International Law

When will Labour's snooping scandals end ? More widespread Prison bugging allegations

When will the Labour database surveillance state scandals ever end ?

The Daily Telegraph has published some more whistleblower revelations , which claim that the abuse of of supposedly confidential client lawyer privilege, through the secret electronic eavesdropping in Prisons, is far more widespread than the Sadiq Khan MP / Babar Ahmad scandal.

Hundreds of lawyers 'bugged on prison visits'

By Robert Winnett, Deputy Political Editor

The full scale of a nationwide policy to bug British jails can be disclosed today after a whistleblower revealed that hundreds of lawyers and prison visitors had been secretly recorded.

Why should anyone believe that these lawyers were only bugged when visiting their clients in prison ? Have they also been subjected to the full panoply of state bugging and interception surveillance techniques ?

Is this how the alleged Mobile Phone Intercept Voice Identification of Farid Hilali as the supposed "Shakur" was done, by sending the Spanish intelligence agency Centro Nacional de Inteligencia a copy of a legally priviliged conversation between him and his lawyers, obtained whilst he was at HMP Belmarsh or HMP Woodhill ?

[...]

Serious criminals, including the Soham murderer Ian Huntley and the letter bomber Miles Cooper, are also thought to have been targeted by the alleged secret bugging

What possible "national security" justification is there for bugging the legal conversations of a notorious child murderer, whose only peripheral accomplice is already in a protected witness scheme ?

Was this bugging actually due to corruption, with those involved hoping to sell sensational tidbits to the tabloid media ?

Full post as published by Spy Blog on February 09, 2008 (boomark / email).