Our Own “Urban Legends”

While there haven’t been any formal write-ups on the following, conversations have also collectivized the following information based on conversations/word of mouth, personal experiences, court proceedings, and social/news media.

Hamilton Police

• Hamilton Police actively and absolutely monitor the social media of known individuals, projects and groups
  • While their “Sam Brown” profile made this more public, it existed previous and has continued since
  • Officers will also live-monitor action page posts, groups, and livestreams during actions or ongoing events, as they did during the Wet’suwet’en rail blockades
    • We understand them to be doing this to: collect intelligence on who is organizing, how many are involved, obtain/capture  identifying details, anticipate what (our) next moves might be, to feed live information to on-the-ground officers, and set up interventions if need be
• On multiple occasions they have contacted event organizers by phone or messenger, unsolicited
  • • This seems to be a tactic mostly limited to “newer” organizers and Indigenous peoples – and is a method of intimidation often under the guise of wanting to be helpful or ensure safety
• Anarchists/militant leftists and Indigenous folks specifically seem to be tracked by the HPS Intelligence unit, or the Hate Crime/Extremism Unit (HCEU)
  • Many recent arrests, surveillance notes, etc. are made or filed by these two units
  • The HCEU has – at least previously – reported actions or graffiti against police as hate crimes in their annual publications used for budget requests and performance reviews.
    • Hamilton Police, Courts & City Council are no strangers to accusations (at least some founded) of corruption and entanglement. During repression after Locke Street, the Mayor of Hamilton (Fred Eisenberger at the time) and city staff moved to classify anarchist symbols as “hate symbols”.

Static & Mobile Surveillance

As mentioned in the article on “Details of Police Surveillance Targeting Wet’suwet’en Organizing”  Hamilton Police have actively engaged in static surveillance of places and events, as well as mobile surveillance of individuals. Mobile surveillance has happened both just prior to arrest, as well as to document an individual’s networks (they call it “lifestyle surveillance”). In some cases it has been “justified” as ensuring the “target” was not breaching their conditions. Police will also surveil individual’s homes, the homes of known associates, hangouts, and workplaces. We don’t address the HPS recent use of a tracking device on an anarchist’s vehicle here.

The G20 Main Conspiracy Zine   goes in to a bit more depth on mobile surveillance and how it’s set up, but we wanted to offer a brief idea of how it works here, based on officer notes from court processes:

• Surveillance operations are comprised of 4-5 teams with one or two officers in each.
• One “team” serves as the “trigger”, which mobilizes and communicated with all other teams if/when you start to move. This is the only team to have direct eyes on you or your home/workplace etc.
• Who the trigger is can change depending on factors such as the length of time you’re being followed/surveilled, which direction you move in, whether you might be suspicious about them etc.
• The other teams move in a perimeter around you. For example driving parallel to you on different roads or hanging way back
  • If you turn, it’s communicated to the other teams, and the team you are traveling towards becomes the new trigger. If you drive on one road for a long time – like highways or country roads – the trigger will switch out with another team
    • This prevents a team from having to follow you for too long or over so many turns that it arouses suspicions.
• Spotting the trigger is generally your only hope in spotting whether you have surveillance
  • Since the triggers can switch out, this theoretically means you would need to spot the same trigger at least two times in different situations before being able to “confirm” you’re under surveillance.

Ontario Provincial Police

It pays to understand a little bit about OPP surveillance, because they have an intelligence division (Provincial Operations Intelligence Bureau) that monitors anarchists, activists, and Indigenous land defenders.

• OPP work with and outside of HPS to also monitor  individuals or groups province-wide they consider to be “extremists” through their Intelligence Bureau (POIB)
• OPP have sent officers to people’s doors to follow up on posts or comments made in facebook groups
  • This happened to individuals associated with Idle No More Hamilton
    • Individuals also received calls and texts from officers, without previous police interactions and without invitation.
  • More recently, it has happened to individuals involved in the far-right driven and funded trucking convoy blockade in Ottawa
• OPP will also actively monitor and comb through social media pages and identify situations (at the very least Indigenous-related actions) to send officers in order to covertly surveil.
  • In one recent case, OPP sent officers to covertly surveil someone cutting and collecting a fallen tree for firewood for Landback Lane that had been partly arranged on the facebook group
• OPP have access to a helicopter with video surveillance capabilities, which was used during enforcement and following operations to do with the Six Nations landback lane reclamation.
• As well, OPP have used a surveillance aircraft (Cessna airplane) to surveil and track situations or individuals. The aircraft has been used on occasion during the Six Nations landback lane reclamation, as well as other “organized crime” operations and enforcement instances throughout so-called ontario.