BASIC POLITICS of MOVEMENT SECURITY

12/26/20: Needs proofreading, lazily converted from a lazily OCR'd PDF.

Foreward

This is months after the talk, and sitting down with the transcript from a recording made me smile. Often it reads so rough, as though sentences were jumbled in a torrent through the mixer. Originally, the plan was to use the talk as a kind of skeleton and warmup exercise, and build up to a proper paper or article. But, finally, i decided against that, and instead opted to leave much of the talk transcript in for print as a record of a live event on this subject. Also, this better frames the group discussion, which was too sharp to leave out. Comrades were unusually thoughtful. Many people had clearly been really thinking about security and wanted a chance to discuss it in some focused setting with other comrades. So hopefully some of that's been saved.

A poet once noted, "Art being bartender is never drunk." Just so there was an agenda in giving this talk, as every political act has agency, tactics, and so forth. Many warnings on security that i've heard have been pretty formalistic. You know, lists of things not to do, mostly. My goal was to short-circuit that for now, and talk about the real life struggle and politics behind security as an area of struggle.

As part of that, i didn't tell people at the meeting but i had steered wide to avoid technical discussion. When security comes up, one problem is a tendency of some guys fascinated with technique and especially technology, to run away with the discussion. This has a good side, for sure, but to me what the movement needs first is to work out our political understanding of security.

In the Q&A, there was one comrade who asked a serious question about how we deal with all the compromises and trade-offs involved in doing security. Such as the benefit of computer encryption for our emails and messages versus the daily added work of using it. i refused to answer, in part because such questions could only be discussed with practical examples which would involve laborious back and forth, too much for a short public meeting. And i was personally simply too tired physically at that point to deal with it seriously as it deserved. His question was left in, though, so that readers could think over his point.

Even here, though, politics shines the farthest light. When a comrade once was offering me the favor of installing an "unbreakable" encryption program on my dusty old Apple, without his ever thinking about it a number of political decisions were involved. Was this so that i could have "sensitive" messaging and say dangerous things to other comrades without fear of the state? If so, that means i should be willing to risk prison for using that "security" measure. Prison or death for my comrades as well as myself. Betting that this particular technology is "unbreakable" or can never be defeated.

Of course, our encryption does not have to be cracked to be overcome. The weakest link is the enduser. Any encryption does no good if your laptop itself has had remote control covertly installed on it, or if it is physically bugged. Journalists whose life's work depends on repelling state computer surveillance—such as those who worked with NSA leaker Edward Snowden—never let their laptops leave their sight. They always had the machines physically with them. It's a strict regimen, for sure.

If in five or ten years NSA or a band of brilliant hackers in Uruguay does succeed in cracking that code, NSA won't be nice enough to warn us. They'll want us to go right on blathering away telling them everything. Plus NSA has by their own admission saved every single email message ever sent globally since the birth of the internet, so if they ever crack that supposedly eternally invincible code someone's ass would be grass. Hmm, that's a lot to risk just for the privilege of talking indiscreetly. Nothing wrong with having computer encryption or using word substitution code in telephone calls or whatever, but am for always being discreet and careful too.

And on a deeper level, have to question the whole idea of trade-offs and compromises as a "problem". Know what people mean by this, and have thought it myself many times. But it's there all the time in life, ordinary life, not just in this rarified slice called politics. Using condoms, isn't that an annoying trade-off or compromise ? Or having faster food instead of an hour's work of home cooked meal because we're kinda beat after work? Or … you can fill in the blanks. If we look at it in a zen political way, though, there is no such thing. No compromises, no trade-offs. That is only an illusion our mind creates in its confusion. If you really understand a situation, fully comprehend it, then you know precisely what you have to do. You don't resent it or question it or wish you could only do half of it, because it's the right action then whatever it is .

Called this an "informal talk" because it isn't based on a book and wasn't built on any research. Just talked about this subject off the cuff, as we might do any evening with comrades. So this version went through some steps in addition to the usual editorial cleanup. A number of comments or explanations were added afterwards, and these are usually marked by being in a grey box. And in a few places examples were moved around or replaced by others which much better showed the point i was hoping to make.

i was afraid to do this talk, because traditionally it is never done ( except in closed members only group educationals, which i've sometimes heard complaints about but never been in one myself ). Never even seen a pamphlet or book on this subject. Obviously,there are good reasons not to publicly disclose your security work. Not sure what this is supposed to look like, so please just take this as a sharing. There are several things which should be clear in reading this, however.

This talk and its discussion that night only scratched the surface of how security should be understood and worked on. Many important things were not even mentioned. So don't worry, we haven't done all the work already, there's lots for you to do. And then there's the consumer product safety warning on the label—there isn't any. That is, the goal of security isn't to protect you personally, though it may help do that. The goal of security is to protect the movement itself, to let the larger struggle against capitalism move forward.

Finally, at the anarchist book fair last May in Montreal, someone handed me a copy of Upping The Anti and asked if I'd seen the latest issue. Really, hadn't even known it was coming out. The day after the security talk, finally got a chance to kick back and open the magazine and start checking it out. Almost swallowed my chewing tobacco. Near the end was an interview with Mandy Hiscocks on the state's repression of the G20 Toronto mass protests in 2010, done before she went into prison. If i had known about it before my talk, would have brought it up to discuss. This is some serious thinking over of what the state did and what the movement did in an intense political crunch in the imperial metropolis. Security in alright now" type situation. While some comrades have seen her interview in UTA already, many comrades in the u.s. probably have missed it as i did. So Mandy Hiscocks is letting us reprint it here to further share her experience, spread her radical insights.

The Politics of Security

A Talk on Security with J. Sakai

This informal talk was originally given on May 27, 2013 in Montreal, as part of Festival of Anarchy.

i'm going to speak for a little while generally. Then i'm going to go more into security, and how state infiltration against the movement has worked. This is in the u.s., mostly, what i'm familiar with. And what its results were, and both the movement's successes and failures in terms of combating the security agencies. Kind of some of what really happened. And then we can have Q&A. Okay?

A lot of times when we think about security we're still kind of uneasy about it. It's kind of like this little box way off on the side. It's not part of how we think of our regular politics or struggles we're involved in. Maybe, to us it's kind of a little dirty, and something confusing. Not certain how we can relate to it as a question. And if we do try to relate to it and deal with it, then we suddenly discover that, 'Darn, there's no Security for Dummies". You go to the bookshelf and there isn't a book. Because the tradition is, at least in the u.s. where i come from, that this is a question where knowledge is handed down and transmitted by word-of-mouth, kind of personally. So sometimes when there's a generational discontinuity, big gap in passing on of this. So that's one of the reasons i'm talking about it here.

i'm not an expert on security from some security commission. i'm not a professor. i have nothing against them, but that's not what i am. I'm not a professor who studied this for their lifetime and who writes books on it. i'm just a movement activist. And so i've been taught basic things that I'd like to pass some of it on. i've witnessed security successes against the state and security failures. I'd like to pass that on.

Security is an area that's essentially divided into two parts. The first is our attempt to understand, keep track of and spotlight police activity. Eventually at some points even penetrate the armor of state domestic security agencies. What traditionally has been called the "political police".

The second part, of course, is dealing with their attempts to infiltrate our movements and activities, gain information against us, jam things up, harm people—and don't make any mistake about it they're definitely into harming people. This is not the nice guys' club, no matter what they always say.

The key thing is, to start with—and it's the most basic understanding—security is not about being macho vigilantes or being super suspicious or having techniques of this or that. It's not some spy game. Security is about good politics. That's why it's so difficult. And it requires good politics from the movement as a whole. Not from some special body or leadership or commission—from the movement as a whole. This is demanded of us. It's part of the requirement to be a revolutionary, that you try to work on this.

When we say "good politics", well, what is that? Everybody will say they have good politics. So really this cannot be assumed. It absolutely has to be broken down. Or, as the congregation always shouts back at the Baptist preachers, "Make it plain". So we're going to try and make it plain, as much as we can here.

First of all, good politics is not the ideology you may or may not have learned from reading a book of Marx or Proudhon or something like that. That's good, it's part of education, part of politics. But that's not sufficient. In terms of security, that and 2 bucks will get you a cup of coffee. That's about it.

Security demands a higher level of politics. A level of practice and experience, in all three of its aspects. It demands individual experience, collective experience, and historical experience, melded into one knowledge. And that may be a lot for us, but it's just part of life, it's what's demanded of us, to do this work.

You know, after all, if you think about it, it's like revolutionary zebras, a collective of them on the high savanna in Africa. They're always being stalked by predators. Well, how do they deal with that? They deal with it usually pretty handily. Because that's their terrain. They can read their terrain. The ripples on the grasses, all the information brought by the wind. They read that, they understand it.

The same with us when we struggle with capitalism. When we attack capitalist society—that area that we're on, that we're engaging them on, this is for that time our terrain. Part of the terrain is still theirs because this is still capitalism. A part of it is now ours because we made it so . And we have to be able to read that terrain, the constant ripples, changes in it, and understand what they mean, you know, in real life.

it's just like, when i came into the movement—had been around the movement from my early teen years, just cause i hung out with the small pack of nerds and leftovers in secondary school, and many were from movement families. But when i was 18, i joined a social-democratic organization which was pretty moderate and pretty worthless, really, but it was there and i was so glad to find other people to join with and do something political.

Within a year i met 4 people in the group or who came to its public meetings, who were agents. And this is not some case of rumors that they were said to be agents, they all sooner or later confessed to being agents. Okay? In each of the four cases i would not have thought they were agents. i was 18 years old, why would i have thought someone was a police agent? i wasn't thinking of that stuff. Someone quietly came up to me and said, "You know so and so is probably an agent, and this is why. You should listen to him, check it out. This is why we think he's an agent."

So, one guy, for example, clearly he'd gone to see a Hollywood movie or two about leftists or anarchists or something, and that's what his act was based on. He was a young college dropout, finding excitement by working for the FBI. So he had a dramatic pose, wore a beret and a black turtleneck sweater, and he smoked Gauloises, the French cigarette, like what he thought the Left Bank of Paris was like. The other thing is he always made these really angry-sounding speeches which were incomprehensible because he actually didn't have any politics, you know. He didn't have any good political points or bad political points, he didn't have any political points at all just about. He was peppering his speech with all kinds of words that he heard others use. The "dialectic" this, the "oppressor" that. It was just peppered in.

After awhile, i wasn't listening to him. i was just tuning him out. But when i was listening to him and he just didn't have any politics at all, that i could ascertain—so what the hell is he doing here? Then it dawned: Oh, that's why you think he might be a police agent! And the more experienced comrades didn't try to beat him up or anything, just made fun of him—and created a kind of bubble around him. Anything important wasn't discussed near him.

When we look at domestic security agencies, the political police ( and it may be somewhat different in the u.s. than in Canada, my experience is all in the u.s. so i may be saying things that are really obvious as A-B-C to people in Canada and you know this all already and that's good, so I'm sorry if this is just old stuff ), what we see is the regular police force always justifies political policing and domestic security persecutions as the normal outgrowth of their claimed attempts to be preventing mugging or having traffic accidents or whatever.

This is totally untrue of course. Instinctively we know it's untrue, but factually it's just completely untrue in several ways. First, obviously, because the everyday police are there primarily to protect capitalist property and maintain that order in general. While the political police are a part of that, but more narrowly are a counter-insurgency police targeted against political enemies of the state, and in particular dissident groups of the colonized peoples and classes. That is, we could see them as an intelligence police for the oppressors in our permanent internal class war.

Let me use an example which may not seem to connect up for awhile. So bear with me:

Once i was on federal government probation for a couple of years for a protest they didn't like, and by "coincidence" my probation officer happened to be the commanding officer of the 113th US Army Military Intelligence Detachment, which is a reserve unit. And his supervising my probation consisted of every few weeks he would appear unannounced at my job, in front of everybody haul me out of work, march me out actually in front of everybody. Put me in the lobby or the hallway and subject me to his, what he obviously thought was his very slick psychological intimidation and brain washing. And it's kind of gross, and i'm going to mention it only for two reasons: one to show what they really are like and secondly because the u.s. military are still using these exact same tactics that they were trying to use on me, which were really simple and ugly:

He would say, basically, "You know, I'm your friend and here you are, you know you're a young guy in trouble and you know you just aren't having fun in life and here's why," and then he would start with all the stories of all the Asian women he'd used and hoW in Korea the lowliest G.I. in his unit had 2 women that sexually serviced him full-time and he of course had many more being the big officer and you know the life you could have if you came over to his side, you know, and became a real man, which i wasn't. Be a real man and you could go around the world raping women, forcing women into brothels and so forth.

So this is kind of wacky. Why would he be saying this dumb crap? And then i realized: well, firstly he's trying to obviously mess with my mind. You know, week after week, we would have this little conversation. First of all if he could get me to break, like, "Okay, i can't take this anymore, and i'm going to punch you out." Well, then, hold it, then I'm in jail for another coupla years. Well, he wouldn't mind that. Or, he keeps emphasizing the thing that, see, he's a real man. i'm not a real man, of course, because i don't have these things, i'm not doing these things that real imperialist men do. So he kept saying to me that i could either hate myself because I'm not a real man, and this may sound funny but this works sometimes on young guys. Or, i could somehow find his spiel attractive because he always said, you know you could have all this. You don't have to have your miserable life, you could have this glamorous military life; you could be in in some Asian country with all the local women you want or if you like another country to have women in, you can do this too.

This sounds unbelievably stupid and crude, and it was. Well, do you know, they're still doing that to this very day. The u.s. army has things that they use. It's unofficial of course. They will disavow it. But they always use it. For example, specially against Asian guys. So you have an 18-year-old Asian volunteer in the army who was stupid enough to join anyway knowing he was going to go to Afghanistan to kill civilians or get his ass blown off. Anyhow, so he's there and the typical thing is, the training sergeant will walk by him and he's in the barracks looking at home pictures. You're lonesome and you're homesick and you're looking at home photos. And the Sgt. will come lean over your shoulder and will say "Oh, that's a nice looking girl, is that your sister?" and you'll say "Oh, yeah." The Sgt. says, "Yeah, I thought so, I fucked her when I was on leave" and then he walks away and says, "Next time I'm going to fuck your mother." So, of course maybe you can… once again, you can punch him out—well, a year or whatever in jail for you—or you can start hating yourself because you have to take this crap, or think you're not a man like he is.

The thing is what does this have to do with policing? With security? It turns out the 113th Military Intelligence detachment was part of the shadow government behind the Chicago Police Red Squad that was investigating and infiltrating the 1960s–70s antiwar movement. They and by implication larger military agencies, were selecting targets and guiding our local police. And in fact they got into a lot of trouble, this military intelligence detachment, because they weren't content with that and they started sending their own guys out to observe the movement, maybe sabotage it or whatever. Except they got caught doing it and that was kind of embarrassing, because the u.s. army wasn't supposed to be doing that in the city of Chicago. The cops are supposed to be doing it. The division of labor for bourgeois legality purposes. But when we say that political police are not just an outgrowth, an innocent extension of local policing, right, this can't be emphasized too much.

Like New York City, in the late '60s the New York City Police Department decided it had to get rid of its Red Squad, because traditionally the subversive squad in the New York City police department was geared on investigating trade unions and all that old stuff that was really hot in 1920. Or was after the Communist Party or something Cold War that was dead as a doornail by then, and they weren't really keeping up with the times. So it became clear that the Red Squad had to be totally rebuilt. So u.s. intelligence—not city hall in New York—u.s. intelligence said, you know, New York is the major capital in reality, it's critical to us. When we see that the police department has a problem which is that they're a white settler police department representing a white settler government, ruling a city with a large colonial population of color that's increasingly getting rebellious. And they don't know what to do about it because they have these old-fashioned anti-subversive ideas.

So who has more expertise in a situation like theirs? Oh, those settler South Africans in Johannesburg!

So u.s. intelligence arranged for a team of counter-insurgency detectives from what was then named the South African Bureau of State Security ( obviously called by the acronym "BOSS" ) in Johannesburg, i.e. the settler Afrikaner political police, to fly over to New York and to help be the big brothers, reorganizing, retraining, getting the New York City political police up to speed. To honor their Apartheid mentors, the N.Y.P.D. also officially named its own political police squad after them, also "B.O.S.S." It was their settler guys' little imperialist in-group joke, since their whole relationship was secret back then ( the squad's name has been changed several times since then, naturally ). Today the New York City political police, which is commanded by a former top CIA official, has branches all over the United States and in eleven foreign cities, including Toronto. It's a little far from New York City, but they clearly have their reasons to maintain that major investment in terms of what they're doing.

The difference between regular policing, capitalist crap as it is, and the political police is going to become apparent as we talk because there is an important difference. One of the things that's true about the political police throughout the capitalist world is that they're all different but also all "family" in the sense that they're descended, unbelievably as it is, from the Okhrana, the department for the protection of the public order of the Czarist government in late 19th-century Russia. Which was the first modern political police force under capitalism and was actually quite innovative. Its genetic makeup persists literally to this day inside political police almost everywhere.

So the Okhrana did the usual things you would think. They followed people, infiltrated groups, arrested people, blah blah, blah. But they actually also had a whole different strategic vision, which was really controversial inside that primitive Russian state. It's controversial actually today in most capitalist states, because there's a division in security between the people who in effect want to do accelerated or militarized policing—"Well, why can't we just arrest them all, just beat them up and shoot them, and put them in prison as much as we can, right, at every opportunity"—versus the people who actually usually end up running things, because to be honest they're smarter. They have an interesting view. They have our class understanding actually. They're just on the other side.

i was in a classified library once—a law enforcement library, with publications that would fill this room, and mostly none of us has ever seen these things because they're classified—reading a classified FBI political journal. The FBI had political journals. One of the agents stationed in their bureau in Latin America—because in American security the world is split between the CIA which handles international stuff and the FBI which handles domestic stuff but that including all of South and Central America, since South and Central America in the u.s. ruling class mindset is a lesser part of the u.s.a. "It's ours, by imperial birthright", kind of thing. So the FBI is there and they have agents throughout all of the capitals and so forth ( as the CIA does, too, obviously ). So this FBI agent is writing a theoretical article about how to stop revolution. He's saying something like: "Some people wanted to just stamp it out, get rid of all the revolutionaries. That's impossible because the overwhelming majority of people in the world hate us. They hate American corporations, they hate Wall Street and they're always going to hate us. There's no way to change this."

i'm reading this and i'm, "Hey, you know, they finally got clued in."

He said, so the "We'll just stamp them out like they're insects or something" strategy isn't going to work. Well, actually, you could never get rid of insects. You could tell that in the real world. So, he writes, that's not really practical. It's not a good way strategically to proceed. What we have to do is let everybody hate us. We can't stop that. Let them have anticapitalist, anti-American opinion, fine. But when they organize into groups, when they have dangerous movements, then we don't worry about average people who hate us. That's like confusing the issue. Then we go specifically into those movements, those organizations and we destroy them, as much as possible. There's no talk anywhere in this article of rights, civil liberties, human rights and laws. They don't care about these things. We think they don't care about them and they really don't care about them. Believe me.

A friend was teaching a class of policemen, of cops. The class was report writing, because you think cops are illiterate and everything else and can't sign their names barely, and that was true more than they liked. And so the commanders get these reports back of some major incident and it's completely indecipherable. So you have to give them the usual how-to-write lectures, i guess. Anyway, the thing is, my friend was telling them: gotta learn to write honestly, concisely, clearly, really tell people what happens, when you write that report. So one of the cops jumps to his feet and says, "If I told what I did I'd be in prison!" Everybody applauds, all the other cops applaud. "Right, no more of this accurate report writing shit."

So, this has nothing to do with laws, they don't care about laws. We don't care about them, they don't care about them. We think most people in the world should hate capitalism. They agree, absolutely. You know, that's why they're always trying to mess us up. Otherwise they'd just be laissez faire—"Oh, the revolutionaries, let them do whatever they want, you know, let the protesters run around, you know, give them whatever, it doesn't matter 'cause you know the people will reject them." They don't think that. Believe me, they do riot think that.

They think, "We have to really be on top of these people, and sooner is better."

So the Czarist Okhrana had both factions; the "stomp them out" cop faction and the more strategic "we have to manage this" faction. So, they ended up doing things like sponsoring trade unions. Originally, trade unions were illegal, workers want to organize and "Hold ill just a minute! you can't be doing that, damn subversives!" And the Okhrana said to the other cops, "You hold it, you can't stop the workers from doing unions. They are miserable and pissed off and they're absolutely going to do something. Why don't we start our own loyal trade unions that are like, you know, hate the boss, demand more money, but love the government. The government is on your side."

So literally the whole legal trade union movement in Russia was started by the political police. If they arrested a band of underground illegal revolutionaries they always would leave one or two people unarrested. They were called breeders. And the reason is really simple. Their worst fear was that rebel movements would start and they wouldn't know anything about it. They wouldn't know anybody in it. That was a really terrible idea to them.

So they'd always leave some people not arrested so when new people came into revolutionary anger and awareness they'd seek out the people who were known as revolutionaries, and since those were under surveillance they would actually just be leading people to be in the files of the secret police. The Okhrana would even sponsor what is now called encapsulated gangs, where there's even like illegal armed terrorist or robbery or guerrilla organizations at the center of which are genuine revolutionaries. But unknown to them mixed in with the new recruits are police agents and they're letting the group proceed because as long as they know everything it's doing, has everything under surveillance, and It has prestige and new people get drawn in, they're Just getting an enormous influx of information. The primary thing for political police. And then when they're ready they wipe this group out and set the stage for a next doomed group.

In other words, they want to control dissent, rebellion, manage it. They don't want to try and eliminate it because they don't think that's possible. They want to control it. By controlling the movement as much as they can. There are limits obviously of what anybody can do on this.

To give an example, they were really alarmed about anarchism. Anarchism wasn't strong enough in Russia in the 19th century to overthrow the government, nevertheless it was destabilizing society and more so all the time as most people here know. So they said, well we have to have an antidote. Let's get people to have a different kind of dissenting ideology than this anarchism. So they picked out a variant of socialism, which was popular at the time called Marxism, and they said, well, we'll make this legal. So if you're a dissident and you want to study all these exotic ideas, learn this Marxism. The great Russian encyclopedia said, "We'll even have an entry on Socialism, who could we ask?" The secret police said: "Well, there's a guy named Lenin. You've never heard of him, but he would be a good guy to have write this." So they even wrote to him, like would you please do the entry on socialism for the kind of official Russian encyclopedia?

Clearly they made a few small mistakes in doing it this way, and in fact there's lots of criticism of them in capitalist police theorists circles, like: "The Czar's secret police really messed it up. They were really too arrogant. They thought they could maneuver around everything. Well, see what a mess they made out of it. Blah blah blah."

So, to the security agencies, the most important thing is not immediate arrests, it's information. That's the lifeblood of their work. And they're going to infiltrate us to get it. As well as all the other surveillance stuff, okay?

So, when we talk about information, to be honest, we are not primarily talking about what a room of 50 radical people do or don't do because they're actually operating on a much bigger scale. Because don't forget, it's probably true that every single person in this room not only has a file in the computers of the Canadian police, but you certainly have a file in the computers of the u.s. political police. That's like virtually guaranteed.

But its effects run much bigger than that because to them any organization of the oppressed, even "gangs" that they are at the moment de facto sponsoring and manipulating, are potentially really dangerous. They could get out of control, get politically aware. So that in Chicago, the city where I'm from, for example, there are roughly, there are known to be over 100,000 youth in street organizations, i.e. the "gangs", maybe even close to 150,000 something like that. There were as of last year about 73 publicly known street organizations ranging from the Latin Kings to the El Rukns to the Gangster Disciples and so on, the groups of young men who are currently shooting each other like in my neighborhood. The largest of these para-military street organizations have many thousands of members.

Many of these 100,000 plus kids, cause it's a lot, there's a file on. But this isn't necessarily a usual individual police file, or an arrest record. No, often it's a security file. A normal police file might have your name, address, phone number and your arrest and cop contact record. While a security file has all your family, your relations, school and medical record, the places you like to go to drink or recreate, the economic activities you are known to be into, the corners where you hang out, your enemies, the crew in the street organization that you work with, your homies, you know, your fellow soldiers and friends. They have a complete dossier of your activities, on who you are. Of course, being cops, they are also clumsy on the job and get many names and facts wrong as cops do.

It's amazing. They just put enormous resources into that. They brag for example, that like if i were in such a "gang" and i got shot, you know one day, the next day they could go around and prevent the conflict from spreading by simply picking up all the guys in my crew. Because they know who they are. Well, hold it, they're not the ones who shot me, right? So, see, the thing is that the guys in my crew were the guys most likely to be shooting back at the other organization that shot me and so the police would be doing "preventive" arresting, you know to stop the revenge back and forth if they wanted to.

So they're pretty open that they have the intelligence to do this, not that they bother. Which raises a few questions, like so you know each person's crew, their basically criminal work associates, you know, the guys they fight alongside, the fallbacks and where they hang out. And you can just arrest them because somebody in their crew got shot even though they didn't do anything yet? You couldn't even begin to do that unless the state security had updated computer files on the personal lives of masses of oppressed people.

Okay. The thing about security agencies and the political police is that they're not playing cops and robbers. One of the big political things, and you're not going to find this in Lenin or something: bourgeois society conditions us to think of rebellion as a cops and robbers game, like their story is it's crime and punishment. There's two sides. The state and whatever. They want us to obey the law and we're saying "no", rebelling, we're the criminals breaking the law and that's what rebellion is.

Well, that's true in some way and in a deeper way not true. Almost all rebellion begins in law-breaking, under capitalism. The problem is that that framework leaves your thinking still within the capitalist system and their values as your reference point.

So that i wish i had a dollar for every time some young guy has told me in a movement meeting or a demonstration, "I'm not afraid to talk to the police because I've done nothing wrong." Well, first of all you're an ass for thinking that. But secondly, it's not about doing something wrong, breaking a law or something, right? Because what's really happening is, it's class war—there's a war between those of us in the oppressed, fighting with the oppressed against capitalism, and those who are defending the system. So this isn't about cops and robbers. But people tend to think of it this way—precisely because that's how bourgeois culture always tries to get us to think of rebellion.

By the way, the "I'm not afraid to talk to the cops because I've done nothing wrong" stuff even on the immediate practical level is not too bright. What the political police want is to update their map. They're mapping the terrain of the rebellions. So if you prove to them, plausibly, that you and your six friends didn't do anything illegal last week—and know nothing about it—that helps them narrow the search for the revs who did. You are just helping complete the map to guide their drone strikes, as it were.

So that, for example, i've talked to guys who are experienced revolutionaries, who've in the past been through armed urban guerrilla groups, who've been in prison, and sometimes they'll say something like, "There's no way the cops could've known anything about us until we got arrested, cause if they'd known a week before, a month before, a year before, well, they would've arrested us then." You see, because this is what my comrade Yaki calls the colonial criminal mentality: that the security cops are about arresting you for violating the law. That's what they care about. That isn't true. They actually don't care about any of that shit. You can't have bigger criminals and law-breakers than the cops.

But people, if you think this way you get completely misled as to what security agencies are doing, because they will absolutely let you do things to get the deeper information or reposition agents they need to advance their own plans. We have plans, they have plans. Don't think they're just individual cops enforcing the law, not true and far from it.

The CIA through an agent inside the Brazilian movement learned for example of an airline hijacking in the 1960s about to take place down there. Now you would think that they would stop that right away. No, because to stop that might have exposed their agent. They let the airline hijacking go right on, all kinds of people were terrorized and some killed, and the airline was hijacked but their agent—he'd proven himself as a rev, right? i mean, you can trust him because of actions like the airline hijacking, the whole thing. Anyway, 2 months later he finally found out about the CIA's No.1 target there, a guy named Carlos Marighella, who was one of the main revolutionary guerrilla leaders in Brazil at that time, who wrote the famous "Mini Manual of the Urban Guerrilla", who they absolutely wanted dead. And they finally killed him. So what do they care about a airline hijacking or a bank job or two or ten if they can get somebody they really want, if they get the information they need to put away a whole group or blunt a whole offensive. They absolutely will do these calculated things in cold blood every time.

So this is just practical experience, part of our practical knowledge as revolutionaries. We have to understand these details.

Let me tell you about an FBI penetration of the movement that had mixed results. Of course, the thing about it is that it's completely over and completely documented publicly so we fully know the results and we are not endangering anybody by talking about it.

At the end of the '60s, i was recruited… i was living on the Southside of Chicago and was recruited by a small group of working-class women to join a community, a revolutionary community group far on the other side of the city. And i got talked into it, so moved to join this organization. It was a working-class, mostly white revolutionary group.

So, this group had an interesting history. When Students for a Democratic Society ( or SDS ), the nationwide white university radical whatever mass anti-war people of that time went on the offensive, one of the things they wanted to do was to break out of their class world. They started student-run organizing projects in poor working class neighborhoods, often using the name "Jobs Or Income Now" or JOIN. Newark, Baltimore, Chicago, a few other places. So in Chicago these student radicals "colonized" one particular poor neighborhood, temporarily moved activists in there to live, and started organizing. One result was a small street organization of Southern white youth that was political. First organized to do a protest march on the local cop station, against police harassment of poor white youth. And the middle-class university radicals were overjoyed. The working class Southern whites who were supposed to be so racist and patriotic redneck and against the movement, well, they had convinced some of them in this neighborhood to join the movement. To be anti-war and for the Black revolutionaries and even ally with them and so on.

To some degree, though, those middle-class radicals were way inexperienced and didn't quite know what they were doing. When i got into that scene, it was surprising politically. The street organization, which had a hard core of a couple of dozen members mostly from teenagers to guys in their mid-twenties, and maybe a supporters layer of that many, had a small group of about five or six guys who were central, who were leaders in a somewhat informal way. Everyone looked to them to start things, but two of these guys were clearly like fascists. You have to keep in mind whenever you go down, all the way down into the oppressed and very poor, there isn't one class there but always two. The lower working class and the lumpen do not just coexist, they share the same streets and homes and families, they're people mixed in with each other fighting to survive on the same shared terrain together.

One guy in particular seemed an obvious fascist and an obvious danger, because he really did want to lead things his way. Tom had grown up in the neighborhood, where his mom was still a "working woman" in the same slum residence hotel they had lived in since he was a kid. He had grown up with many of the other guys, and they all knew him as one of the smartest guys around. Actually, he had even gone to Stanford on a scholarship ( few of the other poor white guys had even gone to secondary school ). But Tom had dropped out, had kicked around at a different job, and finally come back home to join the movement. And he was pushing definite strong politics, which to me tripped all the alarm bells.

Say what you want about him, Tom did have game. In 1969 the Panthers had called for their United Front Against Fascism, a national conference to unite the left against fascism in America under their leadership. Whether that's a good or bad idea, not germane to us here. The main Maoist group in America at that time, called the Progressive Labor Party, said, like, "This is outrageous, this is a fraud. The Panthers, who are they? They don't follow Chairman Mao, they have the little red book, but the only true Maoist leadership here is us. So therefore we're going to go to the conference, but we're going to stay a block away. We'll form a line in the street around the conference." What we had heard from the movement grapevine, was that they were threatening to physically stop anybody that came to support the Panthers. Sounded like they'd lost it mentally, going to just beat the shit out of anyone and basically prevent them from going to the conference. Don't know.

But that was a mental moment made in heaven for manipulators like Tom. It isn't true that someone else's bad politics like that early Maoist group trying to play little stalin, only effects them and doesn't hurt us. So he quickly organized a group of our guys from the neighborhood, this was while he was still in the group. They flew out there and they just literally marched right at the Progressive Labor guys who were led by—they actually had their martial arts class there with an instructor with a black belt—Tom went right at the PL karate instructor and punched the shit right out of him. Frankly, because Tom had been seriously fighting people and hurting people his whole life, so you might have got yourself a black belt in a dojo somewhere but this isn't the same deal as getting mixed up in a chaotic street brawl.

So that Summer we heard him saying, pretty smoothly, "Hey, all these black people, they're talking about black power. I'm all for that. That's wonderful. I love them so much we should adopt the same slogan for us—White Power! That should be our slogan, White Power." So some of the guys were influenced, like, "Oh, that sounds pretty cool, white power, I like that." What Tom wasn't telling them was that "White Power" was right then an official slogan of the neo-nazi movement in the u.s. And had the added treacherous appeal of seeming to be only "equal" with Black Power, while denying that in "race" terms settlers didn't need to demand power since they already had it all.

We were saying, "Hold it, just a minute, we might want to think about that, you know, whoa, whoa, whoa." And so Tom went around everybody else, convinced a couple guys to go with him and they went to the button shop and they got a thousand buttons printed up saying, "White people gotta get it on." What exactly does that mean anyway, right? But there's kind of a common theme in the work he was doing, you know. It's all about white people being angry and doing things by themselves and for themselves and that's the main thing. There's kind of a pattern about what he was doing.

Anyway so the women mostly it was a small group of women you see all the propaganda about this group done in the left talked about guys. How they were like a street gang of pro-movement white guys. Teens and men who had come over to the revolution, wonderful, but it was odd that it was almost like there were no women there. But it turns out that there really were women there, and they thought this was really a bad scene. Their guys are really getting turned around.

So first of all they went and recruited some of us to come in, though we didn't know what the hell was going on. And—the other thing was by the way this neighborhood was not all settler. For example it was overwhelmingly poor but it was not all white. It was the major neighborhood center for Native people in the Chicago area, for example. In a similar way, it was a center for some of the Asian peoples. There were 15,000 indigenous people in the neighborhood ( and over 6,000 Asians ), which wasn't really mentioned in the left propaganda or anything because of the importance of the whiteness to the left of the young guys they were organizing…

So the women with the group started recruiting a few people of color and women with civil rights movement experience, basically just to make certain there wasn't a racist outbreak going on there. And then they convinced some guys, they talked to some of the guys and said "look, we have to deal with this, what's going on". Two of the women in particular i remember—one was an older woman, they were both older from my point of view, could have been in their 40s or 50s. One of the women was Native, and disabled and had 2 kids and was on welfare, and the other woman who was truly leading this was a white southern woman from Appalachia who had no education at all except that she had been through union organizing battles as a poor woman working in a factory, and had the klan try to shoot at them and had been communist baited in her town and whatnot for being against racism and so she actually had experienced politics.

So i came to this meeting and the women said you don't know what's happening, just vote with us, don't worry. i said "okay" and they called out one of these guys, the guy who was Tom, the white power dude who was causing all the trouble.

The thing was… Tom was, the guys knew he was a troublemaker, they said that's just how he is 'cause they grew up with marin the neighborhood. He grew up on the streets with them. They all knew each other for years. So to say, Tom is no good and to kick him out, the guys couldn't do this.

But the women they were serious, they just said, "Tom we have to talk about you. The fact is you're always causing trouble, and second, you're a damn racist. No matter what you say, you're a racist. And third, when we add that up, we think you're an agent. Why else would you be doing this shit, right? Except that you gotta be an agent. So, we're taking a vote. Our motion is: Your ass gets kicked out. Oh, by the way, you and all the university students. Part of our motion is that you have to be a worker, a working class person, to be in the group, like it's a union now. All the university students who are being famous at our expense, we thank you for all you've done for us, we love you, and you can now leave because we're now voting to kick you out, too." There were some surprised people in that room.

And bingo! Tom was doing his usual excuses, "oh, it's politics that's so hard for me to learn, 'cause I had no education". Though he had no trouble getting into Stanford. He was hanging his head and whining, "I wanna learn, I'm sorry, give me another chance." But the women weren't going to stand for that shit. The women said, "No, Tom. We've known you your whole life and you're a racist and now you're a damn agent, get out of the room." So they kicked him out.

So Tom went and we thought, oh, that's the end of that. The guy's been kicked out of his own community group by people who've known him his whole damn life. Hey, he's gone permanently, we don't have to worry about him, good or bad, whatever he is. Yeah, we were wrong about that!

Well, Tom went to the university student movement leaders, and they were nationally important people on the left at that point and they'd been kicked out of the neighborhood and were pissed. Tom played them, using his men's solidarity angle. It must have been something like, "Yeah, those bitches, they kicked us out, well I'm with you bro'" and ka-ching! The next movement radical conference, there's Tom being vouched for by these middle-class student leaders. Damn, we know he's an agent, but suddenly he's back in the movement again!

He goes back to California, to Stanford, not to school but to hang out, he makes his living doing armed robberies and boasting about it. He's knocking over a liquor store, a grocery store, whatever, he's doing armed robberies, selling drugs, stealing drugs at gunpoint to sell, never gets arrested, gee, wonder why. And beating people up. He's picking fights in the movement. You know, he'll come to a meeting and, "I don't like what you're saying", suddenly he will lunge himself across the room. He was actually really good at fighting. And he'll start pounding the crap outta some guy.

So, half the people in the movement said, "Wow, what a revolutionary! Poor, working class, so angry he can't contain himself, he's gotta be a revolutionary." The other half of the people in the room in the movement said, "You know, he's a stone mental case, he's so crazy that the FBI would never have somebody like that. He's totally undisciplined and untrustworthy. So, he may be bad news, but he's not an agent." So both sides, for different reasons agreed that he wasn't an agent.

Only problem: Tom was an agent. Tom was crazy like a fox. Tom was just a fascist, that's all. So, eventually through the movement he got introduced to the Black Panther Party in Northern Cal and Tom reminded them of a very—to him— important moment in history and this is again where we see the relationship between bad politics and bad security in a practical sense.

Back at that conference, remember, Tom and the guys completely mopped the streets with the Progress Labor activists and sent the Maoists leaving, running for their lives. So Tom could later remind the Panther leadership, "Remember that? I was the guy who did that and I know all this stuff—martial arts, bomb making, I can teach marksmanship, I was in the marines, Iwas in intelligence in the marines. I was really good at, you know, interrogating people, wink wink (i.e torturing people). You got agents, bro', in your group, I can help you with this."

So the Panthers say, wow! They're impressed: a settler guy who had fought on the streets to defend us and he's got all these skills and now he's gonna help us find the agents. So Tom launched on a spree of bad jacketing honest ordinary people in the Panthers, "Yeah that guy, he looks like an agent, beat th crap out of him until he talks, throw him out", torturing people, the whole thing.

It culminated, he had gotten a ranch up in the mountains he called "Guevara Ranch" where he had bomb making classes, literally. So one night they lured a leading Black Panther revolutionary activist named Fred Bennett to "Guevera Ranch". Fred Bennett was leading the defense around getting support for George Jackson and the other Soledad brothers in prison, the black revolutionaries who were leading the struggle in prisons in California at that time. He was the chairman of that committee. Anyway he was killed. He was tortured and shot to death and his body was set on fire, burned and buried, etc. So nobody knew what happened. All of a sudden a couple weeks later the FBI and the police descend, they dig up the body, they started raiding Panther offices and they get a witness saying so-and-so and so-and-so was involved.

Tom suddenly appears in suit and tie before the u.s. senate subcommittee on intelligence to explain how, "Yes, it's terrible the Panthers, they're killing their own people, they're so demented and violent that they're torturing and killing other Panthers. Terrible." Actually of course Tom instigated the whole thing and he was proud as shit of it. For a settler fascist, to have manipulated the vaunted Black Panther Party into killing one of its own best people—and have done it with the stupid help of those "rich university leftists" that he hated so much— he really loved that.

Okay, when you reel that back what do you see?

What you see is a young undeveloped left in which a small group of working-class women figured out who an agent was, and how dangerous he was. Because more than just being smart, Tom was a very aggressive and manipulative guy. And they thought they had gotten rid of him, just banished him out of the movement. But some middle-class guys who had gone to NYUs and Berkeleys, those young white guys said in effect, "Who cares what those women think!" They were sure they knew better.

Tom the "revolutionary", they passed him onto the Panthers who absolutely should have known better, except of course they were caught up in their own patriarchal thinking—revolutionary attitude that's male attitude, aggression, being more violent, forcing your will on people, being the tough important guy… Tom looked great to them!

Well, a lot of people actually ended up getting hurt out of it. They only surfaced one killing because the feds couldn't admit that they had their agent do a torturing and killing spree through the movement. Tom was like, "I was nowhere near anything and Inever knew what happened. I just heard about it later when I couldn't do anything except tell the FBI, blah, blah, blah." Complete lies, the grapevine said.

So here's this mini tragedy. Certainly a successful disrupting of movement activity, that should have been stopped at any number of points, but bad politics covered for agents. So we don't need good politics because that makes us into super people because it doesn't. It's that bad politics—like opportunism, patriarchy, sexism, class privilege—rips up the fabric of our terrain, the area of our radical culture and it weaves instead into that terrain all their old oppressor politics, their values. At which point we're confused, it's all backwards. We're alice-in-wonderland now on their side, their ground, so to speak, even though we don't have their views.

So i'm just going to stop here.

Q&A

Q: I was wondering, you pointed out before, there's no Security for Dummies book where you can learn various techniques and various strategies, but that seems like something that's widely deficient within our movement and people are getting infiltrated quite easily by police surveillance. As you were pointing out, it's the tradition that that information get handed down orally, but if we don't have that information how would you recommend that we cultivate a stronger sense of security within our movements?

J: i can't say that i know the answers, i don't. Like for example the NATO 5 in Chicago, who were set up to be guilty of trying to throw Molotov cocktails at Mayor Emanuel's house. Popular idea, of course. But you shouldn't let the police agent set you up to do it, right? In every mobilization, in every organization, people have to quietly organize themselves to take responsibility for teaching and training. So, you start to learn things and when there are problems like with radical environmental actions or the NATO 5, well… The problem wasn't with these guys who were perhaps injudicious in how they related to this cop, it's the fact that if we don't assume responsibility for politics this is the result. People come, who are not educated, they're let's say naive, they're vulnerable to being worked up by the cops, let's say. This is one problem. It's not the biggest problem, necessarily. There's nobody looking out after them. There's nobody saying, If you want to be doing controversial stuff, don't be doing it with people you didn't know before yesterday. And you have no idea who this guy is. You know, that's not how you do things. Do serious politics with your homies, people who you really know, if you want to do whatever—i'm just saying you should be careful about how you do politics because it changes your life one way or another. This is like a little lesson about how to do it or not do it. Well you see, nobody said this to these guys necessarily. But who takes responsibility for these things? A movement really has to set up mechanisms. Just like there's a book fair here and people take responsibility for all the manifold functions, glorious and unglorious of the book fair. And if you have a movement, people have to take responsibility for all its functions. Hey, security is one of these functions and it's not just being a marshal, and it's not just having a few official roles, right. It's a communal political activity.

Q: This question is because I have been thinking about the challenge of making good security compromises. For instance if you make use of a secure encrypted form of email, because you don't want to be monitored, that inconveniences you somewhat. And because there is a great deal of uncertainty about how closely we're being monitored and what the most secure ways of doing things are, we might be sort of shooting ourselves in the foot rather than just getting stuff done. You said earlier that the security stuff is part of a bigger picture of what we're trying to do, right. So if we make bad security compromises, we're actually going backwards a little bit. We go backwards sometimes, we go forwards sometimes, not every decision we make has to be perfect. [inaudible]… What do you think about, how do you make good security compromises?

J: Sorry, but i won't answer this question. [stir and comments in audience] It's too big. It's a huge subject of trade-offs and compromises, which can only be discussed in practical details. So you and i would be going back and forth between ourselves on this forever, i'm sorry, but it's too big for here.

Q: Can you say what you mean in more detail by security itself, like in a general sense. Because we keep saying it, and the examples tend to help, but i thought it was about the art of attack and defense, and we're always talking about defending ourselves. Could you tell us what you mean by security?

J: i'm not certain i quite understand, but the thing is this: security is not just stopping infiltration. That's a big thing. Because we're actually fighting in an area of the overall struggle, fighting capitalism and its state. Not as an idea or something far away that we protest, but in this area quite intimately. When you go to school, there's a branch of capitalism that's interested in selling you a tuition. And there's a branch of capitalism that's interested in selling you shoes. And there's a branch of capitalism that's interested in nullifying everything we do as rebels and if necessary killing us, right? Security is fighting that branch of capitalism. That's what it's about. It's not basically defensive in nature. It's about the same political struggle we do in our mass demonstrations, you know, in actions or teaching, in whatever, when we go into this and security blends into the edges of the larger struggle. That's why when we start talking about these examples, they blend into organizing and they blend into it because it's part of one political whole.

Q: In your presentation you talked a lot about infiltration. I was just wondering, especially today, how important you think that technique is versus acquiring information through surveillance of social media or photo and video surveillance?

J: Well in reality today, they're both important. i mean the thing is maybe we think they don't need to infiltrate a group because they got it wiretapped and videotaped and everything—only, that isn't how they think really. They really want their people there. It isn't just information in an abstract sense. The biggest problem they have politically is that they have information that they don't understand. And that's their biggest problem actually, when we fight. They need people to stir the mix, cook the dish. This is a war, which means that we're never going to not have agents or infiltrators. That's like saying you'll have a war but you'll never have casualties, that's silly. Of course there'll be infiltrators. Just like they'll never stop us from reaching and influencing and winning over people on their side. Which we do. i have a friend who convinced a cop to leave their side, to not be a cop. Had him as a student in Ethnic Studies, an Asian cop, and he got convinced because it's pretty convincing that cops are the complete enemies of people of color and oppressed people. Just practically speaking, unless you really like shooting people who look like you, you know, who are poor and struggling, you shouldn't be a cop. And the last day of the course he came to my friend after the others had left, he thanked him for what he'd done, he unbelted his holster with his 9mm and gave it to my friend and said: “If you ever need it for the movement, use it,” and walked away. Serious. So it isn't true—and look at Private Manning and all that—it isn't true that we're just on the defensive. We're fighting politically with them. We'll never stop them from doing some messing with us and causing us casualties, and they won't stop us from winning people over.

So it's just like, when i came into the movement at 18 and didn't know anything but was glad to find others and do something political. And within a year i met people in or around the group who were agents. So earlier i've mentioned this one college dropout guy acting like a Hollywood version of a revolutionary who turned out to be working for the FBI. There was another settler guy, his close comrade and friend in the group, who turned out to be a part-time informer for a county sheriff's office. You know what i said about terrain, about knowing what the changes and moves in our terrain mean? Well, this second guy stood out like a dead spot to everyone because… he really hated us! i mean, hated us all personally, as people. He was a student at a conservative bible college, and he truly hated and feared all of us lefties so much that he couldn't even hide it. That stood out. He was acting like the pope trying to be undercover at a convention of Judas fans. Which made comrades think: why is a fundamentalist bible college student who seems to really hate almost everyone in the group even around us at all? There was nothing natural about it. Definitely, this second guy was a candidate for world's worst agent award. It was so pathetic that comrades mostly laughed it off. And anyway, our social-democratic group wasn't exactly shaking capitalism from its foundations, we would have rejoiced and broken out the champagne bottles if we'd ever had any actual secrets to protect (yes, it was also true that any remotely sensitive discussions these clowns were kept away from). So that Dynamic Duo was a good example of complete political police ineptitude, or a badly failed attempt at intelligence-gathering which we had deftly foiled? No, unfortunately, in the slippery long range of things it worked out in a way that shouldn't have surprised me but did.

James Yaki Sayles always told his New Afrikan comrades, over and over, “We have to take ourselves more seriously.” This is a lesson which was really borne home to me, for instance, in this case. And, by the way, this relates to whether agent infiltration is so important to them anymore in an age of total electronic surveillance? This is a question that is raised all the time now—not just by that comrade but whenever the issue of movement security comes up. The interesting fact is, our enemy has a “spare no expense” agenda when it comes to fighting the movement, weak though we are. They want it all, every tool, every weapon, and definitely always see a priority need for human informers and agents. We can make it plain. While everyone in our little group back then laughed off these two obnoxious and obvious white guy agents, what we weren't thinking of was any larger picture. Like, to start with, if they were so isolated then how did they stay in contact with things at all? The answer was that they were part of a small dissident tendency led by one very smart comrade who wasn't considered an agent. Who was politically well educated from the IWW to Leninism, much more so than myself or most other young comrades. Let's call him “A”. So what did that relationship mean? Well, “A” turned out to have a bad weakness which we saw but didn't see. His critical faculties got suspended whenever someone was willing to be his follower, to praise him and politically support his personal agendas. So “A” wasn't bothered by everyone's disbelief in the two agents in his clique. While we dismissed them and laughed it off, the two fumbling agents had tripped over a very useful piece of information: “A”—who was an experienced player in the left—could be a “security aircraft carrier” for their whole team, a controversial though respected activist but one who could be manipulated to give political cover to more police infiltrators. How valuable that one piece of information could be. “A” himself got deeper into the struggle over the years, being smart and curious and important. Wanting to be closer to “real hard-core struggles” such as Black nationalism and working class organizing and even supporting urban guerrilla politics in other countries. Inevitably, we now understand, as he got deeper into the struggle, in at least one important situation he was used to run cover for and validate a police agent who outwardly was his comrade. How often this happened we aren't completely sure, but the magic number isn't likely to be zero. This is something those of us back in early days never understood or foresaw, because his major-league egotism was just so “natural”, so common for many of us in the movement back then that it didn't stand out. It was accepted as normal static on our political radios. Sometimes the most cutting secrets are the ones hidden in plain sight, hidden it turns out by our own hands from ourselves. So human agents aren't just walking ears for the police. They are themselves catalysts as all people are, changing things and transforming things that might have not been otherwise. The problem in the end turned out to be not with the two clumsy agents but with the smart and “political” comrade who wasn't thought to be dangerous like an agent would be—and we totally didn't see it coming. What we do and don't do in our small spheres of political work, often has larger effects in the struggle far beyond us. Taking responsibility for that is hard.

Q: I wonder if you want to speak to… good politics is obviously a defense against infiltration and you gave a lot of examples where you can identify a person as an infiltrator because of their bad politics, or because of our bad politics this person got a long way. But it also seems like branding people infiltrators is obviously really dangerous. I wonder if you could speak to some of the other preventative values of good politics, or ways it may protect us that don't involve us identifying people as traitors—which is probably not even our biggest security problem.

J: It isn't. Security is like all politics, all living. It's art and craft in as much as you need to know how to practically do it. You need experience at it. You can't go around saying, oh, you have bad politics, you're an agent—that's like harmful and silly, frankly. i don't want to get into too much tactical stuff because tactical stuff depends on the actual situation, it isn't a big principle that you're going to run out and apply like a cure-all lotion kind of thing. And when i talk about egotism or patriarchy, in part that's because if i overemphasize it… in the sense that they seem to need cooler people as agents now, you know, who can fit in better. But of course in the '60s and '70s over and over and over again, we saw the same pattern. Only we couldn't stop ourselves. It was beyond our ability, because our politics weren't good enough. And not in any abstract way. Like, you ask people how was Malcolm killed? If you say it was a conspiracy, then it must have been an operation and so how did it work, practically speaking? Malcolm had security and he had trained them, too. This is a guy who basically almost created the Fruit of Islam, the Nation of Islam's security people that cast a long shadow we all respected. So how did he get killed so easily in the Audubon Ballroom? Answer: Eugene Roberts, police agent, who presented himself as war veteran, top martial artist… like, “I like roughing up bad guys. Anybody who causes trouble with you, Malcolm, well don't worry. I won't let anyone…” blah, blah, blah… Malcolm liked that. Sounded really tough, man-competent, you know? He made him head of security. So, did Eugene Roberts have good security? Absolutely for his mission. He had painstaking security. Everybody who walked into the Audubon Ballroom meetings was shaken down, patted down, their bags were emptied, you know, questioned, scrutinized, pushed around. Nobody was going to get past Eugene Roberts and his guys. After a while, of course, many people stopped coming to Malcolm's speeches because they didn't feel like getting messed up and patted down on the way in, and people were complaining to Malcolm about it. So Malcolm said, “Well, this is counterproductive, this security thing!” So he said, “Okay, no more security, no more searching people at the door, no more patting everybody down, no more looking in their bags, just open the doors. It doesn't matter.” Bingo! Eugene Roberts struck the jackpot, got what he was aiming at with this murderous cop scheme. The minute he did that and then you got 3 dangerous other guys known to police coming into the weekly public meeting with shotgun and pistols. They came in and did the assassination in front of 200 people and 2 of the 3 got away. (One was grabbed by the crowd.) Even though all of them were known to the state, the 2 who escaped were never caught or publicly named. Although the police did arrest innocent people afterwards, of course, as they usually do. Malcolm's security didn't do anything to protect him, because it wasn't his security anymore. New York police who were normally all over revolutionary meetings, disappeared for that night, totally not in sight. What a coincidence, they decided to take the night off. So it all worked out really well for the oppressors. Not so well for our side. This happened to us over and over and over again in one way or another, coast to coast. It didn't happen just once, it happened 50, 100, 200, 300 times and you know something, we hardly learned a damn thing from it. So if people are beyond that and they know that, that's excellent—sorry it's just ABCs, but it cost us a lot to tell you this, i mean the knowledge, people died and only then did we get the knowledge in effect that we're dealing with. It's not nothing.

Q: I don't necessarily know if this is a positive example or not. I've had experience of groups I've been a part of having been infiltrated and I feel that one of the things that people have talked about a lot is about how much do you trust your gut? Like how do you go about trusting your gut if you think people are infiltrators without calling people out for being infiltrators when you could be wrong? I would just caution people to not have just such a black-and-white view… you have suspicions about people so they're an informant and you treat them like a spy, but at the same time you don't react against that because of guilt and still include them in everything that you might not want to include them in. I think that people could take a more balanced approach to it and be straightforward about it and try not to alienate everyone they have suspicions of. I don't know what you think about that. It's something that we tried recently.

J: It's true, a lot of security questions when it comes to infiltration are gray, they're not black and white. Like most of them are gray. So you have to figure out how to deal with it. It depends on how much work you put into it. This may sound funny to you, but we used to simply investigate people. It's not a big deal to me. Once the main anti-war group in Chicago was in a crisis because the guy who had the mailing list, they couldn't reach him by phone and they had to do an emergency mailing. So people went out to his house and they knocked on the door and he wasn't home. Where the hell is this guy? He's a retired bookkeeper he told us, so where the heck is he? Oh, he's probably at the neighborhood tavern. And so they went to the neighborhood tavern and said “Hey, you know so-and-so? Did you see him lately? Has he been here today?” And they said, “Oh, you mean so-and-so the cop?” And the anti-war people could only say, “What!?” It turns out the guy was a full-time on-duty Chicago police detective, right? He had the only copy of the movement mailing list for this citywide group… They threatened him with a lawsuit to get the only copy of the mailing list back, but it sure changed things.

Among other stuff, the comrades involved felt like fools. So they formed a small informal but no-nonsense work group to not have it happen again. That wasn't a secret at all, but they didn't share all the details of the work with everyone, which was understood as just common sense. One of the techniques they used was they dug up a sympathizer who owned a small business, and had access to doing credit checks and bank info. Anyone they had questions about, they ran a credit check to see if their identity and work record matched with what they said about themselves. They also did other similar things, sometimes with unanticipated results. As well as checking with movement sources more. As an old Chinese philosopher once said, “No investigation, no right to speak.”

And oh, here's another thing that came up in our movement experience a lot: there were people, there wasn't anything on the surface wrong with them, they were nondescript, they sometimes didn't say anything at meetings. They'd say something fawning like: “Listen, I don't know too much about all these politics. I just wanna help and do your mailings, help do that kind of stuff.” And some groups in the old days, hopefully not now, there was a hierarchy of roles: the important people didn't do any work, physical work, they gave orders and talked, whatever. And all the way down the hierarchy, the kind of new, unimportant people that nobody knew, they were left to do a lot of the practical whatnot. It always sounded a little backwards to me, but anyways… So time and again, we just learned that this was like unbelievably backward on our parts.

When Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz left Boston's Cell 16, the first radical feminist group in the United States, to start a branch they called the Southern Feminist Revolutionary Union or Women's Union or something like that in New Orleans, along the way they picked up this young woman who was a graduate student and who said as usual something like, “I love this feminism, I'm all for you, I don't talk much, I don't know much about it, but, you know, I just want to help. Like I'll do all the paperwork. I'll keep minutes of every meeting. I'll do all the correspondence. You creative leadership people, I want to free you to just go out and I'll just take care of little things.” So, of course, one day they came back to the office and discovered copies of letters that she had inadvertently left. It turns out of course, she really was a grad student and her professor apparently had been contacted by the FBI. So his line was, “Well, in order to get your thesis approved we want things like a psychological assessment of every person in this radical group. We want all their correspondence. We want to know their personal friends, etc., etc. We want to know this and we want to know that. This is all part of your thesis work. Just do this academic work and if you don't give us this we're throwing you out.” She was a rich kid at a fancy university. So, of course she said “I have to do this.” She was like a complete spy inside the group, but instead of being on the police payroll she was actually paying them lots of tuition money to get university credit for being a spy? You do know that capitalist culture is really weird, right?

This whole hierarchy of roles thing—really a bad idea, and not at all the same thing as practical division of labor. Working in the gray areas because we had to, we just looked up people, we thought about who they had worked with before. This wasn't a big witch-hunt or anything. Just because we checked out people's stories and looked at people's backgrounds a lot—because we had to, because we had bad experiences otherwise. This idea that we must automatically assume that everyone is good and trustworthy is just as cracked as the idea that we must assume that everyone is under suspicion and thought to be untrustworthy. Neither is realistic. We play the hand that we are dealt. And you do have to trust your gut and sometimes while you're working it out you put people in a bubble. They're in theory at the meeting, but actually you're working around them, you're protecting everyone from them but you're just not saying anything. i don't know, it sounds Machiavellian or whatever, but it's a war here. We're doing what we can, and if there are better ways then hopefully people will find them.

This new idea that the movement has to be completely transparent to everyone as a principle, especially to people whom we don't trust—to me this is an unconscious influence from the liberal culture or something. That no one should be held back from knowing everything that any part of the movement is up to? This is really new but not too fresh. To be blunt, this is an idea that has come about from the current distortion of the left as part of the cultural zone of “play nice” middle-class reformism. As though bourgeois civil liberties mindsets developed in part by interaction with cops and courts should define how we in the struggle relate and work with each other. As though we aren't outlaws and rebels. This didn't exist in earlier eras when the movement was primarily made up of oppressed working people fighting to survive, guarded in their trust, and for good reasons. Necessity knows no laws.

Q: I was just wondering, do we really need to figure out if someone is an agent or not, in order to figure out that they shouldn't be in one of our groups? One of those things that used to drive me nuts. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. That person is being sexist all the time, they shouldn't be in the group, right? A person who is disruptive so that we can't do our business during meetings shouldn't be in the group. I don't know, maybe it's different here, but a lot of people think it's the worst thing to be like, “No you shouldn't be in this group.” It's just really tough for some groups—maybe not every group—to say that somebody needs to take a time out.

J: Yes, you're right. Can't say any more than that.

Moderator: It's time, the meeting is over.