Meatspace anonymity manual

[Sampo Syreeni]

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, petro wrote:

>>The only logical conclusion I can see to skirmishes between black-clad
>>anarchists, going on "street operations", and governmental riot control
>>forces, is that the police are eventually given the right to just gun the
>>protestors down, irregardless of whether they have *done* anything. Unless
>
>Maybe in Finland, but here in the US, the government official that gave
>the orders to shoot a crowd of protestors would *not* be working much
>longer.

(Actually the police here have far more stringent requirements for even
drawing a gun than they do over there in the States. But that's not really
the issue.)

The issue is escalation, and we know entirely well that there's been a lot
of that in the last twenty or thirty years. We already have riot control
measures (such as promiscuous use of OC dispensers, barricading entire city
centres, and watercannons) which couldn't have been applied a few decades
ago. It also seems that some of those measures are now beginning to be
applied to peaceful protestors, a worrysome and relatively new development
probably motivated by tough-on-crime attitudes.

The police are already given broad discretion in their use of force. (For
instance, to stop a fleeing suspect.) I fear that the mechanisms which
brought us dedicated riot control forces could very well grant the police a
catch-all licence to kill when "threatened" by a group of protestors. The
Bloc attire and their interest in direct action constitute a highly
plausible threat. So could any larger crowd of angry people who refuse to
disband, if people ever start to think of protestors merely as "anarchists"
or "hooligans".

Of course I'm fully aware that this has nothing to do with the way US law
enforcement is supposed to work. But it seems that people care increasingly
little about the Bill of Rights. At least the trend has certainly been for
the worse, with bigger protests, lots of cops around, force being used more
often, and intense, largely unfavorable media attention towards the
protestors. Extrapolating from this to wider police powers is no great feat
of the intellect.

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy at iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front