Disillusioned Discordian

As regular readers will know Moon has little love of FIT (Forward Intelligence Teams). These people get paid to basically hang around collecting information on people at protests, or when there are no protest harassing chavs on council estates. A sort of bastard latter day Stasi born from Neo-labours war on ‘terror’. The result of this action whether intentional or not is to cause fear amongst activist. This in turn puts people off participating in legitimate political protest, helpfully quashing dissent against our Dear Leader Brown. FIT are also closely linked to the NETCU (National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit) and other similar teams. NETCU is a concern to me as they blur the lines between legitimate political protest, direct action and terrorism. For example legitimate political protest is listed as the first of three stages leading towards criminal actions and ‘home visits’ on their site. The suspicion is that anyone undertaking political protest is on the first stage of becoming an ‘extremist’. Remember folks political protest is the first stage of a domestic extermism campaign.. They also warn how the ‘target’ could be posted on extermist websites like http://blog.geeklawyer.org/

These teams are also involved in the propaganda of painting political activists as extremists, for example the Observer article that portrays Earth First as terrorists. Since writing that blog articule the Observer has embarrassingly pulled the story after a flood of readers complained at their printing of Police State propaganda.

Most alarmingly during a recent court case, where three political activists were accused (and later found guilty) of obstructing a FIT officer from taking photographs, an admission in court was made by PC Dan Collins:

“Is there a mechanism to check which demonstrations [the defendant] has attended?” asked the defence.

“Not me personally. But the police could, yes.”

This is the first time that the police have publicly admitted to keeping a database on people who have attended political protests, although in truth such a system has probably existed for some time. As police surpression is nothing new. It raises serious concerns as to whether such a system is in Breach of Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (at least untill Straw is able to ‘balance’ the act). The knowledge of such a system will also again scare a number of legitimate political activists from engaging in protests for fear of becoming a suspect or being marked as an extremist by the state.