{"id":84095,"date":"2016-12-12T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2016-12-12T12:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=84095"},"modified":"2016-12-12T12:15:10","modified_gmt":"2016-12-12T12:15:10","slug":"guns-grenades-and-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/12\/guns-grenades-and-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"Guns, Grenades, and Facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

The victory at Standing Rock in the face of state repression is a testament to the power of direct action.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Standing Rock, North Dakota. ChuckModi \/ Twitter<\/p><\/div>\n

5 Dec 2016 – <\/em>The confrontation seemed imminent.<\/p>\n

The governor<\/a> of North Dakota and the Army Corps of Engineers<\/a> had both issued orders to close down Sacred Stone Camp, the main protest encampment near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, and allow construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to proceed. Despite initial warnings that they\u2019d be forcibly removed if they refused to relocate to a nearby \u201cfree speech zone\u201d by December 5, the self-described \u201cwater protectors\u201d vowed to hold the camp. As the deadline approached, some two thousand US military veterans arrived, promising to form a \u201chuman shield<\/a>\u201d to block any eviction.<\/p>\n

Then, yesterday, came the Army Corps\u2019 surprise announcement<\/a>: Dakota Access would not be given the permits it needs to drill under the Missouri River, effectively halting the $3.8 billion oil infrastructure project. Auditors will now conduct an environmental impact statement and search for alternate routes.<\/p>\n

The announcement is a tremendous victory for the water protectors \u2014 even after allowing that the delay could be temporary (the company will appeal, and Donald Trump is a pipeline investor<\/a>), that the pipeline could simply be rerouted (rather than nixed), and that Trump\u2019s \u201claw-and-order\u201d rhetoric is a clear sign<\/a> his administration will have no compunction about cracking skulls.<\/p>\n

The Army Corps\u2019 about-face is especially impressive considering the level of repression protesters have endured in recent months.<\/p>\n

In September, private security sicced dogs<\/a> on protesters trying to obstruct the bulldozing of a sacred site. In October, the police, donning body armor and driving armored hummers, arrested 127 demonstrators<\/a> and used tasers, pepper spray, beanbag rounds, and sound cannons to disperse a blockade that had stopped traffic for days. Last month, law enforcement sprayed protesters with fire hoses<\/a> in below-freezing weather and fired tear gas and rubber bullets to clear hundreds of protesters who were blocking a bridge. Over three hundred water protectors received treatment for hypothermia, and twenty-six were hospitalized.<\/p>\n

Yet the state\u2019s crackdown at Standing Rock has also been more than simple heavy-handed brutality. It\u2019s showcased the modes of repression that the state has developed in reaction<\/a> to recent social movements: namely, aggressive disruption of protest; psychological warfare; and wholesale surveillance and intelligence-gathering.<\/p>\n

At Standing Rock, we\u2019ve seen the largest mobilization of Native American peoples in decades and an efflorescence of solidarity actions around the country. We\u2019ve seen the further escalation of the confrontational, unpermitted protests and direct actions that Occupy Wall Street favored and Black Lives Matter intensified.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019ve also witnessed how the state responds when corporate power is under attack.<\/p>\n

Containment and Control<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the alter-globalization movement of the late 1990s, police were faced with a problem: instead of negotiating with local authorities for permits, activists launched direct actions to try to shut down trade meetings.<\/p>\n

Violent repression, while useful, wasn\u2019t their first choice to subdue these confrontational protests. So police developed another tactic: controlling the physical movement of protesters.<\/p>\n

In urban areas, authorities track protests with coordinated mobile police teams that use their own movement in formation and, if necessary, \u201cless lethal weapons\u201d to \u201ckettle\u201d groups of demonstrators, limiting their motion and impeding their ability to disrupt. Activists with Occupy Wall Street<\/a> and Black Lives Matter<\/a> quickly became accustomed to the containment methods and crowd-control techniques of police.<\/p>\n

In rural areas, police try to physically relocate demonstrations to areas where they\u2019ll be less disruptive. At Standing Rock, this logic was at work in the abortive effort to move the encampment to \u201ca free speech zone\u201d south of Cannonball River, where protests would not obstruct construction.<\/p>\n

The goal is to disorient and disassemble, rendering previously explosive demonstrations manageable. But the authorities have been strikingly unsuccessful at Standing Rock. While they\u2019ve consciously drawn on past episodes \u2014 a series of FEMA training modules for \u201cfield force operations<\/a>\u201d cites a litany of protest actions from recent movements by way of instruction<\/a> \u2014 law enforcement has proven unable to control the movement of protesters.<\/p>\n

Psychological Warfare<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even when it\u2019s working, physical disruption alone is not enough to tame combative protests.<\/p>\n

At Standing Rock \u2014 as at alter-globalization demonstrations<\/a> \u2014 police agencies, government agencies, and corporate interests have launched a public relations offensive to tilt public sentiment against demonstrators. Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now<\/a>, a lobby organization bankrolled by a collection of business associations and conservative labor unions, has created the Standing Rock Fact Checker<\/a>, a website that purports to promote \u201cthe truth\u201d and rebut \u201cmisinformation about the approved \u2014 and nearly complete \u2014 Dakota Access project.\u201d<\/p>\n

These psychological warfare operations also mobilize older \u201claw-and-order\u201d rhetoric about protests. Morton County sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, for example, has described the peaceful demonstrations as \u201can ongoing riot<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

At one point, the sheriff\u2019s department used Facebook to make unsupported claims that water protectors attacked journalists and built bombs. Last month, after a police grenade severely injured a water protector named Sophia Wilansky<\/a> \u2014 sending her to a hospital in Minneapolis, where doctors successfully treated her without having to amputate her severely injured arm \u2014 the sheriff blamed Wilansky\u2019s injuries on a propane canister activists had ostensibly made into a bomb. When Mekasi Camp-Horinek, a water protector and camp coordinator, challenged Kirchmeier\u2019s assertions, the sheriff admitted<\/a> he had misspoken.<\/p>\n

Shortly after backpedaling on the propane canister allegations, the sheriff\u2019s department shut down<\/a>\u00a0its (possibly hacked<\/a>) Facebook page as part of a new public relations push. After a few days of radio silence, the department (now on Twitter too!) took to social media to push out its own web series: \u201cKnow the Truth<\/a>,\u201d a collection of short videos that divides protesters into a reasonable, law-abiding majority and a violent fringe \u201cthat uses them [i.e. peaceful protesters] as their disguise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, these more subtle attempts to influence public opinion have also been supplemented by overt repression: local authorities have arrested reporters<\/a>, and the Federal Aviation Administration has imposed a no-fly zone<\/a> to prevent journalist-piloted drones from documenting protests. Law enforcement has even gone so far as to shoot down<\/a> such drones.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Surveillance<\/strong><\/p>\n

The frenzied build-up of the intelligence capacities of state and local police has given law enforcement at Standing Rock another tool to quash protests. Over the last decade and a half, as a result of this multi-billion dollar investment<\/a> in \u201ccounterterrorism,\u201d American police \u2014\u00a0an army of nearly 900,000<\/a> spread across some 12,600 agencies \u2014 are now armed like soldiers, with sophisticated intelligence systems and information-sharing networks at their disposal. Today, 268 federally funded interagency \u201cfusion centers<\/a>\u201d produce intelligence for state and local police.<\/p>\n

We know that some of these fusion centers have monitored both Occupy Wall Street<\/a> and Black Lives Matter<\/a>, and have some reason to believe that authorities have kept an eye on Standing Rock as well. Emails<\/a> obtained by the independent media outlet Unicorn Riot<\/a> included a \u201cBi-Weekly Cybersecurity Rollup\u201d from the local fusion center that references media reports on actions organized by water protectors. While it\u2019s possible that the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center is providing innocuous updates and nothing more, history suggests that the state has taken a more active role in surveilling protesters at Standing Rock.<\/p>\n

Through these fusion centers and their partner agencies, state and local cops can potentially use powerful intelligence collection tools like \u201cStingrays<\/a>,\u201d which mimic cell towers and collect cellphone data. Police typically deploy this tool in poor, predominately minority neighborhoods<\/a>. At Standing Rock, Vice <\/em>reported in October, cellphones began to exhibit \u201ctelltale sign[s]\u201d of stingray surveillance<\/a>. The same month, the ACLU and NLG seemed to be on to something, sending Freedom of Information Act requests to multiple agencies, including some out-of-state jurisdictions that could potentially provide the Morton County Sheriff with access to a Stringray.<\/a><\/p>\n

While only traces and possible outlets of sophisticated digital surveillance are visible at this point, there is ample evidence of constant intelligence collection<\/a> at Standing Rock. Days at the encampments begin with aerial surveillance<\/a>. If there is an action planned, the planes and helicopters fly all day.<\/p>\n

At checkpoints and roadblocks, police and the National Guard regulate movements and compile data. They stop traffic and question drivers and passengers about their destination and reasons for traveling. They check IDs and license plates of anyone driving through one of the roadblocks.<\/p>\n

Some arrested water protectors even claimed to have been \u201cinterrogated<\/a> by a gang intelligence unit from the North Dakota Department of Corrections and asked questions about where they are camped and with whom they are associated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which Side Are You On?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The repressive tactics deployed against water protectors \u2014 aggressive disruption of protest; psychological warfare; wholesale surveillance and intelligence-gathering \u2014 make their victory all the more impressive. This win, however, wasn\u2019t an accident. The protesters prevailed because they had power. Not mere \u201cmoral authority,\u201d but real social power. Their disruptive direct actions polarized the issue. Their refusal to abandon their encampment heightened the lines of conflict, and the Obama administration blinked first.<\/p>\n

The protesters\u2019 victory underscores an important point: disruptive protests open up new political possibilities by creating \u201celite fragmentation<\/a>.\u201d They widen fault lines, making a politics of accommodation difficult.\u00a0They generate space for new alignments and dramatic policy shifts. Consider, for example, how the sit down-strikes of the 1930s midwifed the political conditions for the New Deal, or the way the sit-ins and Freedom Rides and Montgomery Bus Boycott made the South ungovernable and Jim Crow untenable.<\/p>\n

Could Standing Rock become the wedge that drives another realignment? It\u2019s already exacerbating divisions with the Democratic Party<\/a>. And Sunday\u2019s victory certainly provides more momentum for the forces that could effect a tectonic shift.<\/p>\n

If the water protectors can stop pipeline construction for good, it would be a tremendous advance for indigenous people and the climate justice movement. It would further galvanize popular resistance to the Trump administration, which promises to abandon Obama\u2019s mild reforms and launch new offensives against marginalized groups, workers, and the environment.<\/p>\n

The coming months will be filled with more struggle, more direct action. But already the showdown at Standing Rock has clarified much about the contemporary contours of state repression \u2014 and how to beat it.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Brendan McQuade<\/a> is an assistant professor of sociology at SUNY-Cortland.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 jacobinmag.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

5 Dec 2016 – As the deadline approached, some two thousand US military veterans arrived, promising to form a \u201chuman shield\u201d to block any eviction. Then, yesterday, came the Army Corps\u2019 surprise announcement: Dakota Access would not be given the permits it needs to drill under the Missouri River, effectively halting the $3.8 billion oil infrastructure project. The victory at Standing Rock in the face of state repression is a testament to the power of direct action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonviolence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}