The Tightrope Between Tinfoil-hat Paranoia and Rose-tinted Naivety

2023-08-18T17:02:52Z

In the late 1990s, like a lot young and idealistic anarchist geeks, I was inspired by EFF founder John Perry Barlow declaring independence for the internet ("cyberspace", as some people were still calling it). I was fascinated by the potential of the net for democratically coordinating action among global citizens. These were the days of the "anti-globalization movement" (a meaningless buzzphrase coined by corporate media, see footnote). A series of huge, distributed protests, coordinated on a global scale, through online networks like People's Global Action. I joined and created a lot of email lists, and I saw a lot of this happening in real time.

It was on one of these email lists that I first encountered Rob Gilchrist. I didn't get on with him at first. Like many activists (well.. real activists... but we'll get to that), he could be abrasive to deal with online.

After I moved back to Ōtautahi at the end of 2000 I ended up meeting him in person. He was already involved in a few of the groups that pooled resources to create the InterActive activist centre, which we set up in 2001. At the time, a network of local groups was communicating on yet another email list about setting up Aotearoa Indymedia. I was part of the Ōtautahi Indymedia group, which helped find a space to rent for InterActive, organise a network connection, and source computers, inspired by examples like the original Independent Media Centre in Seattle. This pushed me into regular contact with Gilchrist, and I still remember him insisting I install PGP email encryption on the InterActive computers, and claiming to have found a "bug" (listening device) in the building.

I was suspicious of Gilchrist from day one. To this day, I couldn't tell you exactly why. Something just... smelled wrong about him and his origin story. I was so suspicious of him I contacted a few geeks friends, who I'd seen at public meetings against state surveillance, asking if they had any idea how to check his background without tipping him off, or his handlers.

But I was young and green, and my understanding of the ins and outs of anti-activist spying was pretty limited. I presumed that anyone spying on us would hang around a few weeks, a few months at most, whether they were informants for the cops, corporate-funded contractors (like Thompson & Clark), or more sinister alphabet agencies. By then, I figured, either we'd get wise to their game, or they'd finish their operation and vanish. My spidey-senses never stopped tingling when I had anything to do with Gilchrist, but when he was still around a couple of years later, I started to rationalise it away.

As a result of both my own activism, and my role as a roving reporter and ambassador for the Aotearoa Indymedia website, I spent the next few years going to all kinds of protests, picket lines, occupations, public meetings, conferences, and camps, all around Aotearoa. Gilchrist turned up at a surprising number of them. Often doing what seemed like really useful work.

I never fully trusted Gilchrist. But I freely admit to developing a grudging respect for his commitment, and asking myself some hard questions about the possible sources of my distrust. After all, I thought, paranoia is an occupational hazard for any long-term activist. Got to keep in check. After he gained the trust of a number of the older activists I respected, it started to seem crazy to think he was a spy, spidey-senses be damned.

How wrong those rationalisations were. Because my intuition, as it turned out, was right on the money.

In December of 2008, just a couple of months after the Operation 8 raids that unleashed shocked and awe on activist communities around the country, investigative journalist Nicky Hager exposed Gilchrist's real game in the Sunday Star Times newspaper. Hager's article revealed that for about a decade, the cops had been paying him $600 a week (on top of his social welfare benefit) as an informant. A comfortable salary at a time when benefits were about $2-300 a week.

There were a number of lessons in this experience for me. But the most important one was to trust my intuition. Because when I screen out any jumping at shadows that's coming from anxiety - and if I pay attention I can tell the difference - my intuition is always right. I don't know how this works, but it does.

I've read theories about deep pattern-matching abilities, which lurk beneath the rationalising surface of the mind, but who knows. My experience has consistently been that when I let my rationalisations shout down my spidey-senses, it always blinds me to an important truth.

For the last 15 years or so, I've walked a tightrope strung between the twin poles of tinfoil-hat paranoia and rose-tinted naivety. It's possible to over-correct in both directions. As Chomsky once pointed out, just because there are lots of crazy ideas out there labeled "conspiracy theories", that doesn't mean there are no real conspiracies. On the contrary, he says, history is full of them. The trick to staying out of the conspiracy rabbitholes people can tend to go down, I reckon, comes down to two things.

Firstly, I try to be clear about what I *know*, and how. Keep my focus on that. Speculation is useful to a limited degree, if it helps me come up with ways to test possibilities, and gain more useful information. But if I spend too much time speculating, and not enough time testing and discarding, the fantasy world of the speculation can take on a life of its own. As the Wizard of New Zealand used to say, "never believe your own bullshit".

Secondly, along similar lines, I'm very careful not to get lost in the things my spidey-senses are tingling about. Which ironically, seems to get easier the more I *listen* to them, and trust what my intuition is trying to tell me. It's important to unplug and go for a walk, hang out with friends, watch a funny movie, listen to music, juggle, sing, confuse the cat with silly dancing, anything fun that distracts me from the paranoia-inducing stuff I'm probing, and helps me to put it in perspective.

Can I prove any of this story about my personal history with Gilchrist? Can I prove I was suspicious of him from the start? Can I even prove I'm the same Strypey that spent years reporting for Indymedia? Don't know. Probably not, unless there's a Web of Trust that connects you, dear reader, to someone who knew me back then. You can choose to believe me, or assume I'm a raving nutter. That's entirely your business.

But although I can't prove I didn't read about it in the newspaper, or find it online, I can direct you to a range of sources that confirm the Gilchrist story. Turns out there's a few Rob Gilchrist's in the world. Or at least, people with names similar enough to his to come up when you web search it. For your convenience, dear reader, I've spent a bit of time sorting the wheat from the chaff.

In order of publication, here is everything a quick web search turned up on the subject of paid police informant Rob Gilchrist. Both corporate media articles and op eds, and blog pieces from a range of political alignments. It's notable that this is a rare case where activists, journalists, and bloggers - on both left and right - mostly agree with each other. That it's gross and unethical for the cops to be paying a guy a salary to spy on and sleep with activists.

Many of these links date back to a time when news and blog sites still had their own comment sections. Rather than outsourcing that to the datafarms, probably the first of their many mistakes that helped the datafarms eat their business.

Anyway, when you skim a few of these comment threads, it's also notable that many of the shorter comments are spouting the same handful of talking points. I presume this is because they're either being posted by sockpuppets doing PR arse-covering, or Useful Idiots echoing those sockpuppets when the talking points fit their biases.

Note, to create equal opportunities confusion for both local *and* overseas readers, when it comes to dates, I've used the ISO 8601 format that pretty much nobody else uses (year-month-day).

2008-12-14 - Crossing the line: the activist who turned police informer
https://web.archive.org/web/20090531212020/http://www.nickyhager.info/crossing-the-line-the-activist-who-turned-police-informer/

2008-12-14 - The activist who turned police informer
https://web.archive.org/web/20081217031940/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792177a6619.html

2008-12-14 - Who the police were spying on
https://web.archive.org/web/20081217042627/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792188a6619.html

2008-12-14 - How Gilchrist was found out
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216020616/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792178a6005.html

2008-12-14 - Anti-terror squad spies on protest groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20081214131056/https://www.stuff.co.nz/4792627a11.html

2008-12-14 - Chief of police called in over spies
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/chief-of-police-called-in-over-spies/B4KJMTY7HSGGIDVQS5DE4EEJ7U/

2008-12-14 - Sunday Star Times
https://thestandard.org.nz/sunday-star-times/

2008-12-14 - Police state
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2008/12/police-state.html

2008-12-14 Rob Gilchrist : Police Informant
https://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1551

2008-12-14 - The SST Police spying story
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_sst_police_spying_story.html

2008-12-14 - How Gilchrist was found out
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216120311/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76507/index.php

2008-12-14 - Police anti-terror squad spies on protest groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20090127054440/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76508/index.php

2008-12-14 - Rob Gilchrist: I'm a Police Information (video clipped from TV3 news)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPTtG9x1hlo

2008-12-15 - Loose lips sink ships…
https://newmasses.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/loose-lips-sink-ships/

2008-12-15 - State snooping on activists
https://fightback.org.nz/2008/12/15/civil-rights-fast-disappearing/

2008-12-15 - Is the NZ left naive or paranoid?
https://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2008/12/is-the-nz-left-naive-or-paranoid.html

2008-12-16 - Gordon Campbell On The Transition Package, And Paid Police Spies Within Protest Groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20090202062628/http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/gordon-campbell-on-the-transition-package-and-paid-police-spies-within-protest-groups/

2008-12-16 - Police using spies and lies to make case
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216120315/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76514/index.php

2008-12-16 - Special Intelligence Group targetting political dissidents.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100514224310/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76343/special-intelligence-group-targetting-po

2008-12-16 - Unsubstantiated accusations
https://web.archive.org/web/20100514083018/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76345/unsubstantiated-accusations

2008-12-16 - The limits to tolerance of the police
https://thestandard.org.nz/the-limits-to-tolerance-of-the-police/

2008-12-16 - Capitalist state just doing its job
https://web.archive.org/web/20081228113024/https://workersparty.org.nz/2008/12/16/capitalist-state-just-doing-its-job/

2008-12-16 - Rochelle hits back
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/rochelle_hits_back.html

2008-12-17 - Rob Gilchrist - police informant for 'anti-terror' unit
https://web.archive.org/web/20081220142203/http://indymedia.org.nz/feature/display/72017/index.php

2008-12-17 - Who else are they spying on?
https://thestandard.org.nz/who-else-are-they-spying-on/

2008-12-17 - The Murky World of Rob Gilchrist
https://web.archive.org/web/20111124055808/https://nzagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com/2008/12/murky-world-of-rob-gilchrist.html

2008-12-17 - Greens say spy passed information to police on anti-Taser protest
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/greens-say-spy-passed-information-to-police-on-anti-taser-protest/QZH7FI7HGSP7C5ZVPVHXYE74V4/

2008-12-17 - Garth George: Greens' criticism of covert police surveillance a fair cop (doesn't mention Gilchrist by name but is a response to the preceding article)
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/igarth-georgei-greens-criticism-of-covert-police-surveillance-a-fair-cop/Z4I7NQNPYFYSWW2C6CAJKVIQEY/

2008-12-18 - Strange Bedfellows
https://web.archive.org/web/20090113224854/https://blog.greens.org.nz/2008/12/18/strange-bedfellows/

2008-12-18 - Police spied on unions
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2008/12/police-spied-on-unions.html

2008-12-18 - The Gilchrist case gets murkier
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_gilchrist_case_gets_murkier.html

2008-12-18 - https://ludditejourno.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/police-and-terrorism/
Aotearoa – the most terrorist dense population in the world

2008-12-19 - State Of It: Police SIG Unit Wasted On Tag-Busting
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0812/S00364.htm

2008-12-19 - Mark Eden-Should The Police Be Monitoring This Man? (a rare exception, this blogger supports the spying, but check out the comments...)
https://web.archive.org/web/20110101143750/http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/12/mark-eden-should-police-be-monitoring.html

2008-12-20 - 'Nice little memento' for police spy
https://web.archive.org/web/20121107005757/http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10549050

2008-12-20 - Bill Ralston: No spying line a cop-out
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/ibill-ralstoni-no-spying-line-a-cop-out/PR7LGCGPVTHF4EOSO55MOGCLSE/

2008-12-20 - Matt McCarten: Spying on lawful organisations should set alarm bells ringing
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/imatt-mccarteni-spying-on-lawful-organisations-should-set-alarm-bells-ringing/M3U53JZ5KSSX6RMREKQZCPHSWM/

2008-12-21 - Activist to take police to court over informant
https://web.archive.org/web/20100518073112/http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/770658

2008-12-21 - Pepper sprayed activist to take police to court over provocateur
https://web.archive.org/web/20110610141333/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76380/pepper-sprayed-activist-take-police-cour

2008-12-21 - Rob Gilchrist sent naked photos of teenage activist to police
https://web.archive.org/web/20090122211120/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76545/index.php

2008-12-21 - The Gilchrist saga gets yucky
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_gilchrist_saga_gets_yucky.html

2008-12-21 - It’s not often that I agree with a Commie, but here’s an exception to the rule
https://kiwipolemicist.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/its-not-often-that-i-agree-with-a-commie-but-heres-an-exception/

2008-12-24 - NZ: The beauty of hindsight - police informant caught after 10 years - Indymedia UK
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/12/416010.html

2009-01-10 - What DeLillo can tell us about Gilchrist
https://books.scoop.co.nz/2009/01/10/what-delillo-tells-us-about-rob-gilchrist/

2009-04-25 - The activist who turned police informer
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/features/760466/The-activist-who-turned-police-informer

2009-07 - How Police Spy Rob Gilchrist Was Exposed By His Partner
https://web.archive.org/web/20170427040356/http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-180c.htm

2009-07 - Police Informer Caught After 10 Years of Spying on Activists
https://web.archive.org/web/20100712175956/http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-180b.htm

2010-07 - Aotearoa NZ Military Imposters - Robert Stephen Gilchrist – Christchurch New Zealand
https://web.archive.org/web/20100712141550/http://www.anzmi.net/gilchrist/gilchrist.html

2012-07-07 - How To Avoid Getting Robbed
https://web.archive.org/web/20170409064726/http://archive.indymedia.org.nz/article/82640/how-avoid-getting-robbed

2013-02-12 - Case for compensation, says police spy's ex
https://www.stuff.co.nz/editors-picks/8289572/Case-for-compensation-says-police-spys-ex

2013-02-13 - Police spy sues for mental pain
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8285326/Police-spy-sues-for-mental-pain

2013-02-25 - Spy sues cops for pain of decade of deception
https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/8345622/Spy-sues-cops-for-pain-of-decade-of-deception

2013-11-7 - Better work stories?
https://boundmaus.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/better-work-stories/

2014-08-07 - Rob Gilchrist On Nicky Hager
https://thestandard.org.nz/rob-gilchrist-on-nicky-hager/

2015-08-30 - Former spy paid to infiltrate Greenpeace and unions
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/71357903/former-spy-paid-to-infiltrate-greenpeace-and-unions

2015-07-04 - Police spy's girlfriend: I want answers

2018 - Activists and the Surveillance State (this is a book, but the blurb references Gilchrist)
https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/activists-state-surveillance-political-policing/

Footnote: the "anti-globalization movement"

What exactly was this "movement of movements" against, and what it was for as an alternative? These are reasonable questions, but they're very hard to answer, simply because there's no one answer. Every political group that contributed - and perhaps every person involved - will have their own answers, and they'll all be different. For me it was a movement against the massive social and environmental harms caused by neoliberals, as they took over the state in many countries - both rich and poor - and used it to shift control of resources and regulatory powers from the public to corporations; deregulation, corporatisation, privatisation, etc.

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strypey

The Tightrope Between Tinfoil-hat Paranoia and Rose-tinted Naivety