Seven years ago, on this day, March 15th, 2019,
Police unlawfully spied on children as young as 10 taking part in a climate strike protest in London, documents have shown.
The previously unseen papers reveal the Metropolitan police were rebuked by the information commissioner’s office (ICO) for video surveillance of the March 2019 protest, which was attended by up to 10,000 children and young people.
Ruling the data-gathering unlawful, the watchdog said the force had failed to consider the privacy rights of the children at the protest, and had not considered their entitlement to added data protections in light of their age.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 411ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was the police are there to protect… the propertied classes and to subdue political dissent. There’s a lot of other window dressing stuff as well. The Met especially, as the biggest police force, leads the way in a lot of this. And ah, and had been harassing community groups, non violent groups, for a long time.
In 1968 the Special Demonstration Squad, aka spy cops. (Though spy cops is broader than that). It sent undercovers in for four or five year deployments not to gather evidence so much but as to demoralise, provoke etc. Which is absolutely what a thriving democracy, where the elites respect the rights of the peasants, behaves like.
The specific context was that in the 1990s – some of us are old enough to remember – it was still iffy for police evidence gatherers to be randomly and routinely gathering video footage at protests and demonstrations.. Now, well, normalised.
What I think we can learn from this is that in late 2018 the climate issue had burst onto the scene again, thanks to the very hot summer, though possibly not so hot by today’s standards, in the UK and Europe, the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on 1.5 degrees. Greta Thunberg had just started, but the main thing in the UK was Extinction Rebellion, co-founded by Roger Hallam and Gail Bradbrook, and they had announced a declaration of rebellion in Parliament Square. And then a month later, they had occupied five bridges in London.
And no one could know how long this wave of protest would last. So the Met were there busy filming everyone, which has various advantages.
One is you get a nice, fat database to crawl through, potentially disobedient people.
Number two, it intimidates some people.
Number three, it forces other people angry about it, to spend time and energy combating police overreach, rather than spending that time and energy on pushing corporations and governments to do more on climate change – so it’s a nice little sort of diversion of energy and resources.
So it’s a win, win win for the cops, they might, at worst, get a rap on the knuckles from some legal busy-bodies, but they can largely ignore that.
What happened next The police continued filming, of course, and now have facial recognition profiling technology thanks to various dodgy deals with people like Peter Thiel of Palantir.
The techno dystopia is being rolled out, and except for, I don’t know, Liberty and Netpol and a few other groups, everyone else is shrugging their shoulders and doing their best Bart Simpson, “What are you going to do?” imitation, myself included.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
March 15, 1956 – scientist explains climate change to US senators
March 15, 2002 – GM bails from Global Climate Coalition
March 15, 2019 – New Zealand school strike launched, called off.