Civil liberties – Page 9

Karl Rove Not Quite Punk’d

Published on October 22, 2008

A protestor tries, not very hard, to handcuff Karl Rove as he speaks to a convention of mortgage brokers (boo, hiss) in San Francisco:

ABC:

There was major political theater involving President Bush’s former chief of staff Karl Rove. A protestor tried to arrest Rove for treason Tuesday morning while he was speaking at the Mortgage Bankers Association Convention, continuing in San Francisco.

There were three protests during a very lively back and forth between former senate majority leader George Mitchell and Karl Rove. Rove blamed the Democrats for everything wrong with the economy.

A protestor tried to smack handcuffs on Karl Rove, but Rove slapped back, and the woman was taken off stage.

Hmmm. Not sure I’d call that ‘major political theatre’: it was a bit lame, really. ‘Slapped back’? Rove looked like he was shooing a fly.

This lot could do with some lessons from Fathers for Justice. Some of them may be certifiable nutjobs, but by heck they’re good at this sort of thing.

Tits and Bums For Freedom

Published on October 6, 2008

Strange days indeed, when it takes a porn baron to keep an eye on Britons’ online liberty. Could Richard Desmond become the UK’s Larry Flynt, I wonder? He’s had a hand in politics before…

Back along I posted about the Interception Modernisation Programme and the paucity of the available information about it:

Speaking of IT clusterfscks…

Somebody tipped me off to the innocent sounding “Interception Modernisation Programme”, but what is this exactly? It’s mentioned in this “Security and Counter-Terrorism Science and Innovation Strategy” document (PDF) from the Home Office, which seems to be some sort of happy face p.r.-minded strategy overview to show how on the ball the government is in combatting terrorism through innovation and science . In this context, the “Interception Modernisation Programme” is only mentioned in an aside and it sounds like it could be anything:

Intercepting terrorist communications

Knowing the content of terrorist communications is vital to the UK’s ability to respond to terrorism. The cutting-edge interception technology required is therefore critical to building up our intelligence and to understanding the nature of the threat.

The Interception Modernisation Programme is a cross-Government programme which aims to maintain the UK’s world-class capability in obtaining and exploiting terrorist communications data. It is a key example of how Government is using innovative and ground-breaking technology to stay well ahead of the terrorists

Well, now I know, courtesy of the Daily Express, proprietor New Labour’s favourite pornographer, Mr Richard Desmond:

After the top-secret plans were leaked yesterday critics accused the Government of stalking the public. Michael Parker of anti-identity card group No2ID said: “It is a shocking intrusion into privacy. This is stalking. If an individual carried out this sort of snooping, it would be a crime.”

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said the proposal marked “a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals”. And after a series of embarrassing security blunders including the loss of child benefit records for every family in the country, he questioned Whitehall’s competence to keep such data. He said: “Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data and seeing how significant an increase in power this would be, we need to have a national debate and the Government would have to justify its need.”

ALL telephone calls, emails and text messages in Britain will be monitored under new Government snooping plans. A £12billion identity database at the GCHQ spy centre could even log every website visited by computer users nationwide.

Hundreds of bugging probes will be installed in the telephone system and computer networks to monitor communications traffic.

GCHQ has already been handed £1billion of taxpayers’ cash to begin developing the database.

After the top-secret plans were leaked yesterday critics accused the Government of stalking the public. Michael Parker of anti-identity card group No2ID said: “It is a shocking intrusion into privacy. This is stalking. If an individual carried out this sort of snooping, it would be a crime.”

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said the proposal marked “a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals”. And after a series of embarrassing security blunders including the loss of child benefit records for every family in the country, he questioned Whitehall’s competence to keep such data. He said: “Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data and seeing how significant an increase in power this would be, we need to have a national debate and the Government would have to justify its need.”

The plan for the biggest surveillance system in British history is being spearheaded by GCHQ director Sir David Pepper.

It is currently classified as top secret and is being developed under the title: Interception Modernisation Programme.

The aim is to set up a “live tap” on every electronic communication in the country. At present, security service MI5 carries out limited monitoring of email exchanges and internet use.

Ministers have been told that the latest computer technology lays the grounds of a massive expansion of monitoring.

The database is likely to be centred at GCHQ’s famous “doughnut”-shaped spy centre in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

Further details will be released when the Government’s legislative programme is announced in the Queen’s Speech in December.

The plan is even more ambitious than the Identity Cards scheme being gradually introduced by the Government at a cost of £5billion. While a final decision has yet to be taken, ministers are understood to have agreed to the move “in principle”.

No wonder the Express is worried, considering how much money Desmond’s business empire makes from soft porn and technology – and considering some of the very dodgy people he’s done business with too.

Sometimes private (very private) interests and public interest collide – so shouldn’t Desmond put some of his porn-derived cash behind the privacy campaigns, if he’s so concerned?

Oh, Sure

Published on September 3, 2008

Oh yeah, that must really be the explanation:

MUNICH (Reuters) – Young men who die suddenly after being arrested by the police may be victims of a new syndrome similar to one that kills some wild animals when they are captured, Spanish researchers said on Tuesday.

Manuel Martinez Selles of Madrid’s Hospital Gregorio Maranon reached the conclusion after investigating 60 cases of sudden unexplained deaths in Spain following police detention.

In one third of the cases, death occurred at the point of arrest, while in the remainder death was within 24 hours, Selles told the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.

All but one of the casualties were male and their average age was just 33 years, with no previous history of cardiovascular disease.

“Something unusual is going on,” Sells said.

More…

Who funded the research, the police union? And was it broken down by race and/or national origin?

UPDATE: Amnesty International’s report on Spanish human rights abuses.

Pour Encourager Les Autres

Published on August 31, 2008

“A crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit…”
Freda Adler

Glenn Greenwald witnesses the political police swing pre-emptively into action in Minneapolis/St. Paul ahead of the GOP Convention:

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as “Do you have Terminator ready?” as they lay on the floor in handcuffs.

It’s like Genoa all over again, bar the murder, blood and broken bones, and if there hadn’t been journalists and a camera there no doubt there’d’ve been those in the Twin Cities, too.

It’s not even a partisan issue; one can almost understand rabid partisanship taken to extremes, but this kind of suppression of dissent and political collusion with police is common to both parties. The only difference is in the degree of force used. As Greenwald concludes:

The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.

Well, I wouldn’t say the worst tactics, exactly. There are much worse than those – just ask the Argentinians or Chileans.

But still, this police/politician synergy is so strong that the wishes of the one are the policy of the other. There is way too much money to be made from modern paramilitary policing. There is a revolving door between policing, private security consulting and the trade in weapons and accoutrements. Take Blackwater for example….. there’s barely a police officer in the US who hasn’t attended it’s ~~mercenary training camp~~ police training centre. It’s the School of The Americas for cops.

Meanwhile in London, a senior police officer – no 3 on the force of the capital city – who is making a claim of race discrimination against the Met is so scared of death threats from his own colleagues he’s had to hire mercenaries himself. Who’s policing who?

In recent years it appears to have been been deliberate policy in Europe and in the US for police authorities to recruit right-wing meatheads who actively enjoy violence to do the politicians’ dirty work for them, and gladly.

Politicians and senior cops themselves needn’t get their hands dirty; when investigated it’s always a rogue cop what done it and in extremis there’s always medical or early retirement…

Paramilitary political police on both sides of the Atlantic need only a discreet nod from the pols (and sometimes not even that) to go in joyfully and with boots, taser and fists. They love that sort of thing: that’s why they’re police. For every saintly murdered copper, devoted village bobby or innocuous deputy sheriff there are ten barely-controlled thugs with plenty of hate and plenty of gusto.

Every now and then they get let off the leash and someone notices. This time is was Salon. Then it all goes back to normal and soon these incidents just become part of the wallpaper of normal life, like warrantless wiretapping, torture, routine tasering or prison rape.

For anyone to expect that police on any continent will do anything but suppress any person or movement that might put their industry or jobs in jeopardy is very naive indeed.

A Choice of Tyrannies

Published on August 12, 2008

You can have the blue one or the red one. Yellow is not an option.

I have to admit that I quite admired the Conservatives’ David Davis for his principled stand on the erosion of civil liberties; even if it was somewhat hypocritical, given his support for 28 day detention, at least he had the gumption to stand up, even if in the end the whole effort proved a damp squib. Davis tapped into an enormous wellspring of public unease and anger over the UK’s gradual transmogrification into a petty police state.

There is a demonic versatility to Blair’s laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way they are being used. “What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming,” he says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair’s Labour Party: “If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit – in some cases eradicate – habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up.”

The Tories, particularly the one-nation faction, had in Davis a prime opportunity to ride a wave of public support into power, if only they could have overcome their natural authoritarian flog ’em and jail ’em tendencies and their complicity with the prisons industry and the police. But of course they couldn’t and can’t and to think they ever would is fantasy. Tory policy is what it always is, in favour of the status quo, of increased police powers and of the protection of property before people.

This is made crystal clear in today’s announcement on police surveiilance from Dominic Grieve, Davis’ replacement as Shadow Foreign Secretary :

Police would be given greater powers to conduct surveillance operations on people suspected of crimes such as burglary and vehicle theft under plans the Conservative Party will announce today.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, will pledge to amend the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act so that police no longer need to secure authorisation to conduct surveillance on those suspected of non-terrorist offences.

The changes would mean that the police would automatically be able to:

· Use covert video or listening devices in premises or vehicles.

· Watch premises to identify or arrest suspects.

· Conduct visual surveillance of public locations.

· Patrol, in uniform or plain clothes.

· Use thermal imaging and X-ray technology.

· Conduct surveillance using visible CCTV cameras.

In his statement, Grieve will say it is time to amend the rules governing surveillance because they place a “disproportionate burden” on police trying to investigate non-terrorist crimes. A review by the Association of Chief Police Officers of the act, which is designed to ensure that the invasion into people’s privacy is in proportion to the crime, found that police often spend hours filling out forms for relatively minor surveillance operations. The review found that it takes an average of five hours to complete the forms for what is known as directed surveillance authorisation.

So just to get this straight: that nice Mr Cameron, so relaxed and liberal – hug a hoodie! – is proposing to allow the police to spy on anyone they like, whenever and however they like, on their own say-so, for any reason, no permission required. Even Blair didn’t try that.

Davis has clearly lost his internal campaign to make the Conservative party the party of civil liberties (at least for the purposes of winning elections) though there was never much doubt he would lose, despite so much popular support. The rump of the tory party is as pro-lawnorder and a firm fist as ever. Just read some of the comments on Conservative blogs, for example, to get the flavour of party opinion. If commenters had their way the police would be given the power to do anything they like to thwart those nasty crims and moslems – because of course those nice handsomne police officers would never use it against nice people like them. Nothing to hide nothing to fear, etc. etc. Curfews for chavs? Brilliant. Moslems to be electronically tagged? A little light torture? Ideal. More cameras, more tasers, more ASBOs, more jails – for ‘them’, not us.

Cameron knows this about his party and knows he must appease both them and the arms dealers, hedge funds and others with business interests in penal policy who support his party financially. It’s clear that to do so he plans to out-draconian one of the most draconian governments in British history.

If anyone ever expected anything else from the Tories, then they’re fools who should read some recent history. Google ‘Orgreave Colliery’ or ‘Poll Tax riot‘ or ‘Battle of The Beanfield‘ or ‘Criminal Justice Act 1994‘. and see the kind of people the Conservatives were and still are:

MI5 ran an agent to monitor the activities of Dave Nellist, the Labour MP and supporter of the far left Militant group in the 1980s. It asked the West Midlands police special branch to find an agent to infiltrate the Labour party in Coventry and cultivate Mr Nellist, then MP for the city’s south east constituency.

The police special branch also ran a spy in the inner circle of the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill. Given the close relationship between the special branch and MI5, there is no doubt the spy’s information was passed to MI5.

The agent, codenamed Silver Fox, provided valuable information about the tactics of the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers and helped to break the 1984-85 miners’ strike, according to former special branch officers.

The disclosures are made in the second programme in BBC2’s True Spies series, to be broadcast on Sunday. It also includes an interview with David Hart, a millionaire who was Margaret Thatcher’s unofficial adviser. He says he employed former SAS soldiers to protect the families of working miners during the strike.

You’d think Labour would remember those days. You’d think they’d remember when Labour party members and trade unionists were routinely spied upon, followed, falsely accused and even blacklisted from certain professions and jobs. From Labour’s own Employment Relations Bill in 1999:

The blacklisting of trade union activists was a major issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The activities of the Economic League came in for a good deal of criticism. The League provided member companies with a system for checking potential recruits “to see whether they are known to the League as active members or supporters of one of the revolutionary groups of the far Right or far Left”.It was alleged that the League maintained a card index of names obtained from sources such as press articles about demonstrations or industrial action. Many of these people would have been active trade
unionists.

But no, New Labour buried their memories with their principles. That’s what’s always enraged me most about New Labour’s wrong-headed and profoundly illiberal promulgation of so many badly drafted, illogical and tyrannical laws – that not one minister has ever realised that what they were doing was handing the weapons to the opposition to use against them.

The profound stupidity of this policy, if we can dignify such a collection of cowardly panic measures as coherent policy, proves their complete unfitness to govern, even leaving aside Iraq, PFI and all the rest. What party gives its political enemies the tools to repress it?

The voter is in an impossible position. Choose Cameron, you get greedy, unpleasant baby Thatchers armed with added technology and expanded police powers. Imagine Orgreave with tasers. Choose Brown or whoever succeeds him, get the same, allied to breathtakingly callous incompetence. Choose the Lib Dems, get – what exactly? No-one knows. What would Clegg do? Who is he? What does he stand for? Again, no one knows. You can go look it up but you’ll be no wiser. What earthly bloody use is Clegg or his party?

Oh well, when Cameron and the Tories implement the hated ID card scheme (and they will, once in power, they won’t be able to resist it and besides too much money’s already been spent) then we can find out Clegg’s political views from that.