamela Cross and Matt Silburn, we trained people by having them write up talking points for an imaginary (or real) action. Then we had volunteers go to another room for one minute “television” interviews that we recorded on a video camera. To make things more interesting, we threw antagonistic questions at them that had little to do with the subject. Their challenge was to see how much they could get across in sixty seconds.
Then we watched the videos as a group to learn and give feedback. It’s surprisingly difficult to communicate what you want to get across in one minute, especially when the interviewer is cutting you off or changing the subject. Recording practice interviews is useful to help people pay attention to body language, tone of voice, pacing, and other things you usually aren’t aware of without recording and analyzing them. (Remember why you are talking to the media and use the appropriate tone, word choice, and body language. If you are trying to get a message out or mobilize people, you probably want to be polite and friendly, but assertive. If you are trying to send a message to those in power that you are serious, you may want to be less friendly and perhaps even directly confrontational.)
If you still don’t feel confident enough after practicing, it’s OK to turn down a request for an interview, or to direct a reporter to someone else. (A really bad interview can be worse than no interview at all.)
This is why Jerry Mander warned against it in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television; TV has an emotional impact, but often by bypassing our critical thinking faculties and at the expense of being informative. That makes it easy to suppress dissent even as people watch protests on TV.
Katerina, a Greek student, said of the December 2008 uprisings: “I thought the revolution was coming, I really did! . . . But in December I learned that the TV is the most powerful weapon they have. The most important. It’s the only one they need. To make people afraid, to make people stay home, to misinform people, to turn people back against the revolution. Now I think everyone has gone back to their old lives, to the normal way of doing things, thanks to the TV.”77
The internet, too, is a double-edged sword. It has enormous potential for direct mass communications and mobilization on a scale that historical movements could never have imagined. But it has its own pitfalls and limitations.
During the “Arab Spring,” internet utopians clamored to give the web credit for a growing resistance spirit. They even dubbed Egypt’s uprising “the Twitter Revolution.” That might make sense if Twitter is your only source of information about movement organizing. But it ignores the long history of social movement organizing on the ground. (Indeed, the buzz about Iran’s “Twitter Revolution” was not so much from organizers inside as inflated rhetoric from outside the country.)78
In contrast, Noam Cohen in the New York Times warned: “The mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone.”79 And scholar Navid Hassanpour argues that the shutdown of the internet in Egypt actually accelerated revolutionary mobilization, because it forced people to organize in decentralized, face-to-face groups—to get involved rather than just watch things.80
Another criticism of internet-based activism comes from Malcolm Gladwell. In his essay “Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” Gladwell compares historical organizing in the civil rights movement with online activism like joining Facebook groups. Gladwell argues that only face-to-face communities can form strong ties—which I talked about a few chapters ago—and that Facebook groups will not produce the relationships people need to risk and sacrifice and struggle with each other.
I asked Sara Falconer what she thought about this. She told me that the internet was just one of many tools: “You can use them effectively—or not. It’s not that the revolution lives online or that your Facebook status is really accomplishing something. They’re incredibly effective tools in terms of getting information out to people, in terms of reaching audiences you wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise.
“It’s like saying this pamphlet you wrote isn’t organizing the revolution. Well, of course, this piece of paper isn’t in and of itself doing anything. Conversely, saying the printing press didn’t have a revolutionary impact is kind of ridiculous. You can use tools to shape what is happening in society. For us to have this way of communicating to each other on a quite large scale for very little money has incredible potential for us.”
LUSSEYRAN & DÉFENSE DE LA FRANCE
Secure communication is the linchpin of underground organizing. Underground groups need safe and trustworthy communication if they are to recruit members, plan actions, and gather intelligence. Without the required capacity methods, individual dissidents will remain isolated, lonely, and ineffective. And if underground movements can’t share information about what they are doing and why, they too will remain marginal.
For those who work underground, two key questions are: “Who can we trust? And how can we share stories of our struggle with potential sympathizers?” Some answers to both questions come from the French Resistance, and particularly from the story of resister Jacques Lusseyran.
When Lusseyran was just a child, two things happened. In Germany, the Nazis came to power. And in a terrible accident, Lusseyran was blinded, losing his sight completely. Jacques began to perceive more keenly with his other senses, especially hearing. As he would explain in his memoir, And There Was Light, he learned to tell by voice whether people were lying, and to derive character from the tone and cadence of their speech. “What voices taught me they taught me almost at once. . . . If I was deceived by them it was never for long.”81
He called the melody of voice “a moral music. Our appetites, our humors, our secret vices, even our best-guarded thoughts were translated into the sounds of our voices, into tones, inflections or rhythms. Three or four notes too close to each other in a sentence announced anger, even if nothing made it visible to the eye. As for hypocrites, they were recognizable immediately. Their voices were tense, with small abrupt intervals between sounds, as though the speaker were determined never to let his voice go its own way.”82
Lusseyran developed close friends who helped him navigate the halls of his school and the streets of Paris. When they went to the theater, his friends would whisper terse descriptions of the action on stage. Their group took care of each other, and since he might depend on them to safely cross a busy street or take the bus, they developed strong ties of mutual trust.
But their cheerful group was threatened by the rise of fascism in Europe. On the eve of the war, Lusseyran took a trip to Germany with his father and began to learn how bad things had become, how immanent the outbreak of mass destruction was. “When we got back to Paris, naturally I played the prophet to my companions. Almost without exception they failed to understand. In their families they heard nothing out of the ordinary. There had always been incidents, and always would be.”83
He was infuriated by this willful ignorance, and the way most of the adults in his life clung to “bourgeois comfort”:
From my point of view, this refusal to face reality was the stupidest thing I had met in my thirteen years. For my companions and their parents, I was ashamed. If I had only known how, I would have made them understand.
Most grownups seemed to be either imbeciles or cowards. They never stopped telling us children that we must prepare for life, in other words for the kind of life they were leading, because it was the only good and right one, of that they were certain. No, thank you. To live in the fumes of poison gas on the roads in Abyssinia, at Guernica, on the Ebro front, in Vienna, at Nuremberg, in Munich, the Sudetenland and then in Prague. What a prospect!
Some of his peers “declared themselves patriots. Not I. I had no desire to be like them, for they were all braggarts, and not one made the slightest effort to understand what was going on. Besides, inside their anti-German families, it was amazing how indulgent they were toward Hitler and his crimes.”84 Lusseyran was correct. It was not long until Hitler controlled much of Europe, France along with it.
Living under occupation, he writes, “each morning we woke up having lived weeks, though we didn’t know how, since the day before.”85 He decided it was time for him to start a resistance movement. “At the beginning of May [1941] I had adopted the ascetic way of life which befits a soldier of the ideal. Every day, including Sunday, I got up at half-past four before it was light. The first thing I did was to kneel down and pray” and then to wash in cold water.86
He and his friends quietly called a recruitment meeting. They expected perhaps ten people to come; instead fifty-two crammed into an apartment, young men between sixteen and twenty years old. “So long as people thought of us as kids, they would not suspect us, at least not right away.”87 Immediately they began to construct their underground organization. Although they were young and inexperienced, they quickly put in place most of the underground security and organization measures I’ve already written about.
First, to the new group, he said “there was no turning back from their commitment. They would not be able to close the door they had opened that night. What we were making, they and I together, was called a Resistance Movement.”88 And he spoke to each person differently: “Some I was encouraging. Others I was calming down.”89 But he also understood that half of them might drop out in the first two months, and that they couldn’t properly assess their numbers—or consolidate their organization—until after that “trial period.” After that there could be no dropping out, because they would be under a kind of “martial law.”
Second, they created a firewall. Outside their cells, “nothing that meant anything must be discussed. Starting that very evening we must lead a life divided right down the middle, on one side the life of innocent young people, open with their families, their teachers, their classmates . . . on the other side the other life.”90
They also began to crudely compartmentalize their (already dangerously large) organization, and took care to avoid hasty mistakes. “For the first six months, for a year if need be, our resistance would be passive while we were preparing the way. First we would proceed to set up the cells of the Movement, one at a time. There would be no appeal from this rule. The meeting of the fifty-two had been madness, not deliberate of course, and perhaps necessary, but it would be the last. From now on the members of the Movement must never meet more than three at a time, except in serious emergencies.”91
And they encouraged a strict realism and caution. “In the preparatory stages, all childish dreams must be thrown away without pity, all those dreams of cloak-and-dagger, those dreams of conspiracy and guerrilla war. Until new orders were issued, there would be no arms in the Movement, not even a single hunter’s gun. And there would be no talk of arms.”92
They called themselves “The Volunteers of Liberty” and set up a central committee to organize their movement. Lusseyran was given charge of recruiting, and was to use his keen sense of falsehood and character to screen candidates. “That was my job, my specialty. They claimed I had ‘the sense of human beings.’ In my first encounters I had made no mistakes. Besides, I would hear more acutely and pay better attention. People would not easily deceive me. I should not forget names or places, addresses or telephone numbers. Every week I would report on the outlook without resorting to scraps of paper or lists. Everything written down, even in code, was a risk that none of us had the right to run.”93
When a new candidate (perhaps a classmate) was identified, one of the original fifty-two would watch that person for days or weeks. If that candidate was thought trustworthy, they would send him to “the blind man.” Lusseyran didn’t say his name, and they didn’t ask. “The rules were strict. I was never to receive individuals whose coming had not been announced. And I was not to receive them unless they arrived within five minutes of the appointed hour. If their coming did not meet these conditions, and if I was unable to send them away—a difficulty which was very likely to arise—I would ask them in, but, pretending there had been a misunderstanding, we would talk of nothing that mattered.”94
When interviewing candidates he did not have a simple routine or plan. Nor did he go straight to the matter at hand, but went through a series of seemingly unrelated preliminary conversations, putting the burden of conversation on the candidate. The candidate had to fill the silences. In this way, he learned more about their character and their psychology than he would have by running them through a rote interview.95 Each week he would summarize his decisions for the central committee; who was admitted unconditionally, who was “on probation” (under surveillance) and so on.96 In less than a year, he screened six hundred people. Lusseyran was very good at what he did. (He would make only one mistake, but that one would prove very costly.)
At the same time as they recruited and enlarged the movement, they created an underground newspaper to spread the truth about the war to the French people. “Never forget that in those days in the middle of 1941, most of our compatriots, and almost the whole of Europe, had lost hope. The defeat of the Nazis seemed improbable at the least, or postponed to an indefinite future. It was our duty to declare, to cry out our faith in the victory of the Allies. News was needed, surely, but courage even more, and clarity. We were resolved to hide nothing. For here was the monster to be fought: defeatism, and with it that other monster, apathy.”97
Even putting out their news bulletin was an enormous risk and a huge logistical challenge. The sale of blank paper was controlled by the state, so in order to get enough for their bulletin they had to steal it. And the mimeograph machine they used for printing was terribly loud. They convinced a psychiatrist to give them access to a padded cell in a psychiatric institution, where the printing noise could not be overheard.98
Recruitment was difficult, especially among people who were older than they. “The evidence stared us in the face. The men over thirty round us were afraid: for their wives and their children—these were real reasons; but also for their possessions, their position, and that is what made us angry; above all for their lives, which they clung to much more than we did to ours. We were less frightened than they were. The years ahead would prove the point. Four-fifths of the Resistance in France was the work of men less than thirty years old.”99 Though he may be right about age, Lusseyran here is ignoring the contribution of women to the anti-fascist resistance, which was detailed (among other places) in Ingrid Strobl’s fantastic book Partisanas: Women in the Armed Resistance to Fascism and German Occupation (1936–1945). The work of the large number of women in the resistance was absolutely essential.
But not all young people were eager to resist. In the highest academic levels of their school, “out of ninety boys we had found only six, counting Jean and me, who had agreed to enlist in the Resistance. The others never even considered it, some people of moral laziness; . . . others because of the disease that often goes with an overdeveloped intelligence, the inability to choose; others because of bourgeois selfishness, even at nineteen; still others because they had cold feet. Finally, and most painful of all, there were the ones who had chosen the other side.”100
The general population wasn’t much better. When they distributed their news bulletin, they were less afraid of secret police than of everyday collaborators.
Disagreeable as it might be, it was necessary to swallow the bitter pill. Half of Paris was made of people of this sort. Their intentions were not criminal. They would not have hurt a fly as the saying goes. But they were protecting their families, their money, their health, their position, their reputation in the apartment house. To them we were terrorists, and they did not hesitate to say so. They talked about it among themselves, on the doorstep and over the telephone. If only we had not had them to reckon with. But they were worse than the Gestapo. . . . They would denounce us without giving a second thought.101
In spite of their fears and in spite of danger they kept working and organizing. They made contact with farmers and other rural people to establish training camps in the countryside.102 They began to assist with escape lines, and forged false papers.103 Soon their movement merged with the larger and more professionalized Défense de la France.104
Lusseyran himself continued with school, but was eventually barred from proceeding with higher-level studies. The occupational government, under the influence of Nazi eugenics, had issued a decree banning people with “defects” from certain professions.105 The ableist decree targeted an enormous swath of people with disabilities and difference, from the blind to amputees to people whose noses were beyond a prescribed length. Because of the firewall necessary for underground movements, Lusseyran was unable to challenge the decree directly—it would draw too much attention to his aboveground persona. But he worked ever harder in the resistance.
One day, a man named Elio showed up at Lusseyran’s apartment. Ominously, he arrived without having been summoned. For whatever reason, Lusseyran didn’t follow his own rule to dismiss the man or feign ignorance. His senses failed him. “Something like a black bar had slipped between Elio and me. I could see it distinctly, but I didn’t know how to account for it.”
Lusseyran set aside his hesitations. Elio had already been involved with the resistance for a year. He had important skills and resources, he had connections in a region they wanted to expand into. He was exactly the kind of person they had been looking for (in retrospect, suspiciously so). But because of Elio’s assets, the group overlooked their misgivings and let him in.
Elio was an informer; he gathered information about the group and then betrayed them to the Nazis. Dozens of key organizers, including Lusseyran, were arrested and interrogated. Many were tortured. Those who were not executed were sentenced to a slow death in the concentration camps. Lusseyran was sent to Buchenwald, but survived until liberation.
After the war, Lusseyran wrote his autobiography, and the Défense de la France newspaper transformed into one of the most popular daily newspapers in the country. Lusseyran became a professor, and died in 1971.
There are a lot of lessons I take away from the story of Jacques Lusseyran and the Volunteers of Liberty. Among them is the necessity of great caution, and rigorous security, for those who communicate underground.
Those in power have the resources to make many major mistakes with little consequence. Underground resisters pay dearly for every error. People who want to win will learn from mistakes in history, rather than making them anew.
HOW UNDERGROUND GROUPS COMMUNICATE
Underground groups are totally dependent on safe and secure communication. That security is only as strong as the weakest link. If members of a group are sloppy or untrustworthy, even the best encryption in the world is useless. So all of the security measures discussed in previous chapters—firewalls, compartmentalization, careful screening—still apply.
But there are also specific communications tools that underground groups use. Good communications and intelligent security practices look less like James Bond and more like common sense. Elaborate schemes are vulnerable to human error; good security measures are usually simple, so that anyone can follow them even in times of stress.
Tools for secure communication include the following:
Face-to-face meetings. If you want to make sure a clear message is getting to the right person, what better way than a conversation? Electronic communication like email and phones are easily surveilled; face-to-face meetings may be safest for resisters in geographic proximity.
Like Lusseyran, good underground organizers avoid writing things down whenever possible. (Michael Collins of the IRA wrote almost nothing down, and traveled with a briefcase full of unrelated business papers.) That’s not always easy, especially in a time when easy access to digital tools means that most people don’t exercise their detail memory strongly. But there are exercises to improve memory. If something must be written down, organizers encode it, disguise it as something innocuous, and then carefully destroy it once it’s no longer needed. (See Further Resources.)
Of course, underground resisters don’t just meet at any old place. They are careful to arrange meetings where surveillance is unlikely. That means not in their own houses, or vehicles, or activist hangouts, or in front of a CCTV camera. It may mean in a park, or in a randomly rotating public place, or a nook in a library. (They may use specific surveillance countermeasures, as discussed in Further Resources.)
The disadvantage of a face-to-face meeting is that those meeting may be followed, and a link between them identified. If those people already see each other often—say that they are in the same cell or have a suitable cover story—it may make no difference. But if they need to keep more distance, they can use other techniques, such as the dead drop.
Dead drops. A dead drop (sometimes called a dead letter box) is a location used to covertly pass items between people without requiring them to meet. This can be a way of moving information or items across a firewall. People using a dead drop to communicate don’t necessarily know each other’s identity.
A dead drop could be almost any kind of container that offers reasonable concealment but looks unremarkable to passersby. A library book on a shelf, for example, or a locker in a changing room. (Some concealment devices are specially made to look like everyday items, such as hollow candles or books, or screw-top safes designed to look like soda cans.) Even an email account or other file-storage repository online can act as a dead drop. There are items specifically designed for concealment that could be used, like “dead drop spikes,” large hollow spikes with a removable cap, that can be pushed into soft ground or shallow waterways. Containers with magnets can be used, so that a small package can simply be hidden on the underside of a metal shelf, or behind a radiator.
Dead drops are located in places where no attention is drawn to the people who access it. A busy location might help to hide the identities of the users who are disguised among the traffic. A more remote location is also an option, although the users of the dead drop can more easily be identified if someone knows the exact location, and the users would need a plausible cover story for going to that spot.
The use of dead drops has been made much easier by modern digital technology. During the Cold War, spies would use microfilm to pass on large amounts of hidden information. Commercially available memory cards have made this more straightforward. Secure Digital or SD cards are relatively cheap and have large storage capacities. MicroSD cards smaller than a fingernail and less than a millimeter thick can store many gigabytes and are tiny enough to be concealed almost anywhere.
Users of a dead drop need to have a prearranged signal of some kind to indicate when something has been left in the drop. If a source has something they would like to pass on, they can put the item in the dead drop, and then use the signal to tell their contact to go and pick up the item. This signal is something innocuous and commonplace in its appearance. It could be left somewhere online, such as a particular comment left on a particular blog, or an online classifieds listing. It could be a signal left in a physical place, perhaps near the drop itself, such as a marking in a restroom stall. It could be a particular lamp left on in a window, a potted plant or other item on a windowsill, blinds open or closed.
The dead drop is by no means a foolproof method of security. If one user of the dead drop actually wanted to expose the other, they could simply activate their prearranged signal and watch the dead drop until someone attempts to access it. Some degree of trust is required.
On occasion a “live” mailbox, staffed by a person, may be used. This would typically be a cover location or business that is frequented by many people, such as a magazine stand or other small business. The advantage is that the person staffing it can watch for surveillance and pass on messages or packages to the appropriate person. However, that person will come to know any resistance members they encounter, which poses a potential security risk.
Cutouts and couriers. A “cutout” is a go-between or intermediary who passes information between two parties—such as an intelligence source and an underground intelligence officer. Cutouts help protect the identity of those underground. Cutouts may pass on many different kinds of information or messages, including messages between cells or auxiliaries. Cutouts should be people who are not involved in illegal activities and who keep a low profile.
Like cutouts, couriers are people who move items or information for the underground. They are typically people who can move quickly and safely, perhaps because they have a job or routine that involves travel, perhaps because their cover makes them unlikely to fall under suspicion.
Sometimes a “dead” courier is used—someone who is carrying something for the resistance without actually knowing it. The advantage is that this person won’t be unduly nervous if stopped and interrogated, and doesn’t have any information to give up. The disadvantage is that it may be difficult to retrieve the package from them, or they may unexpectedly deviate from their route or accidentally discover or destroy the package.
Cutouts and couriers need a suitable cover. A traveling businessperson or journalist may need to move about and talk to many different people. Someone who runs a café or newspaper stand can talk to people of different backgrounds and classes and pass messages or small packages inconspicuously.
Prearranged signals and codes. Prearranged signals are the most basic—and potentially the most rapid and reliable—means of secure communication. These signals are planned in advance. There are a few different basic kinds of signals. Some are used in an emergency, like a warning to flee, or a request for aid. Some are used to coordinate actions or tactics that have been put in place already and simply need the go-ahead. Other signals may share specific kinds of information, such as indicating the success of a mission or answering a simple question. Such a signal could be an object placed in a windowsill, a classified advertisement with a specific wording, or a particular key phrase used in a conversation or email. Other signals can be more elaborate, provided their meanings can be memorized or securely listed.
Signals may sound innocuous or like nonsense. For example, on the evening of June 5, 1944, BBC radio broadcast the words (in French) “Eileen is married to Jo. . . . It is hot in Suez. . . . The compass points north. . . . The dice are on the table.”106 These signaled the immanence of D-Day and instructed the French resistance to blow up critical telephone exchanges, railways, and roads that could be used by German reinforcements. The BBC also broadcast innocuous-sounding “personal messages” to people like “Pierre in Lyons,” where “Pierre” actually referred to a particular resistance cell.
Typically, these signals should only be used once. Reuse undermines the security of the system. For example, let’s say the BBC had a personal message for “Pierre” like “don’t forget Aunt Jo’s birthday,” and that night a telephone exchange was blown up in a suburb of Paris. If the Gestapo made the connection, and the BBC broadcast the same message again, there might then be guards hiding by the telephone exchanges waiting to catch someone.
These signals have clear benefits for use in the situations described, but they also have obvious limitations. In order to send messages about unanticipated situations, or to send longer or more detailed messages, resistance networks need to use methods of cryptography.
Encryption and steganography. Encryption—the conversion of readable messages into inscrutable code—is very old. Ancient Greeks used ciphers to conceal their messages. World War II–era resisters used more complicated encryption along with Morse code.
Most modern-day encryption is done by computer. Hand-encryption is possible, but it’s usually very slow and easy to break by computer, because computers are very good at the complicated math needed to encrypt and decrypt things. The exception is the one-time pad, which uses a set of truly random numbers to encrypt a message, and which humans can actually use. The problem with computer encryption is that most people can’t trust their computers, which are stuffed with spyware at the best of times. You might have a great encryption program, but if your keystrokes are being logged by hidden FBI or NSA software it won’t matter—the message will be recorded before it is ever encrypted.
Encryption can be effective; it can also be conspicuous. Encrypted messages look like strings of gobbledegook, seemingly random characters; nothing like a normal, aboveground communication. A more subtle approach is steganography, a method by which a secret message is hidden inside some other material. Steganographic software can conceal an encrypted message inside a digital file such as a photograph. The photograph could be put, for example, on the internet, available for anyone to look at. (There are techniques to try to identify files with hidden information—steganalysis—but the contents of a properly encrypted message should still be safe even if located.)
Not all steganography is digital. In Britain, people used to poke pinprick holes underneath letters in the newspaper, such that the letters spelled out a message, and then send the newspaper to a friend. If you are an especially close reader, you may have noticed some apparent typographical irregularities in this chapter. They aren’t accidental. (Hint, hint!)
Despite its shortcomings, it’s good practice for everyone to use encryption, even aboveground. Unencrypted email can easily be read, like a postcard, at any point in its journey over various servers from sender to receiver. Encryption makes the job of surveillance harder for those in power and it means that when people do want to send more sensitive messages, it’s not obvious. Encryption is not just for the underground.
Emergency backups and multiple layers. Resistance groups need backup methods of communication in case their other channels are shut down. Maybe someone misses a face-to-face meeting for a legitimate reason, maybe an encrypted message can’t be read due to a technical error. What’s the backup plan?
Sometimes backup plans are needed on a much larger scale. During the “Arab Spring” after internet service was shut down some groups fell back on ad hoc wireless networks—and even carrier pigeons—to send messages. Some insurgent groups in the Middle East have enough resources to lay their own fiber-optic cables.107 Guerrillas around the world have used their own radio systems for decades.
Multiple layers of security can also make communications safer in general. Having a face-to-face meeting to pass over a USB stick full of important files can be better than emailing them. Encrypting those files is even more secure. Steganographically hiding those files inside of a video file is even more subtle.
Protect the system. Most modern cryptography is incredibly secure—to forcibly break an encrypted message might require a supercomputer to run for thousands of years. Which is why those in power won’t bother trying to decrypt then directly. Humans are always the weakest link in the system. The safe underground communication system won’t just hide the contents of a message, but the messengers themselves and their means of communication. Those in power can’t decode a message if they don’t know where the message is.
But decrypting a message is usually harder than just capturing a resister and torturing them until they tell what they know. The Nazis didn’t just try to locate and kill resistance cells—they also tried to seize their wireless sets or force the wireless operator to collaborate so that they could penetrate resistance communication networks.
Resistance movements in occupied Europe used several different tricks to avoid this. One was the deliberate introduction of errors in the message, one called a “truth check” and the other a “bluff check.” A typo on the seventh letter of a message might confirm that the sender was transmitting of their own free will; a truth check. A typo on the thirteenth letter, however, might indicate that the sender had been captured and was transmitting under duress; a bluff check.
Tragically, in at least one incident the bluff checks were ignored and numerous trained agents were sent into a Dutch resistance network codenamed “North Pole” that had been compromised and put under Nazi control. Eventually several captured members of this network escaped confinement and walked from the Netherlands to Switzerland. But when they arrived, Dutch diplomats put them in handcuffs, because a message from the Nazi-controlled wireless set claimed that the escapees had joined the Gestapo!108
Another method was the use of special answers to innocuous questions. For example, a given cell might be sent the question “shall we send cigarettes?” If the Nazis had seized the wireless set they might respond “please send cigarettes.” However, this was a trick to expose the Nazi control; the correct answer to the question would be something like “Yes, I have met Aunt Ruth.” Safe houses used a similar method by telephone. If a safe house operator said “yes, please come on down” it meant the police were present. On the other hand, if they said “sorry, we are busy tonight” that would mean it was okay to go to the safe house.
Next, we move on to another critical resistance capacity: intelligence and reconnaissance.