The UK has a rightful reputation as a surveillance state. New surveillance technologies, such as facial recognition and police drones, are already a reality across much of the UK. The British state uses these vast resources to harvest data on its targets to control manipulate and divide communities and, with the Prevent strategy, the Spycops inquiry, union blacklistings and countless other scandals have consistently shown that the British state will not stop in it's to assert the state's power over student movements, activists, environmentalists, racialised minorities. How can we resist this slide into authoritarianism?

In this event, the speakers will answer:

- How pervasive is surveillance in the UK and who does it affect?
- What impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of those targeted in Britain?
- How do we resist the injustice of these policies and practices?

Learn more about the books here: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745345413/tangled-in-terror/ / https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745338484/the-suspect/

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Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer, poet, educator and activist, and the author of 'Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia' (Pluto Press). Her poetry performances based on her book 'Postcolonial Banter' have millions of views online and she was the National Roundhouse Poetry Slam runner-up in 2017. Suhaiymah has written for the Guardian and gal-dem and her work has featured across radio and TV stations. She has been commissioned to write plays by theatres including the Royal Court.

Rizwaan Sabir is a Lecturer in Criminology at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK and the author of 'The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State'. His research, which is focused on examining British counterterrorism, was motivated by his wrongful arrest and detention for suspected terrorism when he was found in possession of the Al-Qaeda Training Manual he downloaded for his postgraduate research. In addition to briefing policymakers such as the Shadow Home Secretary, the United Nations, civil society and community groups as well as lawyers, he offers analysis and commentary in the broadcast and written media including BBC News, Sky News, and Al-Jazeera.

Kevin Blowe was a founding member of the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) in 2009 and has been a staff member since 2014, becoming Campaigns Coordinator in 2021. Netpol’s work highlights aggressive police tactics, intrusive police surveillance and the government’s expansion of public order powers (most recently the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill). Before working for Netpol, Kevin worked in a community centre and spent 25 years as a campaigner with the Newham Monitoring Project in east London".

Chair Micha Frazer-Carroll is a London-based writer covering arts, culture, race, disability and politics. She is interested in work that revolves around the theme of liberation. Micha writes the 'State of the Arts' column for the Independent, and has written and edited for the Guardian, gal-dem, and HuffPost. She is currently working on a book on mental health for Pluto Press.