A FIT cop you can't see is as pointless as something really pointless. The whole point of FIT is 'mutual recognition' which boils down to cops intimidating protesters. Despite their name, FIT having nothing to do with gathering intelligence.

while FIT themselves may not utilise the intel, I'd seriously give pause to someone within the Met using it for something. This Met/Gov complex is a veritable pack rat with our data and behaviour - patterns of our reading/ writing/ doing/ buying/ selling/ watching/ protesting/ associating/ etc. - and I am cynical enough to think that they are unlikely to waste any data they do gather, regardless of whether or not the objective of intimidation is furthered along the way.

It is about taking the Panopticon to the people - deployed apparatus of surveillance, as well as pervasive opportunities to gather data in the performance managed, computerised logic of pattern recognition that modern states, as societies of control, favour. The ECHELON is by no means an anomaly, or a grander version of the power to gather and to know. It is the model of surveillance, a diagram of control, the blueprint by which governments will, and have, seized power. Our entire commercial industry has captured us: we are the dairy cows for the corporate-state (fascism, anyone?) dairy farmers. We spend our lives on various hormones and chemical stews, we are fattened, we are herded, and we are milked until we either run amok, quit producing, or merely die. We are controlled in this way through the economy of information - a (dare I say it?) postmodern! - phantasmagoria of stratified flows of capital and serial identifications ... mother/father, family member, consumer, boss/employee.

The FIT would not be *allowed* to lose any intel they gather. That would be an anathema to this system of data collection and pattern matching, like losing capital. This would be a major No-No!!

Don't expect so many connections to work. If you analyze most large government organizations they are not that good with data. They are actually bad. This does not mean that if you are on the hit list they will not have the data and be able to get it together. It is just they are usually crap.

Plan for the worst. Understand it probably is not the case though.

One way in which FIT works is to make people believe they are always being watched, even when they cant see the FIT "at work". So when this cop, or other FIT spotters, next see someone from the mass on a demo they saunter up to them and say "have fun on the critical mass?" and they then worry about how they know they were there, since they didn't see any FIT. That causes the paranoia. If this does happen with this specific cop then people can reply "yes, did you?" as we know he was there. The more we know about how they get their info about us the less afraid people will be.