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rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 20323 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
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Quake42 Warrior Princess
Great Old One Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Total posts: 5212 Location: Over Silbury Hill, through the Solar field Gender: Unknown |
 Posted: 26-06-2013 09:52 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Britain's intelligence agencies will emerge as the biggest winners from the Government’s review of public spending, The Telegraph can disclose.
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Haven't got a problem with giving intelligence agencies money to fight terror - and there is a real threat as the numerous foiled plots have shown. However those agencies should be focusing on the people involved with and on the fringes of violent extremism; most of whom are already known to them. No reason to be gathering everyone else's communications data, |
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| Ronson8 Things can only get better.
Great Old One Joined: 31 Jul 2001 Total posts: 5970 Location: MK Gender: Male |
| Posted: 26-06-2013 10:37 Post subject: |
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| But it's important for them to know how many cat lovers there are in the country. |
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| jimv1 Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 2645 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 26-06-2013 18:33 Post subject: |
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What a difference a few years can make...
Then. 'The government will be monitoring all your communications and the police will secretly infiltrate legitimate pressure groups and actually be the instigators behind radical actions'
'That's just a crazy conspiracy theory. You're paranoid'.
Now. 'The government are monitoring all your communications and the police have secretly infiltrated pressure groups, impregnated the women and instigated some of the more radical acts.'
'Old news mate. Personally, it doesn't worry me that much'.
_____________________________________________________________
Perhaps we deserve everything that's coming at us. |
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| OneWingedBird Great Old One Joined: 19 Nov 2012 Total posts: 418 Location: Attice of blinkey lights Age: 44 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 26-06-2013 19:45 Post subject: |
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| And as always, them as what don't deserve it will get it too. |
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| Quake42 Warrior Princess
Great Old One Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Total posts: 5212 Location: Over Silbury Hill, through the Solar field Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 26-06-2013 23:20 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | What a difference a few years can make...
Then. 'The government will be monitoring all your communications and the police will secretly infiltrate legitimate pressure groups and actually be the instigators behind radical actions'
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In fairness the infiltration of radical groups doesn't seem to be remotely new - the cases coming to light now date back 20 or 30 years and I've no doubt much earlier.
I'm going to put my head over the parapet and say that undercover work can be necessary and valuable. I don't have any issue with the police infiltrating gangs, jihadist groups or indeed the violent fringe of the animal rights movement, which one of the recent batch had been doing. What is baffling and shocking is the way in which some of the undercover cops fathered children and then vanished, with no way for the mothers to obtain even child support for them. |
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| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 989 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 57 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 27-06-2013 10:18 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | In fairness the infiltration of radical groups doesn't seem to be remotely new - the cases coming to light now date back 20 or 30 years and I've no doubt much earlier. |
Acting as 'agent provocateur' ?sp - surely is entrapment and illegal, however? As well as potentially conjuring up the sort of scenario well described in Tom Sharpe's 'Indecent Exposure'.
Beware of exploding ostriches! |
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| Quake42 Warrior Princess
Great Old One Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Total posts: 5212 Location: Over Silbury Hill, through the Solar field Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 27-06-2013 11:14 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Acting as 'agent provocateur' ?sp - surely is entrapment and illegal, however? |
Oh certainly, although again I don't think there's anything especially new about that phenomenon. |
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| RhinoHorn Grey Joined: 13 May 2013 Total posts: 15 Gender: Unknown |
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| Zoffre Joined: 23 Nov 2002 Total posts: 604 |
| Posted: 27-06-2013 18:07 Post subject: |
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One interesting point from Liberal Conspiracy:
| Quote: | What if the police infiltrated left groups not for the state but for corporations?
by Jonathan Kent
So the leaflet at the centre of the McDonalds libel trial was co-written by Bob Lambert, an undercover police officer who later apologised to the “law abiding members of London Greenpeace,” which he described as a peaceful campaigning group.
Likewise Mark Kennedy/Stone, who couldn’t fathom what threat the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station protesters he’d infiltrated posed. The judge trying one group of Ratcliffe protesters praised their public spiritedness. Doesn’t anyone else think it odd that the state spends millions of pounds infiltrating annoying, but mostly harmless, groups of hippies?
It makes no sense, until you stop to consider what happens to the surveillance data.
Simon Jenkins, in The Guardian, noted that Stone/Kennedy was working for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit whose chain of command lead to the Association of Chief Police Officers.
But ACPO isn’t a statutory body. It’s a private company and, according to Jenkins, it sold data to other private companies. It’s when you start to think about surveillance as a business that infiltrating peaceful, democratic green / leftist / anti-capitalist groups starts to make sense. There’s a market for surveillance data and demand drives supply.
Ask yourself this: who might buy data about far-right groups or militant ‘Islamists’ who represent a threat to public safety and the state? The answer, surely, is the state, and the state has tight budgets and a security apparatus of its own.
But who would buy information about greens, democratic leftists and assorted anti-capitalists? Big business has limited security apparatus of its own, deep pockets and, if protesters threaten the bottom line, the corporation’s motive-of-motives; money.
So the question is not ‘why spend so much infiltrating peaceful protest groups?’ but ‘just how far have our security priorities been distorted by the market for information?’ The more it becomes about money the less it becomes about national security and the more about protecting financial interests.
Now think about all this in the context of the Snowden revelations about PRISM and GCHQ.
Once we stood up for our liberties. Indeed millions donned uniforms and fought, were wounded or were killed in their defence. Now all it takes is one or two savage attacks on our streets and we’re prepared to throw away everything our forebears gave their lives for.
But we live in a different world where power is inexorably seeping away from our elected representatives who, however flawed they may be, are ultimately accountable to us. And power is flowing equally inexorably towards corporations – unaccountable, faceless and legally constituted to be amoral; uninterested in right and wrong only in serving their shareholders’ interests. PRISM benefits them.
What is at stake is not different ideas of right and wrong, right-wing morality versus left-wing morality, it’s whether we have a world in which morality plays any significant part at all.
Overwrought? Two weeks ago suggestions of an all-seeing, all-encompassing surveillance state across the Western democracies might have seemed equally so. But PRISM exists and so do real threats to the very fabric of society.
Our forebears were prepared to give their lives to stop this sort of thing. What are we prepared to give? |
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| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 989 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 57 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 28-06-2013 07:48 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | But we live in a different world where power is inexorably seeping away from our elected representatives who, however flawed they may be, are ultimately accountable to us. And power is flowing equally inexorably towards corporations – unaccountable, faceless and legally constituted to be amoral; uninterested in right and wrong only in serving their shareholders’ interests. PRISM benefits them.
What is at stake is not different ideas of right and wrong, right-wing morality versus left-wing morality, it’s whether we have a world in which morality plays any significant part at all. |
What they said ++
This is what faces us if our political system reaches the point where it is totally discredited. |
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| Quake42 Warrior Princess
Great Old One Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Total posts: 5212 Location: Over Silbury Hill, through the Solar field Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 28-06-2013 09:36 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | What if the police infiltrated left groups not for the state but for corporations?
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It's possible, but wouldn't it be easier and lower-risk for corporates particularly concerned about specific campaigns to hire private security people to infiltrate them<
| Quote: | Doesn’t anyone else think it odd that the state spends millions of pounds infiltrating annoying, but mostly harmless, groups of hippies?
It makes no sense, until you stop to consider what happens to the surveillance data.
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Well - the justification given for some of the cases which have recently come to light was that the real target was the ALF, and in order to penetrate that group and gain the confidence of the hardcore nutcases it was first necessary to be seen to be involved with the more mainstream cause. This sounds credible and I can also see why groups which are attempting to disrupt power supplies or civil aviation would attract the attention of the police and/or intelligence services.
What I find less easy to explain is the sheer length of time some of the officers were embedded in these groups and I do wonder if one reason was simply that they were having a great time and enjoying their posting. Let's face it, given the choice would you rather a dangerous and grim assignment infiltrating organised crime gangs, or Islamist/Irish Republican terrorism... or a few years drinking beer, smoking dope, sleeping with attractive women and generally having a party with some environmental activists? |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 28-06-2013 09:42 Post subject: |
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There's ALF, and then there's ALF...
Undercover cops don't go undercover on a whim. They're only obeying orders, from above. |
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| Quake42 Warrior Princess
Great Old One Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Total posts: 5212 Location: Over Silbury Hill, through the Solar field Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 28-06-2013 09:56 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Undercover cops don't go undercover on a whim. They're only obeying orders, from above. |
Indeed, but I could imagine the assignments being strung out for much longer than was originally intended because the officers concerned were actually having a pretty good time. I should imagine that once officers are embedded undercover they have a lot of autonomy. That sort of work doesn't lend itself to much of a command and control management structure.
A desire to extend the assignment and to make it look more useful than it actually is might also explain some of the "agent provocateur" stuff. |
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| RhinoHorn Grey Joined: 13 May 2013 Total posts: 15 Gender: Unknown |
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