Category Archives: Transcribed

The Lives and Legacy of Martin Sostre (with Garrett Felber)

Book cover of “A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre” featuring a picture of Martin Sostre in many parts
Download This Episode

This week, we’re sharing an interview with Garret Felber, author of the book A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre, which is due out May 5 from AK Press. Garret speaks about the life of Martin Soster, famed jailhouse lawyer who successfully won cases related to the constitutional rights of prisoners, was politicized in prison by the Nation of Islam in the 1950’s, ran radical Afro-centric bookstores in Buffalo NY to radicalize the youth, embracing anarchism during his time imprisoned on a frame up during which he was a celebrated political prisoner resisting cavity searches through the courts, went on to organize after his release for tenants rights and rehabilitating disused buildings for community centers and helping run a childcare. Sostre was a mentor to Lorenzo Komb’oa-Ervin and Ashanti Alston and laid important foundations for modern Black Anarchism in the US.

There’s a lot in here and we hope you enjoy the book and that the story inspires complex, creative and combative resistance to all forms of domination. The transcript for this chat is currently on the post and soon we’ll have a zine and pdf up on our zines page.

Some past episodes touching on Black anarchism:

Announcement

Kevin Rashid Johnson

From the SFBayView Newspaper:

Rashid was “compacted” on May 1 to the Perry Correctional Institution in South Carolina, 430 Oaklawn Rd., Pelzer, SC 29669. His ID number in South Carolina is 397279.

In the transit van, he was severely injured – probably a broken bone – in his left leg. He has not been given any treatment for it.

He is in solitary confinement, with only a concrete slab to sleep on. He can make only one phone call per week. A comrade is helping him get onto the “GTL Getting Out” app so that he can communicate with everyone.

Meanwhile, he has been on hunger strike since he got there. He lost 17 pounds during the first week.

He appeals for maximum publicity and pressure.

The phone numbers listed for the prison are: 864-243-4700 and 803-737-1752.

Make calls and spread the word. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, ID number 397279, must be treated humanely, given good medical care and a decent place to sleep and allowed full access to communicate with his lawyers and supporters. Tell the authorities to meet his demands so he can end his hunger strike.

. … . ..

Featured Track

  • Standing At The Crossroad by Eddie and Ernie from Lost Friends

Continue reading The Lives and Legacy of Martin Sostre (with Garrett Felber)

A Red Road To The West Bank (with Clifton Ariwakhete Nicholas and Franklin Lopez)

logo for "A Red Road To The West Bank" featuring Mohawk Warrior Society logo (with an indigenous person wearing a feather headdress looking West with a blossoming sun behind, nestled in a black and white keffiyeh"
Download This Episode

This week, an interview with Clifton Ariwakhete Nicholas and Franklin Lopez about about the film currently in production via Amplifier Films, A Red Road To The West Bank: An Indigenous journey of resistance and solidarity. The conversation covers some about relationships between the people of occupied Palestine and Kanehsatà:ke in so-called Canada, histories of settler colonialism and resistance of it. Clifton and Franklin are attempting to raise $10000 CAD for the film.

  • Transcript
  • PDF (Unimposed) – pending
  • Zine (Imposed PDF) – pending

Franklin also talks about his recently published kids book The mega-adventures of Koko Sisi & Kiki Pupu that he co-created with his son.

Links:

. … . ..

Featured Track:

  • L’enfant Sauvage by Gojira from L’enfant Sauvage

. … . ..

Transcription

Clifton Ariwakhete Nicholas: I would just listen to what you’re saying about everything and I don’t want to be crass, but I’m going to be a little bit crass. It’s a question of chickens coming home to roost, what’s going on right now. I looked at the history, and it’s like 20-22, years of warfare in a 230 year existence. It’s very telling what’s going on and what the entity do we call the United States is really about. It shows itself. Right now, we’re looking at the death of capitalism, if you really want to look at it. We really are looking at the death of capitalism and when things die, they’re sometimes the most dangerous. Right now, there are two entities that are dying: Zionism and capitalism. They’re thrashing about and taking out everything they can before they go, because it’s a new world coming. Either it’s going to be in flames or ashes, or it’s going to be a new way to do things. But we have a lot of work as humans to do. We have a lot of work amongst ourselves to do, particularly in the centers of power. There’s a responsibility that we hold (we live in this continent. Even myself as Indigenous person, yourself as a non-Indigenous person) to stand up and do something.

Again, I go back on that whole Malcolm X thing. We know, it’s a case of chickens coming home to roost. You can only go around so long and take from so many and kill so many before it comes back to you. The biggest American export has always been a coup, and now it’s coming home. Now the chickens have come home to roost. I love that. I love that Malcolm X said that, because it’s very true what he said. We’re living in a very precarious time. It’s scary. I think about my friend Frank and his family. It’s scary for those little ones. What do they got to look forward to? Then again look at Palestine. Look at what’s going on. What kind of monsters are being created right now? You can only hurt people for so long before they’re going to be damaged beyond recognition, and they won’t care what they destroy, when they destroy it. That’s where we’re at right now.

I was reading an article in Haaretz from Israel, that they’re literally on the cusp of the civil war right now. In that country, in Israel itself, there’s a huge divide happening. Again it’s another case of the chickens coming home to roost. You can only do so much damage until it comes back to you. Everything comes back. Everything comes back. Look what happened to the Romans. Same difference.

TFSR: : Well, hopefully we have a long and peaceful collapse, I don’t know.

Clifton: Well, let’s hope right.

TFSR: Inshallah.

Clifton: If anything happens, I hope the three of us have the same concentration camp.

TFSR: That’s the most we can hope for.

Would you introduce yourselves to the audience with any names, pronouns, location or affiliations that you’d like to share for this chat?

Clifton: My name is Clifton Ariwakhete Nicholas. I am from Kanesatake. I am of the Bear Clan, and I’m very happy to be here.

Franklin Lopez: And my name is Franklin Lopez. My pronouns are he him, and I’m originally from Borinquen, also known as Puerto Rico, a US colony. I’m based in so-called Montreal, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory and I’ve been making anarchist and anti-colonial films for over two decades. I was formerly with subMedia and now with Amplifier Films.

 

TFSR: Awesome. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Clifton, and it’s great to have you back, Franklin. It’s been years. So we’re here to speak to you about y’all’s upcoming film, “A Red Road to the West Bank.” Can you talk a bit about the histories in film and media making that you have, and the visions of the world that you bring to make media?

Clifton: Well for me, I want to share stories. It’s mostly what I want to do. I feel there’s a big gap in the storytelling of what’s going on, both for indigenous people in North America and indigenous people in other parts of the world. We need to be able to bridge that gap through film. I like to be able to tell their stories, in their on their way of telling it, not the way it’s been portrayed. Lately, I find there’s a lot of a lot of real negative implications when they talk about us and it’s not our voices being used.

Franklin: That was great, Clifton. I totally agree with Clifton. It’s great to tell stories and to challenge the narratives. That’s one of the main reasons why I make films. When I came up, I started to see that there was an anti-war movement after 9/11, and I was not seeing what was happening on the streets, but this amazing movement against the war was happening. There was a huge need to challenge that narrative. From that my work evolved to really have a huge focus on anti-capitalist struggles, and specifically anti-colonial struggles that intersect with anti-capitalist struggles. So the film that we’re making, “A Red Road to the West Bank”, is a natural extension of this. It’s about linking those struggles, not in the abstract, but through lived relationships.

Clifton: Moreover, I would say too, it’s about a challenge towards colonialism. That’s what we need to make this this film about. It’s not just an occurrence in one place. It’s a global problem and its ramifications are rearing its head in this age right now that we’re living in. We’re seeing the after effects of colonization and its devastating effects on the people who’ve been colonized. We just watch what’s happening in Gaza right now and that’s the ultimate form of colonization, the utter destruction of the people of Palestine.

TFSR: From some of the short audio clips and previews that you can see of the film that are available on the Amplifier website, you can see this story being told, connecting the global nature of Western imperialism, in particular colonialism, which I think is really powerful. So Franklin founded, ran and worked with subMedia for a number of years, had worked on Democracy Now, I think, has contributed to a number of other media projects that I can’t think of off the top of my head. But Clifton, do you have any prior filmmaking that you want to mention, or was this your first major venture into it?

Clifton: I’ve done about two or three other short films. Nothing as extensive and as at the level of what we’re doing right now. I have worked for a couple years, in media and independent media, working at Concordia, helping them set up CU TV at the time. That was a couple years back. I’m very interested in doing more media work. I’ve always been intrigued by it. Doing jobs working on film sets really gave me the desire to want to do more film. I also love film as a medium. I think that film is an important medium. It reaches so many people, and it has a power to it that you can’t match with any other medium. So I enjoy doing it a lot. I think it could be used in so many different ways. That was my experience going into it years ago when I started doing film work. Then meeting up with Frank later on and collaborating with him a bit on the interview side of things, and doing my own film stuff. I did some stuff with rock musicians. I used to interview a lot of people coming to the Montreal metal scene. I cut my teeth on that, but needed to do documentary because, again, there are thousands and thousands of stories that need to be told, that have not been told. That’s compelling me to do what I’m doing right now and pushing me towards talking about the subjects that nobody wants to talk about.

I’ve always enjoyed outsider subjects. That’s why I’m a metal head too because I’m an outsider. Being a colonized person I’m naturally an outsider, talking with other outsiders who are colonized and getting an inside with the outsiders. It sounds like a little twisted thing, but that’s important to understand that once you find other outsiders you can get into them and understand the story. A lot of times, when you talk with people who are colonized, you don’t even have to explain, because everybody understands naturally what’s happening. With film, in my experiences over the years, I find that film bridges a gap that other mediums don’t.

Franklin: Yeah, I just want to jump in real quick and say that I met Clifton a bunch of years ago, and I finally got to visit him in Kanehsatake. I think Clifton can speak more about this later, but Kanehsatake is a place that’s engrained in the imagination of people in Turtle Island and all over the world as a huge site of resistance. I interviewed him for my show “It’s the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel Fine from The Stimulator.” I did an interview with Clifton, if people want to go back to learn about the Warrior Society and what that was. And if people want a sort of Easter egg, the first episode of “Trouble” was hosted by Clifton wearing a mask. I think people should check that out, because it deals with a lot of things that we’re trying to talk about in our filmmaking. In a collaborative sense, I was in Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq community in New Brunswick, where there was a rebellion around fracking that was going to happen there. I happened to be there coincidentally when the police attacked and a bunch of cop cars were burned. It’s pretty incredible. Clifton took that footage and made a documentary about that struggle called “No Fracking Way” that people should check out as well.

TFSR: That was really amazing footage to go back to. And it’s really kind of off topic, but I’m excited to be speaking soon with someone who’s continuing to work with subMedia about InterRebellium, their new series that’s kind of in the vein of that.

Franklin: Oh I can’t wait. I can’t wait. I’m gonna go see the premiere in Montreal in a couple of weeks.

TFSR: So Clifton, what brought you to bring a camera to the West Bank, to Palestine in 2018? What relationships between communities and struggle in these places, Kanien’kéha:ka and Filasṭīn did you exsperience? What binds were you able to strengthen between those places, in those communities?

Clifton: Primarily, I have to go back to my interest in Palestine. My interest in Palestine goes back many decades, at least 30 years, and the struggles that they had to go through. When I went, I was approached by a group called Independent Jewish Voices out of Montreal, and they asked me if I’d be interested in going. They would help me fund raise, and they send me to Palestine. Naturally, if I decided I was going to go to Palestine, I was definitely going to go and bring my camera with me and film, because I was working prior to that. I was working with a Palestinian filmmaker by the name of Majdi El-Omari, working on his film, doing pre-production, production and post-production with him and getting connected with him. He was one of the people that facilitated my ability to go there. He was a professor at Dar al-Kalima University, which is an arts university in Bethlehem, and he invited me to that conference. Part of that paid for my stay there and the flight and everything else.

We fund raised with Independent Jewish voices, and were able to at least hammer out a ten day stay over there. I brought my camera because at the time, I thought I have to be there and have to document this for two reasons. One of the reasons I went there is on a personal note, my late aunt Lenora, was a very big evangelical Christian, and I had to honor her by bringing her picture to the Holy Land which she wanted to visit. She never got a chance to before she died. So that was part of tha trip. But more importantly, I wanted to document and show how Palestinians and indigenous people here were not different. I think I did a successful thing doing that. I wanted to put a more of a human face on people. I have a lot of people from Palestine just saying hello from Palestine. Every type of person I could meet who’s Palestinian, it was a chance to give them a face. Men, women, children. I really like that.

Originally my documentary was going to be called “Hello From Palestine,” but it ended up going to a different direction. Now, with all the stuff going on in Palestine, when I did film it, I went into a big depression afterwards. So it sat in a can for a while, until recent events lit a fire under my ass. Then I had to get it done. I gotta get this out there, because there’s a story to tell. There’s a very important story to tell too, and that’s the story that we’re discussing in the film.

TFSR: Can you give a working definition of settler colonialism for the audience?

Clifton: Definitely. Well, settler colonialism is explains itself, right? So you have people from another part of the world coming and settling a place, colonizing it, planting crops, building villages and taking over. In the process of doing that, they push out the indigenous populations that are there, in order to create a new settler state. That’s in a nutshell what settler colonialism is. Now. Where we go with it, with that, with settler colonialism, is that we have to add mythology to it. Mythology is important. It’s a vital aspect of settler colonialism. So I’m going to concentrate more on the United States, because in the US there’s a very huge mythos surrounding the creation and the colonization of America by Europeans. So it starts with the mythos of landing in Plymouth Rock, with the Mayflower, with the pilgrims. And then American Zionism kicks in, which is Manifest Destiny, after the first colonies are created, pushing westward and taking it over, because it’s God’s divine will.

The mythology is made when you talk about the so called Founding Fathers of that colonial project. That’s where the Americans go get mythological about it, and they do not consider the fact that they’ve only been in existence for about 220, some odd years. They’re not there since time immemorial. They don’t have that connection to the land. They realize that they did come off a boat at one point, but they don’t want to acknowledge it. It’s difficult when you’re working against this kind of ideology and this kind of mythology that people have been sucked into where they have no grasp, no knowledge of reality, of history, of where they’re from and what they’re about and why they’re there. Indigenous people, we’ve always remembered. We never forgot. We have no choice. This is our reality. We have to remember all the time. And that’s the thing that that settler colonialism does. It wants you to forget. It wants you to be erased.

Now, if you look here in North America, everything indigenous has been erased, it’s been removed. If you look in the United States, they went as far as having Indian removals. So it removed a lot of native peoples and renamed places. You see the same thing in Palestine, where you have absolute villages being totally destroyed, entirely destroyed, and parts being put onto it and erasing what they were. The names being changed, being altered to make them sound more Hebrew, and not Arabic or not Palestinian. You have the same processes happening over here. I think Gord Hill did a great job of explaining the levels of colonization, where we are, where we’ve been, where we’re going. That was an important thing, because people misinterpret when I’m talking about the genocide that’s going on in Palestine vis-à-vis the genocide that happened here in the Americas. We’re talking about a gap of centuries between those two events. In that time, things have changed. The mechanisms of genocide have changed, the methods, the speed of it. But if you’re looking at what’s happened in Palestine, you can recognize that with the first 100 years of colonization in the Americas, it’s in that vein. It’s a process, and in Palestine it’s a little bit different. There are many similarities and there are differences at the same time. Whereas over here you had the violent period, then you had the oppression period, which continues to this day. Over there in Palestine, you have both going at the same time.

So you have the Palestinian population that lives in so called Israel, considered Israeli Arabs, they’re forced to speak Hebrew, forced to be more Israeli than Palestinian. We have the same process that happens with us. Our languages are taken away, our cultures are erased. Then we’re forced into assimilation model, to become Canadians or Americans. There is similarity but difference in that, they want us to become Canadian citizens or American citizens. Whereas in Palestine, not so much. They don’t really want you if you’re not from the Israeli majority and the Jewish supremacist part of that society. It’s eerily familiar.

Franklin: I just want to jump in because I sometimes think that a lot of the terminology that we use to describe concept, feels loaded. “Settler colonialism” is just one of those things that does a good job, but it’s useful to know where the word comes from. “Colonialism,” for instance, comes from this Spanish version of Christopher Columbus’ name. The last name is Colón. Christopher Columbus was the initiator of the colonization in this hemisphere. And settlers, to me, I think the best way to describe it is “squatters.” It’s the squatting of land that’s not yours. It’s this squatting of land by people who are better armed than you are. If people really want to bring this home, imagine if somebody who’s well armed just set up shop in your in your backyard, and eventually runs you out of your home and then erases the fact that you ever lived there. That’s one type of colonialism, but there are other types as well. For instance, the type of colonialism that Canada does all over the world, particularly with mining corporations. They basically go set up shop in a country, extract the resources, destroy the water tables, destroy the environment, break up indigenous movements or indigenous culture, and once they’re done with that, they get the hell out, and they move on to the next one, and etc. That’s it.

Clifton: It’s basically like the Borg in Star Trek. We will assimilate you, take over everything you have, build up the bigger, body of what it is! What I’ve always looked at with colonization as an extension of the Roman Empire. It’s no different. We’re still living in Rome.

TFSR: I think that there is something that predates–just to get a little weird historically–the Christianity that ended up becoming one of the engines for colonization throughout the world, centering out of Europe. It was a Roman Christianity. It was a Christianity that was tied directly to the Imperium and to the ideas of imperial rule, centralization of power, homogenization. So it’s not surprising that once it integrated into the Roman State, it’s continued emulating those same values and those same models and terminologies and everything. Even the church is based out of Rome. So I think it’s a really good point.

Clifton: It’s very Roman. It’s a very Roman world we’re living in. If you want to get down to the minutia of it, the lanes on our road are the same width as a Roman road. It’s exactly the width of two horses side by side. So we haven’t changed from that. We still do the road processes. We still do the colonization. Because if you really want to look, yeah, it might be named after Christopher Columbus, but it was the Romans who invented it. If you look at what Julius Caesar did to the Gauls, it’s the same as what’s happening to us, and even more, over what’s going on in Palestine. It’s literally a siege of their main cities, and a starvation of their population, and outright slaughter of them afterwards. Of course, there’s a need to humiliate your enemy afterwards. What you see happening right now in the current context of Gaza, there’s a need to humiliate the Palestinian prisoners. That’s directly tied into the Roman world again. You can blame Rome for everything, if you really want to be honest about it, because we’re still living in that. Particularly in America, the capitals are all Romanesque. They have Roman-style things. They want to be Rome. In fact, we even have gladiatorial fights still, called the UFC. It’s no different.

It’s funny, because I was watching a documentary about Muay Thai fighters. A Muay Thai fighter lives in the gym, and he lives right beside the roosters that they use for cock fighting. I just found it kind of odd how humans are, how we do things with each other. How does that relate to how we perceive the world? How do we use that to navigate how we deal with other people? I know I’m rambling right now. Sorry.

TFSR: Franklin, were you gonna kick in or you good?

Franklin: I just wanted to interject that I do blame the Romans forever, for everything.

TFSR: You hear that Caesar?

Clifton: I say “Fuck Caesar!”

[ all laughing ]

Franklin: You can’t say that on the radio, bro.

TFSR: I’ll bleep it. It’ll be good.

Will y’all talk about the framing by all wings of settler colonial States, of resistance–particularly by indigenous or other subjected peoples–as terrorism? And how working within this framework limits the horizons of settler self-abolition and liberation of the land and its peoples?

Clifton: Okay, let’s go into the American history again. The Boston Tea Party. Let’s look at that one. The British North America Act in the late 1700’s, established boundaries for the American colonies. It said to the Americans that you cannot pass the Appalachian Mountains to go west, because that’s what they called Indiana at the time, and it’s where the state of Indiana got its name. But the American colonists were not satisfied with that, because to them, “Why would we allow Indians to live in that land when we could take it from them like we did over here?” So one of the protests they did was they dressed up like Indians and threw tea in the harbor of Boston. It wasn’t about taxation without representation. It was about unmitigated settlerism. You have the same processes happening in Palestine when you have the ultra radical settlers doing the same thing, having their own little tea parties all the time. That was the impetus for the American Revolutionary War. The inability of settlers to steal more land was the actual impetus, not this excuse of taxation without representation. It’s a total lie. It was about the fact that American colonists wanted to steal more land. So you see the same thing happening in Palestine. I forget the name of the Israeli leader that was assassinated because he basically stopped settlers from settling in the West Bank. I forget his name. Was it Yitzhak Rabin?

TFSR: I think it was Rabin, yeah.

Clifton: Yes. So you see how violently they reacted to that fact that they wouldn’t allow settlerism. When they kicked the Israeli settlers out of Gaza, they had to use military units to force them out at gunpoint, fighting with them. That’s the same colonization that we have over here. We have settler colonialism all over the place in this country. The colonists are totally blind by it too, because at the end of the day, everybody needs to live. So even that guy who’s multiple generations of settlerism has passed, is living in a modern context right now, living off the proceeds of that colonization. He doesn’t care because he’s caring about his bills. He doesn’t care about why he’s there, and how he got there. That’s the magic of what we have in this society. What we have now is people don’t care until they’re forced to care. Israelis didn’t care either, until all this started happening over there, then they actually started caring about what’s going on in their country, you know.

Franklin: I think that the experience in Borinquen is exactly that. There was a pretty vibrant independence movement on the island and an anti-colonial movement to have Puerto Rico become independent from the United States, which I should name, was the second colonizer of the island. The FBI, essentially invented COINTELPRO to get rid of the anti-colonial movement, and label it terrorist. It was very successful at destroying it completely. Right now, the pro-independence movement on the island is fairly small. Only people who are really invested in academia, or people who are Puerto Rican expats in the United States, really know the history of what went down there. For most people, it’s been mostly erased. Now the process of colonization on the island is still ongoing. There’s a great fear that Puerto Rico is going to go the way of Hawai’i, where Americans are going to start buying up all the land and Puerto Ricans are just going to be sort of pushed aside. So, yeah, labeling anti-colonial movements as terrorist is a very effective way to get them out.

As your question put it, it doesn’t really give people any sort of material or information as to why or how they got there. Most people don’t really understand why there is a United States to begin with. Or even Puerto Rico, for example, that I am a process of settler colonialism. I’m part of that process. The people who were living there were fully exterminated by the Spanish and now the only thing left of the Taino are our parks, ceremonial parks, recreations, museum pieces, archaeological pieces, etc. Still the process of colonization is not done. It’s not consolidated. Not fully yet.

Clifton: I would add on to that too, on being a terrorist. Whenever you stand, it doesn’t matter how you stand. Armed or not, you’re a terrorist because you’re going against the narrative of the colonial state. We were considered terrorists in 1990, big time. We were called that when we’re not even citizens, which we’re not. We’ll never be citizens of the United States or Canada. I will forever be Kanien’kéha:ka. So Brian Mulroney was right when he called us uncitizens of Canada/US. We’re not. Canada/US were on top of us. That being said, the colonial project, it’s within their interest to do that. It’s like you said, it’s an easy way to demonize a population, to set the public against you. A lot of that stuff was done. I witnessed firsthand how that propaganda model works, watching it on the news unfold in front of my eyes every day in the 1990 crisis and subsequently. It didn’t end over there. It’s still going on to this present day, right now. So we find a lot of similarities with Palestine in that regard.

Again, with the creation of so called terrorists, whenever they react, it doesn’t matter how they react. If you recall, they always say, “Oh, they used violence,” but they didn’t use violence before in Gaza. One time in fact, they walked up to the fence, demanding their justice and they were gunned down. That was considered itself a terrorist act. Our people, included, when we do something in any peaceful way, it’s considered a terrorist act. In 1990 we peacefully occupied the pine forest, and we were brutally attacked by the SQ for that. It resulted in a 78 day standoff. That’s not the only incidence of that. You look across Canada, different indigenous groups do something peaceful, the hammer comes down on them real hard, and they’re considered terrorists at that point. Mind you, there is a little bit of a narrative change in Canada as of the last 20 years or so, but nonetheless, it’s very easy to put that label on us right away.

Clifton: For listeners that might not be aware that when you’re referring to 1990 you’re referring to what’s known as the Oka Crisis to some, right?

Yeah, let me explain that one. I live in an area northwest of Montreal called Kanehsatà:ke, and there’s a town where it’s kind of like were melded into each other, which is called Oka. It is the non-native settlement. Oka, initially in the 1950’s, opened up a golf course. In doing so, they surrounded our cemetery with a road for their entrance way, so that we couldn’t expand our cemetery any longer. We were stuck in that little area to bury our dead. They made a parking lot. They cut down part of the pine forest, which is a central part of our community. Even the name of our community is Kanehsatà:ke, which means a hill of sand. That hill of sand is where we planted those trees to keep the erosion from going into our village. That being said, we found out there were plans to exhume of the graves of our dead, put them in a common grave elsewhere, put a parking lot over the graveyard, cut down the trees and expand the nine hole golf course into 18 holes. That came out in 1988-89. We started to mobilize by 1990. In the spring of 1990, we decided to occupy the pine forest to keep any surveyors, any other construction workers out, to show that this wasn’t going to go through.

From March of 1990 until May of 1990, there was a lot of tension. In May of 1990 there was an attempt by the by the Quebec provincial police force, to enter and remove us from the pines. That failed and things went quiet again for a bit. Then it came to light in July that the municipality of Oka was going to put an injunction on people occupying the pine forest and that’s exactly what they did. They sent in the Sûreté du Québec, which is the Quebec provincial police with their tactical team, and they attacked us in the pines. Some of our men were armed, and we defended ourselves. We fought back, and what ended up happening that day, was one police officer was fatally shot. It’s still questionable about where the shot came from. That being said, a standoff ensued, and it lasted for 78 days, accumulating in the Canadian Army being deployed, and sending somewhere between 4-5,000 soldiers to Kanehsatà:ke to handle 40 Mohawks.

TFSR: Cool. Thank you for sharing that. I know that’s subMedia has some original footage and tells the story in some films. So I’ll make sure to link that also in the show notes. I think it’s fair to say that this film is a continuation of your strengthening ties with those resisting empires from within these two places, within so called Canada and within so called Israel. Are you still in contact with the folks that that you met during the filming of this? Now is a time of increased military and settler militia pogroms throughout the West Bank. Obviously we’ve been hearing about the war, but there’s increasing violence attending every moment of everyone’s days in occupied West Bank. So I wonder if you could talk about how those folks are and ways that you know to support them, besides letting their stories be told.

Clifton: Well, I’m in continuous contact with a lot of the people that I met over there. One in particular was a gentleman, (and I’ll keep him anonymous on this podcast for the time being but) he had a gift boutique just by Manger Square in Bethlehem. When I was filming that one day, he was trying to drum up sales, and he kept asking me to come into the shop. Politely I said “I’m filming. When I’m done, I’ll go see you.” So after I filmed, I went to go see him, and he’s asking me where I’m from, who I am, and as soon as I told him I was an indigenous person of Mohawk decent (I used the word Mohawk because they don’t understand the word Kanienkeha’ka). So I used that word and his eyes got big, and he looks at me and said, “Do you know, Mahmoud Darwish?” I said, “Yes.” He says “You’re a Red Indian?” I said, “Yeah, well if you want to look at it that way.” And he was totally enthralled by that. Everywhere I went in Palestine, it was the same thing. “Oh you’re a Red Indian like us.” That’s the welcoming I got. They were so happy that there was a Red Indian there because of what Mahmoud Darwish had done in this poem: “The Penultimate Speech of The ‘Red Indian’ to The White Man.” It’s an excellent poem, if you want to look at that to get context of colonization. But going on with this gentleman, when October 7th happened, by the time November came around, he had contacted me in desperation and told me “Listen, there’s no sales, there’s no tourists. Nobody’s allowed to travel here and my family is literally starving.” So I took it upon myself to try and find a way so that we can help him out.

What ultimately happened is that I was able to connect with somebody in my circle to have his products from his gift shop, brought to North America and sold, and help his family out in Bethlehem. We continue to do tha, working still with this gentleman. That’s one of the fulfilling and rewarding things that happened for me, to know that I facilitated helping that man and his family eat. Everyone was eating out of that gift shop and for them, no gifts at Christmas means no money year round. So I’m very proud to know that I did help them make a living and have some money to eat. I’m working on trying to get a pipeline of stuff from there to sell, to help them out. One of the things I wanted to do, was possibly open up a boutique for the man in Montreal, to sell his stuff over there. This is one of the ideas floating around but those are the dreams. You know, but that’s another story.

TFSR: Could you tell listeners about what to expect with the film, and sort of what this the story is? Like I mentioned before, that you were there with the cameras in 2018, you talked a little bit about some of the filming situations, but what can people expect to see when they when they see the film?

Clifton: What I’m trying to do is show what colonization is, and that the colonization in Palestine is no different than what happened here and what’s happening here. That’s the basis of what I’m trying to do with the film. If want to dissect the film a little more, I want to look at religion, how religion plays a role in that. For me, in our colonization, religion is a central figure in what happened to our people. It’s the vanguard before the invasion. As Gord Hill pointed out, it’s the tip of spear. The most divisive and the most dangerous thing that ever happened to our people is that religion being used against us. So that’s something I want to look at, and it’s one of the reasons why I went there to the epicenter of this Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition that comes out of that area, from that single city of Jerusalem/Al-Quds. I wanted to visit this place and check that out and understand why and where it came from. Moreover, I wanted to try and dissect what colonization is and some of the key factors in it, like the mythology making. I talk about Zionism, and also talk about American Zionism, which is manifest destiny. It’s the same thing. It’s just an American form of Zionism, and in the same vein, the same context. I want to look at how there is resistance on the part of the American public and the part of the American government to do and act differently, because they themselves are guilty of the same crime. So it’s hard for them to say one thing and do the other thing, even though they’re used to being hypocrites. But in this case, they have a hard time doing that. They have a hard time being critical of a country that’s just like them.

You know what? The funny part is that Israelis will point that out too. “Oh, you’re gonna give the land back to the Palestinians? Why don’t you give land back to Indians too while you’re at it”. They recognize what they are at the end of the day. They do deeply recognize what they are. That’s the main difference, I think, between the Israeli settlers and North American settlers. North American settlers feel as if they were spun from the earth as indigenous people, and they’re not. You know, they’re descendants of people who migrated from Europe. Then again, they try to make it sound as if we’re also immigrants in our own land, that we came from another place too. That’s the argument being used against us. They try and invent fictitious people. In Montreal and Quebec they have this whole invention of a conveniently disappeared people called the St. Lawrence Iroquois, who they say were the first people that met Jacques Cartier. But conveniently, these people no longer exist.

You have the same narrative in a way, in Palestine, where you had this defense: “Well, this is not really people from here. They’re part of what we call the Arab invasion.” They do the same thing with Mohawk people. They try to tell us that we’re not really from here, that we migrated from another place. There’s a lot of lot of similarities between that narrative and what’s going on here in North America with the narrative of colonization and the myth making of colonization. By and large, for this film I want to give voice, and that’s one of the reasons why Frank has Amplifier Films to give voice to the voiceless. I can see for myself, so that I know now about the experiences of Palestine and where do we sit in that. I’ve been told for a long time by Palestinians that we’re very similar. We have similar things. When I went there, whenever I bring Palestinians here to the reserve, to the community, they say “We feel at home.” Then when I went to Palestine, I could say the same. I felt at home. I can see the similarity, the familiarity of colonization in what’s going on over there.

TFSR: Thank you so much for that, Clifton. Franklin’s gonna give us the other details. Are there any places other than following Amplifier Films with this film specifically, are there places online that people can find your writings, or are you on the social media?

Clifton: No, I don’t. Just my YouTube channel. I have a couple films on there. I’m not really active online to do things. I’m doing mostly things with Frank. I don’t have the patience or the time to do the stuff online right now. At the moment, I’m closing up a business, so that’s my priority. Doing this film also. They’re both going in conjunction with each other. So yeah, I don’t have much really to share on that regard, unfortunately.

Franklin: Sorry to jump in. Clifton, you were part of a book on anarcho-Indigenism. I think the people who are part of the show will be interested in that. Maybe you can tell them about that?

TFSR: Thank you. Franklin,

Clifton: Yeah, I was interviewed for a book interview on Indigenism, and I touched on Palestine in the interview. It’s a book called Anarcho-Indigenism. That’s the book, right there. I’m one of the contributors to that, along with Gord Hill and a couple of other people.

TFSR: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, I’ve seen this at the local bookstore.

Clifton: Cool. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for giving us the time to do this. I really appreciate it.

TFSR: It’s my pleasure, and thanks for taking the time. I’m excited for this film that you made possible. So thank you.

Clifton: I am too, because over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Frank’s work and also the pleasure of seeing his current edits and what he’s doing with the footage I took. I really appreciate what’s going on with it, because it’s an important story and I know in my heart that Frank’s the guy to do it. He’s excellent at what he does, and I couldn’t ask for a better partner to do it his project with.

TFSR: That’s true. Big brain, big heart.

Franklin: Oh, thanks, Papi. I owe you some money for that one.

Clifton: Just add it to the bill.

Franklin: He also did a film about the Énergie Est pipeline out here in Quebec as well. I’ll send you those when we hang up.

TFSR: How can listeners support this film, get tastes of it and keep up on its release? What sort of goals and timeframes are we talking about, to get “A Red Road to the West Bank” showing in our community spaces? Will you be trying to tour with it?

Franklin: Absolutely. When Clifton and I started on this project, we were just going to do a very short film, because he shot maybe a couple dozen hours of footage over there. But as we got talking about it, we’re thinking about doing something a lot more conceptual, using his trip to the West Bank as a starting off point. Now what we’d like to do is bring Palestinians to indigenous communities over here to close that loop, to have Palestinians visit places like Kanesatake and Six Nations and other Kanien’kéha:ka territories, and have some sharing of experiences on screen, but also do a lot more creative stuff with animation to visually explain the processes of colonization. We’re getting a lot more ambitious with the project. A few years ago, I worked on a feature film about the Wet’suwet’en resistance, and I learned a lot while doing that. Right now we’re at the process of developing the film. We’re trying to raise funds so that we can raise more funds. If that sounds weird, that’s really the best way that I can describe it. We want this film to be high quality. We also want it to have a lasting impact. Something that just doesn’t relate things that are happening now, but something that people can refer to for years to come, that becomes a useful document to explain colonization.

So people can go to amplifierfilms.ca/redroad, and they can see the trailer. On the website as well we have several shorts that we’re creating to give people a taste of the film. We want this to not just be a film that comes out one or two years after the beginning of production, but a film that is integral to what’s happening in the now. So obviously people are following what’s happening in Gaza. We want to continuously shine a light on what’s happening over there and see if we can help folks out there be as safe as they possibly can, and see if we can help stop Israel and their plans of destroying that territory. So we’re not just gonna sit on this and then show the film we want two years later. We want the film to be constantly out there and show the evolution as we make it. And yes, once we’re done, we plan to tour with it. What way that’s gonna look, we don’t know. At the moment, I’m not going to travel to United States, unfortunately, and neither is Clifton. But you know, by the time the film comes out, maybe the political situation would have changed and travel into the States might become a possibility again.

TFSR: Yeah, that collapse we were talking about might have occurred.

Franklin: Yeah. If I may since I’m here promoting stuff, a couple years ago, I co-wrote and illustrated a children’s book with my son called The Mega Adventures of Koko Sisi and Kiki Pupu. I think it’s a wonderful tool for keeping young kids off screens. The book is really good, if I say so myself, and it has an interesting recipe for some snacks that I think kids are gonna love.

TFSR: When you say keep them off the screens, you mean just because it’s going to be readable to the kids, and also adults can read it to the kids, and that sort of increases a sort of off screen engagement? Or does it have a bunch of activities in it other than the story and the recipes?

Franklin: No, I think what I’m getting at is a larger goal of mine. Really one of the reasons why I started mass producing the books, is just that my son doesn’t really have all of the same issues a lot of parents have with keeping the kids off their tablets or phones or watching television. Partly because we got him interested in books really early on. He’s a normal kid, he does play video games, he does watch TV and movies, but he also has a voracious appetite for books. This book, by the way, I just wrote it and illustrated it for him to give to him on his birthday, because it’s stories that we came up with together. When some friends saw it, they said “This is really good, Frank. You should print more copies and get it to people.” In a very short amount of time, I sold a bunch of them so I decided to go a little further and try to get it out there and really share with parents, the very simple thing of reading as a hobby for kids. It’s something that can be started even before kids actually know how to read, to really extract them from this reality of corporations, which just really want their undivided attention, and who are really creating a mental health crisis and all over the world, I should say.

TFSR: Can you talk about the accessibility of the book? Like what language is this translated into and how can people find it? I was seeing on the GoFundMe that there was a PDF of it, but if you’re trying to avoid screen time for your kid. That could be a good way to touch the story and be like, “Yes, I want more of this,” but where could people get physical copies?

Franklin: The name of the studio that created it is called papistudio.com and the book isn’t is there in Spanish, English and in French.

TFSR: Thank you so much for taking the time. I just had my coffee apparently. It’s always good to talk to you, and I really appreciate the love and the care that you put into how you share stories and how you try to engage people. It says a lot about the vision of the world that you have. So thanks for sharing.

Franklin: Oh, man, thank you so much. I mean, I love your radio show and so for me, it’s a super huge honor to be here. Even the fact that you’re over the radio. The airways just have such a huge spot in my heart, and I wish more people listened to the radio as well.

Countering Dispossession in Casiavera, Indonesia (with David E Gilbert)

book cover of "Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography" featuring a woodcut of a farmer holding a basket filled with fruit in an ecologically diverse area surrounded by banners reading "Manusia MemeLihara Alam Memberi" + "TFSR 4-27-25 | Countering Dispossession in Casiavera, Indonesia (with David E Gilbert)"
Download This Episode

This week you’ll hear our chat with the author of Countering Dispossession: Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography, the political ecologist David E Gilbert (not to be confused with the former Weather Underground prisoner in the US). For this episode, David and I speak about the book, the small community in south Sumatra, Indonesia known as Casiavera, the legacy of colonial land grabs, the people who live there and the agro-ecology of the rainforest at the base of the Arin volcano. You can find more of David’s work at https://DavidEGilbert.Com

Links:

Announcement

May Day

Happy upcoming May Day, comrades known and unknown! I hope that wherever you are and whatever you do, you’re surrounded by siblings in love and struggle, you can take pleasure in the beauty of the world around you, take strength from our predecessors who share our vision of a life unencumbered by state / capital & the other anchors foisted upon our shoulders, and with the energy to create a path towards our desires

Ángel Espinosa Villegas

We had an interview scheduled with Ángel Espinosa Villegas, a trans masc butch dyke, formerly a 2020 uprising prisoner who was transferred to ICE detention for deportation, however the screws seem to have decided to escalate the deportation to Chile rather than let hir continue to speak to the media. Keep an eye out for upcoming interviews with Ángel, and consider checking out hir GoFundMe. At the end of this post there are some statements from Angel…

Supporting The Show

Hey listeners… we’ve had a string of early releases with more on the way coming out through our patreon for supporters at $3 or more a month, alongside other thank-you gifts. If you can kick in and help, the funds go to our online hosting, and creation of promotional materials like shirts and stickers, but MOSTLY to funding our transcription efforts. We hate to ask for money, but if you have the capacity to kick us a few bucks a month, either through the patreon or via venmo, paypal or librepay or by buying some merch from us (we have a few 3x, 4x & 5x sized tshirts in kelly green coming soon), we’d very much appreciate the support. We’re hoping to make a big sticker order in the near future.

If you need another motivator, the 15th anniversary of The Final Straw Radio is coming up on May 9th, 2025 and we are not above accepting birthday presents. That’s 15 years of weekly audio (albeit at the beginning it was more music than talk), including 8 of which 7 of which aren’t in our podcast stream (you can find some early show examples in this link _by skipping to the last page of posts on our blog).

Other ways to support us include rating and reviewing us on google, apple, amazon and the other podcasting platforms, printing out and mailing our interviews into prisoners, using our audio or text as the basis for a discussion of an ongoing movement, contacting your local radio station to get us on the airwaves, and talking about us to others in person or on social media.

Alright, capping this shameless plug!

Angel statements:

These are press statements and direct quotes that Ángel Espinosa-Villegas has provided from inside Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, TX, where she was held from April 1 to April 25, 2025. Ángel is currently in transfer to an undisclosed location, but has not been able to contact loved ones yet. These messages were received by loved ones on the outside throughout the past 3 weeks and she has given explicit permission to publicize these statements.

“We dance a lot, draw our hopes and homes on the walls of this place any way we can. We tell stories of home, hold each other past language barriers because we all know all too well what it’s like to be torn away from our families, hold onto hope, only for it to be crushed cruelly by these heartless fascist traitors. To remain utterly powerless at the mercy of the abusers of gluttonous power. People
are quite literally dragged out, hogtied, by these pirates that speak of protecting democracy yet dehumanize and humiliate us without so much as a look in our eyes before ripping us apart from our newfound friends, and, more distantly, our families we have here. They rob us of the little money we have and have no paths of recovery. They tell us clean water is a privilege and not a right. That
speaking to our families is a privilege. That seeing the sun is a privilege. That if we get too loud of this constant mistreatment, then we should get ready to eat mace.”

“Most people here don’t have the means to speak out against these human rights’ violations we face every day. But I will take any and every chance to fight, to expose the way they treat us that these human traitors have normalized.”

“This was supposed to never happen again. But here it is again. We need everyone demanding our freedom, to expose all the vultures robbing these vulnerable people of everything from money to merely see our families and small children. We’re not even allowed to say goodbye, to hug our children goodbye.
What madness is this? How is this STILL happening to us, I ask myself when I wake up. Is this country for the free? For those yearning for a safe, happy life? If this country and its people care about freedom and safety, then people should
refuse to let this government and administration work a second longer until they free us ALL.”

“A lot of women here are fighting their cases because they’ve been following protocol to obtain legal papers or asylum or were just rounded up randomly from racial profiling. One woman here lost her purse with all her money on a train and went to church to seek help. The church called ICE on her because she couldn’t speak English! Another woman here was late to her job and her boss called ICE
on her. Few of us have criminal records. Most were just following advice from their lawyers and continuing their appointments with ICE and USCIS to get their visa or temporary protected status or whatever it was they were doing. But because of Trump’s administration they’re all rounded up by ICE and deported.”

“I’m feeling alright, mostly numb since being locked up is so abusive and heart wrenching. Here… It’s a rollercoaster. I witness, every single day, cries of agony and anger and despair. I see people hogtied and dragged out. People being yelled at to gather their things and go into the unknown, being threatened with PREA for hugging as we say our goodbyes and well wishes. This place is much worse than prison in many ways. I hear guttural wails and sobs so many times a
day. It’s like being at a perpetual funeral; laying to rest this person’s life, that one’s dreams, the other’s hope. Knowing they’ll be inevitably harmed, kidnapped, sometimes disappeared or even killed when they go and we can do absolutely nothing.”

“We’re just hostages. Being one for so long now… I’m so hollow on the inside. I haven’t dropped any tears the last year and a half. I just can’t. Not even when I was sentenced. I don’t know how I’ll even begin to heal, but I sure as fuck ain’t ever gonna stop fighting. My hope and ambition to fight… I’ve just been refueling his entire time being down.”

“Fighting brings me solace. Helping others brings me solace, some
meaningfulness, a melting of stone in my petrified heart. I spend most of my time going around and helping people as much as I can; working the tablets, giving phone calls, cooking food, doing little chores and tasks for the older, sick, or disabled ladies.“
With love & solidarity,
Free All Dykes

. … . ..

Featured Track:

  • Judas Goat by Filastine from Burn It (a benefit for Green Scare defendants)

. … . ..

Transcription<

David E Gilbert: I’m David Gilbert, and I’m a political ecologist from California. I’ve worked for a long time in Southern America and Indonesia, and now I live and work in Barcelona, Spain. I’m most interested in threading this line of what is an anarchist political ecology, what does an anarchist praxis look like, both in terms of theorizing, strategy, tactics, and politics, really broadly construed?

TFSR: Thanks a lot for taking the time to have this conversation. I really appreciate it.

DEG: Of course.

TFSR: I’m excited to speak to you about Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography, which you published through UC Press. Would you talk a bit about your academic work, the ethical framework or methodology that you work from, and what brought you to Casiavera?

DEG: Yeah. I first went to Indonesia about 15 years ago, working for a local NGO, where I learned really quickly how much I had to learn still about things like the importance of forests, biodiversity conservation, and how those things are connected to some really surprising geopolitical parts of our world. I ended up working in a place that had experienced 30 years of real civil war, Aceh, Indonesia, and I came right after a peace treaty had finally been called where Aceh became what’s called a special autonomous region. I learned really quickly that biodiversity conservation, these incredible more than human beings, orangutans that are highly endangered, rhinos, Sumatran tigers, these things are intimately connected to the geopolitics of oil and the trade of commerce through the Malacca Strait, one of the most important shipping fleets for the world’s commodities, where Aceh is right there, controlling these areas.

I started to realize really quickly that in the North and America, especially where I’m from, California, so much of what we think of as food, as industrial products, all of this stuff is actually coming from out there. Indonesia in particular is a huge supplier to all the world’s commodities. And all of them are coming through this shipping channel, this area, this broader economy of Asia, the Pacific Rim, China, and Japan. I became really fascinated in trying to understand, how we can disrupt some of those connections.

After I first lived in Indonesia, I ended up moving back to the US and working as an activist, campaigner, and researcher on a campaign against industrial food. Some of the biggest US agricultural companies, like this company Cargill. People call it the biggest company you may have never heard of. They control a huge amount of the food system, just how we get our food in the US, all types of things from corn to palm oil, specifically in Indonesia, to all sorts of commodities we never really think about, the stuff that makes up your lipstick, or the stuff that we use when we need to take a pharmaceutical medication. A lot of these feedstocks, these commodities, are coming from Indonesia, and other places in Asia as well. I worked hard on trying to figure out how to disrupt some of these systems, because, of course, this is capitalism, and it’s the problems of environmental and ecological crises, and the ways we’re consuming. We’ve become a consumer society.

That led me really deep for years to start riding with some organizers around land and peasants and the people that are trying to control these areas of Indonesia. There are hundreds of millions of people that live on the land out there producing all these commodities, rubber, palm oil, tobacco, avocados, cinnamon, and the pepper that Kentucky Fried Chicken buys by the metric ton. All of this stuff was coming from these areas, and these people were trying to figure out ways to do things differently rather than these giant industrial food systems.

A friend, an organizer, and more an environmentalist, working with a group in Indonesia that’s a lot like a Greenpeace type of group. They’re called Walhi, but they’re real organizers in a way that I don’t think Greenpeace really is. Greenpeace does actions and media. But Walhi is organizing communities and factions within these communities against all the plantations, the big extractive mining projects, and others in Indonesia.

This guy from Walhi told me to go check out Casiavera, this incredible town in Sumatra on the Aren volcano. It had become famous for what they’ve been able to accomplish in terms of overthrowing the domination of one of these big industrial agricultural plantations. A plantation that had really deep roots, an almost 100-year-old plantation that started during Dutch colonialism and then became reformulated and became even more terrible, actually, during the New Order—Indonesia’s long dictatorship, one of the most murderous regimes of the 20th century, and one of the most long-running dictatorships under General Suharto.

Actually, I went there for the first time with this huge, huge delegation. There were representatives from over 30 countries that came organized through Via Campesina, the largest peasant union in the world. It’s a type of organization that’s working campaigning, but also organizing, activating, and getting people into protest, getting people really deep into cooperative forms of production across the world. They have over 200 million members. They chose Casiavera as a source of inspiration, not necessarily a blueprint, but ideas that we can think about, that can resonate with other movements. That was the first time I went there. I stayed there a few days, and I was really intrigued by what I saw there. So I ended up going back for my graduate studies in environmental anthropology, and I’ve spent now almost two years there. That was first in 2013, so it’s been more than a decade in my engagement and collaboration there.

This is a long-winded response to thinking about what ethnography means and my frameworks and how can it be both a practice and a scholarly endeavor that’s really trying to orient social movements in a way from within, or just give feedback to them, or even just create a history of certain movements. I think, my book is almost like a history of this specific place and the social movement that has unfolded there. But you know a lot about it was finding one of these stories that people really wanted to tell. I spent a lot of time in the worst plantations with the most land conflict, where private security was patrolling the plantation with attack dogs. And these are Muslim people who hate dogs, you know. Armed people with weapons, special forces, and police have killed people in these types of struggles. I have documented some of that stuff in my work, a fair amount. I have a piece of work about paramilitary forms and their connections with the police state in Indonesia, how they enforce plantation lands violence, and also the disruption of social movements, this idea of direct repression directly.

But for my book, I found a place where people really did want to talk about their history. It’s a long, troubled, difficult history, but people wanted others to know what they had accomplished. When I started living there, I quickly realized this area that was once just basically a messed up, exposed soil, really damaged ecologically plantation, had been turned into what looked like a beautiful natural rainforest. It was actually all planted by the people that occupied this plantation and were able to eventually reclaim it and start doing this amazing form of what we call agroecology, or tree farming, or food forests on this land. By the time I came to visit almost 20 years into their occupation or reclamation, it was full of over 40 different types of very important fruits and spices. These are commodities that they sell locally, but also into the world market. But they’re doing it in a way that was not capitalist at all.

That was really inspiring for me when I thought that social movements require protest and direct action, and this movement required a blockade to protect themselves from the police that came to kick them off the land that they had reclaimed without the legal right to do so, even though most of them have ancestral ties to that place, and almost all of them had worked as plantation laborers, as coolies, as they called them on this plantation. They did all these brave things, they called themselves reckless at times, carrying lightweight weapons, kind of how the black block is armed these days sometimes. They carried machetes, and they did all these things, men and women. But they also did this incredible building of this world, of this forest, of this ecology. They made over 15 cooperatives to sell different things. For example, they have a lot of banana palms. They have a banana cooperative. They have a cattle cooperative, and a dairy operation that’s also a collective.

The incredible building up of their economy that allowed them to sustain this reclamation and this type of activism, and recognizing that we need to understand people like ourselves engaged in struggles can’t always be doing just one or the other. There has to be some type of flow. There has to be some type of change in people’s lives. And yeah, all of those things I found incredibly informative to think about what different types of struggles could mean, especially for the Land Back. In the book, I try to be really careful and cautious and show how difficult that was for people, and that over half the families that tried to cultivate a plot on this reclamation failed. And there’s still capitalism, there’s still predatory lenders there, there’s still really bad ways of getting stuck with bosses and loans and miscommunications.

It’s far from perfect, but it really helped me think through what are the connections to Bay Area reclaiming land. Recognizing that Land Back is nothing less than the full Indigenous control of Turtle Island, for example, where the movement is strongest, I think we can say that at least It’s where this language of “Land Back” originated. Of course, Land Back movements are more broadly these streams of indigenous sovereignty and anti-colonial struggle that have existed all over the world for hundreds of years. But recognizing that that’s the goal and objective of Land Back, and the fact that a lot of the forms of community and collective organization that’s required to have a full-blown modern polity that can be a truly anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, indigenous-led polity, all of those forms in California have been lost. Not just lost, but destroyed and shattered by white settler colonialism.

Here in Casiavera, a lot of these forms are in place, and some of them have been maintained throughout this colonial domination. There was and still is a customary council with a lot of power there. Also, the peasant union created a new structure that was very powerful and very present there. They also were engaged with the state in interesting ways. They were very anti-state, but their ultimate claim wasn’t actually to destroy or smash the state, it was to get their land back. And that’s what they did in a very smart and aggressive way. I think thinking strategically many different movements can think and build a lot from this more general concept I lay out, which is that we need to integrate and be smart about when we deploy direct action and these real economic mutual aid solidarity economies that we have to build as well.

It’s been really satisfying to have conversations with Indonesian activists, feminists, and plantation scholars in Indonesia. There’s been some great conversations about what Casiavera means for the movement now, and how we think about getting land back here. Here as in Barcelona, here as in California, here as in Indonesia. There are a lot of differences, but I think these are the conversations we need to have now more than ever. Especially under Trump, where it seems no matter what you think about the state or your level of engagement with it, everywhere from city, to county, to state governments are trying to defy, evade, and disrupt in a way, and social movements that are about struggle. Everyone needs to be thinking about these things now in a way, Yeah, we needed to for a long time, but it’s just become hyper-clear in the last few months. Hopefully, we can continue to talk about some of the finer points of that kind of broad introduction.

I’ve been really inspired by the work that you guys have been doing on your show, and I’m happy to take it in any direction. But I’d love to try to leave some room at some point in the next few minutes to think about some of these different sites of struggle, and how they might relate. We could have a relational comparison discussion. I’ve been thinking a lot about Stop Cop City, also Standing Rock again. I know it’s been so long, but I’ve gone back and I read a new book about Standing Rock that was interesting. It’s called The Black Snake, and it’s by a journalist. I forgot her name right now, but she reminded me about the importance of the protest camp itself. Not so much that Standing Rock was a blockade, but it was more a camp. In Casiavera I talk about two acts of blockading that were pivotal to protecting this new reclamation or occupation, but it’s a lot more about the land itself and what’s happening on the land. I think that’s what the point of the book about Standing Rock was, that the greatest, maybe less revolutionary, but emancipatory potential of Standing Rock was everything that was happening in the camp.

The protest camp is kind of a weird term. Some of us, like myself, associate the camp with a negative thing sometimes. But I think in a Land Back sense, for Turtle Island and the people that were at Standing Rock (I didn’t go, there’s kind of a long story there), the camp is one of the most beautiful, central, positive parts of life, moving across the landscape, breaking camp, opening camp, having ceremony. So, yeah, that part really resonates with me with my experience in what I saw and learned in Casiavera. The blockade part of the struggle can only be a few moments even of just what people are trying to sustain. As an activist, I think it took me having to write this book to learn that lesson in a fundamental way.

I’ve always been down to protest and ride and get involved in actions, but I’ve never truly turned myself to this one place, one plot of land, or like the Rosebud protest camp and all the dynamics that are happening within just a few family groups as in Casiavera, or just a few hundred people that are getting to know each other at Rosebud. This is the thing that must be sustained by any means, and it’s such a tiny little micro-world. But Casiavera has impacted the lives of now thousands of families. It’s still small. It’s not even a big city worth of people. But I think that these human-scale, really foundational changes to the way things operate are going to be the way that we can enact some sort of hopefully at least semi-peaceful change. Thinking on the scales of changes of millions right now brings us so into the eye of the imperial, geopolitical war machine, that it’s hard for me to see what huge rapturous, revolutionary change would happen right now without it being unfortunately a highly militarized, repressed struggle. That’s why I’ve been really inspired by Casiavera.

In the book I talk about how thousands of other places bring together hundreds of thousands of families in struggle, impacting millions of hectares of land, which is the size of half of Northern California, or something. So what Serikat Petani Indonesia, the specific peasant union, which is just one of many in Indonesia, but the one that was most active in Casiavera, what they’ve done on that kind of scale is world-changing, you know? I think it’s unfortunately suffering all these rising authoritarians right now, in the last decade or two across the world. Unfortunately, Indonesia has been caught up in that now, in the last year or two or three. So it’s yet to be seen how much they could continue to grow their movements.

All of these these peasant movements in Indonesia, started around the year 2000 more or less. That was the first time they were able to operate at least legally, above ground, because of the New Order. 20 years is not that long to grow a non-violent movement. They’re not underground anymore, but that also means that they don’t have to operate only as criminals, right? We learned with the Zapatistas, they were underground for about two decades before their first uprising, their armed reclamation of their territory. And that was actually similar to SPI and Casiavera in particular. That’s actually almost the exact same time in the mid ’80s and late ’80s. It was underground, and then, in the late ’90s both movements went above ground. I find it interesting that there’s this convergence of time. Also with the MST [Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra] in Brazil, that was a really important time for them to consolidate and grow. And now all of these movements I feel are a bit like a wait and see what’s happening right now. I mean, Brazil is a little bit different, but the Zapatistas might be as weak as they’ve been in a long time, it seems… I don’t know.

TFSR: For folks who don’t know MST, that’s the the landless workers movement in Brazil, right?

DEG: Yeah. There’s a lot of interchange and overlap and building between MST and the group in Casiavera, across Indonesia in particular through Via Campesina. They’ve really been refining this land reclamation or occupation or squatting. There are so many different names for what these groups do. Brazil has the largest movement of reclaiming land from industrial corporations, or as in the case, more specifically in Brazil, often it’s really large, wealthy landowners, like individual families. But now more and more they’re incorporated as corporations, as they all are in Indonesia. They’re all corporations in Indonesia. So those two are the ones that I’m most familiar with in terms of what this strategy involves.

The MST has done more than the Indonesian unions have, in not only making it a matter of activism, occupying land, and economic collectives, and this idea of agroecology. The MST has gone even further with education, health clinics, all these things that come from Paulo Freire’s idea of pedagogy of liberation: you need the school, you need the health care, maybe you need the communal kitchen. I think that’s one thing that the Indonesian movements haven’t done as much of. Those types of movements just seem so important for the US right now. Like Cooperation Jackson. Build and fight, fight and build. Everywhere we look, we have places like that in the US, right? And they’ve been coming out in the last decade or two, maybe these very anarchist reconsolidations of the Third World Marxism of the ‘70s or Black Panther Party formulations but more anarchist now.

This is what happened in Indonesia just a few decades ago, where all these groups emerged. You know, Indonesia had the largest communist party outside of the USSR and China in the ‘60s, which was completely dismantled, destroyed, and killed by this New Order, this violent regime. Basically, after about a decade or two after this terrible pogrom against all the leftists, these more anarchist mutual aid groups started forming around the industrial plantations, which was the genesis of the movement in Casiavera. Then they federalized. Serikat Petani Indonesia was the coming together of 20-something smaller peasant unions that had reformulated.

I’m wondering if in the US this is the time to think about that type of strategy really strongly. The mutual aid solidarity groups that have been growing over the last few decades, is it time to federalize in terms of anarchist federations? It’s not about dissolving people’s autonomy, but to really solidify how much we can support each other. Then we think about some of the old-school white European anarchists and what they thought could come out of federalizing. Then add in indigenous ideas of federations that are some of the strongest in the world. In the US, with the Iroquois Federation at the moment of colonization, that was one of the strongest non-states or indigenous polities that ever existed. When the French and the British came up against that polity, they were stunned by its power, by its military power as well.

I’ve learned this history more now, and I wish I had a chance to get it in the book, but I’ve learned it more now living in Spain: Where did the actual military power come from with the revolutionary forces of Spain on the left during their civil war? It came from the federation of the workers’ unions that created their own self-defense units, guards. Because the unions were federalized, they were able to coordinate these truly anarchist self-defense units that were almost unstoppable for a while. I think these are the types of ramifications that could come out of looking really closely at Casiavera and what they’ve accomplished, in terms of where organizing could take all of us or where their organizing took them.

TFSR: Yeah. To address a couple of things that you said, I haven’t been paying as much attention since 2021 probably, to the struggles at Yintah and Wet’suwet’en land. There was a big long-lasting land occupation in so-called Alberta. I take inspiration from Indigenous organizing, mostly north of the border, with warrior societies creating some sort of federated framework and projects like Cooperation Jackson. Cooperation Jackson itself comes out of the Republic of New Africa framework and the folks that run it are very Leninist, but other projects that are affiliated with it will tend to have more communalist or libertarian municipalist perspectives, like the later writings of Murray Bookchin.

There’s a network that a bunch of the “Cooperations” like Tulsa and a bunch of similar whether it be Land Back or social, ecological, alternative economy, parallel economy, dual power projects have gotten together, that’s called Symbiosis Network. I don’t know how active they are right now, but at least in 2019 and 2020, they were pulling a lot of inspiration from what was happening in Rojava, and there was a lot of back and forth. So when people were talking about “Make Rojava Green Again” [the host meant to say “Demand Utopia” – Ed] a lot of the folks that were a part of that movement in the US were also clued into the Symbiosis Network, which I think is great.

With what you said about the communist movement in Indonesia, it’s also worth pointing to the fact that the Bandung Conference happened in that country as well. The conceptualization of the Third World as a positionality outside of the Soviet sphere or the US sphere, and communities, a lot of them indigenous and anti-capitalist, looking for another route outside of the industrial megaliths of those two empires, tried to go their own way with some sort of federative option that was outside of the First and Second World, which is probably one big reason that that was a target of US imperialism and those pogroms that you were talking about, right?

DEG: Yeah. I mean the fact that the power of the West, the arms the West was willing to send to Indonesia right at that moment, post World War Two, where the Cold War was forming, and they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to survive this really difficult transition as a new Indonesian Republic, as it was called. Their first president, President Sukarno, you could see he loved the West. He also loved Russia, and there was no propaganda like the Russian military planes for him. I mean, he was a true freedom fighter. He truly fought the Dutch for freedom in Java. He had a great appreciation for the independence of both forces.

It’s so easy to be judgmental and be like, “How could you ever support capitalists and imperialists?” But Sukarno and Indonesia had just been betrayed by the Japanese of all people, who at the time were the liberators of Asia. Japan and Indonesia called themselves comrades or brothers. But what happened was Japan ended up invading Indonesia during World War Two, and being as brutal and sadistic as the Dutch had been. It was this great betrayal for Sukarno and the other young revolutionary leftists. They were true socialists, but this betrayal made them much more pragmatic towards all these different blocs. And you know, the idea of being a non-aligned nation was where this young republic wanted to place itself, its leaders, as they were busily trying to attend to how to create a nation at all, from all these different Indigenous polities that were truly strong and all had their different ideas of where they wanted this nation to go.

But in the end, of course, US imperialism did predominate in Indonesia. These fires of revolution on the left were extinguished completely in Indonesia for a very long time. The formation of capitalism was this imperialist economic exploitation of plantations. Indonesia was one of the original places for this plantation model: the Dutch East Indies, the Caribbean, and Africa. This plantation model early on was known as the Java Model because it was perfected in Java by the Dutch and then exported across the world by many different colonial powers. And now the revolutionary thought is starting to rekindle, and the nation is a true plantation oligarchy to this day.

I think it’s important to understand that now there’s this vibrant, pretty underground scene of anarchists, of people that are digging up Tan Malaka’s thought. He was one of the early founders of the Indonesian anti-colonial struggle and one of the first founders of the Communist Party in Indonesia. These ideas are really strong again there, but it’s coming from this incredible history of the domination of the oligarchy. And of course it’s one that’s highly connected to the United States and Europe, through the flows of commodities, like we started talking about during the opening of our conversation. But it’s also highly connected to China and India through the flow of these same commodities. So we’re living in this very complex world now. I mean, it’s always been a complex world. But the north-south thing that we love to put into this conversation of how to destroy capitalism, it’s no longer north-south in that simple formulation. And we’re starting to learn that we’re in a moment of geopolitical realignment in the world right now, and what that means for all of these relationships is really hard to understand. I think we’ll never understand them without some history. We’ll never understand them without some perspective, and also without some time of letting them play out.

What we can return to in Casiavera is the importance of getting started. There are many things that I think are quite anarchist about Casiavera’s movement, including the fact that they call themselves “anarchos” and talk about Proudhon, but they also talk about themselves as socialists. I was really surprised that people were talking about Heidegger. It’s a place where people read a lot of books, they read a lot of political books, they read a lot of philosophy. It’s all been translated into Indonesian. But they certainly identify themselves as anarchists, believing that property, individual property, is theft. And people quoted that to me, which I think is straight up out of Proudhon. But when you start to think about, “Well, where did Proudhon get it from?” Maybe from the French experience in the New World? There are just so many different ways these ideas exist in the world. And who am I to say that in Indonesia, they’re learning from European anarchism or the other way around? I really don’t know, but yeah, “property is theft” was an important one.

Also just relentlessly trying to refuse hierarchy and rotating leadership throughout these councils was very important. On the flip side, though, Indonesian peasant union have had the same “leader and founder” for 20 years. And we see that also with the MST that they’re pretty much a Marxist-Leninist-inspired organizations that practice a lot of indigenous, anarcho-indigenous, ideas and practices up to a certain extent. And then we start to understand they could go a lot further, I think, and activate themselves a lot more if they had some more rotating hierarchy. Of course, that’s another big, long conversation about how to create mass movements, through what type of structuring, the party, and all that.

But I think Casiavera never got too hung up on those ideas and part of it was because it’s just a lot of work to occupy a plantation. In their context, they needed to make a living. They also needed to sneak around and avoid these little security forces and start planting things in the cracks of this plantation. Then they got really bold and blocked this road, and they eventually destroyed the workers’ barracks and offices in the middle of the plantation in active protests. After that, they had to get busy trying to figure out how to make this land productive, how to manage it together. They had all these different ideas about what forms that collectives would be, cooperatives, and in the end, they settled on this really simple solution. Individuals could have defined plots, but they couldn’t buy or sell the land. They only could use it as long as they were actually using it. They only have a right to it as long as they were actually using it.

So they figured out how to hold on to the land, and they also figured out how to start making a living from it. But there’s no commodification of the land. It’s not commodified for labor either, because they don’t pay each other to work it. They have work exchanges, or these collectives where people work together and then they receive a percentage of the profits back, if there are any. Often there’s not. They’re all doing other things too to make a living. Many people do construction. Many people have a government job. One of the main peasant union organizers was working within the state for a long time as an agricultural extension officer, you would call it, I guess, in the US. Like someone who works for the FDA. You see these pragmatic decisions, but also that guy was like a straight-up anarchist infiltrator. That guy is the real deal, and he worked for the New Order.

And of course, almost everyone did that’s a certain age. Maybe they did work for the government, but many people were alive, living their lives during that time. So many people have some really surprising, disturbing stories like, “Oh wow, you were the guy with the gun that was hunting communists, and now you want to be an Indonesian peasant union member.” And people know that guy’s history, but it’s also a way of healing some of those traumas and bringing people back in instead of just ostracizing and only creating more conflict in a community. Bringing someone in is an act of forgiveness, right? And so we learn about these things, about how to operate. Some people call it Realpolitik. That’s some crazy [German] word about why it’s excusable to execute someone if it’s going to accomplish the revolution. And so I don’t know if I love that word, but the actual ways of dealing with each other and working together, building and getting over trauma, all of these things movements are struggling with. And conversations are happening, and we need a lot more of them, for sure.

TFSR: One of the things that you’ve talked about is the continuation of the influence of Indigenous lifeways. This community lived through Dutch colonization, which attempted to change everyone’s life and turn people into laborers for export for the profit of the Dutch corporation that was running it, or running the government as a corporation, or also running smaller plantations. Then you’ve got the Japanese exploitation. Then you’ve got maybe a national independence period where there was some waviness about what was going to happen, and then the New Order. You had the imposition of modern nation-state frameworks and property ideas that are central to Western capitalism were being imposed over and over again. And one of the successes that you point to in the book is the fact that despite, whether calling Indigenous practices communist during the New Order period and hunting people in the mountains for collectivizing territory, or James C. Scott sort of idea of evading the awareness, visibility, legibility by the state, you had communities resisting throughout this time, carrying the knowledge somehow, even though a lot of the knowledge was also destroyed, of how to take care of the land and live with it. They still had matriarchal values. They still had indigenous councils based on lineage. Can you talk a little bit about some of these structures as you understand them that were able to survive, and what sort of stuff they’ve been able to relearn? Was that relearning through things like communication with MST and Via Campesina and learning from other indigenous communities elsewhere? Sorry, that’s a lot in there. I guess I’m wondering about the survival of indigenous practices through various colonizations that survived until today if you could talk about those.

DEG: In many ways, one of the most remarkable things about Indonesia is the fact that there are so many indigenous [communities], some of them matriarchal, some of them more patriarchal. Some of them are quite anti-hierarchical, others quite hierarchical and patronizing even. But all of these ideas have existed and changed and made up every piece of their culture throughout the period of domination by the Dutch and then by the Javanese and then this crazy military dictatorship of mostly Javanese people. The fact is that these institutions—most of them, I would say—remained, at least in Casiavera. Very clearly we can see the matrilineal control of land as a collective, that was governed by the councils of family lineage members that were elected by the families. There’s a women’s council, there’s a men’s council, there’s a mixed council. This is a really incredible, fantastic, interesting, and different way of thinking about property and governing it that still exists today. Of course, it’s changed a lot over the last 300 years, but when we start to think what a world of freedom or autonomy or well-being would it be…

Maybe it’s just because I was schooled in civics as an American when I was very young, but I think about the balance of powers. I think that this might be a fundamental idea, that this matrilineal council in Casiavera exists, it survived, it was changed, it was altered. It was probably diminished a bit, unfortunately, by the Dutch and the New Order as well. The Javanese patriarchal, very hierarchical dictatorship. It was anti what is called Minangkabau culture, in this case, in West Sumatra. But the Minangkabau survived, and It’s one of the balances of powers, with the peasant union, with the state, and also, I think, the church, or in this case, the mosque, formal Islamic state or religious powers.

There are almost four main powers that ended up pushing out the plantation company. The state didn’t really do much pushing, but it also didn’t ever bring to bear its worst forms of repression on Casiavera, and part of that is because of the Minangkabau matrilineal council, and the fact that the Minangkabau aren’t the people that are the most marginalized or made “other,” or the people that are the most subjected to racism in Indonesia. They’re kind of a mainstream indigenous society there. The state was a lot less willing to be like, “Look at these peasant Minangkabau people. We’re going to erase them off the map,” like they have done with some people, like the Dayak peoples in Kalimantan, for example, or in Sumatra with the Jambinese peoples, who are a much more racialized minority indigenous group than the Minangkabau.

But also because in of Casiavera many members of leadership in the mosque began actually to abhor the plantation. This is not a common thing in Indonesia, but in this case, many of the religious leaders felt that it was an absolute affront to have a retired military police general run this plantation. They thought that the exploitation of the land and the people that were working there just wasn’t acceptable. Then, of course, you had the peasant union, so there was this balance of powers. They all formed to work in different ways to push out the plantation or to dismantle it from right within itself actually in an interesting way. Without that indigenous polity, without those structures of rule, the customary council, I’m not sure that it would happen.

I think that that’s where people get hung up when they start to think about these types of movements, especially here in Europe. People have so much learning to do about what indigenous means. And how everywhere in the world there’s an imperfect idea of indigenous politics. Many people here are just like, “Yeah, that’s an interesting story, but we don’t have anything like that here.” But Spain is full of these local assemblies or councils. They’re usually organized around very small communities or villages. Even Barcelona has a city council structure, or we call municipalism in the language of Bookchin, that you mentioned, or Rojava. Those councils, while not equivalent to Casiavera indigenous Minangkabau customary councils, they actually have a great potential to operate in the same way in terms of the balance of powers. It’s just that their power is much greater.

In the US system, you can think about what does a city council truly control. They certainly don’t control much to do with any of the apparatuses of violence of the state. In Indonesia, they don’t technically either, but they have created, in certain places, more room to operate, like a more forceful “no,” or a more forceful affirmative decision in a place can be made that really does conflict at times with what we in Indonesia call the republic law, but that would be like the federal law in the US. I’m also a little bit hesitant to allow that whole crazy box to open in the US because we think of a lot of localized rules as being tyrannical and scary and violent and white and racist, white nationalists and white supremacists in the US. So there’s a hesitancy to disparage the role of broader state structures that could help keep minorities safe in the US in a way that maybe is different in Indonesia.

TFSR: Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, when you talk about constitutional sheriffs as a concept in the United States, it’s about the autonomy of the settler role. That’s maybe a thing that we’re talking about a still settler-majority country, and the model is around applying white supremacist expansionism throughout it as a shared content. But then again, in small communities sometimes when there is input from polities, lower levels of governance can be more directly democratic. I mean, in our city, the city council can be vetoed at any point by the City Manager, which is an appointed position, and they have control over the budget, the police department, and everything.

I thought it was interesting to hear you talk about, to use a term that Bookchin uses—it is not his term but one that he uses—for this dispersion of and use of the land, the concept of usufruct. I think you bring it up in the book, this idea of not ownership necessarily but right to something by use, but that that something exists past your use and can be used by someone else. That as a concept of exchange that Bookchin said in some of his writings is a fundamental of many indigenous communities. In a sense of, “We don’t own this. We live with this. And it can’t be distinctly ours.”

It’s cool how the council in Casiavera has worked to minimize the consolidation of ownership because they’re post-civ model that’s aware of problems that they’ve experienced along the way, and they’re trying to work through as they go, allowing for stuff to fall through the cracks, because people are human, and they don’t want to bring down a fist and alienate everyone in the community, like when they started telling people “no tree crops,” because that more permanently ties you to a land base, and then people started doing, and they’re like, “Well, ok, we’re not going to stop you from that.”

The term that’s used in the book, smallholder, is an interesting idea to me within a collective. The Soviet model was forced collectivization that was centralized under the State, and that was obviously a failure. People were not invested in the land that they were directly working on. They viewed it as a job. That forced collectivization in the standard of the state being the representative of the collective poisoned the well of that good will, if not, through bureaucracy, squashed the creative potential of the people involved. The Proudhonian reference that you make of smallholders, small business people, or whatever, doing a thing, living in community with each other, maybe trading, maybe hiring someone for a couple of days a week as a wage worker, but they get to go back to their plot, and that person who hires them is not in control of their means of survival directly—They’re just picking up a little money on the side That heterogeneity, I think, is pretty natural, and even would be probably considered an ideal model of how a community operates to a lot of conservative people in the US. A small town with a main street, you’ve got a teacher, a couple of doctors. You’ve got all these roles that are filled by people in the community. It’s relatively sustained by the community, and people make decisions collaboratively within that community about what happens to the community and to the resources or to the land that they’re living on.

And because it’s modeled in a place with certain sets of experiences and cultural frameworks, as you’ve said before, it’s not a blueprint. People shouldn’t read Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land as something to pick up and put down somewhere else and stamp into some other landscape with other people, because it’s not how it works. Maybe a part of the indigeneity, or the essence of it that’s in there, is that it’s of the place and of the time of the people that are in relation to the land. So not only are social structures that are developed out of that community and those relationships but also people’s communal relationship with the land, fostering diversity, bringing back space for other animals to come and live. Sorry, that was a big mouthful. I love the fact that the book is not a recipe that can just be picked up and plastered out somewhere else, but that it’s a general framework and an invitation to a set of practices that people would adapt to their own situation and learn with as it evolves and as people’s needs evolve.

DEG: Yeah, that is so inspiring. The point of overlap is fascinating to me. Not to romanticize the rural too much, but this idea that we could have ways of living that appeal to many people in this world. I don’t know if we could say that they’re fundamental to human experience, but there may be something to this idea that we can live in a way, as you said, in heterogeneity, and I say in the book like bricolage, or a mosaic, of types of work where we own our means of production. Maybe it’s the land, maybe it’s your 3d printer. You could think of any form of cottage industry.

TFSR: Your labor.

DEG: Yeah, exactly. That would allow us to have a more satisfying, more interesting life. Also having the ability to change our work over time over the course of our own lives, these are things that certainly are possible under neoliberal capitalism or late-stage modernist capitalist economies, but in a way, there’s something fundamentally opposed to that concept of work within the bricolage approach. It’s much more about maintaining autonomy and freedom in that family orientation around economic activity. When you go to a place like in Casiavera, where corporations don’t exist, you realize how rich everyone is. I don’t want to overstate the wealth of this place, but people are sending their kids to college there now. Many of them own family cars. Most people have motorbikes, not everyone. There is certainly some dire poverty in the place, but it’s a quite well-off place. You feel that in the quality of life, the quality of living, the material possessions, the sense of wealth.

Of course, the Minangkabau was famous for its wealth during the colonial encounter, as many of these places were. In fact, quite impoverished British white settlers were often astounded by the wealth, leisure, and quality of life that they encountered as they went off to destroy those ways of living. I’m locating a lot of the origins of that problem in the capture of rents, wealth, or money by corporations. It’s a simple message, but it’s a powerful one when you see how Casiavera has put that into practice in a way that’s far beyond most places I’ve visited in California. Although there are some kinda communes, eco-villages, and hippie spots that I’ve been to, where you start to get a sense of that. None of them are so comprehensively large or like a full-scale community or even a town. Casiavera I would call a town.

There’s a lot there to be inspired by, and there’s a lot to think through, like that idea of smallholder, being the owner of your own means of production, while at the same time being engaged with other different forms of production and making money and getting by that do satisfy a lot of people’s needs and how that overlaps with what we think about as conservative rural America and how strong it could be if we could somehow create a truly anti-racist rural bloc in America, how strong it could truly be. The latent potential that exists I think is huge.

Interestingly enough this idea of a libertarian that we so much associate with a certain type of Tea Party politics have maybe inspired MAGA. Maybe there still are libertarian strains of thought operating like Ayn Rand in MAGA, but it seems that recently it has shifted a little bit just to straight oligarchy. Anyway, those libertarians were important to this rise of the right recently, and of course that was from the original Communards of the Paris revolutionary commune, the libertaires, libertarians in a truly anarchist sense I would say. There is this fundamental overlap or interest in this form of life that spans the political spectrum in the US.

Also, the New Afrikan movements you mentioned earlier—I forget exactly how we got to New Afrikanism. Oh, yeah, Cooperation Jackson. That type of survivalist New Afrikan instinct also overlaps in an interesting way, of course, with indigenous ways as well. I think that’s really a fruitful ground for all of us to think about how to organize around this concept of the smallholder across the economies, landscapes, and territories, both urban and rural. That seems like a wonderful place for us to get to in this conversation, that commonality. Not to be silly about it and to say that one day we’re gonna activate the links between the right and the left and all this, but just to know that when we’re thinking about the bases and where to organize. There are a lot places we could look into.

TFSR: Yeah, and not to beat my drum, but this is a necessary part of every anarchist podcast when somebody says the word “libertarian”: The majority of the world uses the term “libertarian” to talk about anarchists—libertarian socialists, libertarian communists, libertarian municipalists. It’s just the jackasses in the United States that use it to mean theocracy, apparently, at this point. The theocracy of property and masculinity.

You mentioned the ecological damage that the monocropping and the industrial system translated to the soil and to the forests of the Aren area around Casiavera, the side of the volcano that people have made into a communalized and repossessed area. Can you talk a little bit about how the smallholder model of working with the landscape and growing this diverse forest has repaired the landscape and enriched the diversity of the landscape?

You’ve mentioned that the occupation is not technically legal, but they do have lawyers working with them. They made two claims, some of which are based on law in Indonesia, the anti-colonial perspective that they are uplifting the livelihoods of indigenous communities that live on the land by increasing the material wealth of people. That’s one argument that they made, and that’s based on a shared value, ostensibly, that they have with that document. And the other side is that they’re repairing the ecology of the area. I think it’s cool that they’re able to argue those things and stave off some of the worst attacks of the state, even while it’s still tenuous. Some of the shots from above, the satellite photos, seeing the comparison of what the soil looked like when it was going through the period of being a cattle ranch, and then when it transferred over to tobacco and whatever. Could you talk about that, please?

DEG: It’s remarkable. When we start to think about what our world, our planet, needs, how to heal and repair it from all the devastation, we start to think about the climate. In Casiavera, they took this land that had been completely degraded and made into basically barren soil by these mono-cropping systems. First it was just all cut down and logged by a Dutch logging company. Then tobacco was mostly planted and also ginger just a single line of one crop over and over with pesticides sprayed, exposed soils. And so the rains would come—In Indonesia, up in the mountains, it’s super hard rain—wash all the soil away. This went on for decades. They had some cattle up there that were just trampling everything. I found some early old-school NASA satellite photographs that showed how huge this was. The whole plantation was just basically bare soil in the ’90s. You can see this from space, on the whole flanks of this mountain, this giant area.

By the time I got there, it was often an emergent canopy rainforest of hundreds of species. Some of the tallest were trees like teak, meranti, and red cedar, these really valuable timbers. Those have been planted by the people. I learned that over 60 different plants and trees that were living in these forests were planted on purpose, and then there are many other follow-on species. So it looks like a rainforest, it smells like a rainforest. And it turns out, of course, that type of what we call land use change, or just changing the environment, actually sucks up all this carbon out of the atmosphere and stores it in the new soils that were created, and the trees themselves as they grow. So we’re actually talking about way to be a natural carbon cleanser of the atmosphere. Growing these types of agroforests on the many millions of hectares of degraded land that exist across the world can actually be a contributor to cleaning up our climate.

And then, it goes much beyond that there. These are living rainforests now. It’s supporting really important species, like these primates called gibbons that are not critically endangered but are an endangered species, I believe, in Sumatra. They live there, they make the most remarkable calls to each other in the morning. There are now Sumatran tigers in that area, of which there are only a few hundred left on the entire island. In that area, there are elephants, also critically endangered. And then beyond that, you have this watershed and water cycle effect. This is on a mountain, and it’s actually a watershed that is now sustaining the flows of rivers in a way that that bare huge flank of the landscape didn’t. In fact, that was just contributing to flooding downriver.

So these are all the cycles that are very important across the world. They make a threefold contribution just by reforesting. That’s one of the reasons reforestation has become so popular for people to talk about, but the people that are actually doing it in a way that has ecological value in this sense are most often indigenous people, as well as campesino people in Latin America who are doing it a bunch. We just have to remember that the best way to achieve those types of incredible ecological changes is… This word, empowerment, has become such a cheesy word, but what does empowering the campesinos of Latin America really mean, to let them do agroecology? It means a massive land reform. It means political struggle. It means, perhaps, at times, armed struggle. I think that that’s the point of disconnect. Often people have a really hard time making that jump. They will say: “Okay, forest, rainforest, tigers, orangutans… Hold on, revolution?”

But when you start to learn what political ecology means, and the history of Indonesia, and it’s not an accident that the sub-discipline of university research/activism that political ecology is originally came to exist was in Indonesia. Why? The teak forests of Indonesia were all cut down to create the Dutch and Portuguese colonial fleets that dominated the world. These things are just so intimately connected in a much more fundamental struggle kinda way. A lot of people come to learn about endangered species through WWF, and the whole board of WWF is corporate America, with banking or finance even. So of course, a lot of it does come down to how we learn about these issues and experience them.

That’s the beauty of Land Back, that in all of our neighborhoods and communities, there are movements. There are indigenous First Nations. There are the Ohlone people in the Bay Area where I’m from, (and I talk about this in the conclusion of the book) they have reclaimed a ton of land in the Bay Area, where land is so expensive, so policed, so enforced, that the minute you don’t pay your rent, you’re going to be evicted by armed sheriffs. Moms for Housing occupying one house had resulted in hundreds of riot police responding to their eviction. Even within that milieu, the Sogorea Te Land Trust, represented by a few Ohlone peoples, an Ohlone family basically, has been able to find a way to reclaim land in a place like the Bay. They now have six different land reclamations in the Bay of a number of acres each. They’ve pursued more of a legal, land trust model. Basically land being donated to them by philanthropists and state agencies. But, you know, I’m down for it. I think revolutionary struggles are needed, and I think Sogorea Te Land Trust is needed as well.

That’s how we think about the revolutionary connections with ecology and soils and just how critical that type of work, that type of guerilla gardening, is and how it can be in the cities. The Bay Area has shown that. Detroit has shown that with Feedom Freedom. Many places in the south with Planting Justice. These spots that are taking urban areas, restoring soils, and growing food, this is in fact a revolutionary practice that people have taken very seriously for a very long time. Anyone who wants to somehow convince you that growing your own food is not a political revolutionary practice… They might be right if that’s the only thing people do. But in the end, it’s also a politically activating activity, getting involved, reclaiming land, and planting food on it. You get activated in different ways. I think that those folks just aren’t really paying attention. I think it’s actually one of the most important places we can all put our efforts in on the day-to-day. We all need our own little patch of reclaimed land where we’re trying to grow a squash or something.

TFSR: Yeah, and when you’re directly getting your livelihood off of the land base that you’re on, you’re going to pay more attention to it. You’re going to be invested in defending it. It’s going to be a lot harder to cut off your supply lines for your community if you are building some independence because it’s directly underneath you.

I think that there’s also an element of the conservation ideology that things like the World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club, and other organizations are very much based on, this concept of the separation between human beings and the natural world. An important part of this indigenous influence in the concept of being in a place that the book talks about is the fact that humans aren’t separate from nature. We are nature. We are part of nature. It’s a matter of if we are living in balance with what’s around us and who’s around us, or are we living in opposition, extracting, and then trying to move on to another place to extract from, that sort of disconnection from a land. I’m not trying to get all blood and soil on us, and I’m also not trying to claim that people identifying with the land base makes them Indigenous. But I think that there’s a close tie between that investment, understanding of and viewing the land base as a member of your family that you’re not going to screw it over. You’re going to worry about what’s going to grow back next year. You’re going to worry about what you’re leaving for the next generation or the next seven generations.

DEG: Absolutely.

TFSR: So how have your friends in Casiavera been doing these days since the writing of the book? There are a lot of people’s names that are dropped, whether made-up or pseudonyms. You’ve obviously built a lot of relationships with people, and that’s a valuable part of the story that you tell. Do you keep in contact with folks? How’s the organizing going?

DEG: Yeah, thanks for that question. It’s been really neat to know that the book’s been received well there. And yeah, I’m in touch with folks for sure. And I mean, these struggles are never done. That’s something I’ve been learning over the decades now, especially in these places that are trying to hold back these giant, mega projects. You may win a victory, and then 10 years later the project comes back in almost the same form, but maybe they’ve changed the legal structure around it, or the scope of it a little bit, and they’re gonna slide through. Or like Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline was built despite all that movement energy, and there have been some recent pipeline successes. So many of these places, we build from them, we learn from them, even if they might not exist anymore. I’m so, so glad to say that Casiavera still exists. You know, it’s there. The form is there, people seem to be doing good.

There are some interesting new threats to the land that actually speak a lot to the way that capitalism is changing in our world. One of them is local government authorities wanted to build a hotel on the land, and they wanted this kinda touristification of the place, because it was so nice and so beautiful now, with this forest and the cinnamon trees growing in there and the avocados. They’re like, “Let’s build a hotel on it. We’ll only kick off most of the people. We’ll keep most of the forest there.” And so then, they had to reactivate the network, especially the peasant union.

One of the most important people that I talk about in the book, the founder of the West Sumatran Peasant Union, which then became part of the Indonesian Peasant Union. His parents named him the name of the volcano, Aren, where he was born, which I think was such a powerful move at the start. You have to have certain feelings about that child to name your child the name of the place you that’s also a volcano. It panned out. He became an early pioneering lawyer and organizer for destroying the dictatorship. That was their first and main thing when they were young. Then he learned he needed to bite off that revolutionary goal on more concrete material factors, like land occupations and how effective they were to actually improve people’s material conditions before any broader revolution had happened. Aren told me, that they had to rejuvenate their form of organizing, and they defeated this hotel proposal.

That was no joke. There were a lot of people involved, a lot of money, and a lot of investors were interested. The State loved the idea. Of course, this kind of gentrification and touristification of the world is a serious issue now. To my younger self, I would have been like, “That’s nothing like building a mine in a place” or something. And it’s different, but it really threatens people and cultures across the world at this point, the touristification of the world. It’s not just the fact that tourists come. That’s not the main thing. It’s the fact that the capitalist economy finds a way to control the economy of that place, and everything can change through touristification.

So, yeah, they defeated that, in this really inspiring way. I wish I had had time to get this into the epilogue. There was a bit of a twist in that struggle, where after the fact, the peasant union and some of the collectives that have been operating there were like, “‘You know what? That was kind of a good idea.” They didn’t build a hotel, but they built a really simple coffee shop that now is run as a collective, where they’re serving coffee grown literally in the backyard. They have snacks that are all local produce, and it fits into their mission. Hopefully, it’ll be another way that they can gain economic sustenance and well-being from. I mean, it’s basically capitalist, I guess. I don’t know. They’re buying and selling. I don’t necessarily think that markets are bad, and I don’t think markets are at all the same as capitalism. That’s how I think about it in my own frameworks. They are commodifying the place a bit more, I think, with their tourist cafe stop. But I also think it’s kind of cool and a sign of how it’s growing and still sustained.

There’s been some tough things there, just those mundane parts of life, like people passing away, an new kids being born. For me, the big question is how are they going to manage this handing over of both power and also control of the land to the next generation? And this is an outstanding question, a question that is never answered in the book but that I pose. People talk about their children inheriting their plots of land, but that’s technically not allowed by the way that the council and even the peasant union set up this form of non-property use. As you said, usufruct, the right to use it is only as long as you’re actually using it, but then you’re not supposed to let it go on to your children. How are they going to reformulate for the next generation, make room for them, bring them in?

These inter-generational connections are really important for our movements, for all of our movements. I’m starting to feel that now, passing over 40. I’m like, “How many young activists am I building with?” There are some. I feel grateful to have some in my life. A lot of them are through the universities, though, which is cool. I mean, that’s one of the coolest parts of working at a university, that I do get to interact with a lot of young people. But I start to worry about the most anarchist, mutual aid, info shop vibe place organizing. Are there these institutional structures that are gonna allow the transfer of knowledge from everything we learned, from Occupy, to our veterans, to our people who have been incarcerated? Are we gonna pass it on? I don’t even know if any of our websites and blogs are gonna even last 5 years, let alone 15. Whereas, you know, in the ‘60s—I grew up in Berkeley—there were a lot of magazines and pamphlets and posters around in my parents’ house and their friend’s house, the Berkeley bar, radical newspapers. That’s how I learned about a lot of my own history.

I’m thinking about that for Casiavera a lot. And I think that there’s no doubt that these types of projects… I shouldn’t call them projects. But these types of movements are only going to be these liminal, not-forever type of movements until we get broader systemic change. We see that with the Zapatistas, I think. Right now people are worried about them being engulfed in drug violence and immigration problems. The tide is rising in many ways, I think, and it always will unless we have broader systemic changes that allow places like Casiavera to not just be these tiny little islands floating in this really exploitive sea. I think that’s the broader horizon, understanding that these places are going to inspire us, they’re going to give us some real tools and insight into how to organize, but that they need broader mobilization to survive, at least as long as 100 years or something. Nothing’s forever, nothing would be permanent, right? But let’s think about how to achieve permanence. It only really comes through, I think, broader revolutionary change.

TFSR: Yeah, it doesn’t mean the structures have to exist as they stand, but we do have as enemies, incorporated things that have power, that have institutional memory, that accumulate over time, whether it be states or corporations, our enemies that are trying to extract, centralize, pull profits and disinter us and don’t have a care because they aren’t living entities for the actual soil that we all live with and on. How do we not reproduce that, to talk about Freddie Perlman’s thoughts on wanting to have that longevity and becoming the thing that we are trying to defend against by adopting its ways and methods?

I think that networks of communication, reciprocity, mutualism, and respect can lead the way toward the possibility of intergenerational, federative resistance. And it’s not like we’ve got forever to work on this too. You know, between nuclear war or the climate, the global temperatures rising, the seas dying off. It’s dire, but I like the fact that this book is a good contribution to the general conversation that you find in like one of Peter Gelderloos’ more recent books, for instance, The Solutions Are Already Here. This tells a little bit of the story that I think Peter was trying to point to as possibilities and places that we can learn lessons from people doing it, making mistakes along the way, making imperfections, but putting themselves into it, investing, and creating the world that they want to live in.

DEG: Yeah. Big shout out to Peter, another Barcelona expat or immigrant or exile, we should say, maybe.

TFSR: So I guess the last question I have is, are you working on anything else these days? Would you suggest any interesting subjects, groups, movements, places, or struggles for further study around the topics that you’ve discussed today or are covered in your book? I made a list of some of the organizations, like Walhi, Via Campesina, or the landless movement, the MST. So I’ll have some of that stuff in the show notes with links to organizations, but any other shoutouts or stuff that you’re working on right now?

DEG: I’m really interested in trying to break down ways of how we understand the history of social movements in a way that can inform our present conjuncture, our moment right here, right now, around strategy and tactics more. I want to use those tools of humanistic inquiry and scholarship. I’ve been thinking a lot about tactics of anti-capitalist strategy and what those might mean for different places. And also trying to push forward my ability to draw comparisons or relations across Indonesia, California, Barcelona, and South America, like Amazonia. So yeah, I have another book that I’m working on that is very much about this idea of not so many places, but what are different tactics that are out there in the world? I have chapters I’ve started to write on. Some of them are inspired by my experience with Via Campesina, SPI, and MST, like the occupation, but also the blockade, of course.

Another great one is the ZADs or the Zone To Defend movements in France which are movements to stop big capitalist infrastructure projects, and they’ve been really effective with the protest camp, kind of like the Dakota Access Pipeline Standing Rock struggles. They employed basically the same type of thing, created big protest encampments in the way of some of these projects. So, yeah, I’ve been learning more about the ZADs in France now that I’ve been out here. And to set within this idea of like. “Ok, I don’t know what you think about the US state, but I don’t see it being the source of any actual well-being or potential for change right now.” So we need these tactics of direct action more than ever. But we need to know how they apply in a more broad sense, which pillar first against what.

I’m trying to learn more about different types of like workplace strikes. Mad respect for Amazon workers organizing wildcat strikes. I was part of the largest academic strike in US history a few years ago with the UC Berkeley system incorporated through the UFO. Mad respect for these people. But I just have to say it: The workplace strike seems dead to me. So what is the strike? The debt strike, or the rent strike? Those things also seem to lack a certain ability to actually do them in the US. I’m hoping to learn if some places are putting the strike into a new form that we can really use.

And the riot. There’s been some really interesting riots in the recent past that I think should inspire a lot of us. There’s also this group called Waging Nonviolence. They have some people that are trying to look into protest numbers right now, under Trump. They’re arguing that more people are protesting now than during the first Trump administration. It’s just that the press isn’t covering it this time. It almost sounds too hard to believe, but they’re being very diligent and counting protests and protest numbers. They’re being very rigorous and academic.

So yeah, that’s what I’m trying to work on right now. What does internationalism mean within all of this? The communists had their First International. There was even the First Anarchist International in the early 1900s, but where’s the role for internationalism today? Those are the things I’m trying to figure out how to research in a real experiential role as an activist-academic. There’s been some learning curves, but hopefully I’m going to have something out in another year.

TFSR: Cool. And your website is davidegilbert.com, is that right?

DEG: Yeah. Thanks.

TFSR: Cool. Yeah. That’s a place I’m sure you’ll be updating. And are you on social media that you want to shout out, or are you off of that stuff?

DEG: Yeah, you know, I jumped off of Twitter, although my account’s still up there, to Bluesky, but I’m not super active on it. But it’d be great to connect with you there, if I’m not connected yet, and I’m sure you have an awesome audience. I’d love to start using that platform a little bit more, if that’s the right one. It’s wild, Telegram is just huge in Europe, and I didn’t realize it. I’d heard about Telegram before I came out here, but now it’s so active, and it’s just not as public. But I don’t know, how do you share Telegram handles? Do I have to give out my phone number? I don’t want to do that.

TFSR: I can find you, but there are some suggestions on if you’re going to have a Telegram account to hide personal information. So you can make yourself non-searchable by your number or sign it up to Google number. Sometimes that works. Usually, if you’ve got a channel, just a broadcast-only channel, then you can get a short link that’s like t.me/whatever the name of it is.

Yeah. Telegram is an interesting platform. It should not be trusted for security. It’s a Russian-based corporation that has handed over information from radical groups and from attendees in different channels there to both the Russian Government and the Belarusian government, and I’m sure other governments beyond that. When people are organizing demonstrations, law enforcement has back access to it, so if security is a concern for either the attendees of a group or for communications, it’s not great.

I’m a fan of Mastodon, but it doesn’t have the same following, and it’s way, way more decentralized.

DEG: I like that one too. I need to just get a solid, small community of people I follow on Mastodon, on one of those servers. I think I’d be happy with that. I’m just so happy It’s Going Down back in my life, once I signed up for Bluesky, I didn’t realize they were on there. I was like, “Oh, this was worth it alone. Thank goodness.” I was so sad and pissed when they got kicked off of Twitter.

TFSR: And Facebook and Instagram. [laughs]

Thanks a lot for having this conversation and for writing this book. I’m stoked to be able to share this with the audience and looking forward to the next stuff that you come out with.

DEG: Thanks. It’s great to connect with you.

TFSR: Yeah, mutual.

A Left Trans Voice from Turkey + no Bonzo on Art and Anarchism

Bonzo drawing of rats in revolt, throwing beakers, holding flowers and flags and a book with a circle A
Download This Episode

This week, we’re sharing two segments.

First up, you’ll hear comrades from Frequenz-A out of Germany speaking with Eylem Çağdaş, an activist and a trans woman from Istanbul about current protest, queer and feminist perspective, anarchist participation and needs of solidarity. This segment was featured in the April 2025 episode of Bad News: Angry Voices from Around The World, the monthly English-language podcast from the A-Radio Network, which will be available early this week, so keep an eye out in our social media and updated links in our show post. You can find more work by Frequenz-A at frequenza.noblogs.org and more from the A-Radio Network and its contributors at a-radio-network.org. Eylem mentions Bianet and Birgun as good places to get introduced to ongoing news from leftists in Turkey.

Then, a chat with no Bonzo, anarchist historian, printmaker and artist, about how they developed their art, the historical work they do and some upcoming projects. You can find more of their work at https://noBonzo.com and you can find more of no Bonzo from the ACAB 2024 presentation we shared of Art As A Vehicle for Anarchist Ideas, the December 15 2024 TFSR episode.

. … . ..

Featured track:

  • Isyan by Bandista from sokak meydan gece

Continue reading A Left Trans Voice from Turkey + no Bonzo on Art and Anarchism

Pushing Back On Flock Cameras with Kate Bertash

Flock camera on a light pole with a solar panel, "TFSR 4-13-25 | Pushing Back On Flock Cameras with Kate Bertash"
Download This Episode

Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund to talk about Flock cameras, automatic license plate readers, the ubiquity of ai-driven surveillance, databasing and storage of real-time info of people and vehicle movements in public and privacy fears being raised. Katie also speaks about organizing with her village-mates to counter or limit them and artful approaches towards resistance with her Adversarial Apparel project.

Good Links:

Articles on the subject:

. … . ..

Featured Tracks:

  • Somebody’s Watching Me (Instrumental) by Rockwell

. … . ..

Transcription

Kate Bertash: My name is Kate Bertash, pronouns are she and her. I am the Executive Director of the Digital Defense Fund and creator of another project called Adversarial Fashion, which I’m sure we’ll get into in a little bit.

TFSR: Cool, that’s exciting. Can you talk a bit about the Digital Defense Fund or the DDF, how it started, and what it works on?

Kate Bertash: Yes. Digital Defense Fund was actually started the first time Donald Trump was elected. Back in 2016, there was a huge demand for resources in digital security and privacy mostly for the abortion access movement. There had been a bunch of really high-profile attacks, website takedowns, breaches, and a lot of digital attacks targeted at folks who usually help people get their abortions or fundraise for them. And so this pool of resources was set aside.

I had been running events that were volunteer events to connect technologists with abortion access projects in the field, helping organizations turn a spreadsheet into a real database or fix a broken website. In some cases, folks make things like open-source platforms that they use for case management for people who are working to get their abortion via an abortion fund. So there was a lot of work to do to make sure that all the folks who were working out in the field had security and privacy resources, like trainings and evaluations. We also provide funding to help people get the improvements that they need, like software that has good safety standards and all the privacy features that we love.

And since then, it’s grown quite a bit, over the last eight years. We have a small team, about five people full-time. Recently, in the last two years, since the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, which is the Dobbs decision, we actually now also work with organizations and movements outside of abortion access too. I think that was a really important moment where we realized that all the work that we had put in to try and secure these spaces was going to be really important for the wider pantheon of bodily autonomy, abolition, groups that work on democracy defense, all kinds of different service provision.

I know that I’m really grateful actually to talk to you today about one of the huge overlapping areas, which is that work that we try and do on helping folks to understand how surveillance impacts all of these different movements, not just, of course, abortion or any of the other ones we’re going to talk about today.

TFSR: Yeah, that’s amazing. And I’m so happy that you were able to focus on this very important part of our lives, around people’s reproductive health, or people’s bodily and health autonomy, more succinctly, and then be able to expand that out to commonalities and recognize the common ideologies that are focusing from the outside on limiting people’s access to health procedures.

Kate Bertash: I was gonna say it’s really interesting, because I know that we’re gonna chat a little bit today about automated license plate readers, and it was a kind of funny story when I first got this job, back in the day, some of the first folks that were really very supportive of what we were trying to do with Digital Defense Fund were our colleagues over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One of them was, Dave Maass , whose title, I believe, has been updated since then, but he was one of the senior investigative folks over there who was working on automated license plate reader data and how it’s used and misused.

We were having a phone call one day where he was trying to advocate for a particular bill that they introduced in California that was going to basically reconcile the fact that you can actually cover your plate with weather cover when lawfully parked. But why not then just be able to cover your plate when lawfully parked all the time? That might be a really great privacy measure for people who don’t want their stuff ingested into these databases, some of which we’ll discuss a little more about how those are collected and why.

We had discussed how license plate surveillance is actually ubiquitous outside of abortion clinics, unfortunately. Instead of using automated processes, there are often people who disagree with abortion who stand outside a clinic, and they will have a notebook and pen and cameras and record people’s plates going in and out.

Getting to share in that context that license plate surveillance, even when it’s not automated, has been a way in which people are surveilled and oppressed, and it impacts people’s bodily autonomy and freedoms, was a really great piece of context to be able to add to the conversation, beyond some of the other things that I know we’re going to talk about, with impacts on people who are disproportionately policed or targeted because of their immigration status. Just knowing that abortion rights, and I think health access also plays a huge, huge role in the impacts of some of the expansion of these surveillance systems.

TFSR: Yeah, or sexuality, if people are going to a pride event, or are parked outside a gay bar or a queer bookstore or whatever. Or someone attending a demonstration of some sort of political perspective that may not be supported. Yeah, yeah. It really is pretty scary.

So if someone is recording a license plate number and tag information, what can they do with that? Assuming that law enforcement and state agencies have access to these databases connected to the DMV, can the random citizen, community member, or the person that’s recording that’s wanting to do research, what kind of information can they actually find from that, short of joining the police force?

Kate Bertash: Some of what’s really troubling, especially about the rise of these systems, is that they sort of run into this problem that we encounter in the example I gave, with an abortion clinic, but also just in the world in general, which is that we sort of have no right to privacy in public space. Your privacy rights are determined by who owns the ground you’re standing on, which is a very odd thing that I think is a sort of artifact of how America views property rights as the basis of all privacy rights.

But I think one of the things that becomes really troubling about that is that we tend to gauge whether or not something is right or wrong in that regard based on how difficult it is to pull off. So you have people who, it sounds quite tedious, standing outside of a clinic, and they’re taking down stuff with pen and paper. And so you’re like, “Oh, that’s probably not too bad,” whatever I’m going to do with that information.

Whatever private database these people who disagree with abortion are keeping, they might have a spreadsheet, they might use it then to try and find other places where that plate is seen. In many cases, before the Dobbs decision, there were requirements often that people go back to a clinic multiple times in a row to be able to fulfill all of the legal requirements, for having a sonogram on one day, and then there’s like waiting period. So they would try to catch people breaking these rules.

Some of where this becomes especially troubling is that now we have these automated systems. You have the ways in which an automated license plate reader might be available. These are devices, they’re cameras, they’re always on, and they essentially record all the plates that go by them. They are sometimes found on street lamps. They are found on police cars. And there’s just all these different ways that we find places to put them around.

Sometimes they’re owned by the police force. Sometimes they’re also owned by private entities, so parking lots and structures, landlords, businesses. Even now, I think, HOAs are starting to buy and install these devices. So you have then this database that’s accessible by whoever bothered to purchase the system. And whereas we have some measure of accountability—I would say not very much—but certainly more when it is a government entity or agency that is collecting and holding information, you don’t have any control over what a private entity is going to potentially do with that.

TFSR: Yeah, that’s pretty crazy to think that it’s not just going into that person’s notebook, but it’s getting uploaded with maybe location data or time, all this metadata, and then put into a database that’s shared among anyone who just happens to subscribe to the same software.

Kate Bertash: Yeah, and I wanted to pick up on the piece that you discussed. Who owns it and what they can do with it matters a whole lot, just because I think that’s actually some of where getting into these newer systems that are available to monitor folks’ license plates gets problematic. Normally you have these systems where, I think in the past, you would have been a company or a police department or someone else purchasing your system, setting it up, and managing your own data. And so there was a company that came along that decided to make this a whole lot easier by saying, “Actually you don’t have to set up your own servers, your own accounts, your own systems. We’re going to do this as a service for you.”

Flock was one of the companies that popped up to basically say, “We’re going to give you this baked-together system. It’s going to come with the cameras, and they’re going to have all the software already on them. It’s going to connect to a database and to a large nationwide network that we manage.” So they’re going to make it super easy for you to have access to a portal where you can search and look through all of this interface.

And whereas it’s all held on their servers, you are a subscriber. So they basically claim in their user agreement that you own all of the data that your license systems collect, and that they “do not sell access to it.” I’ve actually really had a huge problem with the way that they frame this because they certainly do not resell that data, but they sell access to that data. I forget what that show is that talks about, it’s not “the assistant manager,” it’s ”assistant to the manager.” I’m like, “Okay, whatever.”

But that’s the trouble, that on Flock in particular, and I know to some gradient on other types of vigilant systems and other vendors, anybody who is a subscriber of Flock nationwide can have access to any other customer’s data and search it. So obviously that gets super problematic because many times the data that’s being licensed is actually not even only those that are collected by police forces. In some cases, they are also reselling access to data that is collected by private landowners or people who have bought these systems privately to install as part of their HOA or something else.

And certainly, as the number of people who have access to that information grows, the less and less control people who are recorded on those systems have over who has access to their data, where it goes, and what they’re doing with it.

TFSR: Yeah, that’s creepy. I remember after the Patriot Act was passed, there was a part of it where… I’m going to be totally vague, and if this sparks a note for you and you remember it, then that’s great, and work off of that. I don’t know if it was a part of Total Information Awareness or another program, but I recall there being a concern about the installation of cameras by government entities, by the FBI, I think. And the FBI would also fund businesses purchasing cameras as long as they had access to the contents of what they had recorded. I don’t know how far that actually went, but it sounds kind of like a baby version of what’s being created here, except not market-driven specifically.

Kate Bertash: Yeah. And I think what gets really problematic here, too, is that because this is information that is collected “in public,” you do not need the warrant to be able to access this information. They claim that it’s equivalent to indeed having a cop standing on a street corner, the things that they observe or not, something that you would need to be able to show that is related to an investigation or a crime.

I think one of the things that’s really awful about this in particular is that it reflects this inversion of the way we’ve come to view the accountability for expansion of surveillance services, which is that this is a marketplace. They are trying to make money, and regardless of whether or not anyone needs to know this information, they found that people are willing to purchase the service based on the idea that sometime in the future it might be useful for an investigation.

I know part of the justification under things like the Patriot Act is that there’s this extreme level of visibility and powers, but we might need them. What if one day there is some horrible terroristic threat that justifies this need to keep this always on very deep level of access somewhere waiting on a back burner. That is the excuse, certainly, that has been used to expand the marketplace for these services, including even to jurisdictions like the one I live in, where it might not even be a great bang for your buck on how many times you’re actually going to dig into that system and use it to solve a case.

TFSR: Yes, since you brought up Flock Safety, which has really hit the headlines over the last few years, could you talk about the company, how it markets the service and this equipment, and what is the pricing for it? I don’t want this to turn to an advertisement for Flock, obviously.

Kate Bertash: Yeah, no, absolutely. Let me actually pull that up, just because I do have somewhere in here the pricing that they’ve at least given to my community.

I first became aware of Flock very early in their history. It was many years ago. It was a small company that I think billed itself more as building these in-neighborhood surveillance systems. They were trying to make themselves appear like they were a security camera plus. They started out in Georgia and then have quickly become now a multi-billion dollar valuation company that basically not only sells these pre-baked cameras as a service. Their platform actually includes the Flock cameras. They are not traffic cameras. They don’t measure speed or issue tickets for any traffic infractions, but they are continuously ingesting information, and they come attached to the Flock operating system, which is a portal where users can look up individual plates, last 30 days of driving locations, no warrant required. They also have a huge fleet of other devices that they’ve started to work on, some of which are going to include drones and other types of observation data.

One thing that has really grown a lot, especially about the way that they structure their product in the last couple of years, is the use of something called “a searchable vehicle fingerprint.” I like that you brought up things like whether somebody might be involved in different causes or attending different types of actions or protests because the company basically says it not only gathers the license plate information, but vehicle make, type, color, state of the plate, whether the plate is covered, if it’s missing. There are unique features that are recorded, like roof racks or bumper stickers. Some people put bumper stickers on that indicate their political leanings or something about their identity, and then, basically, you could probably use their system to search for any of those features, including particular bumper stickers. That would certainly be a problem. I know one that the ACLU has taken some umbrage with.

Some of the what I have the biggest issue with especially is that they are a company that goes into communities. They actually have people who are representatives that will go and try to get your police department to see that this might be a great product for them to add and to have your community pay for. One of the things that supports that is these things like we have. I live in Washington State. We have something called the Washington Auto Theft Prevention Authority, and whatever the state sheriffs union is promotes grants that will cover sometimes a portion of the first year. I know they’ve been pushing those really heavily on sheriffs departments, on other local police departments.

The quote that I know that our community got when we were… I’m kind of surprised by one. I’m looking at the actual invoice here, $6,000 per camera. And then you have a sales tax, and then there’s a setup and implementation fee, which is a couple of thousand bucks. So for example, for our community to have started with six cameras, which is quite few—e are a very small town—was still a total of about $43,000. So a grant covered some portion of that. And I know that there are communities where they’re installing hundreds of these.

The prices I know are not fixed. They go up or down based on the type of camera and ability to pay. But it certainly is something that our community then would be on the hook for after the grant runs out. The idea is that, like with many types of technology products that are in your phone, it’s sort of a freemium model pricing. You know, first one’s free, and then you’re kind of locked into these longer contracts where you’re just accumulating annual fees. So it doesn’t matter whether or not you find the system successful, whether or not your community finds it to be good compared to other things they could be spending their tax money on. Certainly, they are looking to get out into as many communities as possible so that they can expand their base of continuously renewing revenue.

TFSR: Was your community specifically experiencing a spate of car thefts? Or is this maybe more an example of: federal funding or state funding is available for this. If it doesn’t get spent, then it’s not going to be in the budget for next year?

Kate Bertash: I’m glad we’re getting into this too, because I had been aware of this company for a couple years, and then, of course, I had been very active on automated license plate reader systems. Back in the day when Dave and I were talking about how these systems work, I created a line of clothing called Adversarial Fashion so that you could inject junk into automated license plate reader systems. These fun shirts and clothes that were covered in license plates and other patterns that would emulate them.

A lot of trouble with these systems is that they have what’s called very low specificity, which means that they’ll read almost anything. They’re meant to obviously work at high speeds, so they sometimes read stuff like picket fences and billboards and other things that they really shouldn’t. It’s kind of fun to prove that the accuracy of these systems is quite low. You can imagine if the accuracy of these systems is kind of iffy, you would perhaps really want there to be a good reason why you would purchase them and to find them actually useful in a small community.

I actually live in a very small town. I had lived in larger cities for many years, but these last couple of years being a rural resident have been very enlightening. So you have to imagine my surprise when I am sitting in my house, and my husband says to me that there’s a Facebook post from the Sheriff announcing proudly that they have successfully installed six Flock cameras in my community.

TFSR: Yay…

Kate Bertash: I was very, very bummed. I’m putting it very lightly. I think I kind of hit the ceiling. I was very angry because I also am very involved locally. I attend and listen in on all of our city council meetings or our community hearings. In the neighboring county, the company had tried to push these types of cameras. The neighboring counties called Klickitat County, and together the county commissioners, city council, and the public had decided it wasn’t a good fit. So you can imagine my surprise when suddenly these cameras are with no discussion in my county, were suddenly already installed.

Thankfully, because I have this kind of job, and because I know amazing people who have taught me how to do this, I have been pulling all the public records to try and get the background. One of them was the grant application, which showed that car thefts, which were used as the justification for buying the system, have actually been going down in the last several years in my county. So I want you to just imagine for $43,000 a year how many car thefts you would want to have to justify the cost of a system? Especially in a small, small place with very little tax revenue. And for the last year recorded, we had six stolen vehicles reported. So not a great deal, I would say. Six divided by 43,000. It didn’t seem to matter whether or not we actually needed these kinds of items. It was more about selling to our Sheriff’s Office that these would be a good addition, especially if they were, “very understaffed or a very small team.”

That kicked off a lot of controversy. When people live in a rural community, they are often out here because they are expecting some measure of privacy. People move out to get away from the hustle and bustle of things and to feel like you have the freedom to live without people always looking at you and everything you’re doing. And so this idea especially in a small place where we don’t have a ton of roads in or out of our county that you could have these choke points where very few cameras then could track basically 100% of our local communities’ movements to and from work, to their kids’ schools, to their doctor, to their church. That did not go over very well, and I’m sure we’ll get a little bit more into what happened next. But I think it was quite a shock to see that even in our small county, where I didn’t think we would be that much of a market for a company like this one, that they don’t seem to discriminate. Everybody’s tax money is as green as anyone else’s.

TFSR: Did Flock learn from some of the problems that they had experienced in the neighboring county? Was that one of the reasons that you didn’t hear anything about it?

Kate Bertash: Yeah, I would guess so. I think one of the big disappointments was that it was a public discussion elsewhere, and it was not a public discussion in our community. And so I actually had organized then two information sessions for my neighbors. I’m very lucky that this is something that I know something about. So I decided to put together a session in each of the two larger towns in our county so that neighbors could come in and learn more about the system.

I understand that everybody also has a different idea of whether or not they think that the risks and trade-offs are worth it, whether this is a good fit. But I think my big goal was to say, “Regardless of whether or not you think this technology is effective or that it does what it should, we each deserve the opportunity to talk about it as a community. It’s a pretty big decision to make without any kind of discussion or consent.”

I love to encourage people that if you feel strongly about this kind of thing, you can go rent a room at the library, you can print up fliers, you can paste them around town. You can talk to all your neighbors. We don’t have a news channel or a newspaper. Facebook is our critical place where we get everybody together. We managed to pack the rooms. And I was very proud that everybody came in to listen and then especially talk. Our Sheriff and the Undersheriff came to both sessions, and we were able to then have a very respectful and productive discussion, which was a very pleasant surprise. Of course, Flock did not send any of their folks who were locally hanging around trying to sell, but it was really good for us to clear the air and say that there are a few problems that we all have with these systems.

I might think that my small-town Sheriff is great, whatever. This could be somebody you voted for, somebody you’ve known growing up. This is where it can get really tough to try and interrogate those relationships and to understand the role that they play in why we do or don’t reject surveillance technology in our community. What is your relationship to who’s going to hold that information? And pointing out that, unfortunately, because this plate data is very valuable, it’s really high risk for being hacked.

I know a couple of different articles have come out where Flock has repeatedly refused to subject its cameras to independent security testing. There was a particular researcher (I will have to find this person’s name), who had done some tests on some of the Motorola LPRs (License Plate Recognition) and found that they were misconfigured, and basically just streaming live data to anybody who wanted to intercept them. Unfortunately we don’t know if there are any similar issues with Flock Safety Systems, because they won’t subject them to that kind of testing. So not only is it then potentially the people who are supposed to have “authorized access” but also unauthorized access.

Because Flock Safety is rolling out across thousands of communities, they don’t really pay very close attention to all of the different rules about what you can install in different types of right of way, or on public land, or getting the right permits. And our community indeed, was also one where they ran roughshod over the permitting process, which led to some [cameras] being uninstalled. But that’s a story for another day.

TFSR: Yeah, that’s a great start. This is a spicy zine called “Birds of a Feather, Destroy Flock Together” that I was handed, and near the middle of it it’s giving examples of how to engage. One of the things that they mentioned, which your story made me think of, was… Here’s what they say: “Cops getting Flocks installed near Portland, Oregon on state highways and freeways without permission resulted in the state telling Flock that it needs to remove the cameras and any related equipment because the company does not currently have a permit to install or operate cameras within State Highway and freeway rights of way.” So it seems like a similar instance. And guess it’s kind of the surveillance version of Bird scooters or whatever those are called.

Kate Bertash: Yeah, exactly, you just kind of go for it until somebody tells you “no.” Again, a lot of my perspective on this is philosophical. I obviously very much disagree with the expansion of the surveillance state. But then it also becomes very practical and personal.

Our community has a really small tax base. Less than 2% of the county in Skamania is taxable land. And so every dollar does count. When you waste public resources by running over this process, and then WsDOT (Washington Department of Transportation) had to get involved, and now we have to have people’s time taken up and get these things uninstalled and reapplied for permits. That translates to actual dollars and cents and time that we often don’t even have to work on very critical things in our community. Like real-time emergency services are an absolutely urgent need that every dollar that’s going towards $50,000 worth of some excessive product we don’t use could be going instead towards search and rescue equipment and things like that.

One of the things that was really a bummer was to see that this is sort of their MO. It costs them, as a multi-billion dollar company, relatively nothing to just forge ahead and shove themselves into every community, and then leave us, as the local folks, to clean up their mess. And that was definitely very frustrating because you have basically people who have also their own concerns about how the information is used day to day.

Somebody had made a really great point. One of the things that was really cool about these meetings was that I was really surprised who showed up. I know my community pretty well. I don’t know how you gauge the mental model of what a rural community is. But we run the full political spectrum. There are a lot of folks here who vote on either side of the aisle. I think also people tend to focus a little bit less in local elections on whether or not somebody is a Republican or a Democrat, but the room is fully represented. I was very pleasantly surprised then to hear that the entire community was on the same page, where nobody likes these cameras and wanted them out.

You had folks who, I know, vote straight ticket red and wear a MAGA hat to the meeting, saying, “Well I might trust you as the Sheriff. But what’s going to happen when this information and access to the system is then given to your successor. Who else gets this job in the future? Suddenly, this is just something that automatically I’m expected to allow the Sheriff’s Department to have.” I think it was really very interesting to hear the commonalities and pushback about how it was about trust as much as it was about anything else.

This company coming in was basically taking the trust that we already had with each other and trying to replace it with something that you could buy or sell. Taking it away from the systems we already use to talk to each other about whether somebody found a car that somebody stole. You know, you have posts all over our Facebook group where people will be like, “Hey, I think my car was stolen.” And then a neighbor will find it for you parked on the hill within 12 minutes, and then instead replace that with something that you have to pay for. That stuck out to me as something that didn’t occur to me many years ago when I was starting to learn and think about these systems. They interfere with your relationships with each other, as neighbors and as a community.

TFSR: Yeah, that’s a really interesting way of thinking about that. You’d mentioned concerns about like, this Sheriff was elected, who knows who’s going to be filling those shoes afterward. With the data that Flock, for instance, as one company that offers this kind of product, is there a shelf life that they promise? And how accurate can that shelf life be?

Kate Bertash: The default setting for Flock Safety’s particular user agreement is a 30-day trailing map of everywhere you’ve been all day. And I think, frankly, that seems very long to me. 30 days is certainly enough time for you to get to know somebody’s work and driving habits. And I think, generally speaking, we also have to just take their word for it. There’s no real way to prove that they don’t keep it longer than 30 days until somebody actually sues them, and they have to prove via the discovery process that that is or isn’t the case.

It’s the same thing when we are looking for a product like a VPN, and they say that they don’t collect logs. It’s really tough for us sometimes to know until that company is sued and has to prove that they do or don’t collect certain information. So we actually just have to take Flock’s word for it, as well as any of these other vigilant systems or any other vendors.

One of the things that the ACLU put out that was really very helpful was a set of parameters or a set of updates that you could ask for your community to make to the contract with Flock to try and shorten this time and also limit who might have the availability to access your community search data. That’s something that we’re still working on locally, trying to get our Office of the Sheriff and our Flock contract updated to make sure that we can shorten that. I know that there are communities that have actually shortened it to as little as a few minutes.

If I’m going to take the most generous view of why you might want this system and have access to it, they often use examples like Amber Alerts as a legitimate use of the system. You have somebody who reports that a child has been kidnapped. We’ll get those notifications on our phone that buzz really loud that tell you what the car is and where it was seen headed, any kind of other critical details. You might argue that a search could then go out to any Flock system and see if in the last few minutes, nationwide or within a particular geography, that plate has been seen.

I would say that we had many discussions, even as a community, over what seems like a fair amount of time. I would prefer that they be removed entirely, but I know that it was easier for me to hear from my community and then see that we could probably figure out some kind of agreement, even with the Office of the Sheriff. Is two days enough time, if it was involved in a search and rescue operation? Is it a few hours? At what point would that risk of having the data be abused or misused be reduced enough, if we’ve had to find a middle ground, that something could be found in a certain number of hours? But again, we would ask Flock to update this and then just have to take their word for it that they’ve updated our system this way. So kind of troubling either way.

TFSR: And maybe I’m misunderstanding too, because of the way that you’ve been talking about this. Is the Flock data actually shared into a database that other Flock users have access to?

Kate Bertash: Yes, by default. Yeah.

TFSR: So, even if they put a limitation on it, like this only gets recorded for five minutes, if you’ve got a scraper running and a very big hard drive and you’re in that network, you could just constantly be scraping this data, saving it on your own device, and it may not be available in that central location, but why wouldn’t someone be able to just upload that to some sort of torrent site or whatever, right?

Kate Bertash: Yes. I am glad you brought this up, because there actually is one entity that has total access via a special agreement with Flock Safety Systems, and that is the FBI. I think a lot of people are not aware that Flock Safety has made a deal where all of the data that is collected nationwide at any given time through any one of their systems is automatically forwarded to the FBI system to search for plates that have been tagged in their system as hot plates. We actually don’t know what the data agreement, the use or retention agreement with the FBI, looks like. That, obviously, is not available to us as the general public. So we don’t actually know what the FBI does when it takes those queries that come in saying, “Is this plate in your system,” whether or not, then what the FBI does with that.

I know that in communities like mine, there are various levels of trust with different government entities or not. The FBI is not a popular one. I think that came as a very unfortunate surprise to a lot of the folks in our very small town, that there are agencies that could basically have this kind of full unfettered access without our notification and without any restriction.

TFSR: Wow, thanks. I was not aware of that. I was just asking a leading question about people creeping on the network, and not even the FBI specifically.

Kate Bertash: Yeah, also creepers. Who knows what any individual user is doing with this stuff? They have a lot of very different types of government or non-government agencies that would access this.

So here I have… I pulled it up: “Flock runs all plates against state police watch lists, and the FBI’s primary criminal database, the National Crime Information Center. When a camera scores a hit against one of those databases, law enforcement receives an immediate notification, as Flock CEO Garrett Langley explained in 2020: ‘We have a partnership through the FBI that we monitor all of the cameras for about a quarter million vehicles that are known wanted.’” So there you go.

TFSR: There’s currently a case winding through the Virginia state court system brought in response to the 172 cameras that Flock has installed on public streets to monitor cars, license plates, passing faces, and other biometrics, and use AI to map out people’s daily routes. Civil liberties groups are challenging this as a Fourth Amendment issue. Can you talk a bit about the fears of this sort of wide-scale observation and recording, its impact on daily lives or activities that those with access might want to chill, or how it might affect already over-policed communities in particular?

Kate Bertash: One of the things that’s very important, especially when we’re looking at this kind of question and what this case attempts to answer. I’m not an attorney, but thankfully, I have many lovely folks in our lives who, via my DDF activities and otherwise, have tried to impress upon me what it is that these devices collect and why they become very relevant in a court case. My understanding is that there is someone who is suing through the Virginia state court system to basically say that being continuously monitored and checked against these hot lists for plates over time constitutes what is called a Carpenter violation.

In the landmark case, Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that… There was a particular person whose cell phone records, their location data was being collected for about 127 days, I believe, and basically they were using it to try and implicate this person in a crime.

Your cell phone’s location data is a very interesting sort of parallel to draw here because as we walk around, our cell phones are always looking for the service that we’ve signed up for. Let’s say I have Verizon or AT&T or something. I’m walking around and my phone is constantly looking for cell towers, and it’s knocking on each cell tower, saying, “Hi, are you my service? And if so, I’m going to transfer some data and receive some text messages and stuff.” And so your phone is kind of just broadcasting your location. That data, those pings, can be collected, and each tower keeps a record of how many times it’s been pinged and by who. This is again, kind of functionally public. Your phone is basically always broadcasting to the air its need for service.

The idea was that this information, when collected without a warrant, somehow constituted a form of surveillance over time. What this case, in my understanding, is trying to basically say is, “This other sort of data I am broadcasting out all the time to the world, which is the visibility of my license plate and other information about my car, does that constitutes unlawful surveillance?” And you can see why it’s a little troubling just because we know functionally that somebody can, at scale, use that information as surveillance.

But again, we run into this very difficult problem of what does it mean for something to be public, and what does it mean for something to be observed? We need license plates, or we’ve decided that we need license plates on our cars because they are a critical safety object. They help us to use traffic enforcement or collect tolls, or ensure that cars are registered to their owners. You do not technically need to have a cell phone legally, but you need to have a license plate legally. I’m looking forward to seeing what the outcome here is just because it opens up a lot of other questions, like you said, not just about plates, but then also about things like your face.

We can’t help but broadcast our face and how it looks to the world all the time without a great deal of effort to cover it up or otherwise make sure that it’s never visible to anybody who could take a picture of it or misuse it. Regardless of how this case turns out, I am excited to see it drive forward the conversation on how it is that we’ve decided that when something is functionally public, it means that it can’t be abused or misused by corporations or the government, which is very clearly not the case. Yeah, we’ll see. I’m waiting with bated breath to see how that pans out.

TFSR: I guess, particularly in the last few years, with the rounds of laws that were passed in many states around the country concerning facial coverings. North Carolina has had since the 1870s laws on the books about not covering one’s face in public that were built around slowing down or stopping the Ku Klux Klan. I’ve seen them applied in protest situations where there’s no clear intentionality of attempting to menace someone or threatening violence on someone present in a demonstration, but people would choose to hide their identity because they don’t want to end up on the front page of some right-wing rag or whatever. But even following the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020, states have passed similar laws, specifically just saying that if you’re wearing a mask, you could get away with robbing a convenience store or whatever. So, as you say, it’s difficult to obscure your face.

Kate Bertash: Exactly. And I think we’ve decided to forge ahead. I think the kind of “Why now?” and why this is coming to the fore is that these days cloud computing has gotten so cheap, AI-driven systems get cheaper all the time. Certainly, they do suck up a lot of energy and compute now, but the amount is starting to become much more trivial. It is less and less of a lift for a company to offer as a service the ability to ingest billions of data points and then sift through them.

We decided to make choices about what should or shouldn’t be allowed based on how much effort it is, or whether it would be really hard or seem an inordinate burden to, for example, track your face or write down your license plate number, or follow you all over a county, or whatever it is. But now that these things are a lot more trivial, we haven’t had the conversation about what we actually should be able to know about each other. Rather, does it matter if I see it if I’m attaching it or not to this wider dragnet database that has a lot more information that could be contextualized as something that gives somebody too much access to my personal information? And that’s because, again, our privacy rights don’t derive from the individual.

I think, in a dream world, we would all walk around with our ability to respire data into the world and have a certain level of protection. I like that you brought up a mask. It’s a great way to think about it. You know, the ability to manage or contain or have some kind of autonomy right as I walk through the world, over the kind of data I exchange back and forth with it. But unfortunately, we’ve decided that who owns the ground that you’re standing on is then who gets to decide what happens with your data and how it’s used against you or not.

In my opinion, I don’t think, personally, we’re ever really going to get to a satisfactory place until we reconcile what happened there and ideally change it. Because I think that there is kind of no future for the answer to all of these different types of surveillance and privacy violations until we reconcile the fact that your right to privacy cannot come from property rights. It’s just not going to work.

TFSR: Yeah, and it’s not just now. It’s your right to privacy from 10 years ago forward.

Kate Bertash: Scary stuff!

TFSR: Because you were talking about the ability of the individual to obscure their appearance, I would be happy if you would talk about Adversarial Fashion.

Kate Bertash: Yeah. Yeah, that was exciting. It was a really fun project, just because it came from this conversation that Dave and I had that these systems can be fooled. I wanted to prove the point, which is as critical to the discussion around whether or not it’s appropriate for these products to be in communities. We would imagine that philosophically, we of course care whether or not they should be right or wrong based on whether or not they do or don’t work.

I think it’s wrong to surveil people continuously, even if a system works flawlessly. But the case here is that it doesn’t. These systems are built for volume. They are not quite built for accuracy. As a result, by showing that they could be fooled by a t-shirt, it was a great example of a way for me to show that these automated license plate reader systems, which we do decide are so safety sensitive and must have many applications and things like tolls and enforcement, that they unfortunately still have a lot of mistakes that are possible and require a greater level of both scrutiny and stewardship.

But the most fun part about working on the Adversarial Fashion project, I got to present it at DEF CON, and it was really amazing to see the reception. People would ask me the question, “Oh, well, what’s the point of making something like this? Are we supposed to fight the system by all just putting on a cool t-shirt and putting junk into these systems?” And to that I say, do I think that if everybody did it, it could make a difference? I don’t know, maybe.

But I think more or less, one of the things I really love about anti-surveillance art projects is that these questions that you and I are discussing, they’re very big, they’re unwieldy, often. If I’m an average person trying to just get through my day, it can be really hard to decide how I feel about my license plate being tracked everywhere. It might feel inevitable that I just have no control and no power. And what does it matter if I’m not doing anything wrong and all that stuff. Or you might be confused about whether or not you would want your HOA to have that same power.

But creating an art project like a T-shirt that can fool a system I’m supposed to depend on suddenly takes this thing that’s very big and uncomfortable and it crystallizes it into a real example that I can form a strong emotional reaction to. We can agree, potentially, that if a system can be fooled by a t-shirt, it probably shouldn’t be the sole thing implicating me at the scene of a crime. So you might want a little bit more than that to be involved in convicting me.

I think that was the best part of this project, to see the enthusiasm. Obviously, Adversarial Fashion can include many other things. I know, since then, I’ve done a couple of different projects. I sort of had a hunch that not all face masks are equal in how they help conceal you from today’s modern facial recognition systems. And it was really fun to get to run some small experiments there and show that color matters, or the shape and the coverage and things like that. You get to also teach people that these systems, it’s really easy, when they’re bought and sold by a large company, to believe that something is going on under the hood that you must just not be smart enough to know.

These closed systems, they seem like they work like magic, but I think one of my favorite things about these projects is to show my process and show that I’m using systems like OpenALPR, which are actually the exact same thing under the hood as many of these commercially sold systems. You can download it, and you can learn how to spin it up on your own computer. You can play with it and test it. There’s nobody who you have to ask permission. And then once you start to play with it, through your own observations and your own experiments, you get a sort of sense of how it works, how it’s fooled.

And of course, then a better basis of discussion of why is it that something that I can mess with myself is then repackaged by a multi-billion dollar company to be the end-all be-all that’s gonna save my community from every piece of investigation it’s ever gonna have to do. Obviously, that’s not the case. So we get to also push back on these marketplaces and systems that claim that these are the best products ever, and then they sell them to entities that don’t really have the time to test them or evaluate their claims. Instead, we all just get charged for basically handing over our data for free to a company that’s going to sell access to it for their own gain.

TFSR: Yeah. And then, as you said, the imperfection of these facial recognition technologies, for instance, and the biases of the data sets that they’re working with. There were reports years ago about how anti-Black a lot of the [systems are]. The inability of facial recognition systems to distinguish between different folks with a lot of melanin in their skin, because all the models that they were testing against were lighter skinned folks, and that leading to false charges against people, false identification.

Kate Bertash: Yes, it can be really alarming to see also how there are these knock-on effects when we ask and answer the wrong question about why that works or not. I mean, it’s many years ago, so that’s probably been updated by this point. But I think one of the very troubling outcomes is when folks were saying, “We have all these different facial recognition systems, they’re bought and sold by different companies. These models don’t work very well on Black faces or people with darker skin, generally, and you gotta fix these if you’re gonna use them.” And so there were some companies that then just went to buy prison data, so they had all of these different mug shots of mostly people who are Black and incarcerated. And so you then created this other extremely exploitive, terrible marketplace, to “solve some problem” with how this data set works and how it’s trained. Without an understanding or an ethos of why it’s wrong, you basically just expand the marketplace for exploiting people and their data.

TFSR: Yeah, a thing about the Adversarial Fashion project and this sort of vein of… I’ve seen a few things come through. There are some that I don’t recall the name of, but they were clothing projects that were making a point of focusing on the US drone warfare program and developing head coverings of various sorts, whether it be hoodies or others, that would shield [from] infrared reading. And it wasn’t so much about the practical application of this, that they weren’t going to be selling it to a bunch of people in Yemen to save them from Obama drones. But it’s still, like you said, the purpose of this [is to show] there are weaknesses to this technology.

Also, I think it’s playful because it does invite people to be like, “Oh, what else can I find there?” There was this glasses company out of Chicago for a while, called Reflectacles, that would produce these different anti-facial recognition technology sunglasses or other sorts of glasses, or they would reflect back infrared lights that would be used for nighttime cameras. This sort of stuff, I think, “Well, that, or we can go around with black metal or Juggalo makeup,” which I think is awesome as a way to screw with facial recognition technologies.

But that sort of playfulness of taking space in that way and opening up conversations with people about like, “Well, that’s weird. Why are you doing this? Oh, I didn’t know that camera could do that too. I didn’t know that in the passing police car, underneath it, or in the lights on it, there’s a camera that is constantly scanning for license plates or whatever.”

Kate Bertash: Yeah, and I think, this does actually digs into this area of work that I’m deeply, deeply interested in. I will probably be spending many years of my life, really, always asking more questions and trying to write and think about it more. Which is what does it mean for a system to look at you and decide what of your data or your image in the world is going to be a substitute for your identity, for your presence in space, and what is it going to translate you to?

Looking at how computers see us, they actually show a lot of questions that we haven’t answered about how we look at each other. One of the big ones, especially, is that human facial recognition is not excellent. We actually have a really long-standing problem with the fact that memory is really weird. When people are often taken in and trying to identify who committed a crime against them in a lineup, there are so many different issues that are very well studied about how poorly we recognize faces.

There’s been incredible experiments done where they show people pictures. I believe this is a Danish study where they showed people photos. It was 40 different photos, all of some guys, and they asked people how many different people there were in these pictures. And the mean score was five plus or something. But if you were from this country, you would know that there were only two people, because they were both celebrities. And so seeing them at different angles, different lighting, making different faces, they were just much more intelligible to you. That is a problem we experience as people, and yet now we expect machines to solve it perfectly, something that we don’t even do ourselves.

And so I think I’m very, very much interested in these questions. I think there are all these kinds of areas where it’s to a business’s benefit to try and claim that all of these problems are solved. There’s an entire area of policing product called Video Forensics that is, in my opinion, nearly bunk. It is actually really difficult to go back to a CCTV camera surveillance system and tell precisely what happened. And you see then that there’s this entire industry through Axon and body cameras that aims to show you, as a jury, potentially, not exactly what happened, but the product is meant to “show what the police officer saw.”

We have this cultural idea that cameras are supposed to tell us the truth or the reality of something that happened, when, in reality, that’s not how these companies are building these systems. They are building them to tell a particular story that is beneficial to the person who purchased the system. And I’m both very interested and very terrified of where that’s all going to go in the next couple of years.

TFSR: This is totally anecdotal because I can’t remember what podcast I was listening to, but I remember hearing this last week the anecdote of law enforcement using body cameras are less and less speaking to individuals when they’re interacting with individuals. They’re speaking and repeating context and subtext to the camera because they know it’s going to be watched later if something happens, or if they have to bring it up in court, it’s gonna be shown to the audience. And so it’s another way of inserting their narrative to it, as opposed to actually de-escalating a situation.

Kate Bertash: Yeah, that they just automatically say, “Stop resisting,” even if you’re not. And that the way that they say things that would be a flag too in some court cases where it indicated that this thing happened. You’re basically no longer speaking to the person who you are interacting with in a police investigation or in a police process, but you are talking to the future jury that you want to acquit you ahead of time for any misconduct.

TFSR: That is so dark. [laughs]

Kate Bertash: It is very dark. And I think some of these systems as well are very open about this. One of my favorite documentaries to come out in the last couple of years that talks about this a lot is called All Light, Everywhere, a highly recommended watch. But part of it is that it goes into this question of the history of the camera, its role then in playing our mental model of what cameras are for and the truth that they tell.

And then they actually go to Axon the company and interview all the people who work there and see the product firsthand and the factories that they’re assembled in. They absolutely feel they have nothing to hide. They know how their product works, and they know who their customer is. So they’re very proud to tell this documentarian and their crew all about how well this is going to show… Because they could actually, with many of these cameras, if they really wanted to put in other types of sensors. You could have infrared in them, or any other type of recording equipment. But they don’t.

They actually put a very purposeful style of camera in that is a little bit like a fish eye sort of lens that’s supposed to show this sort of wider view. It’s “supposed to emulate what the officer saw.” But unfortunately, as we know with these kinds of lenses, at their periphery they tend to exaggerate movement because it stretches and distorts it a bit. So somebody who’s “coming at you from the side” could appear to this lens as if they are making a more rushed movement.

TFSR: Wow, that’s crazy. I’m gonna check that out for sure.

According to a 404 Media article that I will link in the show notes on this subject, there are at least 5,000 communities around the US deploying Flock. And that’s just Flock, that one company, one of a few, at least, that are offering networkable AI-enabled surveillance network systems.

You talked about the pushback after the contract was actually signed in your own town, and the continued pushback that y’all are doing to whittle that back. Do you have any other stories of pushback or resistance that you’ve seen or developed, and could you talk a bit about your traveling education on this subject too? That would be dope.

Kate Bertash: Oh, absolutely. I think honestly, the biggest thing that I wanted to really get through, especially in this conversation, is that it’s really easy to feel like you can just get steamrolled by these systems. In our community, the town I live in is actually unincorporated, which means that we are sort of ruled by the county. That’s our roll-up government. But even then, the county commissioners have very little power over Sheriffs. The Office of the Sheriff is an independently elected position, and in many communities like ours, they operate quite independently. Really, the only person who can do much to stop the Sheriff from doing anything is the Governor of the state. The county commissioners have the power of the purse, but as we can see, even with our national context, that’s not always quite enough to stop folks from doing what they want. We actually really don’t have much we can do to force the Office of the Sheriff to give up these systems.

So you have to start getting creative and thinking about what is actually more motivating. I know that you and I come from these very activist backgrounds, where we all suffer a little bit from the overstatement of the idea that the law is where you can get your relief. You could certainly try and sue somebody or force them with a ballot initiative or whatever to do something. But often it’s very limited and it’s also expensive and not often super practical. It doesn’t always also reflect a vision of a world we want to live in, where people are only accepting something like mass surveillance or not because there’s some big court case that we’re waiting to go through a Federal Circuit Court.

Realistically, I would say the biggest thing that has motivated our community is getting together and just seeing how many people agree, hearing the stories, and hearing the concerns. I think one of the most pleasant surprises that I encountered was that a lot of the people in the room who were the most vocal about their concerns for the system and its lack of appropriateness for our community were former law enforcement. They were people who had either themselves worked for the Sheriff’s Department or been police officers and did not like the level of access that this conveyed, understood that it’s difficult to ensure that it’s used responsibly.

Just having that space where people felt like they weren’t by themselves, and that they could speak out, and hear your neighbor. I was actually also very pleasantly surprised that it turned into a space, unlike a lot of those horrible videos you get of what’s going on at school board meetings or something, there was nobody screaming conspiracy theories at each other, no accusations of this sort of government mythologies that go through some of the more sensational media.

I think, generally speaking, bothering to get in the habit of actually using the space that’s available to you. Anybody can go and rent a space at their library. Anybody can go and put up some fliers and talk to your neighbors. You can ask people to come with you. Almost nobody comes to these public meetings. And so things happen like this. This decision got pushed for us on something called “the consent agenda,” which is just this big, huge packet of invoices that’s hundreds of these long. Whatever way feels right for your community, just knowing that being in the room where it happens matters quite a bit. It can be really tough to do that by yourself, but you don’t need to be a member of an official organization that feels like it’s their job to cop watch to know that it’s your right as a citizen and as somebody who is just living in that community to speak your mind and to ask your neighbors to help you out.

One of the other kinds of projects that I’m really appreciating lately has been the DeFlock project. I think that had come up as a sort of map that people were making together. I know we’ll probably link that in the show notes. But to be able to then go through, and I don’t know if you’ve ever done something called “wardriving,” but it’s where people try to collect this public information that’s available about the Wi-Fi networks that are connected to these cameras, and then they upload them to WiGLE, a database of Wi-Fi networks as they are seen around the country. And those can then be pulled into this DeFlock map, so you can actually see where all of these cameras are. Having that level of transparency to know that you have the right to know where they are in your community, and you have the right to tell other people where they are.

One of the pieces of kind of funny bit of advocacy that I thought was actually quite effective was one of these cameras was actually close to a cannabis store in my community and could basically track everybody going in and out of the parking lot. So I took some fliers, and I went into the weed store and I talked to the staff there, talked to the people who use the weed store, and said, “You probably didn’t know that this is what this thing out here does. And I bet you wouldn’t like that very much.” And so people brought it up at the local meetings, and it’s one of the cameras that ended up being removed.

These things that don’t feel like they matter a lot, that one-to-one personal discussion, actually do matter quite a bit. I think we forget sometimes that our power doesn’t have to come from ballot initiatives, lawsuits, passing new laws, or anything like that. It often comes from our desire to live together and for people to win their elections again for Sheriff or just to understand that we all actually have to see each other every day.

I hope that if this conversation inspires folks to do anything it’s to understand your personal influence in your community, and especially knowing that people want to hear from the person who they live near, who knows about this stuff, and they feel grateful. I was very surprised at the amount of really positive feedback from across the political spectrum. People coming up after these meetings, shaking my hand and saying, “Thank you, young lady, for bothering to put this together.” It was a very heartwarming moment where I feel now also like we’re going to be able to carry the conversation forward in a way that’s actually productive with the Office of the Sheriff, and with the company, moving forward. So wish us luck.

TFSR: Yeah, no that’s really awesome. And yeah, I totally agree. I think it makes sense to pay attention to the laws that are getting enforced and who’s enforcing them and all that. And it can be a lever that if you avoid using it could very well be to your detriment. But our strength is in our community and our relationships, for sure.

Kate Bertash: Yeah, and I think it’s so easy to get discouraged too. When I was thinking about the next steps of what we would do here, but also are there experiments… Something that’s kind of cool about a community like my county that has like 10,000 people in it. It is fairly easy, in many ways, in a way that is not in other types of larger cities, to actually get a pretty significant amount of involvement. You can pretty much talk to almost everybody about it. Getting enough of a quorum of people to take a specific action is a lot more doable than you think.

But I remember getting discouraged because I was thinking, “Well, is it a ballot initiative? Do we have to put something on our next county-level election?” And to just find out that that was going to be really expensive, that the company Flock might put their tremendous resources towards battling us out on it. And then just understanding that I have to remember that I am not limited to this marketplace’s imagination. The way they operate is by throwing money at the problem. But as we have figured out from how a lot of politics are going these days, there is a ceiling on how much you can purchase people’s trust and like for you.

So I’m excited to just keep people understanding that if you believe that you live here and you love privacy and that that’s the thing that brings us together, then there’s no amount of money that you should have to pay to be able to buy back your right to that kind of peace of mind from the place that supposedly wants your votes and wants you to live there.

I’m excited to see, especially, how this changes the conversation in our next Office of the Sheriff election. But also just the fact that it’s come up multiple times now in community meetings since means that you change what people think is possible by telling them that this is a topic you are allowed to talk about and to have an objection to. You can really change a lot of people’s minds about what they’re allowed to expect from the world, which is, I think, the most fun part,

TFSR: Okay, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you. Could you tell people where they can find your work? There’s the DDF that you mentioned. Are there any other project that you want to shout out?

Kate Bertash: So, Digital Defense Fund. We’re at digitaldefensefund.org. All of our learning materials and all of our resources are available online for folks to get to for free. Obviously, you can also reach out there for support around digital security for our various activist needs. But otherwise, I am also on Bluesky and Twitter at @KateRoseBee.

I honestly just would like to encourage everybody to look up, even on DeFlock.me, what the situation is in your community. Are these cameras near me? You know, you can look on your own county commissioners’ website or in your local notes of your city council meetings and try to see if there have been any discussions around this. The closer eye you keep on that [the better]. Turn on a Google alert for it in your town or something. You can both get ahead of it and then also understand the role that a lot of different types of surveillance technology are starting to have in your community and whether you agree with the place that you want them to take up in the world.

TFSR: Yeah, and I guess be proactive too. If those alerts don’t come up, and if it’s not already present in your community, this is a great time to start talking about it. Maybe it’s another company that’s offering a similar service that’s either already there or considering moving into the community. Getting those arguments together, and talking to your neighbors about the concerns is a great way to start.

Kate Bertash: Yeah, The Atlas of Surveillance is another great one that we should definitely link to. That’s a space where some folks who are both from EFF and then also students of journalism have actually done the work to try and pull public information requests to see what surveillance technologies are being used in your area. So check out the The Atlas of Surveillance and learn more. Or you can submit if there’s something there you know that’s being used that you don’t see. But thanks so much for the time. This is great.

TFSR: Yeah, my pleasure. If someone is interested in figuring out how to talk to their community about this, do you have on your website, for instance, a starter pack for talking about this? Or does one of those sites have any good key talking points to start with, that sort of thing?

Kate Bertash: I know that soon there will be more templated directions and examples, including the deck that I use. You can always message me on Twitter. I will happily share with you the deck that I use for my community. But I think one of my favorite places to start was an ACLU-written article that’s entitled “How to Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department’s Use of Flock’s Mass Surveillance License Plate Readers,” and they had a lot of great templated language and some actions you can take to start. I know also that EFF is working on ensuring that communities have more access to things like this in the future. So you can keep an eye out for that. But until then, feel free to always message me on Twitter or on Bluesky, and I will happily share my templated deck with you and the other tips.

TFSR: Awesome. It’s been a pleasure, and thanks again for the chat.

Kate Bertash: Oh, thank you so much. This was wonderful.

Stop Cop City: Imaginary Crimes Tour

"Imaginary Crimes Tour - Stop Cop City | TFSR 3-30-2025" featuring an alchemy-style drawing with three heads with the skulltops cut off over a flat disc cut into portions with symbols floating above the heads and on the disc
Download This Episode

This week, we’re sharing an interview with Selena who speaks about the “Stop Cop City: Imaginary Crimes Tour” and Jordan, a RICO defendant from the Stop Cop City 61 case. The two speak about anti-repression, about where the case is at right now and a wider view of resistance and support. The tour will be hitting over 60 cities (not all in the USA)

From their tour announcement:

61 people are facing RICO trials in Atlanta for alleged involvement in resistance to the construction of Cop City. The State uses imaginary associations and crimes, framed as RICO, as a means to break solidarity and momentum when movements are strong. Anti-repression is a response that uses an alternate imagination to strengthen solidarity and resistance.

In Spring 2025, a nationwide tour will visit over 60 cities to discuss the history of the Atlanta forest, the resistance to Cop City, history of RICO, ongoing legal updates and facilitate discussions on anti-repression and movement defense. Through this tour we aim to share the lessons we have learned across struggles, and adapt to the evolving repressive forces so that we can continue to move bravely together.⁩⁩

Stay updated here:

If you want some more content on the struggle, check out this really interesting episode of Audio Interference, a podcast associated with the Interference Archive in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood featuring materials from and discussion of a September 2024 installation entitled “Archiving Stop Cop City: This Is Not A Local Struggle

To hear past episodes of ours on the Stop Cop City movement, check out this link.

Announcements

A Message from Peppy

A brief statement from Brian “Peppy” DiPippa, an anarchist in Pittsburgh convicted of engaging a home made smoke bomb at cops protecting an anti-trans event at University of Pittsburgh in May of 2023 and sentenced to 60 months in Federal Prison. You can learn more about Peppy & his co-defendant Krystal (who just had a birthday!) at their support site

May we find inspiration and creativity in these challenging times. Let us be guided by friendship and self determination. May we mind our pace, study our ancestors, listen to our storytellers and run towards expansive freedom and autonomy. Solidarity to all those held captive by the state and their loved ones on the outside, your work is felt even if it is not always the most visible.

Now Airing on WEFR 1700 AM, Fairmont WV

We are happy to announce that we’re airing at 3pm on Saturdays on WEFR 1700AM in Fairmont, WV. To support this small station, check out their GoFundMe, and if you’ve got a community radio station, college radio station or public radio station in your area that you’d like to hear us on, check out our Radio Broadcasting tab and send us their way!

. … . ..

Featured Tracks:

Continue reading Stop Cop City: Imaginary Crimes Tour

The Last Standing House In The Neighborhood (Hamza M. Salha in North Gaza)

"TFSR 3-26-25 | The Last Standing House In The Neighborhood (Hamza M. Salha in North Gaza)" featuring a photo of Hamza smiling at the camera
Download This Episode

We’re sharing audio from audio recorded by Franklin Lopez of Amplifier Films with Palestinian journalist Hamza M Salha who lives in North Gaza describing the conditions with the resumption of the escalated genocide being conducted by the Israeli settler-colonial military. Hamza speaks about the means that people are informed of incoming bombing raids, speaks of the sleepless night in the midst falling bombs in the rubble and tents, clearly exhausted himself. He speaks about the availability of food, his thoughts on the strangling and murderous siege of Israel, the failure of the world to stop the genocide and occupation.

You can find stories and photos from Hamza on his  instagram account. If you want to support him and 40 members of his extended family and attempting to get out of Gaza to get medical attention, you can check out his Go Fund Me.

You can watch the video without any accounts, only a web browser and internet connection by visiting the Amplifier Films mastodon account. To echo Hamza, thanks to Franklin Lopez of Amplifier Films (Facebook, Instagram) for sharing this audio and creating videos to share Hamza’s world with us on the outside, and our deep gratitude to Adrienne for the support and Hamza for expressing his experience for the audience. We wish you solidarity and health.

You can read some of Hamza’s writings below (same as last episode):

. … . ..

Featured Track:

Continue reading The Last Standing House In The Neighborhood (Hamza M. Salha in North Gaza)

Prefiguring Autonomy: Student-led Social Movement in Serbia Shake The Government

"TFSR 3-23-25 | Prefiguring Autonomy: Student-Led Social Movement in Serbia Shakes The Government" featuring a photo of a night-time demonstration in a Serbian city with red flares lighting the night
Download This Episode

This week, we speak with Ilik and Koko, two students from Serbia, and another anarchist comrade who participated in student and other movements earlier in this century to speak about the anti-corruption protest that have rocked the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) government of president Vučić’ since the deadly collapse of a recently opened concrete train platform canopy in Novi Sad on November 1st 2024, so far killing 16 people.

Starting with student demands for transparency and accountability from the government that were answered with violence and subterfuge, the protests have grown and drawn from wider and wider portions of the public into millions taking the streets, creating autonomous assemblies and plenums rejecting the political parties. The guests speak about the growth, the reactions against it, and the possibilites they see in what has the seeds that could bring it from social movement to social revolution.

Some other reading sources (thanks Rey!)

Announcement

Fundraiser for Journalist in North Gaza

As the Zionist Entity and it’s racist uncle, the USA, resume the genocide of Gaza, there’s a fundraiser going to support Hamza M Salha, a young journalist and English student and his extended family of 40 in the north.

You can find a video from Franklin Lopez about Hamza and links to his fundraiser at the following social media posts:

You can read some of Hamza’s writings below:

Continue reading Prefiguring Autonomy: Student-led Social Movement in Serbia Shake The Government

Jay Ward on Hunger Strike + Antifascists Organizing in Europe

We’re sharing our episode a few days early this week and it contains two segments plus Sean Swain…

Jay Ward Hunger Strike

Phone zap flyer including demands and contacts (also present in blog post)

First up, a recent interview with James “Jay” Ward. Jay was featured in a show about a year ago: he went into prison at 15 years old in Ohio and has been in for 19 years at this point. He participated in the 2018 Nationwide Prisoner Strike as well as other self-advocacy protests since and is trying to raise funds with his outside supporters to pay for a lawyer to help him win his release as his mandatory minimum date comes up next year. When this was recorded, Jay was 11 days into a hunger strike demanding a return of his personal items and a transfer to a space where he won’t be targeted for violence by gangs, alongside a couple of other requests listed in his letter at the end of this post. You can hear how tired he is from subsisting only on water for the last week and a half, struggling to keep focus and concentrate on the conversation throughout our chat. You can find his gofundme for updates and ways to donate.

If you want to support his hunger strike, his supporters are requesting people call between 9am and 5pm central time (Mon-Fri) the following numbers to voice concern for the safety and conditions of James Ward A517461 on hunger strike :

  • Mansfield Correctional Institution at 419-525-4455 and ask to talk to Warden Harold May
  • the Central ODRC office at 614-387-0588

At the bottom of our show notes you can find Jay’s public announcement of his circumstances and requests. You can also email your concerns to drc.manci@odrc.state.ohio.us as well as to the ODRC Director Annette Chambers-Smith (via annette.chambers-smith@odrc.state.ohio.us ).

Jay is wanting people to reach out to contact him via his mailing address (below) or JPay.com (using the info in his mailing address):

James Ward A517461
Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
Mail Processing Center (OMPC)
884 Coitsville-Hubbard Road
Youngstown, Ohio 44505

Antifascist Voices in Europe

Then you’ll hear an interview conducted by our comrades at crna luknja in Ljubljana, Slovenia with antifascists countering neonazi demonstrations in Budapest, Hungary, and Sofia, Bulgaria. This was featured in the latest episode of B(A)D News from the A-Radio Network, a monthly podcast from a network that we affiliate with and worth checking out for “angry voices from around the world”.

  • Transcript
  • PDF (Unimposed)
  • Zine (Imposed PDF)

Finally, you’ll hear Sean Swain’s promise for a brighter, goldener era for the USA (and subsequently the world)

Announcements

Malik Muhammad Phone Zap

There’s a phone zap currently on to move 2020 “Palestinian pansexual Muslim… anarchist antifascist, anti-racist abolitionist” prisoner Malik Muhammad out of solitary confinement at Snake River Correctional in Oregon.

Call Snake River Correctional with the following demands weekdays between 9am and 5pm pacific time:

  • Return Malik to general inmate population;
  • Restore communications rights and mail;
  • Return all books and possessions immediately;
  • End the persecution now!

Master Control: 541-881-5018
Superintendent: 541-881-5002
Inspector: 541-881-5081
Chaplains: 541-881-4624, 541-881-4625, 541-881-4626, 541-881-4686
General Line: 541-881-5000

Please write to Malik and let him know you stand with him!

Malik Muhammad #23935744
Snake River Correctional Institution
777 Stanton Blvd
Ontario, OR 97914-8335

*Note*: Please include page numbers and return addresses on each page because the prison typically does not give inmates the envelopes.

Update on Fund Raising and supporting TFSR

A quick update to the patreon request we made in recent episodes: We’re back where we were a month ago, covering the basic costs. Big thanks to those who stepped up to help! We have other costs beyond that (printing and mailing our small contribution to prisoner zines per month, replenishing our stickers, equipment upgrades) that we could also use support in if you have a few bucks a month. We have that patreon with it’s early audio releases and other thank-yous, or anonymized payments via liberapay that can be one-time or recurring. We also have a big cartel store with some merch and can take payments via venmo and paypal. These are linked at https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/donate

If you appreciate the work we do but don’t have the extra money, the best way to contribute is to get involved in face to face organizing where you are, integrating movements against oppression and capitalism into your life and brings others along with you since we can’t get there without each other.

If you want to support the podcast without money, you can spread word about the podcast by getting in touch, offering up graphic skills, helping us proof our transcripts, talking about us to friends, incorporating our zines or episodes into a discussion group, sending zines to prisoners, rating us on google and apple podcasts or spreading word on social media. We also take audio submissions and if you’re interested in getting involved, the production and interviews don’t get us paid but they open up avenues to talk to authors about their ideas as well as raise awareness and involvement in social struggles and pick up the skills along the way.

And if you live in a place with a community radio station, public radio station or college radio station and want to hear us on the airwaves, get a few friends together and reach out to suggest our free, weekly radio show and hopefully some of the ideas will filter out to your neighbors. More info at our Radio tab. Thanks for listening!

Statement from Jay on his conditions

This is Jay’s letter to the head of the Ohio DRC:

Dear Annette chambers-smith

This is James Ward from ManCI. The last time I wrote to you I had explained a lot to you that has been going on here concerning my safety. And after that letter the administration got mad at me for going to you because they have not been trying to do anything to really ensure my safety here at Mansfield. And I’m writing you again because I don’t know who else to go to with my recent situation and concerns, because nobody has been helpful. And currently, my safety is back at risk.

About 7 months ago right before the admin got the letter I sent you, UMC Henry got me placed in unit 4B (the faith based block here), mainly for my safety concerns. Every block that I’ve been put in since I been here, I’ve became a victim to gangs and have also got a hit put on me, which UMC Henry and the rest other admin doesn’t want to believe although they seen and heard proof. So it makes it to where I have to go on PC invest, suicide watch or hunger strike to ensure my safety. But I honestly don’t like being in the hole unless I legitimately did something wrong. So my current situation is that I am on hunger strike to ensure my safety, but also for other reasons that I will explain.

When I got put in 4B, its an inmate that the unit refers to as frank (4B/128 bottom) and they basically let him control the operation of the block. How? He’s been in that block for a long time and manages the faith base programs, etc. But due to the reputation he has built up with the unit staff, Sgt Knowlton and others believes everything he tells them. So when I first got moved over their, I was honestly selling food to people that didn’t have any. But frank went to the unit and told them that I was selling drugs to try and get me moved out of the block. The unit called me over and talked to me about it and I stopped selling food for awhile. I was do in everything I was required to do and haven’t got no ticket. Recently, I was trying to organize a group meal for people that really didn’t have much. And an inmate named Green wanted to be involved. But when I told Green that a prisoner support group was going to do a fundraiser to raise the money for the meal he backed out. He then went to inmate frank and told frank that I was trying to scam people and get them outside cases. Franks celly told me that frank said this and was going to put a stop to what I was doing. Next thing you know I’m on the list to move out of the block ( I was sent to 2B). I then sent a kite to Sgt. Knowlton and basically asked him why I got moved and also told him things that frank and others are doing in that block, but he disregarded everything I told him and only told me “you were doing too much, use your imagination”. So I then kited UMC Henry and told him what happened and he said he’d look into it. But before Henry could let me know anything, my Cally told me that someone wanted him to take the hit on me. I then went on suicide watch to ensure my safety. Because PC invest has not gotten me anything and they put you in a cell with someone else that can have their family look you up. That’s what people do here (sneak thru your stuff to find your ID number and have their family look you up). And I also started my hunger strike because I know that the admin won’t do anything to help me.

Recently, henry talked to me and said that he will investigate what happened in 4B, but that a hunger strike isn’t how I will get moved back. But for me to go to a regular block while he investigates. And I get it that a hunger strike is not the way to get moved back, but I refuse to go to a regular block where my safety will be at risk. Henry wanting me to go to a regular block while he investigates is like saying go get jumped on while I look into this. 4C is the only block here that I will be safe in, because its the intake block (all of the new people that don’t know anything about e hit on me goes to that block), but Henry will not put me there.

During the time that I was on PC invest before I got moved to 4B, I found out that property of mine came up missing from the TPU vault. While I was in TPU I was writing complaints on LT. Brooks and Sgt. Risner for not allowing me to do my 2.4. The end result was that the active AIIS at the time (B. Lower) and the IIS D. Blankenship falsified a modified response to my complaint to make it seem like I was lying and that they found the items in my cell. But 2 days before Lower came to search my cell, I was called to the inspectors office concerning my lost property because someone in your office wanted to know what property was I talking about in my complaint. So I told them everything and that a theft report was filed. But the theft report was not put on onbase yet, so lower had to contact the block officer that wrote it (officer Comstock). So they called me back up to the inspectors office and offered to reimburse me with $42+ on my commissary and a few items from contraband. So I told them I’d think about it. They called me back up the next day and I told them I didn’t want it because they wouldn’t replace everything I was missing. So the next day after that is when lower came to search my cell. And when he left he told me that I should have taken the deal. After that, IIS Blankenship wrote 13 false statements in her modified response, which is a criminal offence that I can prove with the paperwork that I have. And now they have lower walking around as a Lt. Blankenship was already caught falsifying state documents in Darryl Smith’ lawsuit.

I been 5 years R.I.B ticket free. 3 of those years was when I was in level 4. I been here 2 years with no real trouble. The first year when I went up for my security review it was said that I needed time to adjust. This past year when I went up, the admin recommended level decrease. But then I find out that I didn’t get my level dropped, because an incident that took place 8 years ago and isn’t true. The BOC said that my level decrease was denied because I tried to kill a staff. I’ve never been a threat to anybody since I been locked up. And the time that they referred to is when I had just got put in a regular cell on suicide watch. They didn’t have a crisis cell to use. So the cuff port had to stay open. And I had joked with the officer saying that I found a razor, so without really knowing if I had one he sprayed me in the face with OC. So they removed me from the cell to clean it, but they never found a razor. And I told them not to put that officer back on my watch cuz he sprayed me for no reason, and I was honestly mad. But they put him back on my watch. So to try and get him off my watch, in a fast motion I acted like I was reaching out to grab him. He was too far from the door for me to grab or anything, but he wrote me up saying that I tried to cut him with a razor. And they never allowed me to go to my R.I.B or SMP hearing. But that happened 8 years ago. And majority of that time since then I have continuously show a dramatic change in my behavior with no R.I.B tickets. I believe the only reason my level decrease was denied is because UMC Henry contacted someone in your office to find something that they can use against me to hold me here. Because I have wrote complaints against Henry and wrote that letter to you. And he knows how much I been wanting to leave this prison, but he won’t transfer me even though my safety is continuously at risk here.

Lastly! I have chronic damage in both of my shoulders that causes them to be able to dislocate if I’m not paying attention to how I use my arms, mainly only when it comes to having my arms outstretched or if I have to climb something. The last time I was placed on the top bunk, my left shoulder dislocated when I was trying to climb up. I feel backwards and busted my head open on a dresser, then on the floor. And that is in my medical record from when I was at W.C.I. And since then, I have had many other dislocations that is in my medical record. I was given bottom rack restriction each time, but I never really needed it since I been at level 4. Since I been here I been trying to get it back but medical tells me its not required for my injuries. They gave it to me for 3 months and that was it. If my shoulder dislocates while trying to climb onto the top bunk and I bust my head open again, then I can sue the medical department for negligence and deliberate indifference because I have told them about my chronic dislocations and they choose not to do anything about it.

All I ask for:
1) My property to be replaced
2) My bottom bunk restriction
3) My level decreased so I can leave ManCI
4) If I can’t get 3, then I ask to be placed in 4C for the remaining time that I’m at ManCI

These are reasonable request and within reason.

Continue reading Jay Ward on Hunger Strike + Antifascists Organizing in Europe

Bodily Autonomy and Health Education In An Easy To Swallow Package (Abortion Pill Zine)

Abortion Pill Zine Cover featuring flowers and houses
Download This Episode

This week, we’re sharing an interview Ian conducted with cartoonists Isabella Rotman, Sage Coffey, and Marnie Galloway on the subject of the Abortion Pill Zine: A Community Guide to Misoprostol and Mifepristone out now from Silver Sprocket (and freely readable on their website). They discuss the process by which this resource was assembled, the benefits of local, focused abortion organizing, the timeliness and timelessness of the fight for safe abortion care, and the power of comics to disseminate valuable and complex information.

Links

Announcements

BAD News for February 2025

The A-Radio Network of anarchist and antiauthoritarian radios and podcasts just released the latest in their monthly series, B(A)D News: Angry Voices From Around The World for February 2025, episode 88. This one features Parias from Athens sharing an interview about resisting wind farms and green developmentalism in the Greek mountains as well as Črna luknja from Ljubljana speaking with antifascists from Budapest and Sofia about resisting Europes largest annual neo-nazi rally, the LukovMarch.

Support for Anarchists in Sudan

You can read a short publication by the Sudan Anarchist Gathering called Al-Amal in English thanks to the translation work of CNT-AIT France (or the original Arabic as well) at this blog. From the blog:

If you want to receive the next
issues, please contact us : contact@cnt-ait.info
If you want to support financially the Sudan Anarchist Gathering, you can use our paypal
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/cntait1
(please validate “Sending ‘money to an individual’ to pay less bank charges) Send an email to contact@cnt-ait.info to inform us of the donation and also so that we can keep you informed of its use.

Continue reading Bodily Autonomy and Health Education In An Easy To Swallow Package (Abortion Pill Zine)