With the price of petrol you'd be lucky :)

Let them stay on ebay.

There are a number of compact Far Eastern devices on eBay that will capture 640x480 moving images/audio and record it to a solid state disk (memory stick) of 4Gb or 8Gb. These come in surprisingly cheap - from what I remember around GBP30 or so. The ones I remember are black and quite unobtrusive, are smaller than a cigarette packet, with the lens mounted on the front. Accordingly they will clip to a front pocket quite well, or for people expecting to be at the sharp end of protest, they could be fixed securely inside a jacket front pocket, with a suitable hole in the fabric made for the aperture.

I saw a video created with one of these devices and the quality was surprisingly good, although it had been hand-held for that test. Accordingly if they are pocket-mounted the resultant image wobble will reduce quality and the device will not always be pointing in the right direction (especially if the wearer is right in the middle of the action, which is not always the best vantage point for recording images). This would therefore be a good supplement to activists willing to use hand-held cameras but not a full replacement.

Confiscated video and cameras could equally be used to convict activists of doing things we agree with.

In some circumstances you don't want a load of idiots standing around surreptitiously filming you...

If you know it's going to be fluffy or you know the police have hundreds of their own cameras pointed at you, then it might be a good idea to have your own footage. But you need to know when to turn it off!!!

I don't know if this still applies, but someone told me in the past that the best cameras to get are tape cameras (as opposed to digital, memory stick / dvd cameras). This is because in a court, apparently digital recordings cannot really be trusted because they can be computer edited, whereas a tape cannot be unless done directly on the computer. So if you wanted to film for evidence purposes, tape is the most likely to be accepted in a court.

Also, from my experience video cameras (especially tape ones) - they do break easily!! Worth getting a warranty if possible, especially if wrestling with police a lot. Also don't expect a second hand camera to last too long, so don't pay out huge amounts of money on ebay for second hand.

Bearing this in mind video cameras are an excellent tool for all activits. Nowadays it is useful to have a digital camera that is mainly for stills but also takes decent enough quality videos also - these I have found quite useful on demos and the added bonus of having a more sturdy (and smaller) camera in your hands.

>This is because in a court, apparently digital recordings cannot really be trusted because they can be computer edited, whereas a tape cannot be unless done directly on the computer.<

I think you are mistaken. Most video camera tapes are digital, most CCTV record to a hard disk, you can dump a disk to tape. Even analogue tape can be messed with.


A company is selling a robot that you slip a cheap low-resolution digital camera into, which then takes thousands of photographs which it stitches together into a gigapixel panorama. Photographers have been doing this for a hundred years but this automates that tedious and slow process. The companies main sample panorama is of the presidential inauguration, allowing you to zoom in to faces, but that equally could be a demonstration. Say you wanted a detailed image of an installation, or to record the damage caused by a development over time, or a perfect record of a crime scene. The beta-testers of the device have been scientists using it for ecological uses, but it seems obvious in time it will be used both by and against activists. Try zooming in on this giga-pixel picture of the presidential inaurguration taken by the robot with a cheap camera.

 http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=15374&window_height=848&window_width=1655