Wow. I’m speechless. Richard Greelis, an undercover cop who infiltrated organizing around the 2008 Republican National Convention, has written a memoir in which he tells bald faced lies about independent videographers supposedly turning their cameras off to hide protesters’ attacks on police, then documenting the police ‘response.’ I was there, shooting video for iWitness video, and this is complete BS. Dangerous BS. You kind of just have to laugh at it.

Just posted up on TC Indymedia:
http://tc.indymedia.org/2009/sep/ex-bloomington-cop-richard-greelis-book-reveals-rnc-undercover-work-pdf

Here’s a lol: Cop Book

One chapter of Greelis’ memoir - titled simply “Cop Book” - details his undercover work around the 2008 Republican National Convention, including attending a Northfield peace group’s forum, placing a short-lived informant in the RNC Welcoming Committee, participating in Critical Mass and protests throughout the convention.

The Welcoming Committee sponsored training through various affinity groups, such as the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Citizens Against Police Brutality.  These groups trained volunteers to be legal observers and videographers.  Police sent informants to these, and other open classes, to learn what the training amounted to.  Once trained, NLG volunteers were expected to wear the lime-green baseball caps that made them stand out in a crowd of protesters while they awaited the inevitable confrontations.  When these confrontations arose, the observers’ instructions were to make notes on actions taken by police and record the names and badge numbers of officers involved.  Videographers typically left their video cameras in the “off” position during confrontations with police, while protesters surreptitiously pelted the officers with rocks, garbage, excrement, and urine squirted from Super Soakers.  When the police finally had enough, and brought out the tear gas and hickory sticks, the cameras started rolling and continued to roll until the last mope was piled into the last police transport.  The videographers then turned their cameras off and offered up their video to any of countless sympathetic media outlets covering the event.  (A movie, Terrorizing Dissent, released by Glass Bead Collective, et al., was made after the RNC using a compilation of these types of clips.)

To see what actually happened (massive police brutality that the Twin Cities doesn’t even have to pay for since the RNC allocated millions to cover the lawsuits beforehand) at the RNC 2008 I recommend viewing Ground Noise and Static or Terrorizing Dissent.

So I fell behind during the last few days on a couple posts I meant to write. First off, a little about participating in video the vote during the election. VTV is a great project, developed by some of the folks from Guerilla News Network for the 2004 election and run again in 2006 (and now 2008). It’s great because the premise is clear and simple: coordinate a nationwide network of video volunteers to document any irregularities at the polls, thereby strengthening the evidence of any election fraud so that it will be more difficult to pull off Grand Theft Country as in 2000. This year they managed to line up some heavy hitting partners, including YouTube and PBS. I decided to sign up and the process was easy, just registered using their online form and filled out some info (name, location, availability times on election day, do i have a camera, do i have video shooting skills, and so on). Then I received an email with info about upcoming training conference calls. I didn’t get around to a call right away, and a volunteer even called me to double check that I’d gotten the info. So far so good.

On Sunday, I joined a conference call that had about 20 people from around the country, and a video the vote staff (volunteer?) ran us through how things would work. To make a long story short, volunteer dispatchers at call centers work with election monitors and when they receive a report of an irregularity, they use the VTV database to look up the nearest videographer and send them to shoot interviews. It’s a great project, and with 3,500 people signed up across the country to participate, there’s a decent chance that someone will be available to go shoot, at least anywhere near major urban areas. The interface for dispatch could really be improved with some simple GIS tools, easily accomplished via, say, google maps API. For example it would be nice if the dispatcher could look up the location of the problem and immediately see the nearest shooters (videographers), rather than search around via ZIP codes.

The system is cool, but there was a serious lack of security consciousness. On the dispatch call with 20 anonymous callers from around the country, the VtV trainer gave out login info for the database that gave us all access not only to look up videographers by ZIP, but with a few clicks allowed us to see name, address, phone number, and even download all 3500 people’s info into an xcel spreadsheet. Not good. What if I was Karl Rove? What if I was an annoying telemarketer? What if I were using this system in, say, Tunisia? It should be obvious by now that lots of states are taking action against activists by tracking them online. VtV needs to figure out a better process for giving permissions out; maybe reading through something like the RSF Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents would help.

Anyway, on election day I ended up receiving several calls from dispatch volunteers, and with camera in hand and my partner Chris at the wheel we headed out to document. The first situation was a blank, with no problem and no disgruntled people to interview by the time we got there, but the next call panned out. At a polling place around the 400 block of Union, a number of mostly Latino voters were being given provisional ballots, even when they were fully registered. Also, there was an aggro poll worker who physically pushed a guy out of the polling place for waiting around for his girlfriend to vote, and then physically pushed and verbally abused election observers who tried to stop him. His supervisor wasn’t helpful, either - she ended up calling the police, not on the aggressive poll worker, but on the election observers. Anyway I shot interviews with the election observers and with some neighbors across the street who saw it all, including one family where the father had inappropriately received a pink provisional ballot. Now I have to go upload the interview…