Police
Spy Agencies Target
Australian Universities
By Laura Tiernan
27 June, 2007
World
Socialist Web
Last
week’s revelation that police intelligence sought to recruit University
of Sydney Students Representative Council (SRC) leader Daniel Jones
to spy on fellow students points to increasing state surveillance of
political activity on university campuses.
A front-page report in the
Sydney Morning Herald revealed that 20-year-old Jones was approached
by an undercover agent on June 6. The intelligence officer—who
introduced himself as ‘Ahmed’—offered to “make
arrangements” in relation to charges against Jones following last
year’s G-20 protests in Melbourne.
In a clear case of police
blackmail, ‘Ahmed’ asked Jones to provide regular information
about student protest activities in the lead-up to this September’s
APEC meeting in Sydney. “He was saying that police needed some
help in the lead-up to APEC and of course they could help me. He said
‘have you got charges against you? We can help with that.’”
Five days later Jones received
a call from ‘Ahmed’ on his mobile phone: “Look Daniel,
the necessary arrangements have been put in place in Melbourne.”
“I was in a dangerous
situation,” Daniel told the World Socialist Web Site. “I
was put in a position where to turn down the offer I was effectively
choosing to be charged.” The undercover cop also offered Jones
money in return for regular briefings.
The agent—who claimed
he was from NSW Police intelligence—already knew many details
about student protest activities. During a twenty-minute discussion
with Jones, ‘Ahmed’ spoke of a newly-formed anarchist collective
called Mutiny, and referred to the International Socialist Organisation,
and Solidarity, saying he was aware of their conflict with another group,
Resistance, over pre-publicity for the APEC protests.
The agent also made clear
his familiarity with Jones’s own political views and affiliations:
“He knew about my attitude to other socialist groups ... he used
exactly the same words to describe them as I have.”
Jones, who is SRC Education
Officer at the University of Sydney, said the above information could
only have been uncovered via surveillance of an online “e-list”
(similar to a bulletin board) used by student activists like himself,
or through state infiltration of student gatherings.
The attempt to recruit Jones
comes just 12 weeks after anti-terrorist police coordinated pre-dawn
raids on the homes of five University of Sydney protestors. Jones’s
Newtown home was one of those ransacked. Students were dragged from
their beds, strip-searched and interrogated, while police seized and
photographed personal belongings, including political leaflets, flyers
and other material. The five were subsequently charged with serious
offences including riot, affray, dangerous conduct and unlawful assembly.
That anti-terror police are
now targeting student politicians is no aberration. The real but unstated
purpose of the battery of anti-democratic laws enacted by state and
federal governments since 2001—including provisions for secret
detention, and the stripping of habeas corpus—is the criminalisation
of political dissent.
The University of Sydney
SRC reports that undercover police have threatened several activists
in recent months:
On February 22, undercover
officers followed and then chased a group of student protest organisers
as they walked through Victoria Park. One of the students was subsequently
cornered in a nearby back lane. A plain clothes officer named a long
list of protestors in a threatening manner.
On the evening of March 14,
following the pre-dawn raids earlier that day, a young female activist
was confronted by two suited detectives as she left choir practice.
They told her to stop going to rallies, and to “watch out”
or the “same thing would happen” to her.
Also in March, at least two
plainclothes officers were present at a public forum convened to protest
the opening of a controversial US Studies Centre at the university.
Students allege that a man taking close-up photographs of audience members
was working for police and that such surveillance is now routine.
SRC President Angus McFarland
said some fellow activists now proceed on the assumption that the SRC’s
activities, including email correspondence and phone calls, are monitored.
“I think a lot of people
would be really disturbed by what’s happening. People have this
rose-coloured view of Australia as a democratic country. But we are
seeing measures which have more in common with the Stasi or a police
state. University is a time when people traditionally question things
and open up and learn about the world. That spirit of inquiry is now
under threat.”
Escalating attacks
Recent media reports have
made unsubstantiated claims that Mutiny and other anarchist groups are
planning “violent action” at protests called to coincide
with the APEC meeting of world leaders in Sydney on September 7-8. These
reports, combined with the activity of undercover agents, raises the
danger that police stooges are infiltrating left-wing organisations
with the express aim of instigating violence and thereby legitimising
sweeping police suppression of the right to demonstrate.
During the recent G8 protests
in Rostock, Germany, agents provocateurs were identified amid riots
that triggered a police-military crackdown. Measures prepared more than
a year in advance—the lockdown of entire suburbs, mass detention
of demonstrators without charge or trial, the erection of prison-camp
facilities and unprovoked violence against government opponents—were
suddenly enacted.
Police surveillance at the
University of Sydney is at least partly connected to government preparations
for APEC. The Iemma Labor government has legislated unprecedented police
measures for the duration of the APEC leaders’ summit, effectively
outlawing the right to protest. The latest of these, introduced early
in June, empowers police to establish checkpoints, randomly search citizens,
seal off the city and surrounding suburbs and prevent entry of designated
persons (and items) into the central business district.
But overt police intimidation
of student activists has a far wider meaning. A creeping assault on
freedom of speech and political activity on universities has occurred
throughout the past decade. In 1995, at the initiative of federal Labor’s
Higher Education Minister Simon Crean, charges were laid in the state
of Victoria against the editors of La Trobe University’s student
magazine Rabelais after publication of a satirical article entitled
‘The Art of Shoplifting’. Then, as opposition among students
to government policy deepened, the Howard government moved to disband
student unions with the introduction of Voluntary Student Unionism (VSU),
eliminating funding for a range of cultural activities including clubs
and societies and student newspapers.
As a new generation of young
people becomes radicalised, state authorities in every country are responding
with methods of surveillance, censorship and repression. Last week the
WSWS carried a report detailing FBI spying and recruitment activity
at universities in New England. Similar measures are underway in Europe.
A comment by right-wing British
commentator Ross Clark, re-reprinted in Murdoch’s the Australian
newspaper over the weekend, reveals something of the discussion underway
in ruling circles. Clark warns that anti-capitalist sentiment, which
grew steadily in the late 1990s, is now re-emerging after a five year
eclipse that was ushered in by the terror strikes of 9-11. He equates
the thousands of G8 protestors in Rostock with the leaders of the terrorist
Bader-Meinhof Group in the early 1970s and warns that “the rich
haters are back on the march”. As Clark’s diatribe makes
clear, increasingly, those deemed a threat to public order and safety
are not terrorists but the growing mass of the population protesting
war and global social inequality.
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