Infiltrators in American protest camps

Eco-Activists Smell a Rat

utne.com

10/1/2008
by Keith Goetzman

The raids that snared eight anarchist activists in St. Paul last
month on the eve of the Republican National Convention were based in
part on information from police informants who infiltrated protest
training camps. The New Statesman reports that such incursions are
commonplace in the U.K., with as many as one in four members of
direct-action environmental protest groups working not for the cause,
but for the law or private "corporate intelligence agencies."

"If you stuck an intercept up near one of those camps," one corporate
spy exec says, "you wouldn't believe the amount of outgoing calls
after every meeting saying, 'Tomorrow we're going to cut the fence.' "

The arrested members of the RNC Welcoming Committee learned the hard
way that it's not just eco-protesters in Britain, where new
coal-fired power plants are a protest flash point, who are feeling
the heat. RNC Welcoming Committee organizers apparently had big-eared
visitors in their midst this summer at an activist "action camp" held
from July 31 to August 3 in Lake Geneva, Minnesota, where they
allegedly discussed the tactics they'd bring to RNC street protests.
Police say they talked about Molotov cocktails, paint, caltrops
(devices used to puncture tires), bricks, and "materials" hidden
inside giant puppets.

The information gleaned by these "confidential reliable informants,"
or CRIs, was central to the felony riot charges filed against the
eight RNC Welcoming Committee activists. Bruce Nestor, attorney for
one of the defendants and president of the Minnesota branch of the
National Lawyers Guild, said the information is by nature suspect.

"The charges in this case are supported only by allegations of paid
confidential informants," Nestor said at a press conference,
according to Mordecai Specktor in the Minnesota online newspaper
MinnPost. (Specktor's son Max is one of the defendants.) "A number of
the attorneys here have experience in investigations with the use of
informants in political cases. We are concerned about the potential
use of provocateurs, people who purposely plan and bring up
discussions of violence, in order to get other people to respond and
then report back that those discussions occurred. The confidential
informants are paid based on the value of the information they
provide. They have a clear incentive to exaggerate and lie about the
information."

Though of course the arrested members of the RNC Welcoming Committee
must feel burned by their turncoat brethren, the activists weren't
exactly being secretive about their plans, telegraphing their
intentions to "shut down" the RNC in articles, a website, even a
YouTube video. When an underground movement uses the mobilizing power
of the Internet, it also exposes itself to greater attention and surveillance.

After infiltrating the RNC Welcoming Committee, the spies­two
informants and an undercover investigator­allegedly monitored e-mails
and conversations and helped police conduct "regular surveillance" of
the RNC group. The imposters apparently delivered believable
performances as radical activists, which is more than can be said of
one British informant who was found out by the members of Plane
Stupid, a group opposed to the expansion of Heathrow Airport.

According to the New Statesman, "The group gradually became
suspicious because he showed up early at meetings, constantly pushed
for increasingly dramatic direct action and­the ultimate
giveaway­dressed a little too well for an ecowarrior."