Embed Notice

There are two schools of thought around how to deal with the reality of police infiltrators targeting our scenes.

One is to cultivate practices of anonymity in your interpersonal relationships: use a fake name for organizing, have a burner phone number that you give out, don't let on much about your personal life.

The other is the trust-based model, which involves people having stable identities so you know they are who they say they are and then good community security practices to prevent untrusted people from getting close to anything important.

Obviously (given I use my regular name on here even) I tend towards the second one. But each approach has its advantages. For instance, the first one is smart if you want to work with a lot of strangers, and the second is better if you want to find people to bring in to affinity-based, small group organizing.

Neither keeps you one hundred percent safe. The state will always find a way to criminalize you if it sets its mind to it. But both can help limit the harm, albeit in different ways.

For instance, in a recent (attempted) infiltration here, the cop hung around for almost two years without successfully getting into any spaces that weren't public because the trust model worked. A bunch of us eventually got popped on demo charges, but on the wave of anti-pipeline and anti-gentrification actions he was supposed to be investigating, he got nothing.

Thinking about this after listening to the episode of the @igd_news podcast about the infiltrators in the Denver area... Would love to hear more thoughts.