original here..The State—It’s Going Down shared with thanks. photos added. Jun 18,

While the recent rebellion against the police and white supremacy has been historical, it has also been coupled by an attempt by the State to drown the uprising in a sea of tear-gas and rubber bullets. While demonstrations and actions continue, the State is now gearing up for a more long-term strategy of repression, as a vast network of FBI agents, attorneys, and local police comb through hours of footage and social media, looking for targets.

Already, over 10,000 people have been arrested across the so-called US and around 75 currently have federal charges; many of which carry extensive prison sentences. Moreover, there are reports of FBI door-knocks and visits to those that have recently been arrested. Often times people are being asked if they are involved in “antifa” while some are even propositioned with becoming informants.

As the Pentagon readies for the rebellions to come, its important for us to begin to map out and prepare a strategy of long-term movement defense of all rebels swept up during the uprising. Reaching out to our legal correspondent, we sat down to discuss just what is happening and what we can expect.

IGD: Broadly speaking, what has happened, repression wise, since the rebellion? We know that there has been a slew of federal charges and lots of door knocks by the FBI, can you talk about both? 

So much has happened. Across the country, police have unleashed incredible violence against protesters, rebels, journalists, and bystanders. Countless people have been arrested and are facing all sorts of state charges in local courts. I read that the number was over 10,000 arrests nationally.

Additionally, at least 74 people across the country are facing federal charges for their alleged roles in the uprisings. This is particularly concerning because federal charges tend to carry much more severe penalties than comparable state charges, and are less likely to get lenient plea bargains. So that’s 74 uprising participants who are facing very serious prison time, just in a couple weeks. Countless more people have been visited or contacted by federal agents, usually FBI or ATF but also Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, ICE, or DEA.

There’s a long history of this repression, especially against Black liberation movements and to a lesser extent anarchist movements. The FBI has always been a political police force. Their headquarters is named for J. Edgar Hoover who founded the FBI to fight communists and anarchists, and then orchestrated COINTELPRO to destroy the Black freedom movement for close to three decades. Crushing this uprising, this movement, is in their very DNA.

But the more we understand their repression, the better we can fight back against it. So I started compiling information about all the uprising-related federal prosecutions and sharing it with other people involved in legal support and anti-repression efforts around the country.

IGD: How are these investigations unfolding? What tactics and strategies are being used to identify people?

Most of the cases I first reviewed seemed like pretty low-hanging fruit, prosecutions of opportunity. But this week I’ve seen cases where the feds together with local law enforcement put in quite a bit of effort to investigate and identify people. One example was a case out of Philly where a woman is accused of burning two cop cars. The lengths they went to in order to connect this unidentified person at the protest to an identifiable person through online shopping records, social media accounts, promo videos from work, government and commercial databases, etc. surprised even me.

BLURRING faces on your photos helps, easily done free on GIMP

I think this is where we see a significant connection to the J20 inauguration prosecutions in 2017-2018. The government is willing to invest a lot of resources into scouring the internet for photos and videos from protests, analyzing them in excruciating detail to find any unique identifying features that they can, and then scouring social media and other sources for a match. This is the full weight of the surveillance state bearing down.

Other ways they’ve been able to allegedly identify people recently include:

• publicizing photos or videos and asking the public for tips;
• identifying people based on distinctive tattoos that show up in prior booking photos or police reports or social media posts; 
• identifying people based on distinctive articles of clothing who appear wearing a mask at one time, but not at another time;
• social media posts (often public) that show looting, molotov cocktails, calls for rioting, etc.;
• cell phone location data to corroborate someone’s location at a given time
• anonymously submitted videos and photos;
• many people who were caught at or near the scene. 

Continue reading “Mapping US State Strategy of Repression Against the Rebellion”

Western countries see the rest of the world as their playing field fit only for exploitation.— Pramoedya Ananta Toer in conversation with Andre Vltchek, in Jakarta, 2004 The “global playing field” is “level” only from the perspective of the west.— Robert H Wade

The Fate of Capitalism as a Globalist Runaway Train — Radio Free

Spoiler alert

Introduction

The success of Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite (2019) has drawn attention to his back catalogue, in particular his first mainly English-language film, Snowpiercer (2013).

Snowpiercer is a fast-paced movie about a train on a global circular train track, set in the future after a climate change engineering experiment goes wrong. Ice cold temperatures freeze the world into a new ice age. The train is designed and run by the magnate Wilford to circumnavigate the planet perpetually. The passengers, the earth’s only survivors, are segregated: the elites in the luxurious forward cars and the poorest in the grimy tail compartments. 

The tail-enders, led by Curtis, decide to revolt and make a plan to get through the fortified doors of each carriage to take over and control the train. However, after battles with the train guards take a heavy toll on the insurgents, a select few are brought to the front of the train to meet Wilford.

Continue reading “The Fate of Capitalism as a Globalist Runaway Train — Review: Snowpiercer and Parasite”