As a result of the Guardian's decision to go ahead with publishing the full spotter card, activists found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand they were dealing with their anger that people on the card had been knowingly shafted by the Guardian. On the other hand, now that the story was out in the open, to refuse to co-operate would mean that important aspects of the story might not be highlighted. With some reluctance, 11 of the original 24 contacted the Guardian - some gave interviews, whilst others submitted written responses. Many of these were hacked. Three of them also had pieces published in the Guardian's Comment is Free. 1 | 2 | 3.

The 11 accounts revealed a mix of activists, some of whom had no criminal records, one of whom was an alleged BAe spy, and a rather famous comedian. For activists it highlights the absurdities of the so-called intelligence gathering by the Met. As a poster noted on Indymedia in the aftermath of DSEi 2005:

" Their Oracle 17 'bingo' card of faces to watch out for was like a who's who of some of the most obvious faces from the history of previous years mobilisation but it did not reflect any new intelligence on who would be active this year. Many of those on the card were this year either not involved at all or playing supportive roles in terms of the campaign infrastructure. If this is the best their constant spying can achieve then we can sleep more comfortably in the knowledge that they really aren't on the ball at all. It is clear that their Forward Intelligence Team really exists for no other practical purpose than to harass and intimidate - it certainly has nothing to do with intelligence."

Whilst the revelations in the article will come as no surprise to regular readers of Indymedia, they have come as a surprise to many Guardian readers, and have put further pressure on the MET which is under intense public scrutiny in the aftermath of Ian Tomlinson's death. What is new for many of us, is seeing mainstream media exposure of FIT tactics. However, many will be reverting to being incredibly wary of further co-operation with papers like the Guardian after the 'spotter card' fiasco.

The rise and rise of Paul Lewis

The Guardian has run a number of articles critical of the policing of demonstrations in the aftermath of the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests in April. An American investment fund manager had filmed a police assault on Ian Tomlinson, and had handed the footage to the Guardian. In a recent interview, journalist Paul Lewis recalls:

“That was a good moment. He was on the Heathrow Express on his way to the airport when he checked his video and realised what it was. He was going to send it to an agency but then saw how we had been covering the story and sent it to me.” The paper had already been front-paging the G20 events but after publication of the video there was “an avalanche of citizen journalist material,” he says. “We couldn’t cope with what we were getting — images from peoples’ mobiles, from students, filmmakers, from everyone. It was a treasure trove of information.”

The 'good moment' has resulted in Paul's nomination for the Paul Foot Award, and undoubtably has assisted him in getting information for further exposes on policing of protest.

A couple of months after the G20 story, another fortuitous piece of footage gave Paul new prominence in exposing police tactics. This time it was police footage of the arrests of FIT Watchers at Kingsnorth, which as well as appearing to show disporportionate force being used in the arrests of 2 women who had committed the serious crime of questioning why a police officer was not wearing his ID numbers. Their violent arrests were further compounded by 4 days in detention. The videos were provided as evidence, before the cases against them were dropped. Commentary in the video made it clear that FIT was also targeting working corporate journalists at the camp.

Around the same time, Paul Lewis and Rob Evans were researching further stories. They interviewed several campaigners, who had been involved in protests against EDO MBM, about political policing and collusion between the police and corporations. They also looked at papers from EDO's failed attempt to impose an injunction on protesters. In the interviews and the papers the issue of police targeting and harrassment of campaigners through the use of 'spotter cards' came up repeatedly. They were advised that an example of a 'spotter card', from DSEi 2005, had featured briefly in the film Taking Liberties. Later on an image of the card was forwarded to the Guardian. Throughout this period many campaigners were assisting Paul and Rob in the hope of highlighting police repression.

Guardian justifications for shafting activists

The Register article was updated to give the Guardian's justification for their ironic act of exposing breaches of privacy of activists, by going further than the police in publishing the photos of those who the police had singled out for a campaign of individualised harassment via the spotter cards.

They argued that the spotter card was already in the public domain, after it featured in Taking Liberties. However, there is a big difference in a fleeting glimpse on screen, and the picture appearing on the paper's website, and on the front page of it's print edition. Since the Guardian printed it, it has been reproduced on many websites.

They further argued that by attending public demonstrations, people had "voluntarily gone into the public arena to engage in political action" - although it is not clear how this justifies publication of a police spotter card clearly marked confidential. In light of the fact that several of the people featured had agreed to co-operate as long as the right to privacy of those who did not want to be featured was respected, it seems that they abused the trust that activists had placed in them.

The other face of the Guardian and protest.

The MET has a long-standing practice of divide and rule, where they justify the repression of all protestors on the basis of a presence of a small number of 'bad apples' or 'domestic extremists' who spoil it for us all. The corporate media has an equally long-standing tradition of reporting the claims of the police uncritically, and indeed in the run up to the G20, such a story appeared in the Guardian.

Previously, a police smear against environmental activists had appeared in the Observer, part of the Guardian group, which the Observer eventually retracted. As in the case of the spotter card, the retraction was far less obvious than the original article. Paul Lewis had also written an article which parroted police claims of a 'Summer of Rage' which never actually materialised.

The corporate media, by indulging in such shameful and uncritical rehashing of police briefings, has contributed to the OTT policing, which the Guardian is now championing the exposure of. As the 2005 spotter card shows, this kind of policing has been going on for a long time, and whilst the Guardian exposure may result in some attempts to ameliorate the worst excesses, we cannot expect that it will have any kind of meaningful impact. In the aftermath of the G20 exposure, policing was hands off at Climate Camp. At DSEi 2009, the initial action in the city was policed incredibly lightly in comparison to previous years, but by the Thursday, policing at the Arms Dealers dinner very quickly reverted to the old style policing, with an unjustifiable imposition of a S14 and 10 arrests. Prior to DSEi police had said that they would no longer tail activists, but by the end of the week they were reported to be tailing a 15 year old around Whitechapel.

First they went for AR activists...

On the same day that the spotter card appeared on the front page of the print edition, an editorial inside the paper launched an attack on Animal Rights activists, in a way which further reinforced the divide and rule tactics used by the police:

An alphabet soup of semi-secret intelligence units overseen by the Association of Chief Police Officers all have their eyes trained on the supposed enemy within. Mostly set up six years ago to take on a small handful of nasty animal rights militants who intimidated scientists – and on one occasion disinterred a woman from her grave – the intelligence units did valuable work in this connection. But as the animal rights threat has faded from view, they seem to have greatly widened their beat, perhaps with a view to securing their continued well-financed existence.

Whether the AR 'threat' has really 'faded from view' is a moot point and as Corporate Watch noted:

Ten years ago, animal rights activists enjoyed wide public support and even some positive media coverage. Years of concerted work by the state, however, has normalised the use of terms like 'extremist', 'violent' and 'terrorist' in the media to describe a movement which has never killed anyone.

Whilst Schnews noted that:

How much difference is there between the mass pulling down of fences at Ratcliffe-on-Soar last week and actions at Hillgrove Cat Farm? Both could be argued to be violent, and both were definitely illegal. An artificial division has been drawn between AR and anarchist groups and ‘environmental campaigners and anti-war protesters’ – who are in many cases the same people. The real division between protest groups and how much state attention they receive is not how violent they are but how effective – start to challenge the status quo and the mask of democracy inevitably slips away.

The Guardian is clearly happy to disperse police lies about AR activists, and all the indications are that it will continue to be an organ for police briefings which exaggerate the threats and seek to tar all with the actions of a few, thus justifying bigger budgets, and the kind of OTT policing which activists have been subjected to for a long time, and which the Guardian has recently sought to bring out into the open, but only on those campaigns that it feels comfortable with. At the same time, it continues to reproduce the very same conditions which it denounces, by ignoring the abuses of those in AR campaigns. This goes some way to explaining why there was zero coverage of the travesty of justice that saw campaigner Sean Kirtley shafted by the police and the lower courts. Even his eventual successful appeal was ignored by the Guardian, despite the fact that it was brought to Paul Lewis's attention by a number of activists. The eco-terrorist article shows a willingness of the Guardian Group to entertain a similar campaign against climate change protestors, despite the fact that they have given them mostly positive coverage to date.

So, how do we deal with the corporate media?

Marc Vallee, who has worked closely with Paul Lewis on the series of exposes, returned to his annual gripe about media restrictions at Climate Camp this year. In an open letter he wrote:

The media are not your enemy, but nor should we be your implicit friends either. We are independent and will report all sides of the story truthfully without fear or favour and that should be what you want of us too.

The sad saga of the spotter card, and the Guardian's willful disregard for the privacy of the activists who did not want their faces splashed over the front page of the Guardian, four years after they were singled out for harassment by the police, shows that the reservations that most people have about working with journalists who are all too often motivated by self interest and the possibility of enhancing their reputations and earning power, is not unfounded. Ultimately, Paul Lewis and co, were handed a golden opportunity, thanks to footage and information provided by outside sources, and whilst they have produced some interesting effects with their stories, the experience has left a sour taste in the mouths of many of those who gave them the benefit of the doubt. If they find many of us a little less forthcoming, and a little more insistent on restrictions in future encounters, it can only be hoped that they understand why this has happened.

See also:Can Activists Trust The Corporate Media?