Slashdot Mirror
UK Authorities Accused of Inciting Illegal Protest
jarran writes "Questions are being asked about the tactics being employed by UK authorities to monitor and control protest groups. Schnews reports on evidence that government IP addresses are posting messages to sites like indymedia, attempting to provoke activists into taking illegal direct action. Evidence has emerged recently that the police consider sex to be a legitimate tool for extracting information from targets, and senior police have been accused of lying to parliament about the deployment of undercover agents at protests."
Sign me up! I mean, I'm an activist with information relevant to the UK Police's Interests! Really!... Just don't send the guy in the article my way, he's really creepy...
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Here's a new rule. If the police tell you to do it, whatever you were told to do is now legal. That will rapidly put a stop to this kind of underhanded stuff. Also, weren't there all these laws in European countries regarding lying about your identity when you're sleeping around; or does that also just not apply when the police do it?
How do you kill that which has no life?
Agent provocateur
I fear the UK is removing freedom more and more.
the bad thing for me is that UK is part of europe, so their decisions about freedom ruining stuff has more influence on my country then for example chinas decisions.
War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength!
"senior police have been accused of lying to parliament about the deployment of undercover agents"
But, it does sound like he was doing his job well. How could possibly lying to politicians be an offense?
I only RTFA with "sex" in the link text, but that one seemed a little bit ho-hum. I mean, if they're trying to infiltrate an organization (and accompanying social milieu) where there's a lot of sex, why wouldn't having sex be a legitimate part of their task? Like, duh? Next up, articles about how shocking it is that undercover cops infiltrating drug gangs sometimes handle drugs! And this is considered an appropriate police activitiy! Scandalous!
How addicted to the sinister police narrative do you have to be to have a problem with this? I mean, I like to criticize The Man as much as the next bloke, but I at least wait 'til there's something to criticize.
Now, off to read the other two articles...hopefully there's more meat to those stories.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
So it's part of their job to have sex? as in, they are getting paid to have sex? I wish there was a name for that...
Fact is, the police have been at this game since Victorian times,
My father, being an old communist, used to tell tales of the 'strange' characters that tried to infiltrate the local party, forgetting that this is a small town and that your history, and that of your family, were easily found out, and, if not, you were suspect.
Best laugh, one character turned down by the party on the grounds of 'known police informer', the next week joined the SNP, worked his way right in there as well, pity no-one from the SNP asked any of his neighbours about him and his background, you know, pertinant things like him being a member of the Orange order and a unionist...
Know for a fact, Dundee Uni vegetarian society in the mid '80s was infiltrated by the plods, and if I was a member of any animal rights group in the UK I'd want to do a deep background check on some of my fellow members...
A final parting note, at a Reading festival, was approached by a rather suspect character wanting to know if I had any acid for sale, next day, same character wanted to know if I wanted to buy any drugs..now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that as the number of arrests for possession on day 1 were too low this was a.plod selling stuff so that a.n.other.plod could then arrest the poor sap who bought it, but...
Being fair to the plods, this infiltration mularkey works both ways..
Agent provocateur?
It's called democracy in action.
The irksome part about the police using agents provocateur is that the police are always complaining that they have insufficient funds to police the streets. If the police can spare a man to infiltrate a bunch of hippies for a number of years, how many undercover police are there in all the more disruptive groups? The figure of £250,000 a year was mentioned as the cost of running one agent, which is infuriating to anyone who has been told that the police have insufficient resources to visit their house when it has been burgled.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Know for a fact, Dundee Uni vegetarian society in the mid '80s was infiltrated by the plods
Who cares if some vegetarians at some UK uni got diarrhea?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
LOL. I suppose it's totally different where you live because a few hundred years ago some guys in wigs signed a piece of paper?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
See video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow
In at least one of the demonstrations I have attended I have seen journalists pay people to incite a disturbance. This was an anti-Nazi league demonstration with money been given to a set of skinheads to break it up.
All hail the Emperor!
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Tell me you can see a major difference between a german nazi-resurgence group and an animal rights or environmentalist group, please?
The police also have been shown to hide the evidence collected by the undercover agents if it does not help them lead to convictions or even shows that they are lying to the prosecution. http://policestate.co.uk/articles/109 As well as the undercover police inciting violence the normal police often do it as well at protests. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXNJ3MZ-AUo&feature=related As well as intimidating protestors with FIT teams and questionable tactics including ketteling.
Or rent a home in suburbia with a some consumer ip on copper/optical line.
The government official's IP addresses could be hidden from end users, so only the sites admins could see them?
A great protest is the video exposure of UK Police not wearing ID
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KRgmn-n5ls
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
article about how the comments were detected http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/01/472622.html full list of comments http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/01/472619.html
Now I guess that the police can anonymously post comments to a site then go in and seize their servers because of comments posted to that site and get information on all the commentators.
Freedom of speech means that you have to accept all groups' peaceful demonstration - be it the KKK, Nazis, Environmental groups and the Hugging-People-Randomly-Association.
If being a nazi was illegal (which it is in some countries) - you could just go and arrest them - you wouldn't need a riot.
For those of you unfamiliar with the 'Camden 28', a good example of a US Agent Provocateur can be found in this story-
camden28.org (film shown on PBS independent lens from time to time)
" ...
In the early-morning hours of Sunday, August 22, 1971, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell announced that FBI agents had arrested 20 antiwar activists in and near a draft board office in Camden, New Jersey.
They also asked the jury to acquit on the grounds that the raid would not have taken place without the help of a self-admitted FBI informer and provocateur. The defendants emphasized that they had given up their plan, for lack of a practical means, until the informer-provocateur had resurrected it and provided them with the encouragement and tools to carry it out.
"
German police has been caught doing similar things. They dress up as protesters and start fights with their own colleges.
This way the government can point at all those violent protesters and their misguided cause.
Oh well just like most other western governments. By the sheep for the sheep.
Who's talking about freedom of speech?
We're talking about secret infiltration by the police, not restriction of freedom of speech.
I'm sorry I don't follow you. If you're trying to turn this into some sort of partisan debate I suggest you go fuck yourself.
If the groups were violent, fine, but I see no record of that in the articles from the UK on this particular scandal.
And if you seriously don't see the difference between protest for animal rights or environmental issues and a group that stands explicitly for racism and death? Well, ok, fine. Whatever.
I wonder what all the people will say now, will everyone call Schnews a bunch of conspirary theorists now too? When the G20 in downtown Toronto was here just recently - same thing was brought up and everyone on talk radio and the interwebz got laughed at as conspiracy theorists saying the police are out to get the protesters, so what now?... Is the media a bunch of nuts as well?
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Right, it's an offense against freedom of assembly and right to privacy. It can indirectly become an offense against free speech if the speech of the group is changed - if you made a group change its statements by threatening to bash in their heads if they didn't, it would obviously be an offense. Doing it by deception instead of violence doesn't change the outcome as far as free speech is concerned.
I'm surprised the British aren't rioting in the streets over these Stasi methods. Spying on your political opponents was considered president-toppling bad once in the US, and many democracies ban police infiltration outright.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
There was a case in Germany where a case against a party accused of being nazist collapsed because there were so many government agents in the leadership that it was impossible to distinguish between what they had produced and what the accused have. One government agent wrote a detailed anti-semitic tract. Haven't heard a single peep about that.
If you didn't hear a single peep about that it must be because you read no German newspapers. I can assure you there were lots of loud peeps.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Two explorers stumble upon a primitive tribe and somehow manage to offend them.
They're taken before the chief and he gives them the choice of death or "unga-bunga".
The first chooses unga-bunga. He is promptly raped by all the men in the tribe.
When given his choice, the second chooses death.
The chief smiles and pronounces sentence "Death by unga-bunga!"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You'd probably find those conditions would make absolutely no difference.
Entrapment laws are incredibly strong in the UK and police are trained extensively not to fall foul of them. They may throw that stone, but they'll make sure, if they throw it, they'll be the last person who does. He may be part of an angry mob at a protest but he won't be someone at the front clashing with the police, he'll be standing back amongst a crowd of people.
Undercover operations are time consuming, expensive and embarrassing when they go wrong. The officers are trained heavily to ensure they're always 'going with the flow' rather than pushing it.
"The best way of stopping any liaison getting too heavy was to shag somebody else. It's amazing how women don't like you going to bed with someone else," said the officer...
"Captain Obvious" is clearly insufficient rank for this officer - for an insight of that magnitude, he should be at least a Colonel.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
IIRC there was an episode of Get Smart were KAOS turns out to be run entirely by infiltrators from various organisations. Its such an old joke that you'd think police forces would take more care.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
When you are in fear of losing your police job, or other such government sponsored work....
Create a problem that doesn't otherwise exist and then be the solution.
Of the near 7 billion people on this planet its some fraction of 1% that is causing the rest of us all the world scale problems.
Though we already all know this, its how to stop them is the task.
Who are you opposed to?
Is it me?
I'm thoroughly confused by this conversation.
"I wouldn't have done X, if they hadn't done Y first!"
Isn't "provocation" as feeble a defense as "I was seduced?".
Would you accept seduction as an excuse for your significant other screwing around on you? Would anyone? So why should society accept that as a defense?
I mean, you can't be tempted to do something you didn't want to do anyway.
-Styopa
In UK case there wasn't just sex. The undercover cop married and even had two children with the woman he was supposed to spy.
BTW, in Finland police quite recently got permission to do undercover operations. Soon afterwards there was a case where undercover police became the new boyfriend of a woman suspected (and later convicted) of killing his husband.
The article says that both male and female officers engaged in the practice, but public outcry is only about those poor women who were taken advantage of. What about the men? It's ok to take advantage of them? Their feelings don't get hurt?
It's just like we've been warning them for years: socialism leads to dependence on the government so severe that even anti-government protestors sit around on their asses waiting for an agent provocateur to provide them with a suitably illegal protest plan. Pathetic.
Here in the good old land of yankee ingenuity, we just outlaw whatever internal sedition our plucky can-do citizens manage on their own, and then beat the shit out of it. If the supply proves insufficient, we ensure full employment for Our Heroes by surveilling those terrifying pacifist quakers(they might put the "fist" in "pacificist" at any moment, you can't be too careful) and the occasional pothead(Morally depraved, and responsible for 85% of Cheeto shoplifting incidents...).
Ah, everything is relative eh?
What a load of nonsense. There is such a things as bad, and nazism is pretty close to pure fucking evil. If the people espousing it don't think so then they are, I'm afraid, wrong.
Yes, I said it, WRONG. It does exist, that word. Everyone is not a special snowflake and equal in every way, every opinion is not equally valid. Advocacy of racism, violence and death *are* something that makes a group worth keeping a very close eye on. You absolutely *can* say that some ideologies are more likely to resort to violence than others.
"You have to look deeper than that, and see what they are actually doing and what they really believe in."
I don't disagree, and some animal rights groups have crossed that line multiple times.
However there was no hint of violence from the groups that were infiltrated in the UK, from the coverage I've seen, and the original poster was trying to make a partisan point about how the we should be equally upset that extreme groups like neo nazis also get infiltrated.
A non-violent animal rights or environmental protest group, which is what we're dealing with in TFA, is *very* different to a neo nazi group.
Unless they were born in India before partition or Ireland before 1949, they're not 'subjects': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nationality_law
Ah, so these people, these women are so pathetic, incompetent, so easily manipulated that they can not make decisions on their own, right? OK. So, they should be kept locked up and chaperoned at all times. And, just to be safe, premarital sex should be outlawed. And, women should not be allowed to associate with men who are not relatives. You can set up a group of religious men to go around with sticks and beat unrelated men and women who are together without a chaperon!
You and your ilk are pathetic, self-righteous, cowardly prigs.
You don't see it in the articles because that would not support the agenda of the Guardian and schnews. Why be fair, balanced, and truthful when you can be biased, one-sided, withhold information and lie and make more money?
Don't be lyin' to Parliament! George Clinton will kick your behind!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The problem is not just the sex. One of the undercover cops married and had two children with one he was supposed to spy. When the woman finds out this deception she might very well want to divorce, get alimony, child support etc. Who is going to pay these things? And what kind of mental scars will this kind of deception leave to children? It is quite likely that sooner or later the deception has to be revealed. Unless of course, the undercover cop will play this role until he dies of old age, is willing to live in deception in rest of his age and not get real family for himself.
No, you don't see it in the article because of the many thousands, even tens of thousands of animal rights and environmental groups only the tiniest minority resorts to violence. The same can not be said for neo-nazis. So even without going into their motivation, there is a huge difference.
GGP says that animal rights activists have planted more bombs than neo-nazis in the past 20 years. I don't know how many bombs either group planted, but implying that environmentalists have commited more violent acts and caused more harm than neo-nazis is -- well it's just laughable.
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OMFG!!! People have preconceived notions about neo-nazis and aren't interested in what they have to say!
You're actually surprised?
Nazism, the ideology that lead to mass exterminations and millions of deaths in war, and you think that these groups shouldn't be watched any more than the average (non-violent, remember) animal rights or environmental group.
I think you're what people mean when they say it's possible to have a mind so open your brain falls out.
For what it's worth, you're wrong, left-leaning media generally did not applaud those kind of tactics back then and actually heavily publicized and criticized the strange amalgamation of right-wing extremist parties and government agents. I'd wager a guess that left-leaning people and media were more critical of it than the centrist/right-wing guys.
The situation was different in some ways, too; the government agents had already been part of that political scene and were approached to be informants. So not trained officers/spies who infiltrated the neo-nazis. And the government agency was an intelligence service, not police/prosecution. Not that I'm saying either makes a difference, I'll leave that to the reader.
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So, even though you don't know, you have made a pronouncement, and that pronouncement is against a statement that may very well be based on FACTS.
You may be right that a tiny minority of the "tens of thousands of animal rights and environmental groups" may be violent and most neo-nazi groups may be violent but that tiny minority may be larger than all the neo-nazi groups. And, that is based just as much fact as your statement because you admit you don't know.
You are the only laughable thing about your post because you spew out your opinion and then admit it is based on ignorance.
The cop who married her.
And, how is this any different from a guy who marries a woman for money, or for sex, or because she is pregnant and then cheats on her and abuses her? How is this different than a man who marries a woman to get a housekeeper and tax break and doesn't lover her, cheats on her, and/or abuses her?
And, again, you are saying that these poor, little, foolish female protesters are too stupid to make their own decisions. If they are too stupid to know whom to date, have sex with, and marry then they are too stupid to have the right to date whomever they wish, marry whomever they wish, go out on their own, or even vote.
You must choose between being a responsible adult and being an ignorant fool who must be looked after. Either the women take responsibility for whom they date, fuck, and marry or they need to turn their lives over to some third party.
Or rent a home in suburbia with a some consumer ip on copper/optical line.
Trouble is, the copper is really from the met and is working undercover...
If the female protesters are willing, why not? This isn't even a tempest in a teacup.
Why not? Is that a rhetorical question or do you really not know? Most people consider it morally wrong to sleep with someone after having lied to them on such a fundamental thing.
Or, is Slashdot, the Guardian, and the submitter suggesting that women are incapable of making decisions about with whom to have sex and that pre-marital sex should be made illegal?
Pathetic straw man.
Or, are you suggesting that a woman who willingly engages in sex with a man should be able to retroactively claim rape when she finds out he is not the man she thought he was?
Another straw man. Though I can imagine there are actually cases where this is exactly what happened.
I guess we should start arresting every man who has ever cheated on a woman and was found out; or who ever had sex with a woman and then never called her again; or who ever had a drunken one night stand.
Straw man. Cheating on someone in a non-open relationship is something most people consider morally (but not legally) wrong.
And, I am sure no protesters have ever had sex to gain information or access to an area, too, right?
Errrr well I guess it's happened, but I never heard about any of these kinds of protesters purposely seducing anyone to get information. Of course, that's not really what happened here, either; I don't think anybody can seriously claim he slept with those women to get information. He probably slept with those women because he could.
And of course, that's another logical fallacy, tu quoque.
The Guardian, a liberal newspaper that supports the idea that female protesters are incompetent, stupid and should be chaperoned. And, Slashdot, samzenpus, and the submitter supporting the idea. What a lovely bunch of hypocrites.
More straw man arguments. Those might be your consequences from the story, don't attribute them to other people (or institutions or websites, for that matter). You haven't established any instances of hypocrisy, either.
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Uh, go read "The man who was Thursday".
It's where Get Smart stole the story.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
And in my opinion government shouldn't on purpose get involved in creating broken families and creating mental traumas for children as it is unethical even though similar cases may happen in real life as well.
Sigh. I don't know about many bombs either group planted. I doubt the AC who originally compared the two has any idea, either. In both cases, I'm pretty sure that the number is low enough that it's a fairly unreliable metric to draw a conclusion from.
I do know for a fact that neo-nazis are responsible for far more violent crime than environmentalists. Violent assault with a right-wing extremist background happens often enough that number of instances are reported a couple of times per year. Violent assault with an environmentalist background happens so incredibly rarely that every single instance is pretty much newsworthy. There are more incidents of neo-nazi violence in the city I live in than there are violent acts of "eco-terrorism" in all of Europe. Comparing the two is comical, like comparing the fatalities from lightning strike to the fatalities from car accidents.
Huh, seems like a long explanation for something any reasonable reader should have understood. I get the feeling I'm being trolled.
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Link here
Free Martian Whores!
Sometimes it comes off this way, sometimes it doesn't.
I've wondered whether activism for a "disadvantaged minority" is really activism against an "advantaged majority", and if some problems stem from merely assuming they're an "advantaged majority" to begin with.
Conversely, I've wondered if it could actually good for everybody, especially but not only the "disadvantaged minority", when done right.
(Heterosexual Caucasian male here, BTW...)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Yet people do it all the time. Gold-diggers, cads, players, whatever you want to call them, men and women do it all the time. It has happened to people I know and to myself. In fact, it was not that long ago that getting a woman drunk for the purpose of having sex with her was common place and not consider rape.
That word you use, I do not think it means what you think it means. I am taking your comments to their logical, but extreme, conclusion and/or using false dichotomy to mock the absurd idea that women are not responsible for vetting those they chose to date.
Arguing from ignorance I see.
You mean a guy was offered a chance to have sex with a willing woman and did? OMG! Call the press! This is big news! He may even have felt a need to have sex with them to maintain his cover, especially if the women often had sex with different members of the group. You do know it is not unheard of for people to date and have sex with people they know from groups.
If one is a liberal, one believes in equality of the sexes. Either women are equals to men with all the personal responsibility to vet their partners as men, or they do not have that responsibility, in which case they are not the equals of men and thus need to be protected not just from men but from themselves. You can't have it both ways and trying to claim both, which is what so many are doing, is hypocrisy. So which is it? Do women need to be protected from "bad" men and their own bad judgement? Or, are women the equal to men and have the same personal responsibilities of men?
That is a question for the divorce court to decide. You have your opinion, and it matters about as anyone else's opinion and often less.
Really? And your source is for that is? Where is your proof, your evidence? Your feelings and intuition are not evidence of anything.
You think you are being trolled because I will not accept your words as fact. You mistake being trolled for being required to provide proof of your statements.
Your assumptions and opinions are worthless. Only verifiable evidence from non-biased sources matter.
David Cameron, is that you?
Sorry, but anyone that believes that clearly doesn't know any British history. We have many inalienable rights, starting with habeas corpus and including the Bill of Rights (1689) which is the basis and inspiration for the American bill of rights that was drafted nearly 100 years later.
Despite the attempts by our latest politicians to remove them from us - you will never convince us that we didn't have them at them some point.
Try looking up "straw man".
You're claiming that people say women (in particular) need to be protected from such a behavior. Nobody said that, I certainly never did. Straw man. I have no idea why you would keep stressing the gender thing, anyway, the same could have happened in all kinds of constellations. You are the one who keeps making this into a debate about gender equality, when there is really no reason for that at all.
You're claiming that it's not a crime. I didn't say that it is, the article doesn't say it, the summary doesn't say it. Straw man. I don't even particularly care if it's a crime. People are just saying that it's a repugnant thing to do. Obviously everyone is responsible for "vetting their partners", and obviously no one should be tricked in such a manner, certainly not by a police officer acting in an official capacity -- even if people do it all the time.
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Whatever, finding something akin to a statistic on eco-violence would take half an hour, and I'm not wasting that kind of time on you. It's hard to find because it's not relevant (like a statistic on deaths by choking on pretzels). Since the AC who introduced this whole thing ('environmentalists use more bombs than neo-nazis') did so without giving any external references, I don't feel obligated to come up with one. It's comparatively easy to find data on damages caused by environmentalists (e.g. Wikipedia eco-terrorism), which makes sense, since it's (publicly perceived to be) a real issue, unlike bombs and actual violence against people.
OTOH it took about a minute to find stuff about right-wing violence: 137 deaths due to neo-nazi violence since 1990 in Germany. Deaths, mind you, not just cases of assault, that number is way higher (nearly 1000 just for 2009).
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Divorce court decision won't remote the trauma children will suffer because of this unethical spying operation.
It was illegal, but still the law wasn't able to prevent it. There is no reason blindly to believe that the law will not be broken again in the future.
LOL. I suppose it's totally different where you live because a few hundred years ago some guys in wigs signed a piece of paper?
It certainly should be. But the "living Constitution" theory has largely gutted the reality.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Then exactly what is the problem? Why, exactly, is there an article about men who are undercover cops having consensual sex with willing women in the group they are investigating? Why, exactly, is it repugnant? Because the men acted like everyone else in the group thus maintaining their cover?
The people who are making this into a gender equality issue is the women who are complaining that it was abuse when they had consensual sex with the officers while the officers were under cover and the reporter who are framing it as such.
And, if you really want to get in to it
Sounds like these women were having sex with many of the men in the groups and if the officers didn't have sex with them, then the officers' covers would have been blown. I am sure the women in the group would have liked that.
I hate to break it to you, but these women were not abused, they were not forced to have sex with anyone, and they are not victims. They are women who have consensual sex with many men. How many of the men in those groups are there because the women are so easy and the sex so free? Would you care to wager?
You make a claim and don't feel obligated to come up with proof of it?
It would take half an hour to find "comparatively easy to find data on damages caused by environmentalists"?
Congratulations you are a pathetic, lying asshole.
They are British Subjects. They don't have inalienable Rights. Their privileges are whatever the government thinks they should be.
Britons have been citizens, not subjects, since 1983. See the British Nationality Act of 1981.
We have had statutary rights since 2000, see the Human Rights Act of 1998, and arguably since 1215, see Magna Carta.
Rights may or may not be inalienable, but if there's no legal penalty for aliening them...
That's not to say the British state is not authoritarian. In fact that's one of the reasons I left the country.
Regarding the actions of the police under the covers, are these activities in general efficient uses of police time and taxpayer money? Why are undercover police spending seven years infiltrating environmental activists? Not terrorists, mind you, but activists. Another officer spent 4 years infiltrating an anti-racist group. Not racists, but people against racism. Really?
Seems like in seven years agents could infiltrate various government or corporate entities and expose enough graft that the program could pay for itself.
You don't have to be stupid to fall for a lie from a good liar. Sincerity is easy to fake. Now, there are things you can do to root out lies if you suspect someone. The thing is, an undercover police officer is going to be have access to all kinds of resources to back up their lies. Your average sleazebag just looking to trick women into bed isn't going to be able to, for example, hide things like his real name without a fake ID. An undercover police officer can get a real ID with a fake name if necessary.
No. Wow, you really try hard to not understand stuff. It's easy to find data on (pecuniary) damages caused by environmentalists, e.g. in the Wikipedia article on eco-terrorism (a misnomer, but that's what it's called). It's difficult to find statistics on eco-violence, ie. assaults with an environmental political background, e.g. that Wikipedia article has no of information on it, despite the name. It's difficult to find because it's not an important statistic, nobody bothers to calculate or publish it. Maybe looking extensively (like for half an hour) would turn something up, but even that seems optimistic.
In a similar vein, you'll agree that the number of assaults with a blue-cheese-brand-dispute background are lower than the number of drug related assaults, but you'll be hard pressed to find a statistic on the former to back up that fact.
Feel free to continue to call me names.
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I suggest you read your own fucking post, shithead. YOU said you didn't feel the need to prove your statement. That makes you a lazy, lying fuck. You don't want to do the work to provide proof? Fine, you are just talking out your ass. This is not religion and you are not a fucking preacher. You are just another shithead on a website demanding to have his anonymous word treated like the truth handed down from on high.
You proved you were lying when you refused to provide proof your statement is based on fact instead of your misinformed opinion.
Actually, it seems to have started with an AC who wrote:
So, by the rules of the Internet, moonbender doesn't have to provide the proof either way, the AC needs to provide the proof. Yay! moonbender wins the Internet! :)
Seriously, maybe moonbender doesn't know it "for a fact" like he said, but his general argument seems fairly reasonable. These arguments where people scream "you have to provide proof! It's easy to find, so prove it!" get kind of ridiculous. If it's that easy to find, then either side can find it to refute the other and gain a lot of credibility. No-one gains any credibility the other way.