Slashdot Mirror
UK Authorities Accused of Inciting Illegal Protest
jarran writes "Questions are being asked about the tactics being employed by UK authorities to monitor and control protest groups. Schnews reports on evidence that government IP addresses are posting messages to sites like indymedia, attempting to provoke activists into taking illegal direct action. Evidence has emerged recently that the police consider sex to be a legitimate tool for extracting information from targets, and senior police have been accused of lying to parliament about the deployment of undercover agents at protests."
War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength!
The irksome part about the police using agents provocateur is that the police are always complaining that they have insufficient funds to police the streets. If the police can spare a man to infiltrate a bunch of hippies for a number of years, how many undercover police are there in all the more disruptive groups? The figure of £250,000 a year was mentioned as the cost of running one agent, which is infuriating to anyone who has been told that the police have insufficient resources to visit their house when it has been burgled.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Technically, that may be true, but the police (and, for that matter, most people employed in the public sector) in the UK have developed a remarkable way of avoiding criminal liability for these things.
It works something like this: If one person does something illegal, that will be prosecuted within the law. OK?
If a whole bunch of people are involved in something illegal as part of their job, and those people are employed in the public sector, that is never a crime. It is - at most - a "concern" which may result in an investigation, a report, and maybe even a full-blown inquiry. At no point will any individual (or, for that matter, group of individuals) be singled out for punishment. The most they can expect is some harsh criticism in the resulting report, but that criticism will in no way harm their career.
How do you deal with that when your bosses at the top level ship you to somewhere like Afghanistan or Iraq where there's virtually no visible difference between soldiers and civilians?