Let’s be variety and assume that the police officer caught trying to persuade an activist to spy on Cambridge University college students who may possibly be moved to protest, wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box. For this is indeed the things of comedy. A officer sneakily trying to recruit a spy and not realising that all the even though he was currently being spied on himself. Once the embarrassment subsides, the officer could at least console himself with the understanding that the younger man he had singled out did indeed have the useful attributes for the occupation. Only the spirit was unwilling.
But this is also the things of nightmares. Put oneself in the place of that activist, cannily lured into getting into the intimidating precincts of a police station – alien territory for him but the seat of power for the officer. Would you have the strength of will or presence of thoughts to resist that pressure, by no means thoughts the gumption to return wearing a camera? Citizens in a free society have a duty to act responsibly and to aid with the servicing of law and order, but this police operation seems to be an outright abuse of energy. A single figure in a place of state-backed authority, surrounded by the trappings of that power. One particular figure drawn into a position of vulnerability.
The specifics of the Cambridge case will shock, but there is a now acquainted narrative of how the secret snoopy state seeks to monitor the respectable activity of these who may request concerns of it. This seems to be exercise undertaken with minor or no public consent or oversight. How much of this is going on? What are the tips? Are they adhered to by forces up and down the nation? Is there central management? Who controls the information and how lengthy is it stored? No doubt the Association of Chief Police Officers has guidelines but what do you know of the legislative framework? Who keeps the practice truthful and assures that the objective is the servicing of law and purchase rather than the policing of irksome ideology? This week we realized of Green party London Assembly member Jenny Jones being monitored by Scotland Yard for attending legitimate left-leaning protest events. Are other individuals so targeted? We do not know. We should.
But this is also one more example of the attempt by those in energy to enlist citizens as agents of the state. In universities up and down the nation there has been a significant work to cultivate assets capable of monitoring younger Muslim college students considered at risk of radicalisation. The government’s Avoid programme, and its deradicalisation arm Channel, has drawn on the university establishments themselves: lecturers and bureaucrats as surveillance assets. The outcome is predictable. Yesterday Ratna Lachman, director of the human rights group Just West Yorkshire, informed a Society for Educational Research seminar of fears that some universities have grow to be “Islamophobic spaces” for people who now regard them as “extensions of the security arm of the state”.
The government orders landlords to report illegal immigrants house owners as surveillance assets. GPs to check the legal status of individuals they may treat health care employees as surveillance assets. As the state shrinks in size, as the prime minister says it will, it requirements an army of narks to engage in surveillance and policing in a different sphere. Possibly which is portion of his huge society.
Through the efforts of Edward Snowden, we now know the extent to which technological innovation can be and is being utilized to monitor what we do. But even though we grapple with the new, let’s not neglect the scope and attain of traditional surveillance or fail to remember that policing authorities – in noble cause – will usually stray to the edge of the permissible. It starts with a man getting groomed to spy on his mates at university, but the place does it end?
How the British state now snoops on those who ask questions of it | Hugh Muir
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