Last night I started reading "Main Justice," by Pulitzer-winner Jim McGee and Brian Duffy, about the DoJ's recent history of organized crime/drug war fighting and wiretapping. The book describes how Federal agencies have been granted more leeway in terms of entrapment thanks mostly to a conservative Supreme Court. Scary stuff. -Declan On Mon, 9 Sep 1996, Dale Thorn wrote:
Per the tendency of federal agencies to let it be publicly known that they lie openly to trap suspects (and apparently this technique has been OK'd for local enforcement as well):
This is going to backfire on them (and us), and probably has already. If govt. protects its "sources and methods", however nefarious, to the extent that the public is never asked to assent to these methods (even though a few of us know about them anyway), then the public doesn't have to become overtly cynical about what's going on.
On the other hand, whether you think the people have this much right to know or not, when the public consciousness embraces the concept that the police openly and regularly lie (and that it's a "good thing" they do), the result will be greater public cynicism, distrust, paranoia, hatred, and anarchy (the bad kind).
// declan@eff.org // I do not represent the EFF // declan@well.com //