Scratchpad for : Helen
Some interesting links/articles:
Cory Doctorow: transparency is worthless without justice
Simply Understand - a democratic translation service providing plain English versions of official documents, policy and consultations.
Why are the police in a state? - Spiked, Tuesday 21 April 2009
How the government uses dirty data to legislate morality - The Register, 10th April 2009
UK: Police State and UK: Police State Part 2 - Quick and Dirty Hacks, Jan/April 2009
"The current preemptive stop and search laws and other points of the terrorism act allow the police to do this to anyone at anytime, which is basically the same as walking up to someone, punching them in the face then saying “Oh it looked like you may have hit me”… So this boils down to the state becoming the aggressor, the victim isn’t a victim because the state defines them as guilty until they can prove their innocence over the vast evidence the state can accumulate to find you guilty of something, and everyone is guilty of something if they look deep enough. Right?"
Multi-issue Politics by George Monbiot, February 21, 1997. Direct-action movements facilitated by the Internet are not a new phenomenon.
Things to read/refer back to later:
Torture - does it actually work?
