Web of Deceit

Some were grabbed off the streets, blindfolded and bundled into the back of a car. Others were detained at airports and taken away by force on small private jets, often to secret locations in countries known for torture. Extraordinary rendition, a kind of state-sanctioned kidnapping that breaches international law, became a popular method used by US authorities to capture terror suspects in the years following the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks. But only now are full details about the practice, and the many corporations that have profited from it, beginning to emerge.

In recent weeks human rights group Reprieve has been publicising some of the private companies that helped organise the renditions, most carried out under the authority of the George W. Bush administration between 2001 and 2008. Among the firms are military contractors such as Virginia-based DynCorp, paid to organise the logistics of rendition flights to places like Thailand, Egypt, Syria and Morocco. But there are also less conspicuous firms that played a key role, some with strong UK connections. One is Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), an IT firm that has held contracts with the NHS and Transport for London.

“The role played by the prime contracting companies – DynCorp and CSC – was extremely significant,” says Crofton Black, a Reprieve investigator. “They basically ran a significant proportion of the entire project in terms of helping move people around between detention sites. The various operating companies that provided the airplanes and crews are significant too, because it’s unlikely these guys didn’t know what was happening in their planes.”

According to Reprieve, court documents show that CSC organised rendition flights on behalf of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry prisoners between a number of locations, including the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention camp and secret “black sites” in North Africa, South East Asia and Eastern Europe. It is alleged that the prisoners were held incommunicado and tortured during lengthy interrogations. CSC, which turned over £10.2 billion in 2011, has a string of British investors, including Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and Prudential.

Earlier this year, Reprieve wrote and asked CSC to sign its “zero tolerance for torture” pledge promising that it would not be involved in rendition, secret detention and torture in the future. The company declined, saying that individual pledges on specific topics were “not within the framework” of its existing corporate responsibility programme. Reprieve is now writing to investors in the firm asking them to “confirm whether investing in companies implicated in torture is compatible with their ethical commitments.”

“CSC has explicitly refused to rule out taking on such missions in the future,” Black says. “It’s fine for the investors to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that ‘we didn’t know such missions were going on in 2005.’ But they can’t say that anymore. So they have to come to come to terms with the fact that they are investing in a company that has basically made a commitment not to honour international law, which is effectively what CSC refusing to sign the zero tolerance for torture pledge means.”

At the same time as details about private companies’ involvement in extraordinary rendition continue to emerge, new information about the scale of Britain’s role in the programme has also been revealed. In the wake of the civil war in Libya last year, documents were uncovered showing in 2004 MI6 had helped US authorities abduct Libyan dissident Abdelhakim Belhadj and his pregnant wife in Bangkok, where they were flown to Tripoli and abused by Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police.

Belhadj is now suing MI6 and then-foreign secretary Jack Straw, a serving Blackburn MP, for complicity in torture and misfeasance in public office. Government sources say MI6’s role in rendition was part of “ministerially authorised government policy" – but Straw has gone on record claiming that "no foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time."

In other countries, too, the repercussions of extraordinary rendition continue to be felt. In March, Poland became the first EU country to indict one of its officials over CIA renditions, with the country’s prime minister promising an end to “under-the-table deals." It is alleged that a military garrison in the north-east of the Poland was used as a CIA black site where terror suspects were interrogated and subjected to waterboarding, a kind of torture that makes a person feel as if they are drowning.

Some details about the rendition programme, like the names of the terror suspects involved, are difficult to establish as they remain classified. But more revelations may soon emerge as part of a major new academic effort to pull together all of the information that has so far been published about extraordinary rendition. Launched by University of Kent academic Dr Ruth Blakeley in May, the Rendition Project is studying reams of court documents and flight logs, collating data about hundreds of victims of rendition and secret detention since 2001. It hopes to chronicle the 45 countries, 6500 flights and 140 aircraft allegedly connected to the CIA renditions programme.

“I don’t think the world is very well informed about the types of things that governments in the US and UK do,” Blakeley says, explaining her motivation for starting the project. “On both sides of the pond current governments don’t really want to carry out investigations [into rendition] because their own records are not that squeaky clean either.”

Prior to coming in to office in 2008, US president Barack Obama condemned many of his predecessor’s more aggressive counter-terror policies. He barred waterboarding and signed an executive order entitled "Ensuring Lawful Interrogations," designed to increase oversight. But he didn’t outlaw extraordinary renditions. Obama has also significantly heighted the use of unmanned military drones, remotely controlled aircraft that are used to bomb suspected militants in places such as Pakistan and Yemen. Some argue that, to avoid using the costly and controversial rendition method, Obama has favoured drone strikes – killing rather than capturing.

“It’s expensive to detain people in prison,” Blakeley says. “A lot of people say drone attacks are Obama’s preference because you just get rid of the people and you don’t have all the messy stuff afterwards to deal with... It avoids the public outcry around rendition.”

London-based human rights group Cage Prisoners, founded by Birmingham-born Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo detainee, believes rendition is still happening today but on a lesser scale. The group, which campaigns to raise awareness about individuals held extra-judicially as part of the so-called War on Terror, argues public inquiries into extraordinary rendition are the only way to redress the abuses of international law that became commonplace after 2001.

“There’s no way that we can adequately compensate those who had these things happen to them,” says Asim Qureshi, executive director at Cage Prisoners. “In the grand scheme of things, for those people inquiries mean nothing, because they’ve already had their lives ruined by renditions.

“But for the future they become important, because this is effectively the way the human rights industry can fight back – by bringing these legal cases, by having the process of accountability, and by really placing the emphasis back on due process and the rule of law.”

Police In Crisis

A cloud of controversy is hanging over police forces across the country as they face unprecedented change. While deep budget cuts force job losses and dent morale, damaging allegations about corruption and racism surface on an almost monthly basis. The scale of these problems has been played down by police chiefs – but critics are clear the forces are facing a crisis.

Figures published late last month revealed that more than 8,500 allegations about police corruption were recorded by forces in England and Wales between 2008 and 2011. Contained in an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report, the allegations included rape and sexual assault, perverting the course of justice, the provision of false statements, theft, database misuse and fraud. Only 13 police officers were prosecuted and found guilty.

The corruption figures came fresh on the back of recent disclosures about the rising level of racism complaints levelled against the police. Records published earlier this year under the freedom of information act showed an increase by more than 30 per cent in allegations of racism at forces across England and Wales. And if that news wasn’t bad enough for the country’s cops, at the same time, police budgets have been slashed – causing staff shortages and leading to fears about potential privatisation.

“I think we’re facing a crisis in lack of leadership,” says Simon Reed, vice chairman of the Police Federation, an organisation that represents 124,000 police officers in England and Wales. “We do not have leaders in the service who are standing up for the service, responding to these allegations and standing up to the government – that’s the view among the rank and file.”

Reed, a former officer with Bedfordshire Police, accuses the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) of “covering up” how hard forces have been hit by cuts by trying to “put a brave face on it.” He accepts that racism and corruption allegations are serious – but believes that they are being overplayed.

“Our police service is the most scrutinised anywhere in the world,” he says. “We’ve always had allegations, whether it’s racism or corruption, but the actual level is still very low. To put it in perspective, the number of complaints officers get is considerably less than we see made against banks. Banks will get hundreds of thousands of complaints a year.”

Over the three year period between 2008 and 2011, forces in the north had 1400 corruption allegations levelled against them – around 15 per cent of the total across England and Wales. West Yorkshire had the most of the northern forces – at 309 – followed by Greater Manchester (287); Merseyside (267); Lancashire (231); North Yorkshire (141); and South Yorkshire (165). London’s Metropolitan police, Britain’s largest force, came top of the overall list, with 1,487.

The most common allegation in the IPCC’s report – 33 per cent of all that were recorded – involved perverting the course of justice, followed by theft or fraud and abuse of authority. In one case, the chief constable of North Yorkshire police admitted gross misconduct at an internal hearing after “irregularities” were found in the force’s recruitment process. This was the first time in 34 years that a serving chief constable had faced such a hearing. The chief constable and the deputy constable, it emerged, had jointly assisted relatives in circumventing the first stage of a recruitment exercise.

The IPCC says that police corruption is “not endemic” but is “corrosive of the public trust that is at the heart of policing.” Of the 8,500 allegations recorded between 2008 and 2011, just 837 were referred to the IPCC, leaving individual forces to investigate their own officers in the vast majority of cases. The watchdog has vowed to take a more “proactive role” investigating corruption allegations as it has accepted that “the public is understandably doubtful about the extent to which, in this particular instance, the police can investigate themselves.”

Some campaigners, however, believe the IPCC is part of the problem. They claim that because a third of the watchdog's investigators are former police officers, it lacks full independence and the teeth to hand out serious punishments.

Val Swain, a spokesperson for civil liberties group the Network for Police Monitoring, argues structures set up to hold the police to account have “neither the will nor the capacity” to do so.

“The real-life experience of many is that the police are able to act with almost complete impunity,” Swain says. “The IPCC has recognised the need to improve public confidence in the complaints procedure, but it is far from clear how they are going to make the changes necessary to achieve this.

“The number of police officers who are found guilty of misconduct is very low. Of those, most will face nothing more serious than a written warning. Given the lack of sanction, the establishment of a culture of corruption seems almost inevitable.”

Complaints about police accountability over corruption also punctuate the debate about racism. Despite receiving hundreds of racism allegations, the police themselves have dismissed the majority of complaints against them by ruling that they are untrue or cannot be substantiated.

ACPO says a rise in racism complaints in recent years is down to more people now coming forward report alleged abuse. But critics argue racism remains an institutional problem within police forces and is not being tackled efficiently enough.

“Without the action it’s never really going to change,” says Sophie Khan, a solicitor who specialises in cases involving racial discrimination and the police. “90 per cent of my cases have a racist element to it. It happens time and time again, year after year.

“It impacts on a lot of people’s lives the way that they get treated. When they’re walking down the street or in the custody suite – they are treated differently depending on the colour of their skin.”

Uncomfortable issues were raised for police forces after the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993. A subsequent report into Lawrence’s death, authored by Sir William Macpherson, accused the Metropolitan Police of being “institutionally racist” over how it had handled the investigation. The report made 70 recommendations, many aimed specifically at improving police attitudes to racism.

But race scandals have continued to dog police forces across the country. In 2003, video footage emerged showing Greater Manchester Police (GMP) trainees and officers using racist language, with one filmed making a Ku Klux Klan-style hood and saying he wanted to “kill” an Asian colleague. Figures released earlier this year showed GMP received 351 racism complaints between 2007 and 2011, the second highest in the country behind the Met.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission says it is “seriously concerned” about allegations of racist police behaviour. “We hoped and believed that this sort of culture had been tackled by all the changes that followed the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry,” said a spokesperson.

Questions around the culture within the police service, though, are not likely to be addressed in the immediate future. Sir Hugh Orde, president of ACPO, has emphasised his priority is to deal with the forces’ financial problems. Police nationwide are facing 20 per cent budget cuts and an expected 16,000 job losses by 2015.

"For the first time officers suddenly feel vulnerable," Orde said in an interview last month, making it clear where his sympathies lie. "There is a sense they feel let down.”

Secret Justice

Alarming links between British spy agencies and torture, unlawful abductions and dealings with dictators have been exposed in recent years, prompting investigations and major court cases. But now, in a historic move that could erode centuries-old principles of open justice, the government wants to limit sensitive material being disclosed publicly – enabling complicity in human rights abuses to be kept secret.

The controversial plans are set to be included in the Justice and Security Bill, formally announced earlier this month in the Queen’s Speech. The Ministry of Justice says “common-sense” change is needed to protect national security and better equip courts to pass judgment in cases involving classified information. Because the new legislation would enable the government to present evidence to a judge without having to disclose it to the whole court, however, there are major concerns it could lead to cover-ups and put the government and other public bodies above the law.

“The simple fact is that closed courts are inherently unfair,” says Clare Algar, executive director of human rights group Reprieve. “What the government is proposing is a system in which they can use whatever evidence they like against the citizen, but the citizen is unable to challenge or even to see that evidence. This is unacceptable in any circumstances.

"Our current system is working well, and judges have always been extremely deferential to the government on matters of national security. Yet it appears that our security services are attempting to undermine our justice system because they are unwilling to be held accountable in a court of law."

Justice secretary Ken Clarke argues that the government will have to reveal “damaging” secret security information or settle out of court unless ministers can order some cases to be conducted behind closed doors. Clarke says that Britain’s intelligence-sharing relationship with America was dented after a ruling in 2010 forcing ministers to reveal a document showing British complicity in the torture of West London resident Binyam Mohamed, who was held at US-run prison Guantanamo Bay over alleged links to terror groups.

But last month the government’s claims that US authorities have withdrawn or reduced the amount of intelligence it shares with Britain were attacked by the joint parliamentary committee on human rights as being based on “spurious assertions”. And former officers from the US Central Intelligence Agency told the Daily Mail the US would “never hold back” information from British spies if it was “important to their domestic security.”

Prominent critics argue that the reform, far from being motivated by a desire to protect national security, has more to do with preventing politically damaging details from being made public.

“We should not sacrifice Britain’s open and transparent justice system simply to protect politicians and their officials from embarrassment,” said former director of public prosecutions Ken MacDonald in February. “After a decade in which we have seen our politicians and officials caught up in the woeful abuses of the War on Terror, the last thing the government should be seeking is to sweep all of this under the carpet. However, that is exactly what their disastrous secret justice proposals are likely to do.”

Macdonald’s scathing remarks took on added significance last month, when it emerged spy agency MI6 had tried to avoid having to appear in open court by offering a payment of £1 million to Abdelhakim Belhadj, a Libyan dissident it helped hand over to Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2004 as part of America’s extraordinary rendition programme. Belhadj and his pregnant wife were abducted by US authorities in Bangkok after a tip-off from MI6. They were forced on a plane to Libya where they were mistreated by Gaddafi’s secret police – and are now suing Sir Mark Allen, an ex-senior member of MI6, for “complicity in torture" and "misfeasance in public office."

If the Bill were to become law by the time Belhadj’s case makes it to a British courtroom, a government minister could sign off a “closed material procedure” (CMP) certificate vetoing sensitive information about MI6’s role being publicly disclosed. CMPs were first established by Labour in 1997 to be used mainly in a small number of immigration cases concerning the deportation of terror suspects. In 2010, for instance, alleged extremists based in Manchester and Liverpool were accused of having links to al-Qaida – but in subsequent deportation hearings CMPs were applied to keep evidence against them secret.

Crucially, aside from cases involving terror suspects and torture, the newly proposed Bill has far wider ramifications. It would apply across all civil court cases or inquests and could potentially be used not only to protect the security services – but also to halt sensitive information involving the police, the army and other public bodies from being revealed. (The definition of “sensitive” information is broad, encompassing the disclosure of anything deemed contrary to the interests of national security, the international relations of the United Kingdom, or the detection and prevention of crime.)

Inquest, a charity that provides support to bereaved people affected by contentious deaths, such as deaths in custody and police shootings, believes the government’s proposals “seriously undermine fundamental legal principles of natural justice and open justice.” The group, whose members number lawyers involved in high-profile cases including the Hillsborough disaster and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, has warned that the Bill, if legislated, would “fuel fears that the state is attempting to deliberately prevent information about its own culpability in deaths becoming publicly known.”

“It is deeply regrettable that the government is pursuing proposals to extend the use of closed material procedures,” says Helen Shaw, Inquest’s co-director. “It is abundantly clear that there is no need for such sweeping changes to the law.”

But not all elements of the Bill have been subject to such intense criticism. While many argue it would be particularly detrimental to the accountability of the secret services in the courtroom, others point out that at the same time, in stark contrast, it also contains a proposal to enhance their accountability to parliament. Currently spy agencies MI6, MI5 and GCHQ are overseen by the intelligence and security committee (ISC), an executive-appointed group of nine parliamentarians, which reports directly to the prime minister. The government wants to improve the ISC by having it report formally to parliament for the first time.

“I see this as a measure of making them more accountable,” says Anthony Glees, an expert in security and counter-terrorism at the University of Buckingham. “There is a problem with accountability in our secret agencies; too much secrecy fuels speculation and it leads to a lack of responsible behaviour. But we can’t expect that they can’t have full accountability because then they wouldn’t be secret agencies.”

By enhancing parliamentary accountability while simultaneously planning to radically reduce judicial accountability, though, it is ultimately the overall impact that is of most significance, according to Hugh Bochel, professor of public policy at the University of Lincoln.

“The proposals give greater parliamentary oversight but they reduce the amount of judicial oversight and to some extent civil society and the media,” Bochel says, adding that this is a “negative step.”

“What you need is overlap between all those different forms of oversight and that should give you a good view as you can and accountability in all sorts of different ways.”

Campaigners point out that the Ministry of Justice’s own impact assessment of its plans for secret court proceedings warned of a “reduction in confidence in court processes” and a “higher risk of potential security breaches,” costing up to £11 million every year. This was compounded last month by condemnation from the joint parliamentary committee on human rights, chaired by Dr Hywel Francis, which said in a report that the court plans were a “radical departure from our longstanding traditions of open justice” and “inherently unfair.”

“The government has now tested the parliamentary waters and its proposal to expand secret evidence has been condemned as unfair and unjustified,” says Angela Patrick, director of human rights policy at campaign group Justice. “Proceeding in the face of these conclusions would undermine the coalition’s commitment to civil liberties and could damage public confidence in the justice system irreparably.”

Mass Surveillance in Former Soviet Republics

Western firms that sold dictatorships in the Middle East mass-surveillance technology have been subject to intense scrutiny over the past year. But now a new exposé by journalists in Sweden has shed light on how the same tools are being used closer to home — in ex-Soviet republics across Europe and Central Asia, whose leaders were seemingly shaken by the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

Last week an investigative documentary shown on Swedish public service broadcaster SVT revealed in fascinating depth the extent to which Stockholm-based telecommunications firm Teliasonera is linked to spy agencies in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Georgia, facilitating crackdowns on dissident politicians and independent journalists.

Citing a multitude of sources — including official government documents and whistle-blower testimony — SVT’s reporters documented how companies owned by Teliasonera had allowed “black box” probes to be fitted within their telecommunications networks. The black boxes allow security services and police to monitor, in real-time and without any judicial oversight, all communications passing through, including texts, Internet traffic and phone calls. (Similar so-called “monitoring centers” were set up in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria with the help of European companies.)

SVT found some citizens who said they had been targeted for the strangest, most banal reasons. Several Azerbaijanis, for instance, said they had been summoned by police and subject to interrogation after phone records showed they had voted for a country other than their own during the televised Eurovision Song Contest in 2009. One man said he was told by officials working for Azerbaijan’s security agency that he was a “traitor” because he had voted for a song performed by musicians from Armenia, a neighbor with whom Azerbaijan has historically had tense relations.

Other cases were far more serious and sinister. Documents obtained by SVT showed an Azerbaijani reporter had his phone tapped after he published a piece about being beaten at the hands of government security agents while covering a story. He was subsequently stabbed in a savage attack and had to flee to France, where he has since taken up a case against the security agency and Teliasonera-owned Azercell in the European Court of Justice.

SVT also reported that the black-box surveillance was used in Belarus to track down, arrest, and prosecute protesters who attended an anti-government protest rally following the 2010 Belarusian presidential election.

Similar stories were reported in relation to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Georgia. In Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, sources said security agencies had even been given their own offices within the telecom providers’ headquarters to snoop on communications. One whistle-blower who worked for Teliasonera told the reporters, “The Arab Spring prompted the regimes to tighten their surveillance... There’s no limit to how much wiretapping is done, none at all.”

In response to the documentary, a spokeswoman for Teliasonera said that “police tap into information from telecom networks to fight crime” and “the rules for how far their authority goes are different from country to country.” When pressed about complicity in human rights violations, she looked shaky, refusing to comment on why security agencies were being given access to telecom buildings in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

This article first appeared at: slate.com

Squatters' Rights?

It could potentially criminalise swathes of homeless people and cost over £700 million to implement. A controversial clause that will outlaw squatting in empty residential properties for the first time in England and Wales was given the green light in the House of Lords late last month. The government argues the change is essential to protect distressed property owners. Amid rising unemployment and the worst housing crisis in a generation, however, there are concerns that it might further marginalise some of society’s most vulnerable.

Under existing law, if squatters move in to an occupied home (for example when the residents are on holiday) police already have the powers to immediately remove them. The new law will broaden the scope of these powers, and will extend to residential properties that are empty and not being lived in. It will allow property owners to get police to, without applying for an eviction notice, arrest and remove squatters, who will be made to face a maximum one year jail sentence or £5000 fine.

“Ultimately the best way to end squatting will not be through fines and criminal sanction but by ensuring all homeless people, not just those deemed a ‘priority’, get the help they need,” says Duncan Shrubsole, director of policy and external affairs at homeless charity Crisis.

“We are obviously disappointed that the government is going ahead with its plans to criminalise squatting in residential buildings given the concerns that Crisis, with the support of Baroness Miller and other parliamentarians, have consistently raised as the likely impact on homeless people.”

The reform will represent a fundamental shift in how squatting is dealt with across the country, bringing an end to the long-held principles of “squatters’ rights”.

Historically in England and Wales, squatting in empty residential properties has been considered a civil dispute between the squatters and the landlord. As long as a squatter has not broken in and remains in the house, they can’t be forcibly removed and property owners have to get a court order to get people out. Within months that will no longer be the case.

“I have been contacted time and time again by MPs and constituents about the appalling impact that squatting can have on their homes, businesses and local communities,” said Conservative justice minister Crispin Blunt in a statement last year. “This is not media hype. It can and does really happen, and when it does it can be highly stressful for the owner or lawful occupier of the property concerned.

“It is not only the cost and length of time it takes to evict squatters that angers property owners, it is also the cost of the cleaning and repair bill which follows eviction. While the property owner might literally be left picking up the pieces, the squatters have gone on their way, possibly to squat in somebody else’s property.”

But a number of groups have expressed serious concerns about the ramifications of criminalising squatting, the provision for which is contained in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill. A survey conducted by Crisis last year showed 39% of homeless people had resorted to squatting at some point, a factor that prompted organisations including the Law Society, The Criminal Bar Association and housing charity Shelter to argue against criminalisation.

“A new criminal offence of squatting is unnecessary,” says John Wotton, president of the Law Society of England and Wales. “Squatting is not a major problem and where it does occur, there are a range of laws both civil and criminal that are adequate to deal with it.”

While the Criminal Prosecution Service has backed the new law, opposition has come from a number of unexpected quarters. In a speech made before the House of Lords on 27 March, Lord Paul Strasburger – formerly the director of Safe Estates, a security firm tasked with keeping squatters out of empty properties – launched an attack on the part of the Bill dealing with squatting.

He said: “This clause is a blunt instrument because its unintended consequence – and I sincerely hope that it is an unintended consequence – is to protect unscrupulous property owners who keep properties vacant for years for purely speculative reasons and, in the process, prevent homeless people having somewhere to live.”

Though squatting is set to be criminalised in empty residential properties, campaigners have claimed a small victory in that the government is not pursing the criminalisation of squatting in commercial properties (such as, for instance, disused warehouses). Assurances have been given by ministers that those who occupy abandoned or dilapidated non-residential buildings will not be committing the new offence, and will be dealt with through the civil eviction-order process. The government has also pledged that students who occupy academic buildings or workers who stage sit-ins to protest against an employer will not be committing any crime.

“That was quite a big concession to win along the way,” says Joseph Blake, a spokesperson for squatters’ campaign group Squash. “But it was a struggle to get what is a serious piece of legislation heard properly – it was debated late at night and never properly scrutinised.

“I think it fundamentally comes to a lack of democracy in this country. Now what we may see is thousands of people becoming criminals at some point, in the middle of what is one of the worst housing crises this country has ever seen.”

There are currently over 700,000 empty homes in England, 279,000 of which have been vacant for over six months. In March new official statistics revealed that the number of people classed as homeless has jumped by 14%, with 48,510 households accepted as homeless by local authorities in 2011. The increase is the biggest in nine years and was described by Shelter as “a shocking reminder of the divide between the housing haves and have nots in this country."

The government has vowed to “tackle the root causes of homelessness, to provide affordable homes and to bring more empty homes back into use” to counteract any negative impact that there may be on homeless people through the implementation of the squatting crackdown. Until it meets its words with actions, however, the chances are squatting will continue unabated well into the future – regardless of the consequences.

“Squatting is a response to the housing crisis that we’re in – properties remain empty and our homelessness rates are rising,” Blake says, resolutely. “The two things go together. People will continue squatting if that’s the desperate last resort for them.”

Police Meetings and Trojan Surveillance

Infecting a computer with spyware in order to secretly siphon data is a tactic most commonly associated with criminals. But explosive new revelations in Germany suggest international law enforcement agencies are adopting similar methods as a form of intrusive suspect surveillance, raising fresh civil liberties concerns.

Information released last month by the German government shows that between 2008-2011, representatives from the FBI; the U.K.’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA); and France’s secret service, the DCRI, were among those to have held meetings with German federal police about deploying “monitoring software” used to covertly infiltrate computers.

The disclosure was made in response to a series of questions tabled by Left Party Member of Parliament Andrej Hunko and reported by German-language media. It comes on the heels of an exposé by the Chaos Computer Club, a Berlin-based hacker collective, which revealed in October that German police forces had been using a so-called "Bundestrojaner” (federal Trojan) to spy on suspects.

The Bundestrojaner technology could be sent disguised as a legitimate software update and was capable of recording Skype calls, monitoring Internet use, and logging messenger chats and keystrokes. It could also activate computer hardware such as microphones or webcams and secretly take snapshots or record audio before sending it back to the authorities.

German federal authorities initially denied deploying any Bundestrojaner, but it soon transpired that courts had in fact approved requests from officials to employ such Trojan horse programs more than 50 times. Following a public outcry over the use of the technology, which many believe breached the country’s strict privacy laws, further details have surfaced.

Inquiries by Green Party MP Konstantin von Notz revealed in January that, in addition to the Bundestrojaner discovered by the CCC, German authorities had also acquired a license in early 2011 to test a similar Trojan technology called “FinSpy,”manufactured by England-based firm Gamma Group. FinSpy enables clandestine access to a targeted computer, and was reportedly used for five months by Hosni Mubarak’s Egyptian state security forces in 2010 to monitor personal Skype accounts and record voice and video conversations over the Internet.

But it is the German government’s response to a series of questions recently submitted by Hunko that is perhaps the most revealing to date. In a letter from Secretary of State Ole Schröder on March 6, which I have translated, Hunko was informed that German federal police force, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), met to discuss the use of monitoring software with counterparts from the U.S., Britain, Israel, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Austria. The meetings took place separately between Feb. 19, 2008, and Feb. 1, 2012. While this story has been covered in the German media, it hasn’t received the English-language attention it deserves.

Both the FBI and Britain’s SOCA are said to have discussed with the Germans the “basic legal requirements” of using computer-monitoring software. The meeting with SOCA also covered the “technical and tactical aspects” of deploying computer infiltration technology, according to Schröder’s letter. France’s secret service and police from Switzerland, Austria, Luxemburg, and Liechtenstein were separately briefed by the BKA on its experiences using Trojan computer infiltration.

Interestingly, at a meeting in October 2010 attended by police from Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, representatives from the Gamma Group were present and apparently showcased their shadowy products. It is possible that the Germans decided at this meeting to proceed with the FinSpy trial we now know took place in early 2011.

If nothing else, these revelations confirm that police internationally are increasingly looking to deploy ethically contentious computer intrusion techniques that exist in a legal gray area. The combination of the rapid development of Internet technologies and persistent fears about national security seem to have led to a paradigm shift in police tactics—one that appears, worryingly, to be taking place almost entirely behind closed doors and under cover of state secrecy.

The use of highly intrusive surveillance technologies in any context demands some level of democratic scrutiny. How many police and government agencies are sanctioned to use hacking and Trojans as a means to surveil their citizens, how frequently does it happen, on what grounds, and with what oversight? The fallout from Germany’s Bundestrojaner scandal may have shed some much-needed light on this murky world, but still we are left with many more questions than answers.

This article first appeared at: slate.com

Elected Mayors

It has been billed by some as the most significant constitutional change England has faced in generations. Next month, a referendum will be held in ten cities across the country to determine whether council leaders will replaced by elected mayors. It could mean that, rather than councils picking who is in charge, more people than ever before will have the chance to directly decide who their local leader is. Advocates of the reform say it will bring about greater democracy and more regional control – but not everyone is convinced.

Come 3 May voters in Leeds, Wakefield, Manchester, Sheffield and Bradford will be among those to go to the polls. Birmingham, Nottingham, Coventry, Bristol and Newcastle will also vote, while Liverpool and Leicester have already chosen to switch to the new system without holding a referendum. The government is keen for cities to adopt elected mayors, which it says will lead to more power devolved locally. However, critics claim they are being pressured into making a change that is not necessarily a good thing.

“I’m sceptical about mayors,” says professor Alan Harding, director of the University of Manchester’s Institute for Political and Economic Governance. “I think it would be a complete and utter waste of time for Manchester, which has been run perfectly effectively for donkey’s years.

“There are certain places in the world which have directly elected mayors, and I don’t think you could say hand on heart it makes a decisive difference to how those places function. At the end of the day it’s not the position that makes the difference – it’s the quality of the people who occupy the position and how they make use of the opportunities that they’ve got.”

Since the Local Government Act was introduced by New Labour in 2000, 16 English towns have adopted elected mayors, ranging from London to Bedford, Middlesbrough and Watford. But the current government, as part of its 2011 Localism Act, wants to expand the system across all of the country’s major cities, with May’s mandatory referendums an integral part of that process.

“I’m really enthusiastic about this because I profoundly believe we should be moving our country to having more directly elected mayors in our big cities,” prime minister David Cameron said in a speech at 10 Downing Street last week. “I know it is a big cultural change for Britain, it is a big move for us, and it is absolutely going to be up to the people of those cities to make that decision, but I very much hope we will get some yes votes across our country.”

Thinktank the Institute for Government (IFG) has also backed the push towards having more elected mayors. It believes the change will lead to more funding and independence handed over to cities, with increased stability and better leadership.

“Mayors are likely to bring significant benefits – in terms of visibility, stability and responsiveness to the electorate,” says Tom Gash, programme director at the IFG. “Mayors are elected every four years by tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of voters. Council leaders are chosen by other councillors and can be ousted at virtually any point if they can’t keep these councillors happy.”

Statistics produced by the IFG show that 38% of people questioned nationally want a directly elected mayor rather than a council leader. But a separate poll earlier in March revealed 62% were unaware of the May referendums, with 90% saying they had been given little or no information about it. As a likely result of this, during an elected mayors referendum in Salford in January, just 18.1% of the 171,000 eligible voters took part.

According to Steve Connor, chief executive of Manchester PR firm Creative Concern, there is little appetite for the change in his home city because it would not offer any tangible benefit. Connor recently authored a letter, published in the Manchester Evening News and signed by academics, artists and businessmen, calling elected mayors a “bad deal”.

“For Manchester it’s a really bad option,” Connor says, “because we’ve got ten local authorities, not one, and we’ve got Greater Manchester, which is the scale at which our city works.

“If it was one elected mayor for the whole of Manchester – that would be a different issue. But this referendum is about a mayor just for the Manchester city council area, and it’s crackers.”

In London Boris Johnson is mayor of Greater London, which puts him in charge of all 32 of the capital’s boroughs. But Manchester is being offered an elected mayor who would only be responsible for the City of Manchester (one borough), as opposed to Greater Manchester in its entirety (ten boroughs).

“Elected mayors should be for larger areas – like London – they shouldn’t be for smaller areas,” Connor says. “There’s no demand for it, we haven’t asked for it, and yet it’s been forced on us.”

Last week the BBC quoted an unnamed Downing Street adviser saying Manchester would be at a competitive disavantage if its citizens didn’t vote yes on 3 May. In Wakefield council leader Peter Box has accused central government of engaging in “Alice in Wonderland politics” for asking people to vote on something that they are not fully informed about. Meanwhile, an anti-mayors campaign group called “Vote No to a Power Freak” has been founded by politicians in Birmingham who claim elected mayors will lead to corruption and a form of dictatorship.

“Concentrating power into the hands of one individual makes it easy for them to do things that mean other people aren’t consulted – unless they are wealthy people or high up in the bureaucracy of the council,” says John Hemming MP, a Liberal Democrat involved with the Vote No to a Power Freak campaign. “It leads towards corruption, because power corrupts – the more power you give people the more corruption there is.

“If you think politics should be a celebrity contest once every four years and otherwise people do what they feel like, then great – vote for it. But if you think politics is about policies and trying to make a society where everybody is taken into account – then oppose it.”

In Liverpool the prevailing attitude is more positive. The city’s council decided to adopt an elected mayor without holding a referendum after being promised a £130m funding package from Whitehall in return, including a £75m economic development grant and a low tax enterprise zone in the north of the city.

“It’s time to embrace mayoral politics,” says Liam Fogarty, a former BBC journalist running as an independent candidate for Liverpool mayor. “It will be different to the sort of politics that we’re used to, I think and I hope. A mayoral figure provides clear visible leadership – there’s no hiding place for a mayor – and I think that makes for a stronger democracy.”

Among the other candidates who will be running for mayor of Liverpool are Herbert Howe, a celebrity hairdresser, and Tony Mulhearn, the former Militant leader who has pledged to reverse all council cuts should he get elected. Phil Redmond, the creator of TV series Brookside, Grange Hill and Hollyoaks, finally ruled himself out of the race last week, after much speculation that he would stand.

“At the moment we have this whole kind of alphabet soup of people taking important decisions that are not visible or held to account – quangos, joint boards, partnerships, multi agency agreements,” Fogarty says. “If the price of accountability is the odd eccentric, I think that’s a fair price to pay.”