Yesterday evening, I received a text from a friend asking if I knew the Fitwatch website had been suspended. I checked our email account and discovered it had been closed for a minimum of 12 months on the behest of the Metropolitan police for "attempting to pervert the course of justice" for a post giving advice to students worried about facing arrest following the Millbank protests last week.

Fitwatch was formed three years ago as a street-level response to intimidation and harassment from the forward intelligence teams (Fits), with tactics ranging from blocking cameras to printing numbers, names and photographs of known police officers on our blog, and offering advice to demonstrators about staying safe in protest situations.

Through our research, and criminal trials for blocking police cameras, Fitwatch has been instrumental in bringing much of the information about protester databases and the domestic extremist units into the public domain.

Our success in challenging the behaviour of Fits has obviously made us unpopular with the police, and there have been various attempts to intimidate us over the last three years.

However, the closing of our website is a new direction with worrying implications for bloggers everywhere. Fitwatch has been highly critical of policing strategies, and only a few hours before the site was taken down published a piece criticising the way the police have been seeking to capitalise on the protests to justify further repression and to avoid cuts in their budgets. This is a highly suspicious attempt at preventing dissent and it must be resisted.

Unfortunately for the police, this is already happening. The offending post has been spreading rapidly around the internet since last night, and the support we've received has been phenomenal. This is not the end of Fitwatch – we will carry on resisting intimidatory policing and fighting for the rights of protesters.