Sheffield Repression Newswire Archive

A POLICE spy pretending to be an environmental campaigner targeted the Save Titnore Woods! campaign in its early years, The Porkbolter can exclusively reveal.

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Egyptian police used the very instrument that sparked the recent anti-government rebellion, social media, to catch its youthful organizers, according to a published report.

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Dissident Island interviews Corporate Watch on the subject of 'less lethal weapons'.

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What has changed over the last 3 months, and
why? Is what we’ve done in the past still useful today? And what
can be done now that couldn’t have been done last year?
Wednesday 16 February 7.30pm - LEEDS IN CRISIS

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Gareth reports:

On Monday 31st January 2011, in solidarity with Jon Gold’s action outside the White House, I took a ‘911 Truth’ sign to Downing Street – the British Prime Minister lives at No. 10 – and sat down outside the gates. Within seconds I was approached by a policeman carrying a machine gun who demanded I immediately move, a request with which I respectfully declined to comply with. After ten minutes I was approached by two Ministry of Defence policemen who issued the same request. We talked a little about 9/11. Moments later a police van pulled up and four police officers got out – I was also surprised to see a further four Ministry of Defence policeman approaching to see what was going on. After explaining that I was respectfully going to decline all further requests to move on I found myself being dragged from where I was sitting, put into the police van, and driven away to Charing Cross Police Station

I was released later the next evening having been detained for 30 hours. I’m glad I took a good book!

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This article recently appeared in Big Issue in the North.
It's about infiltration of anti-fascist / anti-racist activity in Hackney from 1995 - 2000.

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My headline is an excerpt from a prophetic commentary written by Mozaz on the current state of things which was actually titled "The Truth is sometimes self-evident", published on 13th January 2010. Original article where this comment was posted:  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/01/444647.html

The question in the title brings to mind the recent uncovering of a number of undercover cops in the scene, the murder of Ian Tomlinson & subsequent cover-up predominantly as a result of the compromise of his initial post-mortem conducted by the inept stooge Freddy Patel as ordered by City of London coroner Paul Matthews, police collusion with the US led war machine in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with the unprecendented enforced convoying of anti-war protestors from RAF Fairford back to London, long-running allegations of agent provocateur activities amongst the black bloc (video evidence in Genoa 2001), similar tactics being used by the state in Egypt, and these allegations of attacks by black balaclava-wearing men on students and members of Press TV at the student demo on 11 Dec 2011 [go to Utube and type in words "Press TV" & "London Student Demo", watch 2 mins-in interview with Press TV cameraman Adam Apostol].

I could also have titled this posting "Cops Suck Arse".

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Please send letters and cards of solidarity to:

Sylvia Boyes
HMP New Hall
Dial Wood, Flockton
Wakefield
West Yorkshire WF4 4XX

Quaker Woman Imprisoned over Anti-Trident Protests

Sixty-seven year old Sylvia Boyes, a Quaker from Keighley, appeared on Thursday (3 Feb) at Bingley Magistrates Court. She was sentenced to 14 days in New Hall Prison for refusing to pay fines arising from a series of protests against Trident in and around Faslane Naval Base in Scotland during the summer of 2009.

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On Monday January 31st the four activists, Simon Chapman (Britain), Suleiman “Kastro” Dakdouk (Syrian origin), Michalis Triakapis (Greece) and Fernando Perez Gorraiz (Spain), were found not guilty in Greek court of the charges related to the EU Summit in June 2003 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

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Mark Kennedy, the police agent who worked undercover in the environmental movement for eight years, was active in his undercover guise as Mark Stone throughout Europe.

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Civil liberties groups raise alarm over extension of surveillance without warrant

[Not to be confused with GCHQ's extensive tapping of emails and other internet traffic, for which no warrant is required]

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The looting of Cairo’s world-famous Egyptian Museum over the weekend seems to have engendered the desired news headlines.

‘Looters smash ancient treasures’, ‘Looters decapitate mummies’, ‘Looters rip off heads of artifacts’ etc., read a rash of headlines, following the apparent breaking into the country’s national museum, which is said to house the world’s biggest of Pharaonic antiquities.

However, it has since emerged, although with much less headline coverage, that some of the would-be looters apprehended by protesters outside the museum were identified as working for the state’s interior ministry.

The incident may be just a foretaste of a wider range of propaganda stunts or false flags, including atrocities and fatalities, that the Mubarak regime will enact in order to discredit the protest movement sweeping that nation.

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This week we mark a year since Lyn's last new episode by deviating from our usual format. Instead of a few separate speeches, an audio collage of speakers, some with backing music. The most prominent voice is Noam Chomsky's, but he is supported by a couple of dozen others from earlier episodes and other sources. The overarching theme is the need to question the existing reality, especially to shake off the hierarchical institutions and prejudices of the past, and embrace a new spirit of autonomy that respects the individual.

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Last week the respected alternative news project SchNEWS published a story revealing long term malicious use of indymedia by elements within the states police apparatus. The piece was base on the so-called 303 Gateway article written collaboratively by a number of indymedia admins and proposed in secret as a feature for the UK site over six months ago. The proposal was blocked by London and Northern IMC. They claim they failed to get agreement on amendments aimed at distancing themselves from admissions within the article that indymedia admins had in fact had access to IP logs despite having repeatedly said the opposite in the past. Both London and Northern said that they would have no objection to the article being published as a feature on Indymedia UK if it was made clear within the article that the IP logging was a feature found within the MIR content management system used by IMC UK and its regional sites Birmingham, Cambridge, Liverpool, Oxford, Sheffield and South Coast, not those using alternative CMS such as Bristol, London, Northern, Nottingham and Scotland. However it seem tonight that their claim has be proven a lie...

The draft article stated, "what has never been openly stated before is that the CMS system we use has a number of anti-abuse measures which include the ability to monitor for particular IP addresses and log their behaviour." The draft goes on to say, "site admins believed that they would never be able to gain the trust of posters, if the range of anti-abuse measures were made public. As is often the case, once a body has failed to be completely open about something, it becomes 'the elephant in the room' and so a situation was created where the new and current admins were actively blocked from bringing these measures into the open. The stalemate continued until now, with site admins proposing a new approach of coming clean about the measures that are in place, and others in the collective blocking this."

Prophetically, that stalemate over coming clean about the IP logging meant that no consensus was possible on publishing the article. There was no way that the information about the governments disinfo campaign could be published without revealing that indymedia had been lying about IP logs. Apparently some suggested it could be published via a different alt media outlet while leaving out the info about indymedia but the story would have been weak without the evidence gathered by indymedia admins.

The impasse remained but then the draft article was leaked by a disgruntled admin using the name 'indyleaks'. The posts were repeatedly hidden from the indymedia sites it was posted to and a filter set up on IMC UK to automatically hide it whenever posted.

There remains no consensus about publishing the article which includes a frank admission that indymedia has misled its user since 2003. However the lack of consensus is now a moot point since SchNEWS has ran the story and Birmingham IMC has published the 303 gateway article as a feature on it's own site.

 https://publish.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/01/472622.html

Both the story about the government running a disinfo campaign via indymedia, and the story that indymedia UK has been hiding the truth about IP logging for all these years, that is big news for activists at a time when trust is already in short supply.

As the article says "continuing to gloss over the reality in a misleading way was detrimental to Indymedia UK, and that there was no small likelihood that at some stage we could be outed." Now that the truth is out, lets hope indymedia can recover from the damage to its credibility and move on to become more open and honest with its users.

Fisher

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According to this article 'Peter Black' was deployed against environmental activists from 1993 to 1997, including at the M11 link road protests.

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The following is a statement from the ActivistSecurity.org collective following discussions with individuals involved in the expose of 'Lynn Watson' as an undercover police infiltrator. The original of this, including photographs, can be found at their website  http://www.activistsecurity.org/lynn_watson.html

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Corporate Watch published last week an article outlining a history of NETCU / NPOIU and other related units. It is long but it gives a pretty detailed overview of them, including their history and what they have been up to. The body of the text is below. To get the references in it see the original article at  http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=3868 They have done another interesting article on the various companies involved in spying on protestors at  http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=3869

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New revelations published in an excellent article in today’s Schnews show police and/or government employees actively disrupting activist websites, posting comments designed to “sow mistrust, demoralise movements and to incite violence and illegality”.

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“No - stuff that - SHUT the place: Let’s not all stand around like lemmings - lets shut the place!Bring ladders and wire cutters. If there are enough of us we can shut it!” - a pretty average comment on Indymedia you might think - if a little gung-ho. In fact it was posted there by the police - and SchNEWS has the proof.

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Reporting on the abuse of civil liberties by West Yorkshire Police.

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