Mass surveillance: Civilian snitches

You can dress anonymously to prevent civilians from providing a description of you that would be valuable to an adversary.

If a civilian follows you after an action, you can scare them off with threats or pepper spray. If a civilian tries to call the police, you can destroy their phone.

Civilians can observe you during an action and report their observations to an adversary. To mitigate this, you can carry out actions at night or in areas with minimal foot traffic to minimize witnesses, and use a lookout to report the presence of any witnesses as soon as they are noticed. Beware of balconies and windows overlooking the action site.

Several civilians helped investigators. In particular:^[1]

• After hearing Louna make an appointment with a doctor through an intercepted phone call, investigators contacted the doctor, who provided them with Louna's personal information, including her address and phone number.
• The pharmacist at a pharmacy where Louna obtained medication provided a physical description of Louna, confirmed recognizing her from a photograph, and provided personal documents of hers, including copies of prescriptions.
• The director of a higher education institution where a person studied provided the person's class schedule and information about the transportation they used to get to the institution.

In the weeks following the train bombing, investigators interrogated many citizens in a large area surrounding the bombing site.^[2]

In particular, investigators interrogated a shop clerk in a village. The clerk told investigators that, before the bombing, someone wearing a camouflage jacket and carrying a backpack had passed by the shop. The clerk provided a description of the person, which investigators used to create a composite sketch. Three weeks after the bombing, Ruslan Siddiqi encountered a local cop who compared him with the composite sketch and arrested him.

While trying to cross the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, the people stopped at a shop about 10 kilometers from the border.^[1] A shopkeeper called the border guards on them, which led directly to their arrest.

The saleswoman of the cell phone store where Mónica bought a phone that was used as part of the 2020 action, when questioned by investigators, gave a description of a person that the investigators matched to Mónica.^[3]

When Lukáš Borl was in clandestinity his photo and personal information were published on the national police website to encourage civilians to send information about him to the police.^[4]

Several civilians helped investigators.^[5] In particular:

• Journalists told investigators that they had noticed similarities between action claims published by Direct Action and articles in a local quarterly publication called Resistance.
• A hunter, presumably by chance, discovered two wooden structures where members of Direct Action stored the stolen explosives they used in bombings, and alerted the police to the discovery.^[6]
• The landlords of the house where four members of Direct Action lived gave investigators the key to the house so they could enter and install hidden microphones.