Why study the UK climate movement from a digital security perspective?

Being a part of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cyber Security for the Everyday, a conventional 3-year PhD becomes a 4-year PhD. This is because the first year of the CDT is spent in various cybersecurity modules, culminating in a ‘summer project’ that transitions from this taught year to pure research. The summer project was described to me as a sort of ‘thesis pilot’.

Going into my PhD, I had a strong sense of the types of questions I wanted to explore, but not necessarily where I would do my fieldwork. Looking around to my former classmates from my MSc in Social Anthropology, I see people scattered all over the world in different sites. Despite the anthropological tendency to go elsewhere, I had the realisation that where I live in the UK is actually the best spot for a pilot, and in particular, the UK climate movement is the best subject.

Having lived in the UK (mostly in London) for about five years, it feels like at any given time, people are protesting. When you walk around, you will come upon protests for the climate, systems change causes, various non-UK related causes, far right causes, anti-government, etc. (recently you will come upon many protests calling for ceasefire in Gaza, although this development fell after my pilot ended). Protests look and feel different in different areas – London is not Cornwall, just as Cornwall is not Leeds, and Leeds is not Glasgow.

Londoners do have this kind of thing about them though. When one Londoner participant was asking my opinion on the climate activism scene in Canada, I described experiences in Montreal – where I spent my undergrad years. They replied something along the lines of “But what can you confront in Montreal? Here, there are all the headquarters of the biggest banks. There is the national government. How do protests in Montreal turn violent? It doesn’t seem like there would be any major people or institutions to confront.” I reminded him that Montreal is French Canada and that seemed to sufficiently answer his question about how our protests can become violent. In all though, protest in the UK both in London and in other parts of the country is distinct from the rest of the world, and in particular, environmental activism has a rich and storied history regarding civil disobedience.

When interviewing an activist who has worked in both the USA and the UK, they kept emphasising that despite what makes the news in the USA, the American public perceives climate protest completely differently than the UK. This participant thought that this was to do with the civil rights movement in the US, where the public does not always get what protesters are being disruptive about, but they always passively support your right to do so. I was surprised by this opinion, given the violent clashes we watch on the news from the USA. This participant said though that in general, the UK likes direct action and civil disobedience more than protesters in the USA, and that this could be why the public is more hostile to protest in the UK (in their opinion).

I mean, I have had endless conversations with people in pubs about protests, since as soon as someone asks what you do and you say the word protest, you hear all their thoughts on climate protesters in the capital. And in 2023, everybody had an opinion. Just Stop Oil made the news what felt like everyday and the government, feeling the public discontent with traffic disruption, passed the Public Order Bill Amendments in 2023. JSO leads to mixed opinions and was seeming to become an easy way to garner conservative support – after all, it is easier to blame JSO than talk about the more complicated grievances that people have.

PCSC Act (2022) and the Public Order Bill Amendments (2023)

Realising that this was a hot-button issue - there have been numerous legislative changes to the protest landscape in the past two years. The introduction of the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts (PCSC) Act in 2022 resulted in five key amendments to sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act 1986. These changes allowed the police to impose any type of condition on a procession or assembly (any gathering of two or more people) that could be considered to be disruptive in any way (including noise, without specifying a level). Building on Part 3 of the PCSC Act amendments, the Public Order Bill amendments aimed to further strengthen police powers to deal with protests. The Bill introduced new offences, including locking on and ‘going equipped’ for lock-on protests. Locking on is the act of attaching oneself to a person, object or land for the purpose of causing disruption. Carrying a device potentially intended for lock-on purposes is defined as ‘going equipped’, with the maximum penalty now an unlimited fine. The revisions to the Public Order Act also introduced new offences relating to obstructing traffic, delaying infrastructure and tunnelling - with prison sentences ranging from 6 months to 3 years. In addition, police stop and search powers have been extended to include the identification of locking devices, and both suspicion-based and suspicionless searches. Individuals involved in protests can now also be subject to a Serious Disruption Prevention Order (SDPO) from the courts, which imposes restrictions or conditions on their activities - including their use of the internet, communication with certain people, access to certain locations and the right to protest in the UK.

With and Against the State

In this moment of tightening legislation and public discontent, climate activism was on everyone’s lips. Even if you weren’t in a civil disobedience group, all groups were being lumped together - making all activities dangerous for activists who don’t want to go to jail. Despite what the news says, not all climate activism involves protest, in fact most of it does not. The stated aims of most climate groups in the UK are in line with those of the UK government, which has signed up to the Paris Agreement and is aiming for net-zero emissions. Many groups are working within and alongside UK government departments to achieve these goals. As Hasler et al. (2020) put it, the dynamic can be characterised as ‘in and against the state’, with some activists working within the state and others being persecuted by it. This seems to create security dynamics that are multiple and complex in the sense that cooperation between groups can become complicated in terms of who is considered an adversary and the relevance of security within these models.

The Necessity to be Open

In climate activism, there is a constant need to be open to new members - creating security dynamics that are sometimes tense and conflicting. In some other types of social movements, which are exclusionary (in that you have to have a certain identity or social position to be involved), security is less of an issue because new members are expected to look, act and belong to certain social groups. For example, one participant told me that he sometimes joins far-right groups so that he can understand if they are a threat to the left-wing groups he has been in. He said he was able to do this because he ‘looks like the type of guy who would be in those groups’. That made sense to me - The Proud Boys are all men, for obvious reasons. In other words, many social movements tend to rely on some idea of what a ‘typical member’ is - but this is worrying in the climate movement. In the climate movement, having expectations of how members should look and act is incompatible with the movement’s stated goal of being open and accessible to everyone - because climate change affects everyone. People who are ‘more secure’ tend to bemoan people who are ‘less secure’, and conversely, the ‘less secure’ accuse the ‘more secure’ of being exclusionary. Thus, the need to be nonchalant about vetting new people clashes with the security practices that some groups seek to implement to mitigate the risk of police infiltration. In this conflict of priorities, climate activism represents a unique security space.

Research Questions

With hundreds of groups operating in the UK and a rich history of environmental protest, I wanted to know how the movement’s sense of security (both digital and not) reacted to the changing political and cultural climate, and how internal dynamics reflected the dominance and assumed disruptiveness of protest as modelled by groups like JSO. Climate activists in the UK have differing opinions on the role of technology in the movement and how much they want to rely on it, and thus their perceptions of digital security and the danger that online surveillance presents in terms of infiltration and suppression (a real issue I was surprised by, there are many cases of undercover police in climate groups in the UK, in some cases having romantic relationships and children with activists while undercover) reflects these uneven perspectives. I always try and keep my research questions simple:

1. How is digital security practised and perceived within the UK climate movement?
2. What are the relational social dynamics that shape activists’ collective and personal sense of security?

I was not just interested in people telling me about the things they did to feel more digitally secure, but I really wanted to know the broader context from which these practices emerged. So this project involved different forms of data collection within that broad framework.

Methods

Semi-structured interviews I interviewed 15 climate activists in the UK, either online or face-to-face. These interviews varied widely in length, with some lasting 30 minutes and others lasting hours.

Unstructured interviewing I interviewed 19 climate campaigners in an unstructured way, meaning that they completely controlled the conversation without me following a specific agenda of questions. These interviews often took place at events I was attending or immediately afterwards. I adopted this method because many people think that they need to have technical knowledge of digital security or computer science to be interviewed for a project that deals with these esoteric topics. Giving people this option, essentially a chat with a consent process, allowed people to just talk about the movement and their understanding of security without the pressure that technology as a subject can put on people.

Participant observation In other words, doing things with the people I was interviewing. I went to protests, meetings, trainings, workshops, a camp, and ran my own workshop at one point - the total amount of time was roughly 150 hours. I think that without doing these things my project findings would feel lost - participant observation is the anchor from which interview statements find their meaning.

The findings from this study are forthcoming. And my engagement with the UK climate movement is ongoing, both from a personal standpoint and from a research standpoint. I am forging forward in this context, while expanding to other fieldsites – notably in the Philippines. I will make a seperate post about the reasons for combining these sites in the same thesis - there is too much to say.