On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Scott Loveless <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2/13/09, Amita Guha <[email protected]> wrote: >> http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/13/brits-rally-to-save.html >> >> http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=839141 > > Reading between the lines a bit. They pitch it to the public as a > means to protect policemen from terrorists, and to prevent terrorists > from obtaining information related to ongoing investigations, or some > crap like that. > > In reality, it works kinda like this. The police arrest some jerk for > a minor infraction and said jerk gets lippy. So the police give him > the ol' wood shampoo. Someone with a cell phone snaps a few frames. > Police claim shampoo'd jerk could have been a terrorist. Maybe. They > think. Perhaps. Cell phone snapper is detained under section 76, > pictures deleted, police experience no repercussions for breaking the > law and the cell phone snapper does 10 years in a cage with Bubba. > > Am I missing something?
Bullshit. The legislators (with the full support of the police) want to put a chill on PJs. I think this is serious as hell. For democracy to work, the government must be transparent, meaning that the general public has a right to know what they're doing. Since the police are in effect the enforcement arm of the government, the public has a democratic right to know what the police are up to. This means the newspapers need to have an absolute right to let us know who the police are arresting, how they're arresting them, how the police behave at rallies, protests and riots. Let's say there's a protest in front of the Israeli consulate. The cops start wading through the crowd with batons flailing. Do ya think that some of the protesters might be of Middle Eastern heritage? Maybe even some Palestinians? Perhaps some even have ties to Hamas? Are you going to risk spending 10 years in jail to shoot brutality against that crowd? Are you not going to at least think twice before you shoot? Is your editor going to risk printing them? cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
