Punishing whistle blowers

Britain’s home secretary, John Reid, is planning a new official secrets law to punish intelligence officers who blow the whistle on government policy by leaking secret information.

He wants longer jail sentences and the removal of a key legal defence of “necessity” for whistleblowers.

The crackdown is aimed at preventing cases such as that of Katharine Gun, a former translator at GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre.
Gun leaked a memo which revealed that in the months before the Iraq war in 2003 the Americans wanted GCHQ’s help in bugging the homes and offices of UN security council members.

The government dropped its case against her after she threatened to use the necessity defence that she broke the law to prevent a greater “crime” in the form of an invasion of Iraq. David Leppard

This is one more example of how ‘democratic’ governments are slowly diluting our rights to question dubious behaviour.

Just today on UpdateAmerica, abi ran a blog - 'A Slow-Rolling Coup d'Etat' It’s not just the US, most leaders of our western democracies seem to have this need for autocratic powers.

I expect, before long, many of us are going to be working hard to justify ourselves against ‘civil disobedience’ charges. If that is the only way we can be heard, that is by breaking restrictive laws, so be it!

But, ironically, another report out of Britain screams - Blair a failure on crime
Three out of four voters believe Tony Blair has broken his promise to be 'tough on crime' in the nine years since Labour came to power, an opinion poll has revealed.

So while his government is busy creating draconian laws to protect their dubious deeds, real crimminals are slipping the net. Is this the early picture of how these authoritarian regimes are going perform?

UPDATE: With respect to those willing to challenge unlawful government positions -

The one good man who brought down Guantanamo

Lt Cdr Charles Swift, 44, an experienced military defence attorney, was expected to draft a simple plea bargain after prosecutors requested the appointment of a lawyer to represent Osama bin -Laden's driver in 2003.

Instead, he launched a series of ground-breaking legal challenges that ended with the ruling by America's highest court that the military commissions backed by Mr Bush for international terrorism suspects were unlawful.

"As an officer, I have the deepest respect for the President," he told The Sunday Telegraph after the hearing. "But as an officer, it is also my duty to point out when an order is wrong.
What protects our democracy is that we do not just follow orders blindly.

"There was often a real Alice in Wonderland quality to this case," he said. "They had already decided that the detainees were terrorists so didn't have normal rights, but then they wanted to hold a commission to determine that they were terrorists."