“What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to public criticism?” – (optional question on the University of California’s 1959 English aptitude test for high school applicants, said to have infuriated j.edgar hoover)

(via andy)

met police hold a secret databank on thousands of protesters.

Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.

Photographs, names and video ­footage of people attending protests are ­routinely obtained by surveillance units and stored on an “intelligence system”. The ­Metropolitan police, which has ­pioneered surveillance at demonstrations and advises other forces on the tactic, stores details of protesters on Crimint, the general database used daily by all police staff to catalogue criminal intelligence. It lists campaigners by name, allowing police to search which demonstrations or political meetings individuals have attended.

Disclosures through the Freedom of Information Act, court testimony, an interview with a senior Met officer and police surveillance footage obtained by the Guardian have ­established that ­private information about activists ­gathered through surveillance is being stored without the knowledge of the people monitored.

Police surveillance teams are also ­targeting journalists who cover demonstrations, and are believed to have ­monitored members of the press during at least eight protests over the last year.

The Guardian has found:

•Activists “seen on a regular basis” as well as those deemed on the “periphery” of demonstrations are included on the police databases, regardless of whether they have been convicted or arrested.

•Names, political associations and photographs of protesters from across the political spectrum – from campaigners against the third runway at Heathrow to anti-war activists – are catalogued.

•Police forces are exchanging information about pro­testers stored on their intelligence systems, enabling officers from different forces to search which political events an individual has attended.

if all this sounds terribly familiar, it’s because it’s almost the exact same tactics employed under hoover’s fbi and specifically the “cointelpro” covert surveillance programme which kept secret information files on people it believed to be possible political dissidents, potential radicals, or their sympathisers.

according to the church committee report which investigated the cointelpro programme:

The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government… has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous — and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations — have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable…Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials. While the agencies often committed excesses in response to pressure from high officials in the Executive branch and Congress, they also occasionally initiated improper activities and then concealed them from officials whom they had a duty to inform.

try substituting “british” for “american”, “prime minister” for “president”, and “parliament” for “congress”, and then see how it reads.

particularly distressing is the police surveillance of the journalists:

The National Union of Journalists… documented at least eight ­protests since last March where its ­members were “routinely” photographed and filmed by police. Several journalists said police officers they had never met knew their names. “We have put this to police and the Home Office several times but they have always denied the practice or sought to avoid answering the question,” said Jeremy Dear, the union’s general secretary. “With this evidence there is no credibility in doing so any longer.”

a free press is one of the cornerstones and guardians of democracy. this too, however, harkens back to the more nefarious hoover tactics. in particular, cointelpro also targeted the alternative media and press, for the purposes of intimidation and harrassment.

ringing any (alarm) bells yet?

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