I-Witness Video was born in the wake of the crackdown on freedom of speech and assembly which followed the embattled Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in 1999. Since 2000, we have used video as the foundation for our investigations into police and government misconduct in and around political demonstrations.

The I-Witness Video blog will explore a plethora of police wrongdoing including surveillance, police perjury, prosecutorial misconduct and preemptive arrests. We will also try to shed light on the mechanisms of government repression through the use of obscure federal agencies, little-known Presidential directives, disinformation and the hyperbolic conflation of social activism with terrorism.

Living in the era of what a friend ironically calls the post 9-11 Constitution, we will try to offer some perspective on the history of resistance and repression in the U.S.

To do all this we will use a variety of tools: video, still photographs, news articles, lawsuits, government and NGO reports and whatever open source intelligence we can get our hands on.

The story of the current wave of political repression is so complex that we may have to tell it in small pieces over a long period of time. We hope that you will join us in this unfolding, adding your own thoughts, analysis and observations to the mix.