Surveillance, Democracy, and Protest in a Time of Climate Crisis

Government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have prompted public protests across the world, often in defiance of strict lockdown restrictions enacted under emergency legislation. This chapter examines the question of how surveillance should be used to police protest in a time of emergency, focusing on environmental activism as a case study from which conclusions relevant to protests in other conditions of crisis can be drawn. Issues around police surveillance of protest movements are intertwined with urgent political questions about how prepared we are as democratic societies to deal with a climate emergency, an emergency that intersects ever more frequently with other crises, including the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.