Free to Protest

Free to Protest graphic - illustration of protest scene

The 'Free to Protest' project highlights the range of surveillance tools that police forces around the world can use to monitor and identify you if you attend a protest, and how you can better protect yourself from protest surveillance.

We believe that people should be able to attend peaceful protests without the police using sophisticated surveillance tools to monitor, track and identify protestors indiscriminately.

Unfortunately, across the globe, police forces do increasingly use a wide range of  surveillance capabilities at protests, like facial recognition  technology, IMSI catchers and mobile phone data extraction tools. It  means that by attending a protest, the police can potentially identify  you, track you and monitor you.

Privacy International and our partners have devised 'Free to Protest' guides for different national contexts, which you can access below.

The 'Free to Protest' guides provide a wide range of  bite-sized information about the surveillance capabilities that police forces have, and also provide strategies and tips to defend yourself  against surveillance. But please do note, that police surveillance  capabilities are very powerful, and ultimately it's impossible to fully  protect yourself from police surveillance at protests.

If your organisation wants to adapt 'Free to Protest' for your country, contact us at info@privacyinternational.org.