Indymedia Stories #3: Rob and Me
The tightrope between tinfoil-hat paranoia and rose-tinted naivety
Indymedia Stories:
Rob and Me (this one)
Valuing Our Contributions (coming soon …)
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.
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:
Crossing the line: the activist who turned police informer (archived) - Nicky Hager’s exposé article on his own homepage
The activist who turned police informer (archived) - Nicky Hager’s exposé article, as published on the Sunday Star Times section of the Stuff news website
Who the police were spying on (archived) - Uncredited explainer, as published on the Sunday Star Times section of the Stuff news website
How Gilchrist was found out (archived) - Uncredited explainer, as published on the Sunday Star Times section of the Stuff news website
Anti-terror squad spies on protest groups (archived) - Sunday Star Times article by Nicky Hager and Anthony Hubbard, as published on the Sunday Star Times section of the Stuff news website
Chief of police called in over spies - NZ Herald article by Lincoln Tan (Archived version)
Sunday Star Times - Discussion about SST articles from The Standard blog
Police state - Commentary from No Right Turn blog
Rob Gilchrist : Police Informant - Commentary from slackbastard blog
The SST Police spying story - Commentary from David Farrar’s KiwiBlog
How Gilchrist was found out (archived) - Repost of the SST article on Aotearoa Indymedia newswire, with discussion
Police anti-terror squad spies on protest groups (archived) - Repost of the SST article on Aotearoa Indymedia newswire, with discussion
Rob Gilchrist: I'm a Police Informant - video clipped from TV3 news, embedded in the text (archived version, video may not play)
2008-12-15:
Loose lips sink ships… - Commentary from The New Masses blog
State snooping on activists (archived) - Commentary from Fightback blog
Is the NZ left naive or paranoid? - Commentary from Bryce Edwards’ Liberation blog
2008-12-16:
Gordon Campbell On The Transition Package, And Paid Police Spies Within Protest Groups (archived) - Commentary on Scoop
Police using spies and lies to make case (archived) - Press release by Justice Now! Collective, posted on Aotearoa Indymedia newswire
Special Intelligence Group targetting political dissidents (archived) - Commentary posted on Aotearoa Indymedia newswire under the name Roger Rabbit
Unsubstantiated accusations (archived) - Discussion on a comment posted to the Aotearoa Indymedia newswire about the appropriate handling of as yet unconfirmed allegations
The limits to tolerance of the police - Commentary by LPrent from The Standard blog
Capitalist state just doing its job (archived) - Commentary from the Workers Party NZ blog
Rochelle hits back - Second commentary from KiwiBlog
2008-12-17:
Rob Gilchrist - police informant for 'anti-terror' unit (archived) - Feature article by Aotearoa Indymedia collective
Who else are they spying on? - Commentary from The Standard blog, under the name Tane
The Murky World of Rob Gilchrist (archived) - Commentary by Steven Cowan from Against the Current blog
Greens say spy passed information to police on anti-Taser protest - NZ Herald article by Patrick Gower
Garth George: Greens' criticism of covert police surveillance a fair cop - NZ Herald opinion piece, doesn't mention Gilchrist by name but is a response to the Patrick Gower article
2008-12-18:
Strange Bedfellows (archived) - Commentary from FrogBlog, the defunct NZ Green Party blog
Police spied on unions - Second commentary from No Right Turn blog
The Gilchrist case gets murkier - Third commentary from KiwiBlog
Aotearoa – the most terrorist dense population in the world - Commentary from Ludditejourno blog
2008-12-19:
State Of It: Police SIG Unit Wasted On Tag-Busting - Commentary by Selwyn Manning on Scoop
Mark Eden-Should The Police Be Monitoring This Man? (archived) - Commentary on Trevor Loudon’s New Zeal blog (a rare exception, this blogger supports the spying, but the comments are a riot ...)
2008-12-20:
'Nice little memento' for police spy (archived) - NZ Herald article by Patrick Gower
Bill Ralston: No spying line a cop-out - NZ Herald opinion piece
Matt McCarten: Spying on lawful organisations should set alarm bells ringing - NZ Herald opinion piece
2008-12-21:
Activist to take police to court over informant (archived) - Uncredit NZPA article, as published on the Stuff news website
Pepper sprayed activist to take police to court over provocateur (archived) - Press release by Simon Oosterman, posted to Aotearoa Indymedia newswire
Rob Gilchrist sent naked photos of teenage activist to police (archived) - Personal account posted to Aotearoa Indymedia newswire by Rochelle Rees (former girlfriend who outed Gilchrist)
The Gilchrist saga gets yucky - Fourth commentary from KiwiBlog
It’s not often that I agree with a Commie, but here’s an exception to the rule - Commentary from the Kiwi Polemicist blog
2008-12-24:
NZ: The beauty of hindsight - police informant caught after 10 years - Indymedia UK - Commentary posted on Indymedia UK newsire, under the name miss x
2009-01-10:
What DeLillo can tell us about Gilchrist - Book review by Scott Hamilton, published on Scoop
2009-04-25:
The activist who turned police informer - Uncredited article, as published on the Sunday Star Times section of the Stuff news website
2009-07-?:
Police Busted! How Police Spy Rob Gilchrist Was Exposed By His Partner (archived) - Personal account by Rochelle Rees published in Peace Researcher newsletter, as it appears on Converge website
Police Informer Caught After 10 Years of Spying on Activists (archived) - Personal account by Mark Eden published in Peace Researcher newsletter, as it appears on Converge website
2010-07-?:
Aotearoa NZ Military Imposters - Robert Stephen Gilchrist – Christchurch New Zealand (archived) - Account of Gilchrist’s false claims about military service, from theANZMI website
2012-07-07:
How To Avoid Getting Robbed (archived) - My own reflections, posted to Aotearoa Indymedia newswire
2013:
02-12: Case for compensation, says police spy's ex - Uncredited article from Dominion Post, as published on the Stuff news website
02-13: Police spy sues for mental pain - Uncredited article from Dominion Post, as published on the Stuff news website
02-25: Spy sues cops for pain of decade of deception - Uncredited article from The Press, as published on the Stuff news website
11-7: Better work stories? - Commentary published on The Ivory Tower blog
2014:
08-07: Rob Gilchrist On Nicky Hager - Guest post on The Standard blog by Gilchrist himself
2015:
08-30: Former spy paid to infiltrate Greenpeace and unions - Sunday Star Times articles by Chris Barclay and Marika Hill, as published on the Stuff news website
07-04: - Police spy's girlfriend: I want answers - Personal accounts by Rochelle Rees and Valerie Morse, published in the Sundar Star Times, as it appears on the Stuff news website
2018:
Activists and the Surveillance State - this is a book, but the blurb references Gilchrist)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.