That is why there is zero tolerance where I live now. Because of work I have to be perhaps a bit closer to the blue light services than before (mainly Ambulance but they do all work together) and of course nurses, coppers, paramedics all talk to each other and most of the staff are young, in their 20s to early 40s. they have also seen the bad side of rave culture in the UK and in many cases had to treat the casualties.

Suffolk Constabulary went to the trouble of getting a Court Order so Youtube and the ISP had to cough up full address details of the lad what made the video . they then knocked his door at 7am and took away every video cassette tape and piece of camera kit he owned. He got it all back in one piece but only several months later after they had painstakingly copied every frame of video onto their servers for evidence (there are 25 of these per second in a PAL video tape)

Yeh I was talking to err… SO19 (??maybe wrong ) at a demo by parliament and asking him about his camera, I’ve posted this before I think,

He was telling me it was face recognition software, as they were expecting the Nazi lot – another number in their name, and some others who was threatening on causing havoc, at a peaceful friendly demo, the copper was really nice and chatty and saying how great it was the demo had thus far gone really well, no trouble and if he wasnt working in this role he’d liked to have come down as he agreed with it, think it was the climate change one (but have done so many I’m not 100% sure)

so I guess a lot of those faces will be in there now..

And dont get me wrong I love parties – but I am aware a lot of them are illegal and this is the risk you take, why make it worse for everyone else involved…..

@Tank Girl 482180 wrote:

He was telling me it was face recognition software, as they were expecting the Nazi lot – another number in their name, and some others who was threatening on causing havoc, at a peaceful friendly demo, the copper was really nice and chatty and saying how great it was the demo had thus far gone really well, no trouble and if he wasnt working in this role he’d liked to have come down as he agreed with it, think it was the climate change one (but have done so many I’m not 100% sure)

so I guess a lot of those faces will be in there now..

The EA constabularies were sharing custom developed software used for the rave intelligence with metpol for tracking the rioters. Thats how good their tech is.

Bear in mind each year British Telecom bangalores fuckloads of jobs which were once dream jobs for IT techie types and had good pay. Suffolk Constabulary, however, is still recruiting in spite of budget cuts, but they don’t want stereotypical donut munchers and knuckle draggers. What do you think happens to many of these IT staff? 2 years as a bobby and as they are graduates fast track to specialist units such as CID, Dogs, Firearms, Public Order etc..

I’ve spoken to a few ex-BT folk and though the bulk of them are relatively liberal/left in their politics, they won’t turn down a decent paying job with prospects especially in the career industry and can “switch sides” quickly, for instance I’ve chatted to folk what were artists and musicians in their spare time who were willing to join Ofcom to help censor media content and lock off pirate broadcasters.

15 years ago in the UK the crew would have been tipped off when the first surveillance units arrived by someone listening on radio scanner, and the party already shifted to a better area – where they were if they moved maybe a few km at most they are in a different police area and also in a location where less noise nuisance is caused.

So policeman turns up and says “nah, we can’t find it, its moved/stopped already” and if they dont’t get further complaints from locals the cops all go back home and the party continues.

one thing I also learned from monitoring first radio comms but also media responses, police press releases, FOI papers etc is that its not totally the fault of the Police. They do not actually do as much pre-event surveillance as folks think. Many of the cops would like to provide safe havens, as would also the forestry and environment minstry (I once worked for Britains environment ministry). but doing so would involve spending a (small) amount of taxpayers money. I strongly suspect it is way less than the cost of deploying cops to stop a event but folk don’t want to “give in to criminals” here. it is local people in the areas where the parties happen what grass up these events and they would rather blow their taxes on riot cops than compromise.

At least one location where EA parties happen is so far in the forest you cannot hear the music and this noise masking feature of that area is written in a book from the 1940s where this nature loving chap is up a tree there and watching 1940s motor vans on a then new road but cannot hear them.

Also in the UK there was a big weakness in the old Police VHF radios – the repeaters let in the foreign telly soundtrack and anything else they would pick up during summer – and transmitted all this crap back to the cops radios including the helicopter :laugh_at: I originally thought this was due to frequency allocation issues but everywhere else in Europe used the same kit by the 90s, and they still had VHF telly (long gone in England) it was clearly just us English trying to save a few quid and leaving out correct filters etc..

So until about 2004 the cops often didn’t bother stopping outdoor summer parties as their radios were useless in these conditions. Now they have airwave which is similar to mobile phones and does work in dense forests provided there are sufficient base stations (or it then would not work at all).

in recent times though UK cops usually first turn up without riot gear and only about 3 of them (usually two senior officers, and someone with a video camera) and ask the ravers to turn it down/off or try to negotiate a close down time. I’ve heard of “dawn raids” without warning on parties in mainland Europe but not in the UK.

There are some things they still do the “old British way” here. I have never seen in 20 years riot cops turn up at a party without some sort of prior warning. But folk get stubborn, also cops sometimes change their mind halfway through and seize rigs when they previously said they would let them go and so trust is lost.

Bear in mind also when cops let a party happen local people write formal complaints to them. England lacks the culture of tolerance/consensus across the board that other Northern European nations clearly have (including Scotland) and that its easy to take for granted (and that I only have learned more of because of learning other languages).

@Pat McDonald 482389 wrote:

AFAIK the system is called TETRA (Trans European Trunk Radio), does indeed work similarly to mobile phone nets, but is also used by ambulance, fire service, mountain rescue, coast guard, and probably the MIB too. So jamming it, as well as being illegal, causes ethical issues with disturbing life or death services.

this is correct and Eastern constabularies are aware of the vulnerabilities of this system – it crashed hard when the EA cops first used it en masse to stop a rave in 2006, they had to go back to the old VHF kit at one point! Suffolk Constabulary also went through the entire Court process of getting full legal title to a (far larger) genset seized off a rave crew as backup power to a remote airwave repeater van. The cops here (and TBH any kind of authority) tend to be full of smart folk used to dealing with stubborn resistance of all kinds and this goes back centuries.

Also the system was designed by Simoco (formerly Philips / PYE Cambridge), Motorola (which incorporates Storno), British Telecom, NTL and Arqiva who traditionally have used the Eastern coastal areas as a test bed for radio communications equipment (its flat and near the sea).

Ofcom / Agentschap Telecom and similar ministries really take a dim view of any attempt to jam even normal civillian mobile comms, AT busted loads of people in Holland doing this and put a strong warning to anyone considering deploying this sort of kit.

though I have unashamedly been involved in pirate radio operations in the past, and various forms of surveillance and counter surveillance ops (to this day) intentionally jamming anyones comms unless its full on warfare and required to deal with a direct threat to myself or those close to me goes against my principles even if I disagree with what they are being used for. In professional work I am responsible for critical radio communications kit which is used to look after vulnerable elderly people and not dissimilar in operational methods to TETRA (though its DECT based).

anyway BT and similar organisations are perfectly capable of screwing it all up without any jamming/deliberate interference…

what is worse is that if the folk doing this rave had simply picked a better location in the same area they could well have ended up being left alone.