Getting On Lists and Having Weird Coincidences

What makes me jump to the most paranoid-seeming possible conclusion about why I am shadowbanned on Bandcamp with no explanation?

I've been in conversation with a lot of people in the past few days, exploring the nature of Bandcamp's shady shadowban on me and my music that has recently been brought to my attention.  And while on that subject, I rearranged the missive I sent out recently about that, and added a bunch more information, which can all be found now at davidrovics.com/bandcamp.  If anyone ever hears from Bandcamp or their shadowban is lifted, with or without explanation, I'll keep the site updated.

In the course of these discussions there have been a lot of people wondering whether there's just some kind of random glitch in Bandcamp's system that keeps anything from my catalog from appearing in a search on their platform.  Many others have wondered if this is intentional on Bandcamp's part, and if they are imposing this restriction on my account at the direction of a government agency, or because of some kind of internal policy.

Both the random glitch or the intentional shadowban are entirely plausible hypotheses, seems to me.  Anyone familiar with problematic technology can understand the glitch possibility, and anyone familiar with Cointelpro can accept the possibility of the intentional shadowban.

Without rejecting the glitch possibility outright, I thought I'd share a few anecdotes from my life that tend to make me suspect nefarious activity is the more likely explanation.

The first time I knew with 100% certainty that I was on a government watch list was in 2002.  

As a young person I had known others who had been on lists.  Musician and organizer, Pete Seeger, famously was questioned by McCarthy's Congressional commission and blacklisted.  Bob Steck was blacklisted after returning from the Spanish Civil War and was barred from getting military security clearance afterwards, during the Second World War, along with all the other returning veterans of Spain.

More recently, you can now read from publicly-released files about the FBI's campaign against musicians like Buffy Sainte-Marie and Phil Ochs, designed to prevent them from becoming too successful, while not killing them or banning them outright, like would be more typical in many US client states. 

The only thing that's shocking about it happening to you -- and I've found this reaction to be universal among all the other folks I know who have been selected for such lists -- is most people don't think they're important enough that the secret police would want to bother with us.  The fact is, though, that there are millions of people working for the security state in this country, so of course you're important enough to be monitored by them and whatever else, if you've been to a few protests or done pretty much anything else to attract attention to yourself.

In the summer of 2002 I was supposed to be crossing the border into Alberta for the first time, to perform at events related to the protests against the G8 meetings there then.  This would be the first of several occasions when I was prevented from entering Canada, this time for reasons having nothing even remotely to do with not having a work visa, or not having applied for the work visa correctly.

I had hit it off with the customs and immigration guy, who was, like me at the time, a man in his thirties who played the acoustic guitar and was a fan of some of the same artists I knew from the Boston area, where I had lived for many years.  He was going to let me into the country after we talked, mostly about music, for fifteen minutes or so.  It wasn't a busy border crossing, there in the middle of the Blackfoot Reservation, but everyone was being searched that week because of the G8 meetings, including elderly couples traveling in RV's.

It didn't seem to be the search of my pickup truck that alarmed the guy, though finding a piece of paper from an anarchist group in Wisconsin that advocated "direct action" was the ostensible reason for me being turned away.  (I had tried to clean the pickup of all such offensive literature before crossing the border, but evidently did not succeed.)

The young man was visibly distressed, and physically shaking, when he asked me to come back up to his counter.  He explained to me that he really wanted to let me into the country but that he was worried he'd lose his job if he did so.  He then showed me the screen of his computer, which was a directive for anyone at the border encountering David Rovics to find a reason to turn him away, but not to tell him that the real reason he's being turned away is because he's on this list of undesirables.

I believe it was not the fact that he was being told to turn me away from the border, but the fact that he was being told to lie about the reasons why I was being turned away, that really disturbed this guy.  They are real people who work for government agencies like this one.  He did what he felt he needed to do that day, and he showed me that I was on a list.  He was supposed to turn me away without showing me that, of course.

I'm not the only person who found out they were on a watch list exactly this way.  But if you don't find out in some similar way that you're on a list, you'll likely never know for sure.  You may spend your entire life wondering, feeling paranoid, feeling like something's going on that's not the coincidence it seems to be, and never knowing for sure.  I'm lucky to be one of the ones who got to find out, pretty early on.

The experience at the border seemed like it maybe helped explain the weird coincidences that were repeatedly happening with me on domestic flights in the US around that time. 

I was very busy performing for the global justice and environmental movements prior to 9/11.  But after 9/11 I got much busier, with the global antiwar movement suddenly coming into existence in a big way, which lasted for a solid four years.  It was during these four years just after 9/11 that the weird coincidences began to happen, consistently.

I was doing a lot of gigs, which involved both a lot of driving and a lot of flying.  Not a lot of flying by business traveler standards, to be clear, but a lot more flying than most people do for fun.  Only for one of those years did I actually fly enough for United Airlines to put me on the priority boarding list and give me free entry into their swanky lounges.  But for four years straight, on every domestic flight I ever took, although the planes were usually completely full, I always had an empty seat next to me.

When this first started happening I attributed it to my luck at choosing aisle seats, or perhaps that I had racked up so many frequent flier miles that this gave me some kind of special privilege, even in Economy.  Slowly I began to realize that these theories did not make sense, and that something else must be going on here.  The possibility that it was just a repeating series of freak coincidences also started to lose its sway.

Obviously, when you do the math, the chances that the only empty seat on a flight is going to be next to you every time, every few weeks, for four years uninterrupted, are very slim indeed.  

I was on a list.  But not one that anyone had ever heard of.  We all knew of the post-9/11 "no-fly" list, which reportedly contained the names of over a hundred thousand people on it, who generally found out they were on this list when they showed up at an airport and were not allowed to board a flight.  I was clearly not on that list.  The list I was on was the one where you get a free seat next to you on every domestic flight.

My best guess at an explanation for what was happening to me was that it was related to the armed officers post-9/11 that were supposed to have a seat on every flight, in case they want to be on that one.  I'm guessing I was on a list for people who are allowed to fly, but who should get extra scrutiny, and should be sitting next to one of those officers, if such an officer was going to be on board.

When I do the math, this theory at least makes some potential sense.  If around 17,000 flights take off every day in the US and the federal government only deployed a hundred cops to do this work, which is the number I've heard for how many cops ended up doing this job, it's entirely plausible that I went for four years without ever being on a flight that had one of them on board.  But all I know for sure is I had those free seats next to me all the time to an implausible degree if this is going to be passed off as coincidence, and I never paid for all that legroom.

Major media has generally avoided me throughout my career, aside from the occasional interview on Al-Jazeera, Al-Mayadeen, or RT.  An exception to this rule existed for a few years, beginning in 2002, when Andy Kershaw began to play my music regularly on his very popular weekly World Music program on BBC Radio 3.  Andy had me as a live guest at least twice as well.

This upset certain people so much that for the first time in three decades of working for the BBC and being probably their most popular music show host after John Peel, Andy was called to an interview with the BBC Board of Governors, and questioned about his journalistic neutrality for playing my music.  He continued to play my music, and then he lost his job at the BBC.  Allegedly these things are not related.

Years later at a small festival I was playing at, the MC turned out to be a former producer for Andy Kershaw at BBC.  She explained to me in no uncertain terms that Andy was the only one who could take that kind of heat, and no one else dared to play my music, among anyone formerly associated with Andy's show, anywhere on BBC, after Andy was fired, and I can vouch for that fact as well.  When Andy lost his job, my royalty checks for radio play went back down to the double digits.

There were various occasions, particularly memorably during the G20 protests in Pittsburgh in 2009, where methodically, anyone who talked to me on the phone started then having all kinds of troubles with their phones, hearing echoes and clicks and being unable to make calls, or unable to receive calls, etc.  This sort of thing had happened before, and during this period of time was happening too often to be easily chalked up to coincidence.

In 2013, as I was in the airport waiting to board a flight to Auckland, New Zealand, I received a call on an airline worker's cell phone from Immigration in New Zealand that I was not welcome to enter their country.  As in 2002 when I was turned away from Canada, there was no mention of music or work visas not having been done properly.

The immigration officer quoted from my blog, which had made reference at some point to my appreciation for cannabis, which was cited by the officer, for whatever reason, presumably to imply that cannabis aficionados are not welcome in New Zealand.  (Cannabis was still illegal in both the US and New Zealand at the time.)

The very experienced immigration lawyer I was working with after that had never seen anything like this episode.  He ultimately had a conversation with a high-ranking official from the immigration department, who told him in no uncertain terms that there would be no change in decision on this.  I haven't tried to go to New Zealand since then, and I don't know what would happen if I did.  (I intend to find out eventually.)

Just to point out what will be obvious already to many, immigration officers from New Zealand do not generally read the blogs of people traveling to their country on a flight from the United States or Japan (I was at Narita Airport when I got the call), nor do they generally prevent them from entering their country because of something they wrote.  I actually have no criminal record, and there's no reason any immigration agent would have to be concerned about my behavior in their country.  The worst crimes for which I have ever had the charges dropped had occurred two decades earlier, and involved possession of small amounts of cannabis, and driving a car with a suspended license (which had been suspended at the time due to unpaid tickets, not because of drunk driving or anything dangerous).

After being turned away from entering New Zealand, my next stop back then in 2013 was Australia.  In Perth, where I entered Australia that time, the immigration officers were very interested in my case.  They spent a lot of time looking at the screen and talking about me, mostly too quietly for me to hear from where they had instructed me to sit.  

At one point one of them audibly mentioned how I had just been turned away from entering New Zealand.  What I observed there in Perth was something I have witnessed on a number of occasions at other borders: the older, more experienced agent was the one who was ready to ignore the long list of offenses they were looking at related to me.  The younger, less experienced agent seemed more inclined to ban me from the country, but the older one won the argument and they let me in.

A week or so after entering Australia, one of my gigs was being organized by a person who worked for the federal government in Canberra.  Almost incredibly, one of her colleagues in her department happened to be walking down the hall past the War Crimes department (which apparently exists).  Their door was open, and as he passed by he overheard two people in there talking about me.  He didn't linger to find out why they were talking about me, but he clearly heard my name being mentioned.

I can speculate about why I have had so many challenges with certain borders and no problems with others.  There are a lot of possible reasons why I might have gotten on the radar in one country or another.  A few months before being turned away at the border with Alberta, I was performing and protesting at the FTAA meetings in Quebec City.  Had the Canadian authorities taken note of that and disapproved?  A year or so before being turned away from entering New Zealand in 2013, I had played in a benefit concert to raise money for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to buy a new printing press.  Had the new, conservative government in power there at the time taken note of this with disapproval, and put me on a list?

Or was the consistent factor here that all the countries I was having problems with were part of the 1948 Five Eyes treaty, in which the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand all agreed to share all their intelligence about most everything with each other, including of course anyone on watch lists in any of their countries.  Did I start out on a list in the US, who then shared that with the other four countries?  Did they share this info with the Germans and the Scandinavians, etc., and I just never have problems crossing those borders because their governments have different immigration policies?  Or have I just never gotten on a watch list in Germany or Scandinavia because they're not part of the Five Eyes treaty?  Who knows.  It's not like anyone's telling me what's going on, so I'm just left guessing, like most everyone else on such lists.

Jumping to the present, when I discover I'm being shadowbanned on Bandcamp, the first thing that comes to my mind is not that this is likely a technical error affecting me and no other artists that I can find on the platform.  

My suspicions are not just based on my history with being on lists or experiencing weird coincidences, however.  My suspicions are also rooted in what we know of the modus operandi of "the intelligence community" in the western world generally in modern times.  

Going back to things we know about for sure, because of public records and all that, when the FBI was actively working to destroy the careers of artists like Pete Seeger or Buffy Sainte-Marie, unlike with Paul Robeson, they did not take away their passports or prevent them from performing.  But they did their best to create clouds of suspicion, and they did things like calling programmers at popular radio stations to make sure that undesirable artists like Buffy Sainte-Marie were not given airplay.  That is, they worked hard to minimize the impact of such artists, rather than to ban them outright.

Bandcamp's shadowban is, in a cold digital form presumably involving very little effort on the part of the censors, exactly the modern equivalent of calling those radio stations back in the Sixties and Seventies.

Maybe the shadowban will end as quietly as it began, or maybe it will continue.  Maybe I or one of the other people who have written Bandcamp to inquire about it will get a reply.  Maybe Bandcamp will say it was a technical error and they'll fix it, or maybe they won't.  Either way and until I have concrete proof to the contrary, it seems to me the most sensible assumption here is that it's intentional.