Cooper Quintin

The police have been studying modern street protesters and they know our tactics
through and through. They easily can perdict our actions and be one step ahead
of us at all times. The police are regularly training to be effective against
street protesters, this provides them with a huge advantage to our less trained
groups. Most of our numbers are in the dark as to what the police will be doing
tactically and have no understanding of their tactics. If we hope to remain out
of police detention we must learn their tactics and ways of countering them.

Technologically Enhanced Protesting:
T.E.P is the art of using technology to either increase the odds of a action in
your favor by using technological reconnaissance methods as well as using
technology to make sure those on the street stay on the street and not in jail.
These ideas are coming mostly from street battles in the United States but can
apply in most countries and situations where you are facing a technologically
advanced opponent.

One form of TEP is monitoring police radio communications. For less than $150 US
at radio shack you can get a dual trunking police scanner. Basically the
scanner is a tool that will allow you to listen in on the police's radio
communication. While these tools are small it would be wise to keep them hidden
from the police if you have to be on the street. Modern scanners have a decent
range, you don't have to be anywhere near the site of the action to still tune
into the police in that area. To improve the effectiveness of using one of these
during an action you could get together in a small group which scouts out at the
protest site, someone listening to a scanner and keeping and updating a map of
where everybody is on the streets, as well as the police's movement and possibly
what they are planning to do. The scanner operator should be familiar with the
way the police communicate, they won't speak in plain English and it helps if
you know the phonetic alphabet and common police codes to understand anything
the police are saying. Any maps that are created during an action should be
carefully and securely destroyed after an event. Before any action takes place
this group needs to consider how its going to communicate. Communication between
members of the group needs to be secure or your putting your self and your group
at risk. (* See evoltech's train hoping article part 1 for more information on
scanners.*)

This brings up the problem of secure communication. If you can monitor the
police transmissions what is to stop them from monitoring yours, the police have
the tools to monitor everything from low end walky talkys to your cell phone. In
all honesty unless you are very high profile or its an extremely large action
such as a WTO meeting there is very little chance that the police are monitoring
your phone. The risk is increased in larger cities such as Chicago and LA. In
recent court cases the feds were able to remotely activate the mic on a cell
phone to listen in on conversations, one way around this is to go to your local
drugstore and buy a "trac phone", or similar, these are about $20 and include
100min of talk time when you purchase them. Pay in cash and use fake info...
enjoy your new untraceable phone. If you are engaged in high risk direct
action, do not forget that most phones nowadays have GPS chips in them, for
Emergency 911 purposes, so before you engage, turn off the phone and take out
the battery.

Sometimes, especially when critical information comes in you need to get out a
message to a large group very quickly or to a small team (eg. scouts). Obviously
it would take far to long to call everyone that you needed to, even if you had a
phone tree. Thats where txtmob comes in. Txtmob is like a listserv for SMS text
messages. Everyone with a cellphone signs up by sending a text message to an
email address with the word "JOIN". Then when you send a text message to a
certain phone number it will send it to everyone on the list. More information
and a how to set it up can be found at http://www.txtmob.com/. If you can pass
out fliers before the protest with instructions on how to join, and get your
whole team on a certain txtmob this can be a very quick way free way of
improving your communications. Just remember that if your textmob is made
public, the cops can join. So don't send anything that you don't want them to
know. It also helps to have more then one list set up, one for the scouts, one
for secure information sent only to verifiable phone numbers, and a third for
general info that can be sent to large groups. Again as with cellphone calls
these should not be considered 100% secure, sure they are more secure then walki
talkis but the police have tricks up their sleeves too!

Most protesters on the street don't study the police tactics and get confused
and panic when the police react. Its time for that to change, next time There's
an action in your area dress in plain cloths and watch the police, how they
react, how fast they respond to changes in the routes. If they manage to
surround part of the group make note of where they did it, directions of
traffic, which way they came from, numbers... etc. Keep this information in mind
the next time your on the street. The more we know the more effective we can be!

Technologically Enhanced Protesting leaves more room open for innovation than
perhaps any other form of protest to date. Many other more advanced tactics
than can be covered in the scope of this article could be available to someone
with a little technical training. For example, building a cell phone jammer to
stop police cell phone communication, or alternatively a radio jammer. There has
also been research into replicating ambulance strobe lights to affect the state
of a traffic light. TEP can expand as new inventions and innovations are
discovered; and can be the one thing to give us a one up on the police in all
protest situations. By combining the ingenuity and curiosity of hackers with the
passion and urgency of direct action protesters we can be unstoppable.