As resistance has escalated, so has repression. Now the feds appear to be gearing up for some sort of show trial a la Chicago '68. They have employed excellent tactical surveillance to single out, track down, and arrest those they perceive to be leaders. Fortunately, some people have finally figured out that a movement that does not rely on leaders for its leadership is immune to a decapitating strike. To anarchists, this is self evident. Unfortunately, not everyone is as smart as anarchists. Some people still follow leaders. When will they ever learn?
In electoral politics, we do not choose our leaders. At most, we choose a few of their henchmen. Some poor deluded souls still believe this means we live in a democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only direct, participatory democracy is real democracy. Anything else is a fraud and a sham.
Our so-called representatives don't represent us. They represent the corporations who finance their careers. Electoral politics is a stage show, nothing more, nothing less. It's all smoke and mirrors and "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." America does not have a two-party system. One party runs our government: the corporate party. It masquerades as two parties, but it doesn't do a very convincing job of it, particularly this year. Hitler and Mussolini had greater political differences than do Gore and Bush. It's a choice between cancer and polio.
Protesting at either political party's convention was a complete and total waste of time. What a stupid, useless thing to get beaten, gassed, and tortured over. Wake up, people. No politician on earth gives a tinker's dam about you, your life, your hopes, your dreams, or whatever it is that your banners say. All politicians care about is money. If you go to politicians with a suitcase of full of cash and ask for a favor, you get the favor. If you go to politicians with a bunch of banners, petitions, and puppets and ask for a favor, you don't get the favor. Either way, all you're doing is asking politicians for favors. Protest is nothing more than lobbying in the street. If it were going to help, it would have happened by now. It's time to stop asking for favors. It's time to start making demands.
But be realistic. Make them to the right guys. The politicians are just front men. The real power is held by the rich. They control the corporations. The corporations control the politicians. The government controls the police. The police control us. That's the pecking order here. We do not live in a democracy. We live in a plutocracy. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply hasn't followed the money. Follow the money and you'll very quickly find out for yourself where the real power lies.
Anyone who thinks we don't also live in a police state should perform the following experiment:
Put on your oldest, raggediest clothes. Leave your money and identification at home. Go for a walk down a public street in a rich neighborhood. Better still, wear a black hooded sweatshirt with a circle-A on the back. Be careful to break no laws as you walk. See what happens.
But all is not lost. Behind their layers of corporate fronts, the rich are flesh-and-blood individuals. They live in houses. Those houses have addresses. Those address can be found out, and fairly easily, too. If you must protest somewhere, go to the houses of the rich themselves, preferably while they're at home. Protest there. Or don't. Either way. But whatever you do, leave the politicians and the police out of it. They're nothing but an irrelevant diversion.
And if you do decide to riot at the next protest, wherever it may be, remember, I wasn't the one who incited you. Far be it from me to incite anyone to riot. I would never do something like that, especially in public. Why, at this very minute I'm actively inciting you not to riot, and I'm doing it in front of a lot of witnesses too, and not just because it would look good in court later. I really mean it. But if you're going to just go ahead and riot anyway, no matter what I say, while you're doing it, remember this: attacking the police, especially from the front, is stupid. Don't do it. Don't attack 'em from behind, either. The police are not the enemy. Their masters are not the enemy. The System is the enemy.
The police are fellow workers. As such, they deserve our comradely solidarity. We shouldn't be fighting the police. We should be helping all fellow workers, no matter what their race, creed, persuasion, or nationality. But especially we should be helping the police.
We should be helping them organize for the better working conditions, higher pay, and broader range of benefits – the very least that all fellow workers deserve. Specifically, we should be helping them organize a strike. Even a good old-fashioned sick-in or a work slowdown would be good, but if they were to choose the wise move and actually go on strike, the only righteous and honorable thing for the rest of us to do would be to declare a general strike in support of them. I know I wouldn't be crossing their picket lines. Neither should you. Tomorrow would be a good day for this to start to happen. Today would be even better.
But if it doesn't happen soon, grassroots political organizers are in for some very tough times, and in the very near future. Why them? Because the loyal opposition of "third-party" candidates like Nader, Buchanan, Browne, et al, presents no threat whatsoever to the power structure. Au contrair. It helps preserve the illusion of democracy. As does this column. That's why we are permitted to exist. But genuine, grassroots democracy is a very real threat indeed. It is the only real threat. As the old Ethiopian proverb says, "If spiders unite, they can tie down a lion." Our rulers know this all too well. Consequently, repression of genuine grassroots democracy is among their top priorities.
So dissent is rapidly being criminalized. COINTELPRO is back with a vengeance. In a very real sense, it never went away. What has changed, however, is the technology. Surveillance technology in particular has evolved beyond Orwell's scariest nightmares. Imagine a screenplay by Kafka based on a novel by Philip K. Dick. It's worse, much worse, and getting even worse with every day that passes.
DIRT, B.O., van Eck, cookies, PROMIS, Echelon and now Carnivore make organizing in secret an impossibility, at least over the Internet. As all guns must be treated as if they are loaded, so all phones must be treated as if they are tapped. Room bugs have been a problem since before we were born. No place in which grassroots organizers meet or sleep can be arbitrarily considered free of bugs. This is not a paranoid hysteria. This is how it is. Bugs may be found everywhere activists go. Get used to it. Stepping outside to the sidewalk in front of your local infoshop will give you about as much privacy as Mafia dons get when they step out in front of their social club to get away from the FBI's bugs – i.e., none whatsoever. Like the man said, "Don't follow leaders; watch the parking meters." Strategically placed ones are bugged. Add face-and pattern-recognition software to the mix and it could someday prove literally lethal. When activists are already being tortured, can death squads be far behind?
Upgrading tactical countersurveillance skills must become a priority among grassroots organizers everywhere. How else can they hope to survive, let alone effect social change? Some activists may choose to employ a proactive strategy and conduct active surveillance against those who surveil them. Others may merely educate themselves about devices and techniques so as to be better able to protect themselves in the future. I'm not making any suggestions one way or the other. I'm just pointing out the alternatives.
One reason for this is because I don't want to be prosecuted later for conspiracy or for what the law calls "an act of furtherance." I don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing. If Rukus Society director John Sellers' cell phone can be considered "an instrument of crime," what's that make my modem?
The other reason is because I have your best interest at heart. If you're too stupid to make this kind of decision on your own, you're too stupid to pull the act itself off. In this case, you should probably be doing something else. There are plenty of legal things you can do to make the world a better place. It doesn't take rocket science to come up with a good one. I, for example, write this column. Of all the things I could be doing to make the world a better place, this sure beats being tortured by the screws down at the city jail. It's nicer than being prosecuted for conspiracy. Trust me on this, I do know what I'm talking about.
So don't be misusing the information I'm giving you by breaking any laws. That's my official advice and you really ought to take it. But if you insist on going ahead and breaking laws against my advice, remember this: it's better if you don't get caught. If you absolutely insist on getting caught anyhow, remember this: when they ask you who put you up to it, don't tell them it was me. If you do, I'll deny it, because that's not what I'm doing here, and I have thousands of witnesses to prove it. I'm just passing on information.
If you want to learn a little about how surveillance is done, and maybe acquire some of the equipment (for amusement purposes only, of course), hey, go right ahead. I can't stop you. Click here, here, here, here, here, and here. It'll get you started.
You should also keep in mind that that you don't need the latest, most expensive equipment. You can improvise. The Viet Cong used to make extremely effective man traps out of rusty ten-gallon cooking oil cans and a couple of pointed sticks. The U.S. Army's Improvised Munitions Handbook is full of ideas like this. So is The Poor Man's James Bond. They're fascinating reads and are great places to learn about improvisation. But before you get involved in any irresponsible activities, remember this: weapons are for self-defense, not for transforming society. You can't blow up a social relationship.
You can, however, improvise some really nifty, really cheap, really effective countersurveillance equipment by adapting stuff that is readily available from hobby shops. One good source of adaptable gizmos is field biology. You've all seen the guy on the nature show trailing the critter with the radio collar. The trouble with tracking political dissidents with radio collars is that they flat-out refuse to wear them. Insects, too, are impossible to track with radio collars, but for a different reason. They are too heavy for the insects to carry. So some clever scientists have adapted harmonic radar to the tracking of bees. Click here for the full story.
Bees are fairly burly, as insects go. To track butterflies, an even lighter device was needed. It's a fascinating tale. Go to the library. Find the February 1997 issue of Discover magazine. Read an article entitled "The Wired Butterfly". The pictures are very impressive. In fact, they are downright scary. Imagine a tracking tag small enough that you can glue it to a butterfly's butt and the butterfly doesn't notice. Now that's disconcerting. It's a tiny diode with an ultrafine aluminum wire tail. The handheld tracker emits a 1.7-watt microwave pulse at a 917-megahertz frequency, which bounces off everything in range. The tag, powered only by the radiation striking it, converts the signal to a higher harmonic. It returns a signal at 1,834 megahertz, which the tracker is set to pick up. This neatly eliminates the barrage of 917-megahertz noise bouncing back from every tree and rock within range. The device costs $30 if you have it custom built. For you do-it-yourself types out there, the parts cost $8.
This is basically the same technology that makes the plastic tag on a sweater set off an alarm when the shoplifter tries to sneak it out the front door of the shop. The only difference is that instead of being embedded in plastic so that it's big enough for a human to handle it easily, it's glued to a butterfly's butt. And it doesn't notice. Would you notice if one was concealed in your cuff, embedded in a plastic card in your wallet, or stuck to your shoe with chewing gum? Of course not. Neither would anyone else.
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