Tag: Video Surveillance
Barcelona, Spain: Spying and video surveillance in front of the anarchist compas’ house
Last December 22, the police installed a video surveillance camera in front of the house of some anarchist comrades in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona. The camera was located on the side of the roof of a restaurant right in front of the house in question. It was protected by a dark glass casing and pointed directly at the door of the squatted house of the compas (as can be seen in the photograph), which is why it is impossible to think that it was a “security” measure of the restaurant, which already has its own “security” system. The restaurant has refused to give coherent explanations about these facts.
It should be noted that the compas were arrested on August 23 of this year, accused of having participated in the actions of the May 1st demonstration. This is a repressive case being handled by the Violent Extremism Brigade of the Mossos d’Esquadra, an information brigade that now specializes in the persecution of anarchists. After months of investigation, the compas were arrested at the door of their home, and since then members of the secret police have been seen around the property.
We know that the security forces of the state watch and spy in different ways and periodically on anarchists and the revolutionary movements of which they are part. The police have at their disposal all the means to do so, as they have already demonstrated before and do in territories all over the planet. But now we not only have the presentiment, but also the certainty and the proof that proves it thanks to the images and information provided. Continue reading “Barcelona, Spain: Spying and video surveillance in front of the anarchist compas’ house”
Lille, France: Claim of the arson of a Groupama car
The other night, between Monday and Tuesday, we were raging against this world of cages, private property, exploitation and destruction of the living. So we set fire to a Groupama car, which was lying around on the rue des frères Vaillant in Lille.
Among other insurance company crap, Groupama has joined as a civil party in the trial of the Bure association of criminals. So this burning car was also against CIGEO and the people who defend it.
We learned in the bourgeois press that the fire had spread to 5 other cars in the street. We would like to remind you that our target was the Groupama car and not this collateral fire on private property.
The Voix du Nord (DN: local media scum) takes advantage of this to ask for the installation of video surveillance cameras in the neighborhood and to feed a security discourse. This must please insurance companies like Groupama, who are also actively participating in the construction of a world governed by control, speculation and individualism.
Fire to the state, to the prisons and to the insurance companies!
Solidarity with the fellow anarchist locked up in Villepinte, accused of burning diplomatic vehicles and large companies
Solidarity with the defendants of the criminal association of
Bure
Solidarity with the defendants of the POMA criminal association
Some anarchists
Source: Sans Nom
France: Some initial notes on the investigation file against Ivan
The following information comes from an initial quick reading of the investigation file. Therefore, it is necessarily incomplete.
First of all, how did this investigation start?
The Anti-Terrorism Sub-Directorate (SDAT) of the judicial police began an investigation on its own initiative, at the beginning of January 2022, following “confidential information collected by [the] service” (in another document, a judge speaks of “anonymous intelligence”). The police “gathered” the names of two comrades who, according to this information, were likely to be responsible for the incendiary attacks, claimed by anarchists, which had been targeting vehicles in Paris and the surrounding area for years. In the past, different local police stations and the anti-terrorism group of the DPJ 1 (a section of the Parisian Judicial Police) had already carried out investigations, notably for “criminal association”, without success.
The National Division of Research and Surveillance (DNRS, which can be understood as the “operational unit” of the SDAT) set up an operation for tailing the two comrades. They planned to follow Ivan from January 10 to February 3, 2022, and the other person from January 17 to February 3. Concretely, this part of the file includes the statements of the DNRS agents who, in the morning, placed themselves in front of the homes of the two comrades and followed them (on foot or by car) in their movements, at work, photographed them at the supermarket, etc. It should be noted that they often lost sight of their “target” when the latter was moving on foot or by bicycle.
The second comrade was quickly cleared. The DNRS agents say that they saw and photographed Ivan putting up posters in Paris and Montreuil late in the evening of January 18. On the evening of January 21, they followed him again when he went to Paris. The comrade used his bike and the cops lost sight of him almost immediately. They then deployed four “surveillance devices” (cars come to mind). Suspecting that the comrade was still headed towards Montreuil, they placed them at four transportation corridors between Paris and this suburb. One of these “devices” recorded him on the commune of Montreuil (they lost sight of him immediately afterwards). The police used this as an indication that the comrade was responsible for the arson that occurred that night of a SFR van, in Montreuil, and of an Enedis vehicle in the twelfth Parisian district.
On February 23, the SDAT contacted the Bobigny court, which officially tasked it with investigating the comrade. Continue reading “France: Some initial notes on the investigation file against Ivan”
Bavaria, Germany: Camera and microphone found in front of apartment
On Friday, November 25, an audio and video surveillance installation was exposed outside an apartment somewhere in Bavaria. The listening device had been discovered on a bicycle parked there and installed on it with the help of a tool bag under the saddle (see symbol picture). The interception device itself consisted of a main unit measuring approx. 12 x 12 x 1.5 cm (see technical details), to which a camera and a microphone were connected, as well as an approx. 25 x 5 x 4 cm Li-ion battery (16 Ah). The whole installation was hidden in the saddlebag in such a way that it could not be seen from the outside. Only the camera (max. approx. 1 x 1 x 1 cm with a lens diameter of max. 0.5 cm) was led to the outside via a tiny hole and was pointed at the entrance to the corresponding apartment. With the naked eye, however, this was so nevertheless impossible to identify.
A few minutes after removal of the bugging device, the bicycle was picked up by the suspected spies. Recordings made by the listening device were presumably transmitted via the mobile network with the help of a SIM card.
The design and installation of the bugging device on the bicycle make it at least conceivable that this is a spontaneously deployable installation that could be used in this form at short notice and without much lead time. In fact, numerous suppliers of surveillance technology have been marketing corresponding installations for use in the helmet storage boxes of scooters for many years. Continue reading “Bavaria, Germany: Camera and microphone found in front of apartment”
Chile: 4 comrades arrested for the incendiary attack on the meat company “Susaron”
On November 3, the BIPE (Brigade of Special Police Investigations) of the PDI arrested 4 comrades accused of the incendiary attack carried out by the ” Grupo de Respuesta Animal” on September 18, 2022 against trucks of the meat company “Susaron” in the commune of Quilicura.
The investigation would have allowed through surveillance cameras to track the car where they were moving, in addition to triangulating the signal of cell phones in the house where they had gathered before and after the incendiary attack.
Two comrades were also charged with possession of ammunition in the homes that were raided and the four were charged with arson.
The three comrades were taken to Santiago 1 prison/company and the comrade to San Miguel Prison.
Active solidarity with the arrested anti-speciesist comrades!
Source: Publicacion Refractario
Germany: All my friends are bad kids! – about a (meanwhile discontinued) §129-proceeding against anarchists in Hamburg and Bremen
In the following we want to inform you about a procedure according to §129 in Hamburg and Bremen, describe the collective handling of it and give space to individual voices of affected people.
In summer, some people in Hamburg and Bremen opened their mailboxes and there they were again: letters from the Chief Public Prosecutor Schakau of the General Prosecutor’s Office in Hamburg. From 26.05.2020 to 25.07.2022 investigations of different authorities in a §129-procedure against anarchists in Hamburg and Bremen took place. It was about an association construct to which direct actions, mainly in Hamburg, should be assigned over a longer period of time.
Three of the five people against whom the investigations were mainly directed had already been convicted in 2020 in the so-called Parkbank proceedings and were the three official defendants in these proceedings. In the course of the investigation, two other people were selected as potential members of the constructed association, who were similarly investigated.
It all starts (for us) with a report from the BKA to the Attorney General’s Office suggesting proceedings under §129a (formation of a terrorist organization) against the three defendants. However, this is rejected by Attorney General Geilhorn, as are proceedings under §129 (formation of a criminal organization) at the federal level.
One day later, proceedings under §129 begin in Hamburg, led by Chief Public Prosecutor Schakau. In the course of these investigations, measures are initiated against all five suspects of membership; these run from the beginning of May to the beginning of August 2021 and include observations with photo and video recordings, telecommunications surveillance (tapping telephone conversations and reading text messages), the use of IMSI catchers and silent text messages, as well as Internet surveillance (especially the reading of all known and accessible e-mail inboxes).
In the course of this, a large part of the environments of the five defendants were investigated and a large number of people were affected by almost all of the measures. In this context, it should be mentioned that there were at least two people who were not constructed as (potential) members, whose phones were tapped separately with harebrained explanations. It should also be mentioned that the observations and wiretapping measures took place across federal states (Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, Bavaria and Saxony) and in several cases by administrative assistance also in other European countries (Austria, Belgium and Spain).
Ultimately, the proceedings are discontinued on 25.07.2022, officially for lack of evidence. “Officially”, because of course – as we know – parallel surveillance against some defendants also took place according to other paragraphs, also under the sign of police “danger defense”. A more detailed processing of the investigations in the sense of “files for all” will be given elsewhere and at a later time. Continue reading “Germany: All my friends are bad kids! – about a (meanwhile discontinued) §129-proceeding against anarchists in Hamburg and Bremen”
Athens, Greece: Anarchist comrade Nikos Romanos denounces deep parastate with far-right tendencies
Our anarchist comrade Nikos Romanos releases a text denouncing the parastate and fascist actions of the Greek cops inflicted upon him, his family, friends and comrades. The comrade has been under surveillance on and off since his release three years ago by the fascist scum of the Anti-Terrorist Unit, which has now hit a new level since the beginning of the hunger strike by his friend and anarchist comrade Giannis Michailidis, who has been subject to further imprisonment despite serving the required amount of time that would trigger his release.
The repression our comrade is facing should be considered and analysed within the international context of repressive tactics by states against those who dare to fight back without fear. With the current international environment, such as the war in Ukraine, the impending economical crisis threatening on the horizon, technological developments, the repressive apparatus of all states is entering a new stage to counter the struggles that are coming.
Nothing is over, the conflict continues…
Without further hesitance, we let our comrade’s words speak for themself:
The events that I am about to recount took place on Monday 20/6 in the afternoon outside my friend’s house in the centre of Athens. They concern yet another incident where police surveillance by the anti-terrorist police crosses the boundaries and red lines that exist and defines the peculiar relationship between a secret service and its potential target victims.
So let’s get to the facts. The hunger strike of our friend and comrade Giannis Michailidis, who is fighting against the arbitrariness and methods of the bourgeois justice system by putting his body in a barricade, has been going on for the last period of time. He is in a regime of preventive detention because while he has served the sentence imposed on him, the judicial councils, acting as thought police, reject his requests for release, foreseeing his future behaviour as other Pythias*. In essence, they are punishing him not for what he has done and for which, according to their laws, he has served his sentence, but for what they think he will do, based on interpretations that have nothing to do with reality.
During this period, the surveillance of the anti-terrorist police against me has become a daily occurrence, while their presence outside my family’s house has become daily and provocative, with large groups of anti-terrorist police officers defiantly rushing around in their vehicles. This event was interrupted following an engagement with these police officers on Saturday 18/6, where it was emphatically stressed to them that their defiance must end and that their continued presence there would not be accepted. Which was accepted and they ceased their defiant presence, so there is no point in me expanding on evidence that exists and will not be published unless there is a substantial reason. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Anarchist comrade Nikos Romanos denounces deep parastate with far-right tendencies”
France: Two cases of surveillance devices
An audio surveillance device found in the Libertad anarchist library in Paris (France)
An audio surveillance device was found in the Libertad anarchist library in Paris, France. The device was hidden inside the printer-copier of the library. It was composed of two microphones, an antenna, a transformer, a battery, a small box containing an electronic card, a 64 GB SD card and a SIM card from the cell phone provider Orange.
According to the communique which announced the discovery of the device, it was a surveillance device of model RB800 marketed by the italian company Innova. The product description of the RB800 device can be downloaded here.
The case has been added to our list of surveillance devices, which can be downloaded here.
Here are pictures of the device found:
Exarcheia: THIS IS NOT A MUSEUM, THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE!
As you may have already understood, on the buses, in the streets, in the shops, cameras are watching and recording our every step. The social media industry has made us accustomed to the presence of cameras at events, in marches and in our daily lives (in workplaces, schools, etc.), so that our resistance to them is diminishing. It seems as if there is no other way and this leaves us no room to breathe.
The state is installing cameras to protect its infrastructure, to record demonstrations and to monitor its citizens. On the other hand, the petty bourgeoisie use them to protect their sacred property while their visual material is always available to the cops and is used as incriminating evidence in court cases. Under the pretext that this system of surveillance and control will create greater security, it shields the system of domination.
Cameras have never prevented any “crime”, nor have they ever “protected” anyone. The goal of surveillance is to create a sense of constant monitoring of our every step, every social media post is recorded and creates profiles with data that can be used against us.
Then we start to think twice, where we go, what we say, who we talk to and what we do. This superstitious obedience is part of repression and self-censorship. When we are not anonymous we do not act and speak as we would like, but according to what is socially acceptable.
Gentrification is also related to the expansion of surveillance. Continue reading “Exarcheia: THIS IS NOT A MUSEUM, THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE!”