Free to Protest (UK)
The 'Free to Protest' campaign highlights the range of surveillance tools that the police can use to monitor and identify you if you attend a protest, and how you can better protect yourself from protest surveillance.
We believe that people should be able to attend peaceful protests without the police using sophisticated surveillance tools to monitor, track and identify protestors indiscriminately.
Unfortunately, UK police forces do increasingly use a wide range of surveillance capabilities at protests, like facial recognition technology, IMSI catchers and mobile phone data extraction tools. It means that by attending a protest, the police can potentially identify you, track you and monitor you.
Our 'Free to Protest' guides provide a wide range of bite-sized information about the surveillance capabilities that UK police forces have, and also provide strategies and tips to defend yourself against surveillance. But please do note, that police surveillance capabilities are very powerful, and ultimately it's impossible to fully protect yourself from police surveillance at protests.
This is why we will also be building an international campaign so that people are able to protest without being caught up in indiscriminate surveillance.
You can access each of our short 'Free to Protest' (UK edition) guides from the links below, or you can download the compiled guides from this page.
You can also access 'Free to Protest' guides for other countries around the world, adapted by PI's partners.
