policing

Indymedia Stories #3: Rob and Me

The tightrope between tinfoil-hat paranoia and rose-tinted naivety

Danyl Strype

— 12 min read
Indymedia Stories #3: Rob and Me

Indymedia Stories:

  1. Indymedia and the fediverse
  2. Another anniversary, Looking to the Future
  3. Rob and Me (this one)
  4. Valuing Our Contributions

I’m reposting this 2023 piece from my personal blog on DreamWidth because it seems timely, in light of the antidemocratic policing creeping back into NZ politics. When I first wrote it, some weird and creepy stuff was going on in an online space I’d been frequenting (long story, maybe a future blog post). Involving a newbie who I’d started to suspect might be an inauthentic actor, and I wanted to give some context to why I thought that, and why I wanted to be very careful about how we approached it.

In the end, exactly what I feared happened. A bunch of well-established online relationships ended abruptly, and as for the loose cluster of friendly online hangout spaces where we gathered, they quickly became a digital ghost town. If this person was a Bad Actor intending to disrupt our nascent community-building, they were very good at their job. If not … well … I guess our tinfoil hats got the better of us all.

In the late 1990s, like a lot of young and idealistic anarchist geeks, I was inspired by EFF founder John Perry Barlow declaring independence for the internet (or "cyberspace" as some people were still calling it). I was involved in activist groups working on a range of issues, and 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"1, a series of huge, distributed protests, coordinated on a global scale through online networks like People's Global Action. I saw a lot of this happening in real time, as I joined and created a lot of political email lists to support and extend the reach of our activist work. It was on one of these activist email lists that I first encountered Rob Gilchrist.

Photo of Gilchrist, from Nicky Hager’s 2008 Sunday Star Times article.

I didn't get on with Rob at first. Like many activists (well.. real activists... but we'll get to that), he could be abrasive to deal with online. When I moved back to Ōtautahi at the end of 2000, I met him in person through his involvement in a few of the groups that pooled resources to create the short-lived InterActive activist centre, which I helped to set up in 2001.

At the time, a network of local groups was already communicating on yet another email list about setting up a local Indymedia news site. 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 claiming to have found a "bug" (listening device) in the building, and insisting I install proprietary PGP email encryption on the InterActive computers (probably to bug them).

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 Aotearoa Indymedia, 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 that any long-term activist has 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 many of us were surviving on benefits of 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 Noam 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 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 opinion pieces, and blog posts 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.

Another thing that’s notable too how few of these web pages remain online less than 20 years later. Praise be to the geek gods for the Internet Archive and other groups preserving digital history. But really, we need to make sure digital news articles have more secure long term hosting, and systematic local archiving, along with commentaries that inform our history.

Many of these links date back to a time when news and blog sites still had their own comment sections2. If you skim a few of these comment threads, you might notice that many of the shorter comments are spouting the same handful of talking points. I presume this is because they're posted either by sockpuppets doing arse-covering reputation laundering for the cops or the government3, or by Useful Idiots parroting talking points that 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:

2008-12-15:

2008-12-16:

2008-12-17:

2008-12-18:

2008-12-19:

2008-12-20:

2008-12-21:

2008-12-24:

2009-01-10:

2009-04-25:

2009-07-?:

2010-07-?:

2012-07-07:

2013:

2014:

2015:

2018:

That’s all I’ve been able to find so far. I’ll add other writing about the Gilchrist affair as I find it. Read it and think.

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Image:

Photo of Rob Gilchrist sourced from Nicky Hager’s 2008 Sunday Star Times article exposing him. Used for the purposes of criticism and review, as allowed by the Fair Dealing clause of the NZ Copyright Act.

  1. The label "anti-globalisation movement" is a meaningless buzzphrase coined by corporate media. What exactly was it against, and what was it for, as an alternative? These are reasonable questions, but they're very hard to answer, simply because there was no one answer (“One no, many yeses” to quote the Zapatistas). It was a movement of movements. So every political group that contributed - and perhaps every person involved - would give different answers. 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. ↩

  2. Rather than outsourcing their comments sections to the DataFarms, to avoid the moderation burden. Probably the first of many mistakes that helped them eat the advertising business. ↩

  3. Both major political parties had good reason for doing damage control. The Gilchrist afffair was inconvenient for National, who were leading the recently elected coalition government on a “law and order” platform, and embarrassing for Labour who couldn’t make hay out of it as the Opposition. Painfully aware as they were that all this spying happened on their watch. ↩

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