Greetings Troublemakers... welcome to Trouble.
My name is not important.
In our post-Snowden, smart gadget-laden world,
it’s become clear to anyone paying attention
that we live in an era of unprecedented mass surveillance.
It seems like every day a new story
pops up on our facebook feeds about how
the NSA might be spying on us
through our coffee makers or TV sets.
One... two...
Smith?
6079 Smith W?
Yes, you!
Bend Lower!
Or how the latest advancement in AI technology means that
Amazon now knows what products we're gonna buy before we do.
Lindor Chocolate Deluxe gift box... would you like to buy it?
Yes!
And while the mind-boggling capacity of state intelligence agencies
and IT corporations to monitor our behaviour,
habits and communications
is a perfectly reasonable cause for alarm,
the more unsettling reality is that
this constant flow of data collection forms only one part
of a much broader surveillance apparatus
... one that still makes ample use of
the same tried and tested dirty tricks
that rulers have been using to keep tabs on dissent
since proles first started scrawling
Alpha Kappa Alpha Beta into the walls of the Parthenon.
And on that note... before we jump right into it,
we should point out that as we were putting this episode together
we ran into some legal grey areas
involving publication bans
and laws against identifying undercover agents and informants.
This is particularly relevant to our first segment,
where we cover the multi-city organizing
leading up to the 2010 G20 protests in Toronto,
and the 2013 anti-fracking protests
on the Mi’kmaq territory of Elsipogtog,
both of which were the target of large-scale intelligence operations
involving informants and/or undercover police.
After mulling it over,
in order to avoid putting our crew,
or any of the people featured in the show in a sticky situation,
we've made the call to only use footage and images
of these state assets that are already freely available on the Internet
... plus a few clips from some cheesy Hollywood movies
to help fill in the gaps.
So, with that little disclaimer out of the way
... over the next 30 minutes, we'll share the voices of
a number of individuals as they recount their first-hand experiences
dealing with snitches and undercover cops,
navigating the brave new world of digital surveillance
... and making a whole lotta trouble!
I was involved with the Anti-Capitalist Convergence
in Montreal leading up to the G20.
So several months before even the summit
people had started to meet and organize.
And the other main element was coordinating with Toronto
and other cities in Southern Ontario
with the groups that were already organizing there.
I was part of the Toronto Community Mobilization Network.
So that was a large umbrella group that was involved
in doing all of the logistics and a lot of the organizing
around the G20 Summit in Toronto.
I was also involved in SOAR,
the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance.
We were specifically on the project Get Off the Fence,
which was the militant street march that happened in Toronto in 2010.
Brenda and Khalid,
their real names are Brenda Carey and Bindo Showan.
But we did not know that until later.
They're both members of the Ontario Provincial Police (the OPP)
and they both arrived on the scene much earlier than 2010.
And entered mostly through above-ground organizing,
but then had a much more complicated path
in order to stay in the movement
and get close to people who they wanted to target.
Both of those people played on sort of these political values
that exist within those spaces
in order to both get close to certain people,
and avoid being outed.
Brenda was probably the more experienced cop,
and she produced this kind of narrative of victimization.
And so she had this story of escaping an abusive relationship,
and this also allowed her to avoid answering questions
about her past, and to be very evasive.
And Khalid operated because anyone that questioned
his legitimacy would instantly be called out as being racist.
And because of all the internalized racism in our groups,
that slight-of-hand worked.
And they were both really reliable.
So they worked really hard,
they took on tasks and they always did them on time.
Brenda in particular, I remember always wanted to take minutes.
And we were like “great... take minutes! We don't want to.”
So that was perfect because she could take all those notes
and it was not drawing any attention to her.
Most of the evidence that was introduced
in the conspiracy case came from whatever they were able to collect
in their interactions with anarchists,
with activists, over this period of time.
These notes were then sifted through,
and they basically just pulled out selected elements
that could conceivably constitute preparation for crimes.
It was actually quite shocking to see
how much of the information that she recorded
was personal information about who didn't really like who,
and who was dating who, and who had broken up with who.
And who was maybe having some problems with the way
things were being organized, and all of that stuff.
And it became really obvious that that stuff
was very very relevant to the intelligence gathering.
A night drinking...
going out with your friends and drinking,
would first be presented as, y'know,
“we went to the club and we noted all these things
people talked about.”
But then it would end up looking like a very detailed meeting
that had on the agenda -- people might have made a joke
about fighting cops,
and it would just look like they planned to fight cops.
It's not clear that there was ever really an actual case against us.
But without their notes there definitely
would not have been a case against us.
The case of the Crown rested mostly with a recording
that was done on June 25th,
which was the day before the main action in Toronto.
And it was a large spokes-council,
so a lot of affinity groups were present and represented there.
And Brenda was there with a recording device.
And so on the night of the 25th they went to a judge
and they got warrants for the arrest of around 20 people,
one of which was me.
In the end there were 17 of us against whom
the charges were maintained the longest,
and we were charged with conspiracy to obstruct police,
conspiracy to assault police
and conspiracy to commit mischief
... which just means 'fuck shit up.'
So I think there were at least seven police officers
who had kind of medium-term infiltration roles.
So there's people who infiltrated the medics group,
who infiltrated the legal observers group,
who were involved in different media projects.
And there's probably a lot of other infiltrators
we just never found out about.
Like I can imagine that probably in the context of
the anti-Olympics stuff happening at the same time,
that there were probably a lot of infiltrations
happening in Native communities.
I'm Lieutenant Suzanne Patles of the Mi'Kmaq Warrior Society,
and I'm from the Mi'Kmaq territory.
It's evident that the Canadian Security,
and Canada deems Indigenous people in general
as a threat to national security.
And they see development in the oil and gas industry as critical
– and that's what they call it, 'critical infrastructure' –
and they think that it's what Canada needs
to be able to move forward as a so-called nation.
So they see anybody who stands up
against these developments as a threat.
If they don't us veto over these infrastructure developments
and if they don't listen to the Indigenous peoples' voice,
the Indigenous people are going to rise up.
They're going to take to the streets.
They're going to take to the railroads.
They're going to take to the roads.
They're going to blockade.
They're going to set up camps.
It's kind of harder to infiltrate
within the Indigenous communities
because our Indigenous communities are so connected.
And when we talk to one another
we don't wanna know what you do.
We wanna know about your family.
We wanna know about where you come from... who you are.
It's a built-in block where we're not going to give you
all of our information.
Like, we might be nice to you and say hello,
and you may feel like you're a part of something,
but actually you're still on the outside of it.
We're warriors.
We've been doing this for hundreds and hundreds of years,
prior to Canada even being in existence.
We had this one guy come in.
And he came in on four different occasions.
He came in as a journalist.
He came in as militia.
Then he came in bringing donations.
And then he tried to approach us as being an international lawyer.
So he was just bringing things in that were not wanted,
and that we weren't supposed to have.
That we'd never even asked for.
He was trying to create a situation where our people
will be criminalized for the things that he brought in.
And once the men were already arrested after the raid,
he was approached by several members of the Warrior Society
and he was told: “We know you're an agent.
You need to get out of here.”
States go to incredible lengths to infiltrate resistance movements
and plant undercover agents in our scenes.
Such as the disgusting case of Mark Kennedy,
AKA Mark Stone,
who was outed in London in 2010
after spending 8 years as a mole in the European anarchist
and radical environmental movements
- 6 of which he spent in a long-term relationship
with one of the activists he was spying on.
But as paranoia-inducing as these cases may be,
they are exceptions to the rule.
Not only are these operations incredibly expensive,
but it takes a rare breed of psycho
to be able to effectively maintain the sort of double-life
required to carry out these long-term infiltrations.
Your average cop tends to have a much harder time blending in.
Black sleeves... that's gotta be hot, huh?
Be a little cooler if we had some drugs...
A much more common, and cost-effective method
of gathering intelligence on political dissidents
is through the use of informants and collaborators
... or as they're more commonly known, snitches.
Brandon Darby was a Texas activist
who became an FBI informant in the mid-2000s.
He was somebody who had just been on the fringe
of the activist scene around Austin.
Not a major organizer or anything.
I was doing a lot of anti-fascist work at the time.
We were doing community armed defense from about 2002
... so he was very enamored with that.
Brandon exhibited a lot of behaviours
that were problematic from the beginning,
but they're not because he was an informant.
They're just because he was a fucked up person,
just like many people.
And political and social movements and engagements
draw people who are damaged.
He wanted to do something.
He also wanted to work out his daddy issues.
He wanted to work out his personal stuff in a public setting.
My name is Brandon Darby
and I work with the Common Ground collective
in New Orleans, Louisiana.
He didn't come to Common Ground until about mid-October,
after we had done some initial rescue efforts.
And Common Ground was really an established organization
by the time he came in.
But due to some of the things that he and I had engaged in,
by taking up arms against white militias,
taking up arms against the police in those early days,
Malik Rahim, who was another co-founder
of the Common Ground collective in New Orleans,
gave him more power than he should have in the organization.
And the out-of-control amount of power that he was given
in these circumstances was just a toxic combination.
Just really vicious.
We made him leave Common Ground
because he was so dysfunctional.
And I was dysfunctional too,
you have to understand many of us had severe post-traumatic stress.
You cannot take up guns against people,
you cannot see dead people everywhere
and just, like, go “hey it's okay.”
We're not trained soldiers.
The people who lost their houses weren't trained.
I mean these are hard traumas.
We were able to take our privilege to leave,
but he - of course he acted fucked up afterwards.
But so did I
.... so did many people who were there for months and months.
A lot of people ask the million dollar question:
when did Brandon Darby become an FBI informant?
If I had to pick one particular time,
I think it's some time between March and May of 2006.
That's what it looks like in the FBI documents that I've
already received from the Freedom of Information Act request.
It looks like he starts giving information for free,
and then they offered to pay him at some point.
Recognize that he never did it for the money.
He's a trust fund kid.
Y'know, he's from a working-class background,
but his grandmother came into money
and he does have access to money through her.
He did it for ideological reasons.
And so we made him take a leave of absence.
But then he finagled his way back in, in January of 2007.
That means that he was actively working for the FBI at that point.
But then there were some things that started to happen
that really gave me pause and made me very uncomfortable.
I was working with Anti-Racist Action
and we were going to do some protests against this bookstore
that was a libertarian or right-libertarian book store
that had nativist books and stuff.
They were big supporters of that shithead Alex Jones.
But during that time he wanted us to
burn the book store to the ground.
And he kept at it.
And I just told him I wasn't going to have anything to do with it
because I thought it was a stupid idea.
A prominent Austin-based activist named Brandon Darby
has revealed he worked as an FBI informant
in the 18 months leading up to the Republican Convention.
While Brandon Darby has been involved in several activist groups,
he's best known as a founder of
the New Orleans-based group Common Ground Relief,
which he helped start after Hurricane Katrina.
He's expected to testify on behalf of the government
later this month in the trial of two Texas activists
who were arrested at the RNC
on charges of making and possessing Molotov cocktails.
In the lead-up to the Republican National Convention in 2008,
the other thing that started to happen was he started to
hound me about coming up there.
And I was like “dude... I'm not interested.”
So he started working with some other people,
Brad Crowder and David McKay.
And this is one of my biggest regrets, because
Brad and David were very new and very enamored with Brandon.
And so because of those two circumstances,
he was able to lead them further down the road.
You have to understand this,
that he wrecked a bunch of people's lives
through his being an informant and a provocateur,
but also through just being a shitty person.
Brad and David did prison time for that.
Brandon tried to get me to commit a crime
that I would have done forty years for.
A friend of ours here in Austin,
a Palestinian supporter and organizer named Riad Hamad,
killed himself because of the FBI's harassment of him
due to Brandon Darby.
So those are the major ones,
but there's tons of people that he just really damaged
and injured those people for years afterwards.
You may have heard of the Earth Liberation Front.
The Attorney General himself says
it's a domestic terrorist organization.
The FBI says it is one of the most dangerous groups in the country.
The Green Scare actions really started back in 1997 through 2001.
They were a series of economic sabotage
that used arson to target kind of a mix
of private corporations as well as government targets.
All the FBI agents that had been sent out in the late 90s
to infiltrate and mess with Oregon, in particular,
were completely unsuccessful.
And then ten years later,
one of the Earth Liberation Front co-conspirators,
who had been a long-time heroin addict,
succumbed to the addiction and his own paranoia
by walking into the FBI office and basically saying,
“if you pay me $150,000 and promise that I don't go to jail,
I'll tell you everything I know.”
And he became a snitch for them.
He wore a wire all around the country
attempting to entrap his co-conspirators.
And it was the first crack in the case and it was a major crack.
All of a sudden in December of 2005,
the largest round-up of environmental
and animal rights activists occurred.
The government charged them with multiple counts
of conspiracy and arson and possession of an incendiary device.
And then slowly but surely,
one after the other became snitches for the government.
Joyanna Zacher, Nathan Block, Daniel McGowen,
Jonathan Paul and Marius Mason
never succumbed to the pressures put upon all of them.
Nathan Block was 18 years old
when he was involved in those acts of economic sabotage,
and he was facing life plus 1,115 years in prison.
And even though he was the youngest member
of all the Green Scare defendants,
he never even batted an eye towards the idea
that he would ever cooperate with the state.
Y'know, he served all of his prison time.
He's out. He's back living his life.
Same with Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul.
But the bottom line is that even though these people
were facing life plus 1,115 years in jail,
they ended up doing between three and eight years in prison.
Non-cooperating defendants basically got an additional penalty
of an extra 18 months in prison compared to
their similarly-situated snitch co-defendants.
So the tax for being able to morally and ethically
look people in the eye and say
“I am not a snitch. I'm not a government informant.”
That was a tax of 18 months of extra time in jail.
Which all of them were more than willing to serve
in order to be able to return to their communities
and return to the movements that they
literally risked their lives for.
Nearly 70 years after it was first published,
George Orwell's dystopian sci-fi novel, 1984
is to this day, still held up as the gold standard for what
an authoritarian police state underpinned by an all-pervasive
surveillance apparatus would look like.
But let's be real
... who needs Big Brother when you've got Facebook and Google?
Contemporary techniques of mass data collection and analysis,
combined with a society where more and more
of our communications take place through heavily-controlled
and completely monitored corporate infrastructure,
has produced a framework for social control
that would have made Orwell throw up in his mouth.
The world was given a terrifying glimpse of the true potential
of this unholy alliance of state and corporate power in 2011,
as the Gulf States were putting the finishing touches
on the Arab Spring protests in Bahrain.
After a Saudi-led occupation force viciously put down
the revolutionary uprising,
the Bahraini royal family used facebook to launch a wide-ranging
witch hunt of activists, posting pictures of pro-democracy rallies
and urging pro-regime loyalists
to name and tag people in the pictures,
in a mass doxing campaign that resulted in waves
of targeted arrests and disappearances.
Yes... the future is here comrades.
Angry responses only.
The term signals intelligence seems to come out of
earlier histories of spying in communication
where it was, like, classic Cold War between the US and Russia.
Telecommunications, especially hard to decipher
or hidden telecommunications, was not used very widely.
And with computers becoming widespread
and computers being able to do the math for encryption,
increasingly the ways people are organizing and communicating
with each other is happening through these computerized means.
So the part of their social control apparatus that is dedicated
to signals intelligence,
this gathering of information that's happening electronically,
is just ballooning.
You can think of the types of surveillance
that are done by these agencies in two different forms.
They do mass surveillance,
which is gathering all of the data they can,
storing it, trying to analyze it and look at metadata.
That's for hundreds of millions or billions of people
all over the world, and what their communications are.
And then they also do targeted surveillance,
which is really different.
That's like hacking into things,
or trying to find a way to compromise an encryption system
so that they can then read what people think is being protected.
These sorts of attacks are way more expensive.
This is why mass surveillance has become really important,
because they can do it really really widely for relatively lower cost.
Facebook and social media in general
has been a treasure trove of information
for the government and for corporations.
These types of platforms are a way of instantly getting snapshots
of your network, who your friends are,
who've you talked to, what events you're going to.
And they help facilitate more targeted attacks.
Facebook is probably the worst out there.
Government and corporations can literally look
at all your friend groups and plot out maps
of how different networks are connected to each other.
And they use that information for conspiracy allegations,
for RICO allegations,
as well as finding weak links within those networks to target.
The companies are better at gathering data.
They have set up whole web infrastructures pretty much
dedicated to gathering as much information as possible about people.
For profit. For advertising means.
Google, in its terms of use,
says that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy
when you use any of their products, including gmail.
So basically that means nothing that you do
in that platform is yours,
and they can do whatever they want with it.
They basically say “hey... know that we're
giving all of your shit to the government,
and we're going to use the shit to spy on you some more too.”
That's not disputed that this is the relationship.
Facebook also has facial recognition software
for all those photos and videos that you post.
North Dakota and DAPL used that facial recognition on facebook
in order to issue arrest warrants for people,
and literally arrested and charged people with crimes
based on video and photographs that activists posted.
Protest prediction software has been developed
and is currently being used
primarily in Latin American countries.
By monitoring facebook and other social media,
this software predicts when riots or protests,
or public uprisings may happen
... up to three days in advance.
We have more direct confrontation right now with the state,
and so we think of things in state terms: the capacity
that the state has for repression,
and for social control broadly.
And that makes sense.
But surveillance capitalism is creating whole new forms
of social control that don't even depend on the state.
I mean, they're still built on the foundation of the prisons
and everything else that already exists.
But they're doing a whole other level of thing
that the state is kind of trying to use and catch up with,
but isn't primarily behind
and even isn't really necessarily that good at doing.
One really important aspect of it is
the degree to which it is marketed as voluntary.
That everybody chooses to get a facebook account,
and you have an option of not having a facebook account.
But the way the society is being structured,
there's less and less real choice involved
in whether we have a facebook account,
or whether we have a cell phone.
Your cell phone, and especially your smart phone,
is probably one of the largest vulnerabilities
that you have as an activist.
It's got your photographs, your contacts,
your calendar, your email.
Y'know, every aspect of your life
can often be contained on this phone.
Phones actually have two computers running in them.
There's the main computer,
and that can be mostly running free software.
Then there's a second computer called the baseband,
and it connects to the cell phone towers.
That part of the phone is running software
that we don't control at all.
It seems, at least in some cases,
that the tower has control of the phone via the baseband.
And often the baseband kind of can just override the main CPU.
Even if you turn off the phone,
your phone can be used to locate you.
It can be used as a microphone and/or a camera.
And you really have no sure way of knowing
whether any of those things are occurring,
even if you turn off the phone.
And then the tower is obviously controlled
completely by the telecom companies,
who are working closely with the state.
Or, more directly, via stingrays,
which are the things that police agencies are buying up
all over the place that create a fake cell phone tower
that the phones connect to, and then they get direct access.
Back in the 16th century,
when Sir Francis Bacon first coined the phrase
“Knowledge is Power”,
he was talking about how awesome
he thought the Scientific Method was.
But it wasn’t long before this homage to scientific empiricism
was twisted and appropriated
by the cheerleaders of authoritarian rule.
These days, the adage is more likely to be framed
and used as an ominous desk ornament
by some mid-level party member of a national intelligence agency,
in order to pad their ego and impress their secretary.
Maybe in Latin... if they’re really edgy.
The truth contained in these words,
however, goes both ways.
It's undoubtedly true that states and surveillance capitalist firms
have unprecedented levels of knowledge at their disposal,
which they use to increase their already considerable
military and policing power.
But it's also true that their methods
for gathering intelligence depend,
at least in part, on our ignorance of what they're up to,
and our willingness to fall for their traps.
Arming our movements with the knowledge
of how our enemies gather intelligence,
and adapting our tactics accordingly,
is an important component of building our own power.
Power that grows as we more effectively challenge
their systems of social control.
Don't overestimate the state's capacity, or the cops' capacity.
Don't underestimate it, but don't overestimate it.
They know some things, but they don't know shit.
Their intelligence gathering, unless you are absolutely the target,
is not very good.
Each bureaucracy is doing its own intelligence gathering,
has its own chain of command, and then intelligence tends to stay
in each of those bureaucracies and become trapped in like a silo.
As much as states and empires try to be, like,
“we're all powerful.... we can stop whatever we want”,
they very obviously cannot stop encryption.
And that's something to build on.
Digital encryption is basically a way of using computers
to hide information.
One of the most basic kinds of encryption is
you have data stored somewhere... you encrypt it in that place.
Local disk encryption can be done
using a program called Veracrypt.
It gets more complicated obviously,
when there's multiple people involved,
like when you're doing encrypted communication.
For email the best way that I've found
is using Thunderbird and an add-on called Enigmail.
If you have a smart phone you can do everything
in a program called Signal.
You need to use tools that you understand, based on the risk threat.
So I can drive around a car
and I don't understand exactly how that car works,
but I need a basic understanding of that tool set.
However if I'm using that car in such a way
where if the car breaks down,
me and the people I love get thrown in jail for a decade or more,
then I better have a really good fucking understanding
of exactly how that car works.
We have to support infrastructures that are based more
in the social relations that we want to be reflected in our world.
It's not just about surveillance.
It's ultimately about social control,
which is a more active process
than just knowing what people are saying.
Facebook is controlling people.
When we say their business model is based on advertising,
really what that's saying is get enough information about people
to be able to control their behaviour.
And it can be like a literally person-by-person
individualized version of the world,
to try to influence how they're going to act
and what they're going to say.
We decided that these would be the social norms now,
and we just went for it.
Security culture, at its core,
involves knowledge and understanding.
Developing personal relationships, face-to-face relationships,
affinity groups, trusting friendships and comradery
is probably the most effective form of security culture that we have.
Things like Brandon Darby create media sensation for us
because they are so rare.
Because it costs so much in resources for them
to actually do infiltration,
for them to actually do the heavy surveillance.
Whenever Brenda and Khalid were “on a play”,
and that's what they call when they're at work,
it's not just them that's being paid,
but it's also their two handlers who are sitting in a car.
It's also all of the people who are, y'know, typing out their notes,
and who are holding the debriefs,
and who are doing all of the bureaucratic work.
So it's a really expensive operation.
So there's absolutely no way that they could afford
to do that unless they had a big event to use as an excuse.
What we didn't factor in was that
there was a billion dollar security budget for the G20.
I mean there's a lot of explanations we could give
for our kind of unpreparedness towards that,
and one is that we don't necessarily take ourselves
super seriously as threats.
And that we might have this rhetoric of wanting to
produce radical transformation
and destroy all forms of authority.
But that we don't necessarily take ourselves
as seriously as that intention merits.
One of the main goals of surveillance and infiltration
is to disrupt the organizing that we're doing.
The police are always going to be kind of testing you
and sending in informants and seeing if they can get
different kinds of information,
because of what of your ideas are and because of your decision
to situate yourself as an enemy of this society.
It is the modus operandi of the state
to use informants, infiltrators, and forms of disruption
to keep political and social engagements
and movements from happening.
Sometimes folks will try to say that
when you have a cop in your group
it doesn't matter if you're not doing anything illegal.
And in this situation, we totally were doing illegal things.
Like, I was doing exactly what they accused me of doing.
But even if the police aren't trying to build up charges,
their goal is to maintain this sort of permanent level of disruption.
There's only one golden rule when it comes to talking to cops,
is “don't fucking talk to cops.”
If you suspect someone of being a snitch or a cop,
don't come out to your movement
or to the public before you are absolutely sure.
You don't have to snitch-jacket someone
in order to protect yourself and to further your strategic,
effective organizing efforts.
I think if we had a way to talk to each other
about these things in a way that wasn't gossipy
and didn't start rumours,
we would have caught on a lot earlier
that a lot of people had concerns about Khalid.
Having some level of practice in which you get to know each other
and kind of check each others' back stories a little bit
can be a way of just building trust
and of demonstrating a kind of seriousness and commitment.
We need to build explicit parameters for what we're vouching.
So we could be vouching
“is this person who they say that they are?”
And then we need to set a criteria for how we know.
And you need to make all these uncomfortable conversations
about vouching explicit.
Being intentional about checking each others' stories,
so that it's not just something you do to people you don't trust,
but something you do to people you want to trust more.
If we don't build trust with each other,
fear becomes the winner.
And you cannot make revolution,
you cannot create liberatory spaces,
you cannot create liberatory openings based solely on fear.
We must stand on the edge of our potential
and see what's on the other side.
And be willing to take those risks.
But we must do that pragmatically.
If we understand the role that intelligence plays,
it can maybe allow us to try to be a little more opaque ourselves,
to be a little bit less easily surveilled.
But also to be a bit more resistant to the inevitable repression,
and be a little bit less scared of it when it does fall.
Because ultimately we can't prevent repression
... I don't think it's useful to try to.
I think it's useful to ask ourselves how can we achieve our goals,
and how can we be prepared for the consequences.
As states and corporations scramble to develop
increasingly sophisticated ways to monitor and control dissent,
in a desperate attempt to predict threats
that might challenge their continued dominance,
it is critical that our resistance movements develop
strategies and effective techniques that allow for
the decentralized spread of self-organization,
and methods of communication that thwart their attempts
to stay one step ahead of us.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you
that Trouble is intended to be watched in groups,
and to be used as a resource to promote discussion
and collective organizing.
Feel like anarchists and other activists in your town
could use a primer on security culture?
Please consider getting together with some comrades,
screening this film and discussing what steps people can take
to help protect your communities from infiltration and surveillance.
Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble
at your campus, infoshop, community center,
or even just at your home with friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For 10 bucks a month, we’ll hook you up
with an advanced copy of the show,
and a screening kit featuring additional resources
and some questions you can use to get a discussion going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially, no worries!
You can stream and/or download all our content for free
off our website: sub.media/trouble.
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics,
or just wanna get in touch,
drop us a line at trouble@sub.media
We’re excited to see that people have been
supporting our work by becoming troublemakers,
and wanna send a shout-out to Justin, Ram Philly,
Alex, SIU, Douglas, Jay, Adam, Joe, Scott, Michael,
Matt, Filip, Stephen, Zach and David.
We also wanna send a big shout out
to new Troublemaker chapters in Toronto & Washington DC.
This episode would not have been possible
without the generous support of Ryan, Matthew, Rodrigue and Amelie.
Now get out there, and make some trouble!