Basic Politics of Movement Security

There are many books and articles reporting state repression, but not on that subject’s more intimate relative, movement security. It is general practice to only pass along knowledge about movement security privately, in closed group lectures or by personal word-of-mouth. In fact, when new activists have questions about security problems, they quickly discover that there is no “Security for Dummies” to explore the basics. Adding to the confusion, the handful of available left security texts are usually about underground or illegal groups, not the far larger public movements that work on a more or less legal level. During Montreal's 2013 Festival of Anarchy, J. Sakai gave a workshop about the politics of movement security, sharing the results of typical incidents of both the movement’s successes and the movement’s failures in combating the “political police” or state security agencies. He also discussed the nature of those state sub-cultures. This booklet contains a transcript of that talk, and of the subsequent lively question and answer period; along with several after-the-workshop observations by Sakai. As he explains, "The key thing is, to start with, security is not about being