Louis Brandeis J warned you about eavesdropping ... Undercover work and the risk of paternity suits ... Queensland's VLAD law clearly aimed at criminal clubs such as the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches ... Well-educated Brit trooper shoots Taliban prisoner ... Procrustes opines
It's a mad world, my masters, as if you didn't know.
Edmund Snowden is holed up indefinitely in Moscow for having revealed how the NSA, GCHQ and the Five Eyes Group pick up all our electronic communications and store them for later analysis.
At the same time Rupert Murdoch's senior henchpersons are put on trial in London for having hacked, or authorised the hacking of private telephone accounts.
Am I missing something?
The British and major White Settler Governments hoover-up all our electronic communications, telephone or otherwise, and scream like stuck pigs when the the details are made public, but agents of the media are prosecuted for doing the same thing on a smaller scale.
I'm not defending the Murdochistas, merely concerned as to the hypocrisy involved.
Brandeis (not Brandis)It is 85 years since Louis Brandeis J said, dissenting in Olmstead, in terms later adopted by the whole US Supreme Court, referring to a warrantless wiretap:
"The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Ways may someday be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts and emotions ...
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding ...
In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
To declare that, in the administration of the criminal law, the end justifies the means - to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal - would bring terrible retribution."
Thanks to our reliance on email and similar communication, we seem to have jumped in a single bound into the circumstances that bothered Brandeis.
Never mind the creepy secret drawer trawler.
Our governments now have access to almost every electronic communication and they have, as access has increased, dropped the pretence that they will use warrants to read and listen to us.
As if you don't have enough trouble keeping yourself to yourself, if you operate in a fringe group, you never know which of your colleagues are in fact undercover police.
* * *
Undercover - plenty of fantasies
Reading Rob Evans and Paul Lewis' Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police allowed your correspondent to relive boyhood fantasies - Kipling's Kim and playing a double life.
The British undercover police appear to have lived out a few more fantasies of their own, as the authors explain that the way into protest cells was by taking-up with one of the women members.
The relationship then spread the sensation of trust to the other cell members.
It seems that most of the police involved had families of their own, but built a legend prior to insertion in the field that held them out as single men (there was one reported female officer), and in a position to be involved with women in a target group.
More than one fathered a child in the course of long distance undercover work. And if the new partner was causing trouble, in the words of Bob Lambert, the most celebrated of the undercover officers, and father of one of the by-blows:
"Shag somebody else ... It's amazing how women don't like you going to bed with someone else".
I'm always anxious for these tips from experienced field operatives.
But, the book has lessons for police forces in this country. Many of the undercover officers came to identify with the groups they had infiltrated, and expressed solidarity with the groups that they were meant to be spying on, particularly after being beaten-up by police at protest rallies.
The process of undercover policing began in the 1970s as an aspect of State protection, but the inability to make the undercover operations genuinely accountable is the point at which this aspect of policing becomes parallel to the electronic and warrantless snooping conducted by our many and acronymed security agencies.
The spies start out in defence of the State, but inevitably accountability procedures become less and less coherent, and when pressed the spies merely end-up defending themselves.
Curiously, the courts provide one realistic tool for bringing individual State operatives into check: a number of British women are suing the Metropolitan Police Commissioner for the havoc caused to their lives by the undercover cops.
I can't see breach of promise actions succeeding, but paternity suits could be interesting.
No wonder electronic espionage is now so popular: you don't have to worry about your operatives going completely native and starting families.
* * *
VLAD - catching criminal organisations
Meanwhile, in Queensland the parliamentary sledgehammer lurches on with the Vicious Lawless Association Disestablishment Act 2013, aimed at OMGCs (Oh My God Clubs).
A government spokesmouth has explained that the leading clubs in this pernicious group, the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, require to be exposed and curbed.
The spokesmouth asserted that "these were the largest groups of organised and interacting criminals in Australian history".
The extent of the vicious depredations of OMGC members on children in Queensland and Australia, involving communications between club officers about victims and their availability, was generally now recognised.
The proposed legislation would allow for police to force entry into OMGC clubhouses, and for penalising the wearing of OMGC colours (and the colours are pretty overwhelming).
* * *
Spreading the word about the mortal coil ...
Most of you have to keep up with trends in tertiary education to the extent that your old alma maters always track you down with material about how well they're travelling, while leaving you in no doubt as to their need for your financial assistance.
The big trend is towards mass tertiary education: everyone should have a degree.
The results of this process, already underway in Britain for some time, may be seen in the recording heard by a British Court Martial dealing with the alleged murder of a Taliban prisoner by a group of Royal Marines.
The Marine firing the fatal shot told the victim that he could ...
"shuffle off this mortal coil, you c***."
Terminated with extreme, but well educated prejudice.