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                Date: 1999-12-08
                 
                 
                UK-Dienste überwachen UK-Journalisten
                
                 
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      Nachdrücklich zur Lektüre empfohlen wird diese finstere  
Geschichte über den Umgang britischer Dienste mit  
investigativen Journalisten, die unliebsame Bücher schreiben.  
Sie stammt aus der N.Y. Times und zeigt was für eine Art  
von Sozialdemokratern dort an der Regierung ist. 
 
post/scrypt: Wir ersuchen um Nachsicht für ein paar E-Mail- 
Turbulenzen der letzten Tage: Standleitung und  
Providerwechsel waren angesagt, im quintessenziellen  
Land/büro.  
 
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relayed by Harald W nobody@quintessenz 
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In a book on a long-running civil conflict, the author briefly  
describes how his government uses surveillance systems to  
trace suspected enemies of the state. He is arrested,  
charged with a serious crime, his house ransacked and  
papers seized.  
.. 
 It is an astonishing story, and it discloses a dirty little  
secret: The Blair government has authoritarian instincts.  
 
The author is Tony Geraghty, a respected journalist who was  
the star defense correspondent of The Sunday Times of  
London in its glory days and has since written half a dozen  
books. This one is "The Irish War," about the centuries of  
conflict in and about Ireland.  
 
A year ago this month, six Ministry of Defense police officers  
appeared at Mr. Geraghty's home on the Welsh border,  
searched it, seized a mass of his papers and arrested him.  
He is charged with violating the Official Secrets Act by  
publishing material given him without authority by an official.  
The maximum penalty is two years in prison.  
 
What the Blair government apparently objects to is five or six  
pages in a long, serious book. Those pages say that the  
British government has computer systems that work with  
cameras and microphones to keep track of suspected I.R.A.  
terrorists.  
.. 
Ministry of Defense representatives visited HarperCollins, a  
publishing firm owned by Rupert Murdoch. It had planned a  
paperback edition of "The Irish War" but postponed  
publication indefinitely after the visit.  
 
"It is a surrealistic experience," Mr. Geraghty said when I  
telephoned him, "to find that Cromwell's style of government  
has returned to England -- a determination to quash anything  
that looks like dissidence.  
 
"The system in Northern Ireland is to penetrate your target's  
entire life. That's fine if you're stopping bombers. But the  
surveillance machine, for want of employment, is now  
increasingly being turned on Britons at home. The British  
population is now the most intensely surveilled in the world.  
The terrorist's loss of privacy is progressing to the ordinary  
citizen's."  
... 
When the Official Secrets Act was revised in 1989, the Labor  
Party and Tony Blair, then in opposition, proposed an  
amendment to include such a public-interest element. It was  
defeated. Now Prime Minister Blair evidences little sympathy  
for what Americans would call First Amendment rights -- or  
other civil liberties.  
 
In a speech not long ago Mr. Blair said he was sick of  
"libertarian nonsense masquerading as freedom." His home  
secretary, Jack Straw, ridiculed civil liberties lawyers as  
people "who get into their BMW's and drive off to posh  
suburbs." 
 
Full Text 
http://cryptome.org/tony3.htm
                   
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edited by  
published on: 1999-12-08 
comments to office@quintessenz.at
                   
                  
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