UK Authorities Accused of Inciting Illegal Protest 371
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."
the word you're looking for is (Score:5, Informative)
Agent provocateur [wikipedia.org]
Re:It should make stuff legal... (Score:5, Informative)
It's been done (and exposed) in Canada recently (Score:5, Informative)
See video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow [youtube.com]
Re:It should make stuff legal... (Score:5, Informative)
If the police tell you to do something, it should be legal for you because the police officer is an authority figure relative to you. That doesn't mean that the officer wouldn't go to jail for giving the order.
In a similar fashion, if a police captain orders an officer to kill someone illegally, then the captain should go to jail, not the officer (unless the officer should have had reason to reject the order).
My country had a mandatory military service, so I've been a soldier for some time. As soldiers, we were legally obliged to deny direct orders if they were unlawful. So even if we were ordered by military authority, we'd go in jail for shooting some random civilian (the one who gave the order would probably be jailed, too). And that is a GOOD thing, because it requires the soldiers to keep thinking about their own actions. And it's the same for civilians. If you do something illegal, you are responsible for that action. If somebody else told you to do so, he may be held responsible too, but that does not change the fact that you are responsible for your own actions.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait, Sex with Activists? (Score:4, Informative)
And as to trying to provoke illegal behaviour, everybody knows (or should know) that the Met (London Metropolitan Police Force) do this. A reporter from the Guardian a few years back actually caught a policeman undercover showing some protestors how to unhook the police barriers and trying to get others to charge the police. And a Member of Parliament last year states that he saw two undercover police officers trying to lead people into throwing bottles at the police link [guardian.co.uk]. These are just the ones that are in the mainstream news. You have to ask yourself how it is that in a protest of hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes over a million, where over the course of an entire day there are perhaps three or four notable incidents of vandalism, it is that a few press photographers are always in the right place and time to grab the pictures of a few balaclaved men kicking in the windows of a McDonalds or somesuch. The intelligence services in the UK even infiltrated the Green Party. Note to Americans, the Green Parties in Europe are not the equivalent of those in the US. The UK Greens have an MP elected and do reasonably well at the council level, and in Germany and others, they're respectable groups. But in the UK, legitimate parties are fair game for undercover infiltration / subversion.
If you want to see some despicable behaviour, witness the police dragging a disabled man out of his wheel chair at a recent protest. Really - it's worth watching the BBC interview [youtube.com] with the victim. Note the police claim that he was rolling toward them threateningly. The guy can't even move his wheels on his own.
But that people in the UK have been paid to lie their way into sex with unsuspecting people, usually pretty young people at that, seems there's nothing the UK authorities wont sink to.