{"id":4646,"date":"2021-06-29T13:25:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-29T13:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4646"},"modified":"2021-07-16T10:35:38","modified_gmt":"2021-07-16T10:35:38","slug":"privacy-international-launches-new-guide-to-resisting-high-tech-police-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/archives\/4646","title":{"rendered":"Privacy International launches new guide to resisting high tech police surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It is possible in the near future that attendance at a protest, or a ‘trespass’, might constitute an offence. It thus follows that the police would look for coroberating evidence to back up such a charge \u2026 and obviously surveillance is key to that. With the progress of the bill and it likely enactment, organisations are starting to think what’s what after it comes into force.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Network for Police Monitoring NETPOL and Privacy International have produced a helpful guide. You may thing you are doing nothing wrong in just ‘being there’ \u2026 sorry, you would be wrong!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nhttps:\/\/netpol.org\/2021\/06\/29\/free-to-protest\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Jun 29, 2021 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This is a guest post by Harmit Kambo, Campaigns Director, Privacy International<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine going to a peaceful protest and having to show your ID to the police before you can join it. Or having to fill out a form about why you are attending that particular protest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sounds absurd, right? Surely we should all be free to protest, without the police knowing who we are?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But high tech surveillance of protests is real, and it enables the police to identify, monitor and track protestors, indiscriminately and at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, your face is increasingly becoming your ID card with the rapid development of facial recognition technology and its deployment at protests. But even if you cover your face, the way you walk can even reveal your identify through using gait recognition technology. As well as surveilling your face and body, the police can also surveil you through your phone. The police can access the data on your smartphone through mobile phone extraction and hacking, or intercept your messages by tricking it into connecting with a fake mobile phone mast. And they can even data mine social media posts about an upcoming protest to identify who will be attending. Combined with body worn video cameras, and drones fitted with cameras hovering in the sky above, the police now have access to awe-inspiring surveillance capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this is that you won\u2019t know whether any, some or all<\/em> of these technologies are being deployed when you attend a protest. This makes protests a modern panopticon<\/a>, whereby even if you\u2019re not actually being watched, you act as if you are being watched, and modify your behaviour accordingly. Indeed, perhaps you might think twice about even attending a protest because you don\u2019t want to trade your right to protest with your right to privacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is so concerning is that while the technology is incredibly intrusive and sophisticated, there is little if any transparency, accountability or regulation in most countries. The upshot of all of this, in simple and stark terms, is that you can\u2019t go to a peaceful protest and be confident that you won\u2019t end up on a watchlist (to be clear, we\u2019re not saying you will end up on a watchlist, only that there is little if any regulation to prevent you being added to one). That\u2019s an alarming point to have to make, but this is yet another aspect of the chilling effect on the right to protest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The right to protest is facing threats across the world, even in democratic countries where it is supposed to be a bedrock of our essential freedoms.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And make no mistake, it\u2019s not just about targeting people suspected of wrongdoing. In the UK, for example, people can find themselves labelled as \u2018domestic extremists\u2019 or more recently as \u2018aggravated activists\u2019 just for attending the \u2018wrong\u2019 kind of peaceful protest. The right to protest is facing threats across the world, even in democratic countries where it is supposed to be a bedrock of our essential freedoms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Little information is currently publicly accessible about police surveillance at protests. This is why Privacy International have produced \u2018Free to Protest: The Protester\u2019s Guide to Surveillance and How To Avoid It<\/a>\u2018<\/strong>. It\u2019s a UK focused guide, but we are currently working with our partners to adapt and translate the guides to different national contexts.

It\u2019s a wide ranging, but concise guide to policing surveillance capabilities that can be and are used at protests. The guide provides information about how you can try to protect your anonymity and better control access to the data stored on your phone. But it\u2019s important to point out that because of the sophistication of the police\u2019s surveillance capabilities, it\u2019s extremely difficult (if not impossible) to totally evade it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The guides are bite-sized and modular, which means that you can read them quickly, and in any order, and indeed you can just read those that you are interested in or most concerned about. Over time, we hope to add more guides to provide a more comprehensive overview of police surveillance capabilities at protests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Privacy International\u2019s \u2018Free to Protest\u2019 work goes beyond providing information to protestors and protest organisers. We will shortly launch a new \u2018protest surveillance tracker\u2019, to monitor and show how police surveillance is impacting on people\u2019s right to protest around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And we will also be working with partners like Netpol around the world, to advocate for stronger regulation of police surveillance of protests, so that we can all be free to protest. Download the Guide<\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Find out more<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nhttps:\/\/netpol.org\/2021\/06\/29\/free-to-protest\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is possible in the near future that attendance at a protest, or a ‘trespass’, might constitute an offence. It thus follows that the police would look for coroberating evidence to back up such a charge \u2026 and obviously surveillance … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[98,682,683,95,684,48,367,202,681],"class_list":["post-4646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1","tag-guide","tag-international","tag-launches","tag-police","tag-privacy","tag-protest","tag-resisting","tag-surveillance","tag-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4646"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4740,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646\/revisions\/4740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}