Debunking the OccupyLondon "empty tents" story

Writing in the Guardian, Patrick Kingsley debunks the attempts to smear Occupy London protesters as "part-timers." Local councillor Matthew Richardson has been widely quoted in the press saying that the police's thermal imaging showed 90 percent of the Occupy tents are empty overnight -- but when Kingsley tried to verify the statistic, he discovered that it was unverifiable. The police denied having originated the number, and the Councillor then changed his story, saying the statistic didn't come from "official sources." The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, is using flaky thermal cameras trained on the tents before the protesters' normal bedtime to "prove" that it's all a Potemkin village.

Kingsley, meanwhile, stayed out overnight, spoke to organizers, and suggests that "more than three quarters" of the tents are full at any time. Organizers have a well-managed system that assigns vacant tents (whose owners are taking a day or two off to catch up on family and work) to protesters who "occupy" them.

When I stayed at the St Paul's site last week, I borrowed a tent from Jay Gearing, a 32-year-old graphic designer. He had to leave the camp for a couple of nights to catch up with work. I touched base with him again yesterday to ask whether he felt his peripatetic presence undermined his protest. "No," was the short answer. "People who want to attend the occupation still need to make a living," he says, on the phone from Peterborough, about to head back to the camp after another couple of days away. "Being able to return, like I have done several times, and having a tent there for me, is more than reasonable, and it does get used as many times as possible when I'm not there. The fact that sometimes it may be empty is irrelevant." In fact, he points out, eight different people have slept in it in total, meaning that it has hardly ever been out of use.
This kind of debate is nothing new. Cynics have often criticised protesters who can't stay for every minute of every day. "We also had to confront the spin, propaganda and dirty tricks being used against the Occupy protesters now," says Jason Torrance, 41, currently policy director at Sustrans, and formerly very active in the anti-roads protests of the 1990s, such as Twyford Down and the Newbury bypass. "I've seen it all before. You are variously described as unhygienic, smelly, scroungers, timewasters, uncommitted and the like. It's easy to throw scorn at protesters, especially when you're comfortable in your clean, dry home. But protest is a very important, treasured tradition and the Occupy camp is highlighting a very important issue."

Is Occupy London a part-time protest?

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: london • media theory • occupy • occupy london • protest • uk

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

Sometimes it’s so easy to tell the right side from the wrong side of history even as it’s being made.
stuart10

This is the Cllr Richardson, previously most famous for allegedly pretending to be a eminent economist (he was actually an engineering student):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2004/feb/19/highereducation.students http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1454742/I-blagged-my-way-through-reading-a-torn-up-textbook-and-ad-libbing.html
- Warren_Terra
  
  From the story as told at your links, it isn’t actually clear that he intended to misrepresent himself – he was hired by a firm that had his accurate CV, and fraudulently supplied by them to give lectures in China for a school that had contracted with them. He shouldn’t have done it, regardless – shouldn’t have told himself there was any way he was an appropriate person to ship halfway around the world to lecture on economics, even at the low level he asserts he thought was involved, given that he lacked even an undergraduate degree, and that in a different field. Purporting to instruct the students by reading out of a book is not acceptable (which he clearly knew, since we went to some lengths to disguise this fact); as he had planned all along, he was cheating his students more than he was teaching them. The story makes him sound like rather a bad person. But it sounds like the original, deliberate fraud and misrepresentation was committed by the company that hired him, not by him.
digi_owl

First they ignore, then they vilify, then we win?
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Oliver-Schmieding/100000452523362 Oliver Schmieding
  
  hate to burst your bubble…. but i’m afraid it’s gonna be ignore/vilify/fine/court-martial instead - anybody in for a little side bet?
Max

Lies, damn lies and statistics.
Liars, damn liars and politicians (and local councillors).

That is all.
GyroMagician

My favourite quote from the Guardian article:

The Daily Telegraph claimed their own thermal imagists had verified the rumour. Yet their video … shows three separate protesters evaporating from sight when standing behind their tents – casting doubt on the accuracy of thermal imaging technology in the first place.
onepieceman

I don’t really understand this camp thing. What is its purpose? Is it to show the strength of feeling of its participants? So it’s one thing to go on a demonstration, quite another to camp out over many days?
If that is so, then fair enough, but in that case, it is reasonable to point out that things aren’t quite as they seem. Attention to accuracy would have been helpful, but there was a kernel of truth in the original story, as confirmed by Kingsely’s article. Richardson says 90% empty, Kingsley says 25% empty. Neither figures seem particularly rigorous to me, but the point is that quite a lot were empty. How many people realised this was going on before the article?
I still don’t see there’s much to be ashamed of here though. It’s just a case that instead of a small number of people feeling very strongly, we have a larger number of people feeling slightly less strongly, or having to balance their views with their need to make a living.
- Guest
  
  Because going to work dilutes your feelings about the bed that bankers and politicians share?
  
  I’m sorry, your comment appears to hinge on that being the subtext, rightly or wrongly, either way the facts go, and that’s a pretty shallow subtext.
  - onepieceman
    
    Well, I guess there is some dilution. I suppose a hierarchy of feelings might go something like:
    
    1) Mildly annoyed: mutter under breath
    2) Quite annoyed: join a Facebook group
    3) Very annoyed: go on a demonstration
    4) Extremely annoyed: set up camp
    
    People will quite naturally judge the strength of other people’s feelings. If you are very passionate about something, and I mildly disagree with you, I might be inclined to give way purely on that basis (other things being more or less equal).
    
    So if the purpose of the camp is to demonstrate strength of feeling, then yes, you are diluting matters if you attend part time, but that is OK, providing you are honest about it.
    
    This has got to be a relevant point, because if all we had was a few hundred people interacting on Facebook or muttering under their breaths, how would this be newsworthy? The coverage is a function in large part of the perceived sacrifice being made by the protesters. If 25% aren’t there (according to the sympathetic article in the Guardian), but leading people to suppose that they are, then that’s a bit of a cheat. There’s a trade going on here between sacrifice and attention. Reducing the sacrifice doesn’t negate your argument, but it most likely will reduce the attention people give you. Isn’t that the whole basis of demonstrations?
    - http://sarahhayes.is-a-geek.net/ SarahKH
      
      Don’t forget
      
      5) Really quite upset: Blow up Parliment.
      
      Or at least attempt to. For those about to laugh and point than V for Vendetta is fictional… it’s a Guy Fawkes mask, he was quite real as was the gunpowder plot.
www.auto112.eu

we shall never surrender
Andrew Oakley

GyroMagician – if, as you and the Graun claim, the thermal imaging is failing to penetrate the tents, then there is a much bigger financial scandal here than bankers’ bonuses. The military have spent BILLIONS of taxpayers’ money on anti-thermal imaging camouflage, when they could have instead simply gone down to Millets and bought a few Occupy London thermal-proof tents for around 50 quid, cut them up and draped them over their tank motors and fighter jet engines. Occupy London could prove to be one of the greatest contributors to military technology this decade!
- Cynical
  
  Yeh, you’re right, and this guy only has one leg: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/600/thermalhogwash.png/ (linked from the Guardian story)
  
  £30 “thermal imaging” camera from Maplin ≠ Military grade
- GyroMagician
  
  As Cynical points out, not all thermal imaging cameras are created equal. Various militaries have spent billions (or even BILLIONS) on such technology, but does that means the Telegraph (or even the Met) have access to them? Or did they just pull the IR filter off the front of a standard camera, and apply a fancy colour map?
grahamix

The irony of the forces of the Non-Doms* criticising people for not staying put in the City tickles me pink.

( *Non-Doms: people who live and work in the UK but are “not domiciled” in the UK for tax purposes. Goldman-Sachs tried to filtch the British taxman out of millions by setting up a shell company in the British Virgin Islands that “employed” all of their bankers in London who were “seconded” to the UK. “Earning” their money in the BVI meant that they thought they could avoid paying tax on their salaries and bonuses. And the UK tax collectors let them off with a slap on the wrist. )
http://krisvandenbergh.be/ Kris

Exactly the same is happening in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. People only show up during the afternoon even. But it’s rather symbolic I would say.
ffabian

a little bit Off-Topic but: Any idea where you can get a 8bit-skull shirt like the one on the picture?
phisrow

Ok, now I’m confused.

Yesterday, I was supposed to hate the ‘occupy’ crowd because they were a bunch of pampered students living on their parents money, along with some idle social parasites, all of whom could afford to be out doing a bit of recreational protesting and destruction of property while Decent People Work For a Living because they are hypocritical and/or parasitic scum.

Now I’m supposed to dismiss them because they are just lukewarm part-timers who don’t really care about their ‘movement’; but call time outs to do silly little things like ‘work’, unlike real (preferably long-historical) protesters who put their heart into it.

Head Asplode, guys, head asplode…
- Nick Wood
  
  Don’t worry phisrow, it’s a predictable cycle of ad hominem designed to discredit the movement. You’ll hear it all if you hang around:
  
  They are benefit scroungers
  They are students
  They are middle class with privileged non-jobs that allows them to protest
  They are middle class living off mummy and daddy
  They are spoilt rich kids
  They are hippies
  They are smelly and unsanitary
  They are noisy and antisocial
  They are part-timers
  They are hypocrites
  They are serial protesters
  They are not Christians
  They are from Dale Farm
  
  And so on
  (thanks to the Guardian commentator who supplied most of that list)
  - onepieceman
    
    Still don’t see how being a “part timer” is an ad hominem attack (which I think is the essence of this whole story). Why pretend you’re not if you are? Ditto for being a student or middle class come to that.
    
    Are we saying a protest is only valid if you devote your entire life to it, forsaking all else?Conversely, if you only want to make a part time protest, why set up a camp? Why wouldn’t a demonstration do?
    - Nick Wood
      
      “Writing in the Guardian, Patrick Kingsley debunks the attempts to smear Occupy London protesters as ‘part-timers.’”
      
      Argumentum ad hominem: an attempt to negate the truth of a claim (the issues Occupy are about) by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it (i.e. the protesters not being there all the time)
      
      I’ve no problem with them being part-timers, even if it were true – which it isn’t. And that is the essence of the whole story.
      - onepieceman
        
        You misunderstand my argument. Being part-time, a student, or middle class, are not “negative characteristics”, and you shouldn’t react to them as if they were, or you’re implicitly conceding the point.
      - Nick Wood
        
        But to some people they are negative characteristics, I’m afraid. That’s the unfair, prejudiced world of reality. Keep pushing the buttons and someone, somewhere will be influenced. It doesn’t matter if you or I don’t see them as such if not everyone is like-minded. Is it good news for a movement wanting popular support? No. If the “accusations” are true, there are several positions you could adopt, and likewise if they are false. In the latter case one of the best options is to show it’s being made up simply to discredit you and what you’re standing for.
        
        But I’m stating the obvious…
http://twitter.com/chriscoreline chris coreline

i hate to say it becuase i love a good protest for a good cause but, there is a systemic weekness with non-violent protests in first world countries which i will demonstrate using the following statistic:

days of occupation: 41
number of things changed: 0

I hope things change. Im not sure they will.
softyelectric

“The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, is using flaky thermal cameras trained on the tents before the protesters’ normal bedtime to “prove” that it’s all a Potemkin village.”

Just a note from the technical side: for as little as one to two thousand dollars, from manufacturers like Axis and Flir, a concern could get a thermal camera that definitely works, could “see through” tent material. While using a thermal camera like this is massively lazy “reporting,” if they did it right, it would work.
Guest

“Look where it’s coming from”

Every anti OWS story, debunked in FIVE WORDS