When I was a boy, we moved a lot and I went to a lot of different schools. In fact I graduated from the twelfth public school I ever attended, and so I consider myself fairly well versed in the school practices of the period. One thing they all had in common was that there was a man with the title of “Vice Principal,” and his job was to be the School Asshole. He was in charge of discipline: He was usually large, supposed to be intimidating, but since he was forbidden to actually harm us and we knew it he usually only succeeded in getting even the most milquetoasty of students to behave like Bart Simpson in his presence.
If you’ve even read this far, you’re wondering what got me thinking about vice principals. Well, it’s this.
Pressure is building on British authorities to explain the use of anti-terrorism legislation to detain the partner of an American journalist who published information about U.S. surveillance leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Glenn Greenwald, as even desert hermits know, has been publishing quite a lot of material that could be described as somewhat critical of the American NSA. And if you’re asking yourself what this has to do with British mall cops at Heathrow Airport, you’re in good company. But they took it upon themselves to detain Greenwald’s gay partner, on his way back to Brazil from Berlin, for eight hours and fifty-five minutes of the nine hours permitted them under the terms of some terrorism law. And then they confiscated all his electronic stuff and put him on a plane home. What this was supposed to accomplish, no one currently knows. What it did accomplish was to get Greenwald, who had not previously been picking on the British government very hard, to declare war on Britain.
“I am going to publish things on England too,” Greenwald said, according to a translation provided by the Guardian. “I have many documents on England’s spy system.”
As Greenwald himself points out in his own opening salvo,
Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.
I guess he just doesn’t respect their authoritah.
H/T to Claire, who has quite a lot more on this.
Yep.
Ours was big and bald.
We called him ‘chromedome’ – not to his face.
These guys are calling them chromedome to their faces, and pissing them off.
Good for them.
gfa
When journalists realize that they are hurting themselves when give a pass to administrations that they like, then the world will once again have a chance to be free.
jw, I can certainly appreciate your intended point there, but I’m not sure the world will be ready to be free until people stop proxying out plenary trust to third parties of any kind. Trusting in “journalists” to be a proxy watchdog over the state, ultimately, seems little different than trusting in the state itself to be a proxy watchdog over “the common welfare” *. I suspect that’s one of the reasons why we’re where we are now in the first place.
Meaning: if by “journalists” you mean “each and every individual of any kind, anywhere”, then I think we agree completely. 🙂
______________________
*The problem, after all, isn’t one of the demographics or affiliations of the proxy agent, but rather of the “agreement” of agency itself.
Back in the late 1980s I was working in London. There were small notes everywhere with phone numbers to contact for a copy of “Spycatcher” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spycatcher which was still banned at the time.
The author had been stiffed over his pension by a British spy agency, so he published his memoirs and did very nicely from them. Thanks in no small part to the advertizing it received by being banned.
I finally bought my copy second hand, in Ireland, and it’s currently on long term loan to the son of a former spy who retired to Ireland following a similar falling out with the British spy paymasters. Ireland and Britain were pointedly not cooperating on spying at that time.
One of the threads running through the whole book is the guessing and bluffing game over what capabilities each side has, and what it wants the other side to think it has,
This started off with a Soviet passive microphone, which would pass any security scanning for radio transmitters, and needed no power supply, but when illuminated by the correct microwave frequency, worked as a microphone. I don’t think the Soviets ever acknowledged the existence of the devices, which were found in the walls of foreign embassies, Likewise I think Spycatcher spilled the news that the Brits were picking up embassy communications before they went into a scrambler, via RF leakage to telephone cables… These were real capabilities.
This became interesting by the late 1960s, when several inside MI5 began to suspect a Soviet spy high up in the organization.
The whole organization became paralysed with the suspicion that anything and everything might be getting to the Soviets.
This may or may not have been a real Soviet capability, and it rendered the British spies worse than useless (to their bosses anyway – I’ll argue they’re worse than useless at the best of times).
Here’s a silly take on the current goings on.
Q: What is the value of something?
A: The alternatives someone will forgo in order to get it.
Let’s look at the price already paid:
US IT industry is likely shagged, none of the big names are now trustable. Of the so called BRIC nations, all up and coming in the World, only India remains on the to do list to be directly pissed off. The US vassal states in Europe have been made to show what they are, and now, the fifth column have been stirred into action, the world’s busiest hub airport has become even more of a place to avoid (I used to be through there monthly, I detest the place), and Britain’s beloved “terror” laws, which have been growing for the best part of half a century that I can remember, might be getting pruned slightly.
Interesting question; with the high price already paid, and all of this publicity work
Does that mean that the snooping methods work, and we’re not supposed to know that they do?
or, does that mean that all of these massive IT installations don’t work, and the price being paid is to try to convince us that they do – in the hope that we’ll all be paralyzed by the fear that everything we say and do will come to big sibling’s attention?
Or as a third alternative, whether or not the spying installations actually do what it says on the label, the US is simply acting like your Deputy head and ranting and raging because some child dared to dis him, and that is comical in the extreme.
We didn’t have a vice-principal. Our principal was an ex-Marine who bore a startling resemblance to Jack Webb’s charcter in “The DI”. This wss in a time and place before disciplinary restraints. If you minded your P’s and Q’s he was the nicest guy on the planet. The “laying on of hands” was totally in play, and we mostly all knew the ground rules. Those who didn’t, learned quickly. Things were quite orderly.
Never happen today. Not sure that’s an improvement.
Just interesting to note: Gays historically have been denied security clearances. Now, gays are a protected class and two, Manning and Snowden, have spilled the beans.
BTW, our vice principal had a “board of education” and was most decidedly NOT afraid to use it.