The Million Mask March: Language, legitimacy, and dissent

ABSTRACT

The following paper examines emerging trends in protest management in the UK, looking predominantly at the 5 November 2015 demonstrations led by hacktivist collective Anonymous. This event can be considered unique on a number of fronts. First, the common terminology used by police to justify the use of undercover operatives and aggressive forms of crowd control was conspicuously absent from public discourse surrounding the event. Secondly, conventional media channels throughout the UK focused on the London campaign and all but failed to cover the wider national/international demonstrations – thus depicting London itself as an isolated incident. Thirdly, the Million Mask March was a significant moment in civil history, for behind the scenes much of the policing effort was taking place online, with covert agencies manipulating mainstream coverage of the event to discredit campaigners, disrupt a legitimate public protest, and deny participants their right to dissent.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest
• surveillance
• discourse
• intelligence
• JTRIG
• GCHQ
• public order
• policing
• hacktivism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ben Harbisher (author to whom correspondence should be addressed) is a Senior Lecturer in Media Production at De Montfort University. His previous publications include articles for Surveillance and Society, the Journal for the Study of British Cultures, and Hard Times Magazine. He is a member of the Media Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA), the Surveillance Studies Network, the Media Discourse Group (Leicester DMU), and the German Centre for the Study of British Cultures. He holds an MA in Critical Theory and is currently submitting a Ph.D. on surveillance and protest. De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

1. Denial of Service (DoS) and DDoS attacks are both aimed at the host servers of online organisations. In DoS assaults, an individual can launch a campaign to overload a website and take it offline. In a DDoS attack, multiple agents organise a strike to keep their targets offline for as long as possible.

2. Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

3. BBC coverage of the campaign has been omitted on the grounds that as a Public Service Broadcaster it was not considered a commercial news organisation.

4. A network of machines, linked together to hide the perpetrators identity and launch a DDoS attack.

5. That is not to discredit the recipients of physical harm, nor render any parties involved with the campaign movement under suspicion.