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Let's say a few anarchists are planning an illegal, anonymous direct action. For example, they want to paint a wall, or smash a bank, or burn down a government building. The goals of the police are to prevent actions like this from taking place and/or identify and arrest the anarchists and gather enough evidence for them to be convicted. What can the police do to achieve these goals, depending on their motivation, their resources, the type of action, and the way the anarchists organize? What challenges will they face? And how can anarchists identify these challenges as weaknesses in order to exploit them and act without getting caught?

This text is addressed to the international anarchist movement, which we'll define as the sum of individuals fighting for anarchist ideas around the world. This movement is in conflict with its natural enemies — the State, fascist groups, and so on — and must protect itself if it is to survive in this conflict. In this text, we make three proposals for the international anarchist movement to consider in the coming years in order to allow anarchists to continue attacking while limiting their chances of getting caught.

The No Trace Project is launching a new initiative, the Anti-Repression Talks, to encourage discussion of surveillance and security issues within and between informal anarchist networks, on an international level. We believe that many anti-repression practices are more powerful when they are carried out across a network, rather than only by specific affinity groups.

Sometimes related terms become synonyms, and sometimes that can be fine. English is full of them, like “amazing” and “awesome” — no one misses the difference between these words.

Sometimes though, allowing the difference between terms to get lost also causes us to lose a useful piece of meaning. Operational security (OpSec) and security culture are two terms that have similar but distinct meanings, and both are required parts of an anarchist practice of security against repression.