The 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul provided a vivid demonstration of how even decentralized movements can successfully detect and neutralize infiltrators through collective practice. According to contemporaneous reporting, members of the RNC Welcoming Committee, an anarchist federation of anonymous affinity groups, systematically photographed law enforcement during confrontations and worked to memorize faces over the months.
This practice paid off concretely. At a rally in Mears Park, a protester recognized a man who looked like an anarchist or leftist, dark clothes, red flag, backpack, disheveled appearance, and realized she had photographed him days earlier during a police raid on the Welcoming Committee's headquarters. She spread word to other protesters, who confronted the man and his two associates and told them to leave the park. The men departed and entered an unmarked sedan whose license plate traced back to the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office detective unit. Private investigators associated with the affinity groups were able to recover these plates.
Later the same day, protesters identified two additional men during a planned march, one singled out simply because he was wearing brand, new tennis shoes, a subtle marker of inexperience or incongruity with movement norms. Those men also left in an unmarked sedan.
Academic assessment of security culture during the RNC found it had "a mixed record". It succeeded in "frustrating shorter-term infiltrators operating at the movement's peripheries, but "generally failed to prevent longer-term infiltrators from gaining others' trust" . This distinction is crucial to understand. The men identified in Mears Park and the march were likely peripheral operatives which is shorter-term infiltrators whose behavior or appearance had not yet fully assimilated to movement norms. The deeper penetrations, the operatives who spent months building relationships and trust, remained undetected.
>>Detection Protocols, what the people can actually doThe RNC example illuminates several concrete practices that movements employ to detect infiltrators –
>>Documentation and Memory Work. Systematic photography of law enforcement during operations creates a visual database that can be referenced when unfamiliar faces appear in movement spaces. The protester who recognized the raid participant did so bPost too long. Click here to view the full text.