Protest Surveillance

Legal challenges to protest surveillance

In 2014, Netpol was granted permission to intervene in the Supreme Court, in an appeal concerning the lawfulness of the Metropolitan Police’s ‘domestic extremist’ database.

The Metropolitan Police sought to overturn an earlier Court of Appeal ruling in March 2013 that gathering and retaining information on peace campaigner John Catt, a regular at anti-arms trade protests in Brighton called by the ‘Smash EDO’ campaign, was unlawful.

The judgment in December 2014 in favour of the police amounted, in our view, to judicial approval for the mass surveillance of UK protest movements. It affirmed the Metropolitan Police’s stated belief that anyone taking part in a public protest has no reasonable expectation of privacy.

You can read our detailed analysis of the Supreme Court judgment here.

Making the case for protest anonymity

As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, Netpol has sought to challenge attitudes towards greater protection of protesters’ privacy and debated the ethics of wearing a face covering or mask.

We have argued that, rather than acting as a barrier to taking part in a protest, the desire for anonymity may in fact represent the main deciding factor for many about whether they are able to participate at all.

However, as long as the decision to wear a mask as a way of maintaining some degree of anonymity is taken only by only a few protesters, it does increase the risk that the police will pick people out for arrest. We have suggested one of the few ways to change this is to normalise the wearing of a face covering, so that it no longer perceived as a symbol of a minority.

In 2015, we crowdfunded to purchase hundreds of face coverings that were distributed as part of a Privacy Bloc on a People’s Assembly anti-austerity demonstration in London.

We have subsequently encouraged protesters taking to the streets to plan in advance how they cover up to resist intrusive police surveillance.

Police Liaison Officers

Netpol has been at the forefront of exposing the intelligence-gathering role of Police Liaison Officers, who wear light blue bibs at demonstrations and who are supposedly present simply to “facilitate protest”.

In October 2013, a Freedom of Information request by Netpol revealed that standard operating procedures in London fully expected that PLOs were “likely to generate high-quality intelligence from the discussions they are having with group members” and insisted this information was “passed to Bronze Intelligence for analysis”.

In June 2014, a review of anti-fracking protests in Balcombe in Sussex confirmed that senior commanders saw their Police Liaison Officers playing a ‘pivotal role’ in gathering intelligence on protesters.

You can find more information on Police Liaison Officers and their role in protest surveillance here.

Domestic Extremist Awareness Day

Campaigners deeply resent the smearing of their activism by the police as ‘extremism’, not only because this label is evidently so easy to apply without the slightest evidence, but because it seems deliberately intended to drive away wider public support.

Since 2014, Netpol has organised an annual Domestic Extremist Awareness Day on 5 February, to highlight the police’s obsession with finding so-called ‘domestic extremists’ amongst campaigners and activists.

In 2015, the campaign went viral online and in 2016, we called specifically for the closure of the discredited police unit responsible for surveillance on political dissent.

In 2017, we asked campaigners to share photos of their protests, actions and assemblies on social media with the slogan “This is Not Domestic Extremism”. In 2018, we held a protest outside the Metropolitan Police’s new Westminster headquarters, calling for consigning to history the use of “domestic extremism”as a label for smearing campaigners.