Tagged Data gathering
Police maintain absolute secrecy over counter-terrorism surveillance on anti-fracking campaigners
Police surveillance on an anti-fracking march in Cheshire, January 2016. PHOTO: Netpol
Home Office insists secretive Prevent programme “cannot in any circumstances be considered frightening”
Imagine feeling you have to tell your children to avoid talking about fracking at school, in case it is seen as a safeguarding concern. Or experiencing a knock at your door from counter-terrorism police because your child has been involved in protests against fracking. Or officers visiting your home because you have simply been reporting on these protests.
Imagine staying silent in a Prevent training event when, surrounded by your work colleagues, a police officer mentions opposition to fracking as a potential risk factor for”domestic extremism” and asks if anyone has been involved in anti-fracking campaigns.
Imagine your local council has secretly labelled your campaign as having the “potential for community tension”. Or discovering your college has referred you to a programme designed to “identify and provide support to individuals who are at risk of being drawn into terrorism”.
Most people would find any of these situations terrifying and all have been experienced by campaigners against fracking in the UK.
However, as five separate police forces in the north west of England continue to refuse to say whether or not they are referring anti-fracking campaigners to a controversial Prevent counter-terrorism programme, the Home Office has brushed aside concerns about how individuals might feel about sudden accusations of association with extremism.
It insists this “cannot in any circumstances be considered frightening”.
It’s time to stop smearing anti-fracking campaigners as “extremists”
“Police filming anti-fracking protests in Cheshire, January 2016. PHOTO: Netpol
The way the police persistently label opposition to fracking as “extremism” infuriates campaigners up and down the country.
The National Police Chiefs Council NPCC), which represents senior police officers in the UK, will shortly consult on how local forces should in future plan policing operations in response to protests against fracking – one of the most contentious public order issues of the last five years.
When the consultation, which Netpol has pushed hard for, is finally launched in the coming weeks, one issue it cannot ignore is the persistent labelling of the anti-fracking movement as “domestic extremists”.
In December 2016, the Home Office was finally forced to issue a statement saying “support for anti-fracking is not an indicator of vulnerability” to extremism, after press coverage about City of York Council and a school in North Yorkshire including anti-fracking campaigns in their counter-terrorism advice. Smearing campaigners in this way had not, however, simply appeared out of thin air: it has been part of the constant messaging promoted by counter-terrorism policing units from around the country for many years.
As far back as February 2013, before the site licensed by shale gas company Cuadrilla at Balcombe in West Sussex became the focus of national attention, the county council’s planning committee had been told by Sussex Police about an alleged threat to Celtique Energie’s exploratory drilling site at Broadford Bridge. [
, 3 Mb]
At this stage, counter-terrorism officers in Sussex were still obsessively searching for “extremists” within anti-austerity campaigns in order to add their details to secret police databases, but as the movement against fracking began to grow rapidly, it too was increasingly targeted for surveillance. In November 2013, a Cambridgeshire Police officer was caught on camera trying to recruit a student to inform about a number of groups, including anti-fracking demonstrators.
In 2014, a poorly redacted external review of the extremely violent policing operation over almost 70 days of protests against the drill site at Balcombe the previous summer highlighted the development of a UK-wide policing strategy and recommended that “lessons learnt” should be “fed into the emerging national coordination on fracking”. Its emphasis on expanding the intelligence-gathering role of Police Liaison Officers features prominently in new guidelines for local forces issued in August 2015, which the NPCC is now about to consult upon.
Since then, our work has highlighted the targeting by counter-terrorism officers of a journalist covering anti-fracking protests in Lancashire and of the mother of a young campaigner who took part in protests against shale gas exploration at Crawberry Hill in East Yorkshire.
In 2015, two anti-fracking activists from the north west of England told us they had been referred to the government’s “counter radicalisation” programme, Channel, because of their political opposition to onshore oil and gas extraction. This is now the subject of a three-year legal battle by Netpol against the Information Commissioner to try and obtain statistics about how often such referrals involve anti-fracking campaigners.
At around the same time, we were given an audio recording of a training session that provided concrete evidence that counter-terrorism officers from Merseyside Police were linking anti-fracking protests to “domestic extremism” and making unsubstantiated claims about campaigners who took part in protests in 2014 at Barton Moss in Salford.
This corroborated earlier testimony that police in West Yorkshire told hundreds of teachers to consider environmental activists and anti-fracking protesters, including the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, as potential extremists.
The newsletter issued by Driffield School in North Yorkshire that told parents that “East Riding’s main priorities are far-right extremism, animal rights and anti-fracking” was issued in June 2016 (it has been removed from their website but is available here [, 398 kB]).
Even after the Home Office backed away in late 2016 from claiming a link between anti-fracking protests and extremism, however, police continued to repeat it.
In September 2017, ‘Counter Terrorism Local Profiles’ developed under the government’s Prevent strategy were released that identified protests at Broadford Bridge in Sussex as a “priority theme… where increased tensions or vulnerabilities may exist”. A similar profile for Surrey highlighted “community tensions related to onshore oil and gas operations” in the east of the county.
The Broadford Bridge protests did not start until April 2017, four months after the Home Office’s statement saying opposition to fracking was not a “vulnerability”.
We know this issue really infuriates campaigners up and down the country. In the course of preparing for our forthcoming legal challenge against the Information Commissioner at the First-tier Information Rights Tribunal, we asked people to tell us how they felt about the police describing their campaigning as “extremism”.
We were inundated with responses describing the cross-section of support the anti-fracking movement has attracted and how divisive and insulting it was for the police to even suggest individuals might become ‘at risk of being drawn into terrorism’.
This is why the National Police Chiefs Council consultation cannot avoid this issue. Characterising participation in legitimate campaigning as “extremism” has been used to justify increasingly intrusive surveillance and these subjective judgments may have directly influenced the way the police have treated protesters, often extremely aggressively, at drilling sites.
It may also have led to the wholly unreasonable deployment of undercover officers for infiltration and disruption of local campaigns, a prospect that the NPCC refused to rule out in 2016 when it said that “any tactic, including covert tactics, is for the policing commander for the operation”.
This issue is fundamental to the breakdown in relations between local campaign groups and the police and no amount of reassurances about improved communication will fix this.
It remains a simple but fundamental fact that there is no evidence whatsoever of any link between anti-fracking campaigns and extremism, never mind a risk of “terrorism-related activity”. There is simply no reason for counter-terrorism officers to view anti-fracking protests as a priority for the government’s Prevent programme and no reason for the police to target protesters for “domestic extremist” surveillance.
New national police guidance, when it is eventually published, must recognise this if it has any hope of changing the conduct of future policing operations so they genuinely respect people’s rights to freedom of assembly.
Netpol plans to advise and support campaigners on how to ensure their views are heard in the National Police Chiefs Council consultation, once it is launched. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay in touch.
Durham Police unveils ‘bodycam intelligence database’
PHOTO: West Yorkshire Police
One of the UK’s smallest police forces, Durham Police, is reportedly gathering video captured by officers’ body worn cameras to create a ‘troublemakers’ database – contravening national guidance that officers should not use the technology as an ‘intelligence-gathering tool’.
Body Worn Video cameras, or ‘bodycams’ as they are more usually known, are now a global phenomenon. Most UK police forces use them routinely, as do forces in the US, Australia and Europe. Nor is it just the police that is using this technology: bodycams are routinely worn by bailiffs, security guards, even traffic wardens and council workers.
This is arguably one of the biggest single expansions of surveillance capacity since the introduction of CCTV, and one that is highly profitable for bodycam manufacturers such as Axon (formerly Taser International). Read more
This is Not Domestic Extremism
Launched in 2013, Netpol’s annual “Domestic Extremist Awareness Day” takes place on Monday 6 February. This year, we are calling for a complete end to the meaningless but sinister use of the ‘domestic extremist’ label against all legitimate political dissent.
As we have argued repeatedly over the last couple of years, the term “domestic extremist” means pretty much whatever the police want it to mean.
It is a critical justification for state surveillance on protest movements in the UK, but both the government and the police have struggled to devise a credible definition robust enough to withstand legal scrutiny. As a result, Prime Minister Theresa May’s flagship counter-terrorism and safeguarding bill, announced back in May 2016, is currently floundering precisely because government lawyers have still been unable to codify ‘extremism’ or ‘British values’ in ways that are compatible with fundamental rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Read more
Extraordinary judgment rubber-stamps unfounded link between anti-fracking and extremism
PHOTO: Peter Titmuss / Shutterstock
The Information Commissioner, in rejecting an appeal by Netpol over the refusal of the police to release details of a programme to ‘deradicalise extremists’, has endorsed unfounded and unsubstantiated links between anti-fracking protests and the threat of terrorism.
In October 2015, we asked Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside police for details of referrals made in the prior ten months through Channel, a ‘counter radicalisation’ process that is part of the government’s anti-terrorism Prevent strategy. Channel supposedly offers voluntary support to people identified as “vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism” and although there are a number of agencies involved in it, the police play a central role in its delivery. Rather than overall statistics, we asked specifically for the number of individuals seen as allegedly at risk through their involvement in anti-fracking campaigns.
Our requests were the result of concerns raised with us by campaigners from the region who were angered that their opposition to fracking had been used as an excuse to refer them to Channel, in most cases by universities or further education colleges. All related to an alleged ‘risk’ to adults rather than children.
In a startling determination, the Information Commissioner has said:
Channel may be appropriate for anyone who is vulnerable to being drawn into any form of terrorism… It follows from this that, for a referral to be made to Channel, it must be suspected that an individual is at risk of becoming involved in terrorist related activity.
In effect, the Commissioner is insisting nobody is referred unless there is a good reason for doing so – even if this is for nothing more than expressing legitimate political opinions about fracking. Read more
Report highlights ‘chilling effect’ on freedom to protest against fracking
Netpol has published a new report, ‘Protecting the Protectors: Monitoring the Policing of Anti-Fracking Protests since 2014’, which summarises our activities, findings and analysis of the policing of protests against fracking since 2014.
Drawing extensively on discussions with anti-fracking campaigners, as well as our own observations at prospective fracking sites, the report covers our
- •Engagement with – and development of resources for – anti-fracking campaigners
- Concerns with the policing of anti-fracking demonstrations and camps
- The intrusive surveillance of anti-fracking campaigners; and
- The opaque relationship between the police and the fracking industry .
We have argued that the way policing operations are planned for anti-fracking protests, the scale of intrusive surveillance against campaigners and ‘zero tolerance’ attitudes towards civil disobedience has a cumulative ‘chilling effect’ on freedoms of assembly and expression:
When coupled with an unfounded association with serious criminality and ‘extremism’ and an unwillingness by police to accommodate protests without routinely making arrests, this can start to quickly chip away at campaign groups’ support and participation and have a disruptive impact on their effectiveness and activities.
With the imminence of new test drilling and exploration sites around the country, the report also outlines the next phase of our campaigning work between now and September 2018.
Your can download a copy of the report here [, 1.2 Mb]
Is dialogue with Police Liaison Officers really ‘voluntary’?
A cluster of Police Liaison Officers at the March against Austerity in June 2014. PHOTO: Netpol
Nearly a year after we first raised concerns about new guidelines on the policing of anti-fracking protests, we have finally had some answers to questions we raised with the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC).
In the third of four posts, we look at police attitudes to the use of ‘dialogue’ and ‘liaison’ and whether senior officers have a different understanding from protesters about what these words really mean. Earlier posts cover intelligence-gathering operations and body-worn cameras at anti-fracking protests. Read more
Police chiefs reject body-worn video camera privacy concerns
Body-worn video cameras on police officers in Nottinghamshire. PHOTO: Netpol
Police chiefs show extraordinary lack of interest in privacy issues
Nearly a year after Netpol first raised concerns about new guidelines on the policing of anti-fracking protests, we have finally received some answers to questions we raised with the National Police Chiefs Council.
In the second of four posts, we look at the police’s attitude to the use of body-worn cameras and the implications for protesters’ individual privacy.
In Netpol’s briefing to the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) last year we raised, within wider concerns about the level of intensive and sustained surveillance targeted at anti-fracking protesters, the particular issues of photography and police body-worn video (BWV).
The NPCC guidance makes it clear that police will use live video sources, including video cameras worn by individual officers, supplemented by social media sources. Read more
Police refuse to rule out using undercover officers at anti-fracking protests
PHOTO: Frack Free Greater Manchester
National Police Chiefs Council insists using controversial covert undercover tactics is a matter for local police commanders
In July 2015, the National Police Chiefs Council published new guidance on operations targeting anti-fracking protests. In response, Netpol produced a detailed briefing raising eighteen questions about the scale and tactics of policing operations and the necessity of undertaking significant intelligence-gathering targeting opponents of fracking. Now, nearly a year on, we have finally received a reply from Norfolk Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) Sarah Hamlin, of the NPCC’s National Protest Working Group.
In the first of four posts examining what her answers tell us about police attitudes to the policing of protest, we look at intelligence-gathering and the labelling of protesters as ‘extremists’. Read more
Resisting Prevent: an activist’s guide
PHOTO: Wikipedia
Netpol has put together a new guide for activists on how to start resisting the government’s Prevent strategy at a local level
As part of our support for Together Against Prevent, the campaign tactic adopted by a growing number of organisations, this guide is intended to help activists to organise locally in order to resist the government’s draconian and discriminatory Prevent strategy.
This is a first version that we plan to extend as we discover new ideas for action – if you have any suggestions, contact us. The guide is also a Creative Commons document so please feel free to copy, adapt and expand on it. The text is set out below.