Crimes as Bargains and Law as Crime

The world is almost never a place of simple good and evil. I was very struck this morning, by my morning trawl around the net, of this rule in two ways.

Firstly, San Francisco, or at least its computer system, seem to be being held to a sort of ransom. A disgruntled and, as far as I can tell, indicted, employee has, from his prison cell, shut city employees out of many computers. It is alleged that he also has access to files held exclusively on computer, which he is therefore able to delete. These actions may eliminate the evidence in the prosecution against him.

American prosecutors are very often bulldogs. Sometimes they are paid or promoted according to a ludicrous target of 'successful or pursued prosecutions', which, in that republic, means that they cannot afford to compromise, give in, or come to a deal that might save society unless they are very secure in their tenure or really don't care about their own economic advancement. They represent almost unrestrained sovereign power descended from that of monarchs but enhanced by local election more than anyone else in America today.

Most of the time, because they are saddled with debt, or political ambition, or just deeply amoral self-righteousness, they instead just pursue whomsoever their radar has fixed upon and expect the rest of the world to help them to do it, even after overwhelming new evidence comes to light that could save a man from death.

I presume that some sort of deal can be countenanced in which passwords are transmitted or some charges are dropped. Indeed, there has been no interest in pursuing any suspect of the 2001 anthrax affair as far as I--and this congressman-- can tell.

Bizarrely, those who reported on this story in the US, and who were fed information possibly by prosecutors, have been persecuted to the point of being denied defence funds of the sort that corrupt members of the political classes raise money for all the time.

Is the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks being pursued with the fervour that smaller people are pursued, or with which the wholly innocent Dr Stephen Hatfill was persecuted?

So today, in San Francisco, engineers are working frantically to gain access to the system before the purposes, it is alleged, of this man are achieved. His crime otherwise might have come with its own insurance; interesting once one reads the tale of the asprox virus in Britain's public service websites, and also to the example it sets of how one could infect the internet or cripple a government. In the past, some have even used cyber-attacks launched almost certainly by criminals or private groups to try and draw America and China into confrontation.

There is a good reason why the Americans shouldn't do a deal in San Francisco of course; electronic danegeld is not something to want to pay.

The other theme that caught my eye is of how the growing fury at the family courts and the activities of British social workers, associated in my mind with the exile, has now taken off. This website, which assesses rather than simply records membership details for good reasons, has now launched discussions on the family courts, injunctive secrecy, and legal kidnapping associated with many members of the social services.

I, of course, am a Catholic and I am genuinely shocked and appalled by the child abuse scandals that have so tainted my church. At a much higher level, the Holy Father clearly is too. Yet this woman presided over scandal of a gross sort and was made minister for children ; the history of 'care homes' in these islands is littered with sad tales of abuse; and I have seen scarce little coverage in these islands of what the UN's troops have done in its name.

In opposition to all of this, and 'with the best interests of children' at heart, social workers have been found multiply culpable by inquiries like this. They have launched themselves under cover of secrecy into eighteenth century behaviours little short of kidnapping as detailed multiply here.

Frankly, the behaviour of employees within the social work industry time and again reminds me of the Mortara scandal, or the fevered imaginings of Maria Monk. I suppose that what this all shows is that any institution will fail if it is convinced of its own perfection within a corrupted state and allowed to act secretly.

Today, the terrorism legislation also seems to be being used to separate parents from disabled children, and to police the quality of rubbish in domestic trash cans.

Something is deeply wrong here. I will not take a stand about the family courts--not that it matters, because I, like most subjects in this country, am irrelevant to the laws of the country and the conduct of politics--until I've read and familiarised myself with the law books. I have the time to do it this summer. But if I were asked initially, I'd say that I want for them to be as open as the other courts, to act under formal rules of evidence, and to be able to rely exclusively on social work hearsay and post-hoc rationalisations.

This morning, I look at the story of one man with knowledge allegedly breaking the law to enter San Francisco's computer systems to view evidence, whilst here I can see the stories of the law being abused and evidence invented to achieve 'social work' purposes and I wonder at the craziness of the world.

Here is a beautiful video encapsulating why even the Devil should be given benefit of the law for our own safety's sake, from Bolt's Man for All Seasons.