Loss of Privacy

Here’s an interesting video demonstrating how this one particular model of breathalyzer can have the results manipulated.

Police are investigating the beating of a man stopped for speeding. The police say he was drunk and the original officer called for backup. Though the charges have been dropped, the question of police brutality remains.

Interception of Communications Commissioner, Paul Kennedy, has compiled figures for the United Kingdom in which he states that more than 500,000 requests were made last year to spy on individuals via private email and telephone records.

Each request allows public bodies to access data – which includes telephone records, email and text message traffic – but not the actual content of conversations or messages.

“It doesn’t allow you to see the content of the message or conversation. It’s about the who, where and when – the time element essentially in directed surveillance,” a Home Office spokesman said.

The vast majority of requests to snoop on people’s records were made by the police and security services.

But the report found that some were granted to council officials investigating trivial offences like dog fouling, fuelling concern that the act is being misused.

While the report is new, the stories in them aren’t.  It has been discussed many times over the past year that UK officials are abusing the system, yet little has been done.  Unfortunately, too many people believe that individual privacy needs to be sacrificed for the illusion of security.  The government is supposed to work for us, but we continually allow them to walk all over us and do as they please as they set in motion more and more controls to keep us in our place.

If you want to sit in a park in Montreal, be careful of your other actions or the police might make up an excuse to issue you a citation.  The park’s ledges are designed to be sat on, but that doesn’t mean you still won’t end up with a ticket.

So why weren’t any of the other people who were soaking up the spring sun slapped with a $628? According to the Gazette, Jones appears to have been targeted because, while he was sitting in the park, he snapped some photos of several police officers confronting a group of people who had been drinking alcohol. When the officers noticed that he had been taking photos, they asked him for his camera. When he refused, they told him that it was not allowed to sit on the park ledge. Jones didn’t move, so the police officers demanded to see his identification and then issued the ticket.

Here we see the police, this time in Canada, not happy with an individual taking their photos, so they decide to harass him.  After reading the comments in the article, it seems that this sort of behavior from the police isn’t uncommon either.

In a massive act of deception, the public was mislead by an overly zealous prosecutor in his attempt to capture pedophiles.  While pedophiles were caught, most of the men in question were instead victims of identity theft.

Thirty-five of the accused committed suicide. It’s not easy to think of many things that are worse than being convicted of a paedophile offence when you are innocent of that ghastly crime. Once you are stamped as a paedophile and placed on the Sex Offenders Register, you will probably lose your family, for your wife will divorce you, if only to ensure she can keep custody of the children whom you will now be forbidden to care for. You will lose your friends and you will lose your job.

That’s exactly what happened to dozens of men who either pled guilty or were convicted as a result of Operation Ore. The sole evidence against them was that their credit card details and computer passwords were found on the list of subscribers to websites with such repulsive names as “child rape”.

The most disgusting, and inexcusable, part of this entire mess is that their computers were checked and found free of child porn.  Their alibis checked out.  Yet, judges and juries convicted these men solely on the basis of the electronic credit card details.

But the electronic data wasn’t irrefutable. One simple possibility appears not to have occurred to the police or any of the lawyers assigned to the accused: that they had been the victims of identity theft. Someone had got hold of their credit card details and identified the perfect way to rack up charges: create a subscription service child-porn web site (it need not actually have any child porn on it, just a suitably disgusting name), then charge a subscription to the stolen card.

It took a computer expert named Jim Bates to notice that on the full electronic log, the same credit card frequently subscribes to the same child porn site several times on the same day – and yet the “subscriber” never actually visits the site. Moreover, Mr Bates noticed that the same credit card number was being used to subscribe to child porn sites at the same time on three different continents.

Great.  So a computer expert finds that there are many discrepancies and many men aren’t guilty of what they are accused of.  Does this information come to light so these men might try to repair their lives after being accused of being pedophiles?  Nope.

Mr Bates’s discovery that the electronic data was riddled with fraud did not find favour with the police. His reward was to be smeared as a paedophile himself: the cops searched his house and accused him of – you’ve guessed it – “conspiracy to obtain indecent images of children”. Employed as an expert witness, he had, in the course of his work, examined computers with paedophile material. The police search was ruled illegal and last week he received back the material that they had confiscated.

Remember when you were a child and told that if you do the right thing you will be rewarded?  Well, here’s your reward.

Chris Saltrese, a Merseyside solicitor, believes he can demonstrate that scores of the men caught by Operation Ore are not paedophiles, but victims of identity theft. If his arguments convince the Appeal Court – with whom he has just lodged a specimen case – the police may be forced to apologise for their role in causing this country’s most colossal example of injustice. It will be too late for most of the innocent men they convicted. Their lives are in pieces. And they will never be able to put them back together.

Unfortunately, these men will never be able to recover their lives.  As the article stated, 35 men have committed suicide.  35 men.  Let that sink in for a moment.  How many of those 35 men had wives and children?  At a minimum that’s 35 families torn apart and ruined, with the actual number of people likely in the hundreds.  This is all a result of the prosecution wanting convictions instead of actually conducting a proper investigation.

Defrauding the court is a serious offense and anyone involved in this should face prosecution themselves.

How many of you still think Pete Townshend is a pedophile?