[65115] in Cypherpunks
Re: TWA 800 - Serious thread.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Declan McCullagh)
Tue Sep 10 07:37:08 1996
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 04:14:46 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@eff.org>
To: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Cc: "Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM" <dlv@bwalk.dm.com>, cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <32349A90.51BD@gte.net>
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 //
