Breaking News: Police Pepper Spray Black Lives Matter Protesters in Sydney
Between 50 and 100 protesters didn't want to leave when the crowd dispersed and police have pushed them to the entrance of the station at Eddy Avenue.
Summary
- Thousands protested in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Hobart to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and call for an end to Aboriginal deaths in custody.
- The NSW Court of Appeal ruled the Sydney rally could go ahead in a last minute decision after protesters fought a police injunction to stop the march.
- Many protesters wore face masks, but the sheer volume of people meant social distancing was difficult.
- Victoria Police say while they were "largely pleased" and made no arrests, they would fine protest organisers for breaching COVID-19 restrictions for lack of social distancing.
Crowd at Central Station disperses
7.51pm
Herald reporter Caitlin Fitzsimmons tells us the remaining protesters at Sydney's Central Station have dispersed.
Anita Antonio, 16, from Parramatta said she was among the remaining group of protesters who were heading towards Victoria Park when they were stopped by police.
"There were 20 people down there [in the station] who were pepper sprayed," she said.
Up to 100 protesters in the station were hit with pepper spray, after the main march in Sydney dispersed.
Protesters yell at police inside Central Station
7.30pm
There are about 50 to 100 young protesters, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, inside the gates of Sydney's Central Station banging on the metal and yelling "all cops are bastards".
The small group of demonstrators remain at the station after a day of otherwise peaceful protesting.
A woman is yelling that the protest was meant to be peaceful and the police turned it violent by using pepper spray, our reporter Caitlin Fitzimmons tells us.
Legal observer Jarrod Diamond confirmed police used pepper spray against the crowd inside the station, including minors. He has video footage.
He and several other legal observers said the pepper spray came before police issued a formal move-on order over a loudspeaker. However, it is unclear if there individual move-on orders before that.
Anonymous Responds to Death of George Floyd
All these years later, Anonymous is back in the news, but it's not clear that this is actually the same group of hacktivists who rose to prominence a decade ago, and the information that's being dumped has thus far been quite easily attainable. Of course, that might not actually matter. Anonymous was always a loose collective of hackers, journalists, activists, and shitposters; if this is a new crop of people controlling Anonymous accounts or calling themselves Anonymous, they can still have an impact.
Focusing on the sophistication of these alleged hacks may be missing the point entirely. For McGill University professor Biella Coleman, a scholar who has studied and followed Anonymous and other hacktivist groups for years, the sheer social media reach of the video and the alleged hacks is notable and “are unlike anything I've seen” and may very well be due to them being shared widely by K-Pop fan accounts, as she put it on Twitter.
Coleman told Motherboard that “Some of the retweets for sure were just kind of nostalgia and desire for Anonymous to come back. ‘Oh my god, they're back, this is so exciting.’”
Coleman said that this could just be a testament to their earlier impact, but she also believes it’s possible that all this media attention and the historic moment may lead to a resurgence where skilled hackers join in and wreak real havoc.
Former hacktivists agree.
“This is how Anonymous works. Every few years there's a major event that causes masses of people to get involved with Anonymous. In 2008 it was scientology, in 2010 it was WikiLeaks and now it's this. This is the biggest resurgence of Anonymous I've seen. It's nuts,” Mustafa Al-Bassam, a security researcher who years ago was involved with Anonymous and its offshoot group LulzSec, told Motherboard.
“There's Anonymous smut and fanfic and TikTok fancams with millions of views," he said. "It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: a random person starts a new op under the banner of Anon, and others join in.”
For Coleman, however, a problem for now is that there’s no real existing group of hacktivists that could take on this cause.
“The only one is Phineas Fisher that is really quite active,” Coleman said in a phone call. “So it would really have to be either a new group or someone from Anonymous that were part of the hacker crews that weren't arrested. Some might re-emerge in a different form. But there's no indication that’s happening right now.”
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