The Secret Policeman’s balls-up

It was probably in my sixth post on this blog, way back in January- about Mark Stone, the undercover policeman “embedded” with a group of climate change protesters – that I wrote:

It would be interesting to discover whether the CPS were aware of the undercover officer. Don’t know if we’ll ever hear …

Well DAMN. There I was with Newsnight tuned in, and this is busting wide open. Looks like the Guardian will be breaking the story again. The suggestion appears to be that the Crown Prosecution Service – or some people within it – were entirely aware of Mr. Stone’s role.

And that some of the protesters were convicted, because the evidence that would have acquitted them wasn’t passed to their lawyers. You may recall that the prosecution pulled out of those trials scheduled for after the revelations.

By extension, one could suppose that there might have been a little bit of a cover-up (when the CPS investigated itself).

If the allegations can be substantiated, then we should see some lawyers going to jail for this.

Unless, of course, it turns out that this is just more bureaucratic nonsense imposed on us by the unelected judiciary / Europe ? (delete as preferred)

[Edit 9/6/2011] The Guardian reports that there’s to be an independent enquiry. I’m going to keep my eye on this one...

Even more privacy stuff …

It’s over a month since I first wrote about superinjuctions, and of course everything’s got much hotter since then.

Much of the printed press – and the BBC – seem to be toeing the line at the moment, and the most insightful article (i.e. – the one which most reflects my sensibilities 😉 ) I’ve found was on the Wired site. One link follows through to Roy Greenslade’s blog – also informative.

These provide the answer to the question – Who Makes the Law? Now, to remind you, the options previously available were:

1. Parliament – a popular answer with MPs, although they seem to be reluctant to actually do anything about it.
2. The Courts – who don’t really want to be involved – especially if it means their majesty is mocked by a bunch of oiks on Twitter
3. Europe – it’s actually nothing to do with the European Union, but it still winds up Nigel Farage and the Daily Mail, so lets leave it in 😀

Now we find out that the answer is … the Press Complaints Commission. Here’s the quote from Dave, as reported in the Wired article:

“there’s still more to be done to recognise that actually the Press Complaints Commission has come on a lot in recent years”

Nobody else seems to have noticed. The adjective routinely applied to the PCC is “toothless” (check Google if you don’t believe me). It has consistently failed to provide any protection for those who want to keep their private lives private. And despite the protestations from the reptiles of Her Majesty’s Press that they take complaints “very seriously” (see Fraser Wood being viewed with incredulity after about 4 minutes of this BBC Newsnight clip) , it’s hard to think of a situation where real sanctions have been applied. There may be a 3-line apology on page 94, but that’s yer lot, mate.

Wired looks on this as a “coded warning” to the PCC. I hope so, ‘cos most of us would say “what has he been smoking ?”

Or else we might suspect that – after thinking a bit harder about it – the MPs don’t want to regulate their mates in the press, but they can see that the judges will keep passing them the hot potato …

[Edit]

I seem to recall from this interview with Dave that he said something on the lines of … the right to a private life expressed in the European Convention was intended to protect us from the state, not the press. Total b*ll*cks of course.

[Edit #2]

Almost forgot. My solution (to the Twitter outing) would have been for the courts to order The Sun’s articles to be made available in the public domain – and to their competitors – 24 hours before The Sun could publish them. This goes against my instincts on copyright, but – as with heroin – remove the profit and remove the problem…

Protest progress

A couple of months ago, I pondered whether the UK would take on board the right to protest being applauded in North Africa.

I was mildly surprised – and actually very pleased – by the attitude of the Metropolitan Police over the TUC march. That my impression was endorsed by Liberty, who were invited to observe, shows that things seem to be moving in the right direction.

Maybe the Ian Tomlinson inquest is making the police look a bit harder in the mirror. It’s really important that they understand that they are the servants of the law – not the executive. And that they are their to protect our rights, not to intimidate us into compliance.

the undercover policeman …

The BBC has reported (on 11th January) the collapse of the prosecution of  a number of green activists, after an undercover policeman (Mark Kennedy aka Mark Stone) agreed to testify for the defence.

Most of the reporting was actually about whether the detective had “gone native”. Some – such as Mark Easton’s blog – questioned the role of police officers acting as agents provocateur. I’ve got some different thoughts …

It would be interesting to discover whether the CPS were aware of the undercover officer. Don’t know if we’ll ever hear …

But a cynic might suspect something more banal than the government conspiracy that’s doubtless going to be touted.

The same cynic could, perhaps, venture that a senior policeperson somewhere had “green-lighted” the spend – quoted as “hundreds of thousands of pounds”. And they’d have had to explain why that hadn’t resulted in any arrests. So arrests had to be made, even though there hadn’t necessarily been any crime committed. Add to that the kudos that would result from cracking a cell of dangerous anarchists, and crafting shaky prosecutions wold look like a real win-win for the career path ….

Even though that resulted in the threat of prosecution and possible imprisonment being held over so many citizens for over 18 months.

Just to make it clear -I’m not trying to pillory any individual here. But it highlights the potential for dysfunctional outcomes when the culture and/or metrics of an organisation don’t match the purpose. So – in this case – the more the police “invest” in a case, the greater the “return” (in terms of the number and severity of convictions) that is expected.

Of course, I’m sure that the IPCC will be examining those motivations when they undertake the review that Nottinghamshire police have asked for.

On the face of it, I feel Mr. Kennedy should be commended for his integrity.

(And – as an aside – it would also, perhaps, be interesting to discover the role of undercover police in the recent student protests).

Sorry I didn’t get to this a bit more quickly