Lionel Murphy, 1983

In late 1991 I was speaking to a friend called Jane on the phone when a crossed line cut in and I found, to my surprise, that it was another friend, Arthur Murray. Arthur is an Aboriginal activist whose son was killed in police custody, and who was then facing a charge of injuring a police officer. The four way conversation then went something like this:

All of which goes to show, I suppose, that whoever's bugging your phone probably isn't sharing your sense of humour! Spying is a grubby business though, and one that has serious implications, as the late Lionel Murphy noted.

The political power of secret information is not widely recognised in Australia. Armed with sufficient gossip, half-truth and 'expert' opinion, persons who are the subject of political surveillance can be effectively barred from employment and access to government, as well as being defamed and set up for criminal prosecution with the implicit assurance that the "right" persons are being done over. Information which, if open to public scrutiny and testing, would in many cases prove to be outrageously inaccurate and unreliable, is used within state bureaucracies for these sorts of assurances.

Importantly, also, this information is reserved for the exclusive use of state bureaucracies, almost never being put at the disposal of the public, even when such information as there is may be of most use to the people targeted. I say this from some experience.

Spies are the cheapest, most widely used and most unreliable source of surveillance information. They are used widely by ASIO and the state's police special branches against mostly community, trade union, left-wing and migrant groups.

The NSW special branch in the late 1970s was directed to monitor "subversive and extremist activities", but also "demonstrations and protests" and "factions within the ethnic communities". They were also to provide security escorts and pass on information to ASIO. Consisting of 22 police officers as well as clerical and secretarial staff, the NSW branch was the biggest in the country, and divided its spying into three areas: communists and "revolutionary socialist" groups; the "radical left" including revolutionary and "terrorist" groups; and a strange third grouping of ethnic communities, extreme right-wing groups, university organisations and trade unions.

In practice this meant that, by 1978, the branch held over 20,000 "current" cards, which were mostly on individuals, and 3,500 dossiers - opened when a subject's card file became too extensive. In addition there were more than 50,000 "inactive" cards, which were said to be in the process of being culled. This meant that special branch in 1978 held some record of about one person in every hundred, in the state of NSW.

The information held was mostly useless and often inaccurate. Of all the notations in my fairly extensive dossier, from 1976 to 1984, nothing collected by the special branch was ever of any value to anyone. The bulk of the entries dealt with my attendance at demonstrations, Ananda Marga functions, travel overseas, writings and various jail movements and activities. One surprising feature was the absence of any reference to the special branch spy and agent provocateur Richard Seary, or his story against me and two others, in 1978; this was despite many references to circumstances surrounding the 1978-85 court case.

The errors were rather striking. My address was wrong. More than one false identification was included. And special branch repeated the 1977 Commonwealth Police claim that I had a "criminal record", after I'd been acquitted of a 1976 "obstruction" charge in Canberra.

In 1984 I received an edited version of my dossier, but I later also received the unedited version, and so was able to compare the two versions. The most remarkable thing was that there appeared to be no real difference: it was just gossip and useless trivia on both sides of the censor's lines. For example, on occasions, names of police informants and entries showing that documents had been stolen by special branch from private premises were left in, while entries edited out included such inoffensive things as my position in Ananda Marga, the fact that I had issued a press release, and the fact that I was mentioned in a margii magazine. In Paul Alister's dossier one entry that was specifically edited out referred to a newsclipping which mentioned his arrest in a demonstration.

Many entries after my June 1978 arrest concerned activities to expose the police habit of fabricating confessions: 'verbals'. These entries referred to "alleged police verbals" and even a "poem written by Tim ANDERSON entitled 'police verbal blues'", taken from a house in Bondi. Two of the three special branch officers making these entries were themselves responsible for the fabricated 'confessions' produced against me in 1978-79.

Richard Seary was a NSW special branch spy who infiltrated the Ananda Marga group in 1978 and set up myself, Ross Dunn and Paul Alister over a fictional conspiracy. At the 1984-85 inquiry into our wrongful convictions, barrister Michael Adams compared Seary to Titus Oates, the famous English perjurer, quoting from the London Dictionary of National Biography:

I mentioned in the chapter on Ananda Marga that Seary was given to making outrageous general claims about the margiis: for instance, that every single margii (but one) in Sydney had advocated the overthrow of the federal and state governments. This carried on into detailed allegations, the most well documented of which (other than his "Cameron conspiracy" story) was the Canberra flagpole story. This was a classic example of what barrister Bill Hosking was to colourfully term Seary's capacity to turn "an acorn of truth into an oak tree of falsehood". It reminded me of a game played in the boy scouts, where a phrase would be whispered in someone's ear, and passed through a ring of people: the aim being to see how distorted the message came out at the other end.

Seary reported to his special branch handler, Detective John Krawczyk, in taped interviews, usually conducted in a dark-curtained, special branch kombi-van; or at the back of an inner-city pub. He said that Ross Dunn wanted information on lock picking, as he wanted to pick a "large chrome lock" in Canberra. Ross wanted to pull down the Australian flag and put up a margii flag on capital hill, as a protest at the cost of the new parliament house (in 1978 reported as $150 million, it eventually cost more than $1 billion). This involved opening a small locked door to an electrical pulley system on the flagpole. It was a very large pole. However by the time Seary told the story to Krawczyk this relatively harmless publicity stunt had become the following paramilitary plot:

The flagpole was right in the middle of capital hill, the site of the new government house, with avenues leading up to it. However NSW special branch passed on Seary's story to the ACT special branch, which concluded that the "target" must be the Qantas building, as this was the only one with round chrome locks visible from capital hill; and it also housed the Deputy Crown Solicitor's offices, with exhibits in a court case involving an Ananda Marga member. Seary's plot seemed to be confirmed.

Three days later, on the day of the Yagoona arrests, Ross Dunn had another conversation with Seary and repeated the rather more mundane purpose of the exercise. Seary reported this to Krawczyk, but it was so at odds with what he had first reported that they refused to believe what they were being told. They fell into a confusion based on their mutual desire to find deep political conspiracies, the problem of Seary's original twisted story, and his desire to impress Krawczyk:

In the same tape Krawczyk suggested to Seary that he refine his lock picking tools a little:

And later, Seary told Krawczyk that I had arranged a code for phone communications with him, as he was getting some phone numbers and addresses for me. In fact it was Seary who made and wrote out this code and, while keeping up the pretence with Krawczyk, he lets this slip in the middle of their conversation:

Krawczyk encouraged Seary to steal things from the margii premises, and to collect things thrown in the garbage, as the Seary tapes revealed:

Photos stolen from margii premises also later turned up in the special branch collection at the 1984-85 inquiry.

Some people have asked whether Seary gave any indications of being a spy; the answer is, in retrospect, many. The problem is, if you're not looking for these indications, you don't see them. Seary often boasted of devious skills, such as lock-picking; which is why Ross Dunn approached him about the flag-pole lock. As a provocateur, the most dangerous type of spy, Seary clearly wanted to attract people to him who might become implicated in some sort of illegal activity. He went out postering one night with some margiis, during which one member of the group did some graffiti-ing. Seary had informed police about the expedition, and the graffiti artist was arrested; Seary then helped bail him out.

The day before the Yagoona arrests, and in the middle of the "flag-pole plot" planning, Ross Dunn rang up Seary at his home. His landlady answered and asked: "Is this the police?"; "No" Ross answered, "Why?"; "Oh they're always coming around looking for him", she responded.

Seary was not the only Special Branch spy in Ananda Marga in Sydney in the late 1970s. Two of his former friends, Doc Jerome and "Red", who later gave evidence against him at the 1984-85 inquiry, were briefly also paid informants. In 1978 they and Seary were paid around $30 a meeting to attend and report back to police officers who had no special training in political analysis, but who wanted to collect information about any members of their target group and to implicate them in possibly illegal activity. This included using their spies to set up provocative incidents.

For instance, in 1978 Doc Jerome was also sent to spy on a small Trotskyist group, the Socialist Labour League, in the hope that he would implicate the group in some violence against members who wished to leave. Fearing that he himself was being set up to be assaulted, so that special branch police could make an arrest, Doc Jerome lasted only one meeting. He said he didn't want to be used as a punching bag for the police. But after this refusal, he said, he received a "veiled threat" from Krawczyk, and police raided his house for drugs. This scared him and he left Sydney.

These three were not the only special branch informers in Ananda Marga.

Special Branch payments records for 1979 produced at the 1984 inquiry showed at least three more: a woman code-named "Elizabeth Walker" (or C.R. 45), who provided information on Ananda Marga and possibly other groups, receiving a number of payments of up to $50 in July through to September 1979. Her 'handler' was Constable Alan Henderson, with payments authorised by Special Branch head John Perrin. "Mr Paul" and "Bruiyan" were code-names for informers reporting, along with Seary, to Detective John Krawczyk, and receiving small payments in late 1979. "Bruiyan" attended a margii camp in the Combyne-Wingham area in this period.

In September 1979, Peter Tuor, a university graduate looking for work was introduced to John Krawczyk and Colin Helson, Richard Seary's handlers from Special Branch. They asked him to infiltrate the margiis, telling him that in he joined:

He said he'd prefer a desk job in intelligence, and refused the offer.

It seems that most of the informers were people who associated with the group for a few months, were slightly involved and were paid a fee for each meeting they attended.

In mid 1979, after the prosecution had failed to secure a conviction in the first Yagoona trial, NSW special branch made a concerted effort to have Ananda Marga declared an "illegal organisation" under the Commonwealth Crimes Act. This had not happened to Ananda Marga anywhere except in India during the 1976-77 "state of emergency", and no group in Australia had been banned since the Industrial Workers of the World (the "Wobblies") during the First World War. An attempt to ban the Communist Party of Australia had been defeated in the 1950s.

The rationale for this draconian attempt at suppression was largely a small, obscure 1977 booklet 'Recipe for Revolution'. This was said to be subversive and to encourage terrorist violence. The editing of the booklet, special branch announced triumphantly in April 1979, had been linked to a senior margii figure in Australia. In fact the booklet, for what it was worth, discussed a theory of revolution and revolutionary violence. In support of their argument for a ban, special branch officers Krawczyk, Helson, Henderson and Baxter also referred to questions I'd been asked in the first Yagoona trial:

In fact, I said I'd only read parts of it. It was a puerile but harmless booklet, put out by a few margiis, but not as an official publication. Nevertheless, if the booklet couldn't be banned, special branch suggested, perhaps the group could?

The special branch report was forwarded to ASIO and to the NSW Police Commissioner, who wrote to the Premier:

No such move was taken, but it is perhaps significant that in 1992, when the state Drug Enforcement Agency raided the University of Technology Student Association's offices, following the publication of an orientation booklet which included a satirical review of illegal drugs, the officer in charge was Senior Sergeant John Krawczyk. The booklet was banned and criminal charges were mooted against the publishers of the booklet, for supposedly "aiding and abetting drug use".

With greater financial resources, ASIO was of course able to sustain an even greater network than this. "Ron" was a middle-aged businessman who attended some of the margiis' boy scout-cum-orienteering type camps in the late 1970s and boasted about his owning some rifles. In 1989 he came to see prosecutor Mark Tedeschi and claimed, amongst other things, that while he had no specific information about the Hilton bombing, he had undertaken "terrorist training" overseas and suggested that I'd told him something in 1978 concerning the Yagoona case. He was unable to answer Tedeschi's questions to why he hadn't come to the 1984-85 inquiry into the Yagoona matter.

Unfortunately for him, ASIO had already disowned both Seary's Hilton and Yagoona stories, adding in 1978 that they had "no information that would either support or refute" Seary's Hilton story and that "we have no previous information of any involvement in violence on (Anderson's) part." "Ron" had apparently not told ASIO in 1978 what he told Tedeschi in 1989, and Tedeschi did not call him as a witness.

ASIO had released these documents in the early 1980s after Freedom of Information requests I'd made to various federal government departments. They could have claimed an exemption under the Act, but it seems they wanted to selectively release some documents to dissociate themselves from special branch's handling of Seary and the Yagoona case, and of their implication in the frame-up.

The spies didn't have things all their own way. With the proliferation of informers in the margiis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was inevitable that some person would make some more creative use of the spy-masters increasingly large bankroll. ASIO's budget had skyrocketed in this period, largely because of the political fallout from the Hilton bombing.

"Peter" was a young margii who had been approached by ASIO in the early 1980s to inform. He spoke to a margii monk about this and the monk told him to go ahead: take the money, report to them and then tell him (the monk) what ASIO wanted to know. David gave the money to Ananda Marga. This went on for a year or so.

While the ASIO "handlers" were fairly careful about not passing information back to Peter, they did let him know what they were interested in at different times. For instance, when a margii event of some sort was about to happen they'd ask many questions about certain people, travel plans and so on. In this way one or two of the senior margiis would be kept informed of ASIO's interests. The information Peter passed on to ASIO was common knowledge type stuff, and I believe he was sensitive enough not to exchange potentially embarrassing or intrusive gossip.

As innocent as it is in reality, this spectre of a double agent was the great fear of Justice Wood in the inquiry into the Yagoona case. His only real concern about special branch's handling of Seary was that he was so unreliable he may have turned on them. Never mind the damage he did to us.

Prisons security boss Ron Woodham was also busy spying in the early 1980s, not only for his own budding empire within Corrective Services, but for the NSW special branch. In mid-1980 a report of his turned up on Paul Alister's special branch file, to the effect that:

At about the same time Woodham and his Malabar Emergency Unit colleague Steve Tandy reported that Paul and I were on the Central Industrial Prison's prisoners Problems and Needs Committee (PNC), and handed over PNC documents to special branch.

The PNCs at this time were openly recognised and elected prisoners organisations, which negotiated jail conditions with the superintendents and the administration; however Woodham and his security colleagues maintained the practice of "shanghaiing" committee spokespeople, when it was thought conditions were tense. In November 1980 Paul and I were shanghaied to Goulburn and Parramatta jails, along with others thought to be organisers of the PNC. All organisation or dissent was seen as subversive.

Another entry in Paul Alister's special branch file was revealing in that it records that a letter he wrote to a Canberra journalist in 1981 was intercepted; curiously the report goes on to say:

This seems to have been not much more than an exercise in self-delusion. Apart from Paul's intercepted letter, my special branch file shows that even educational material I had returned to Deakin University, the year before, as well as some pamphlets sent into the prison to me and Ross Dunn, were being intercepted and scrutinised. Who were they trying to impress, recording this sort of obviously false denial in a file they believed no-one (other than their colleagues) would read?

At the ICAC hearings into prisoner informers in November 1991 I asked Woodham about this type of spying, and he admitted that a lot of prison mail is intercepted:

Woodham also claimed that I'd "smuggled" printing out of Parramatta Gaol, where I'd worked in the print shop for several years in the early 1980s.

In fact, I'd never had anything printed there, but had done some typesetting for outside documents. In particular, I'd written and typeset the text for several pamphlets and one booklet on police verbal.

Woodham and others in the prisons bureaucracy were sensitive about my "smuggling" letters because some of those letters had caused them embarrassment. The department is acutely embarrassed by exposure, and goes to great lengths to censor prisoners comments about the prison system, and to restrict access to the jails to those they feel will present the best view.

In late 1983 I wrote an article about the first ten days at Parklea Prison (published in my book Inside Outlaws), which ended up one day on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. That same day I was called in before Superintendent Tony Cerenich, who said he agreed with "95%" of the article, and only really objected to the introductory sentence saying that the letter had been "smuggled" out of Parklea. This was a brief introductory comment by the Sydney Morning Herald editors. Cerenich said there was "no need" for that sort of comment, as prisoners could freely send sealed mail out of the prison. Shortly after this I heard that the Deputy Superintendent was grilling some of the staff, accusing one or other of them of "smuggling" the letter out. For the record, I sent one copy of the article out by mail and one by "courier". But this represents pretty well the sort of facade of openness and covert repression still prevalent in the Corrective Services Department, and the sort of cat and mouse games prisoners end up playing, simply to communicate.

In early 1991 I was banned from the Assessment Prison education section's word processors, because it was believed that I'd typed up and helped organise a group letter of complaint to the Ombudsman about the conditions in that jail; this had led to an embarrassing inspection of conditions in the Assessment Prison. The real reason for banning me from the word processors was never openly given, but it could be justified privately by the expression used above by Woodham: "good order and discipline".

"Good order and discipline of the jail" is a rubbery paralegal concept which has provided cover for a great deal of arbitrary harassment and interference with prisoners' lives, over the years. Acting on information from the many prisoner informers in the "main" jail (as opposed to the known informers in the protection areas), prisoners are often acted against on "suspicion", and punished by indefinite segregation (including solitary confinement) or sudden "shanghais" (transfers) to other jails. This gives the spy in jail a greater direct power than would normally be the case outside, because of the lack of "due process" available to their prisoner targets. On the basis of a jail spy's allegation alone, without any charge or testing of the information, other prisoners often are locked in segregation for many months. The allegation may relate to a planned escape, a planned assault or some other "conspired" offence.

I was shanghaied from Long Bay's Reception Prison to Parramatta Gaol in late 1980, after a lengthy lock-up during a prison officers strike, along with several others who'd been on the jail's prisoners committee. However the document that justified these transfers, to which I later gained access, named several prisoner informers and claimed that the persons shanghaied had been part of a conspiracy to "start a major fire" at the Reception Prison. In fact the jail authorities were concerned to stop any organisation of a counter-strike at this time. This "fire" story carried some superficial credibility, as there had been several minor fires in the reception prison at that time during the lock up; but more importantly the story was a convenient excuse to disperse those associated with the prisoners committee. In this way prisoners' organisations have traditionally been smashed, with the help of spies.

Prison "intelligence" also functions as all covert information: to reinforce the beliefs and prejudices of those that have access to it. Paul Alister's file includes the following comments, from his time at Goulburn Gaol:

This was no doubt why Paul was an elected representative on two prisoners' committees.

The intrusion and gossip of spies might be thought harmless voyeurism until you look at the cases where it has caused actual damage, and cost a great deal. The tradition of secrecy and unaccountability amongst spies and police has only grown through the support it's gained from politicians and judges who, while ultimately responsible for crimes of secrecy, are never held accountable.

I and my two friends Paul Alister and Ross Dunn spent seven years in jail until an inquiry led to our pardons and release. That inquiry was held because of suppressed special branch tapes which came to light some years down the track. The tapes had been produced on subpoena at our first trial (where the jury couldn't agree) in early 1979 but the trial judge, Justice John Nagle, upheld a claim by a crown solicitor (who hadn't heard the tapes) to have them suppressed. Nagle said:

How could Nagle possibly have read and understood the 160 pages of transcripts in his lunch hour? In 1984 the Solicitor General, Mary Gaudron, and a senior crown prosecutor, Malcolm McGregor, said that the same material:

A major reason the inquiry judge found for us, and the pardons were ordered, was the significance of material contained in these tapes. I've summarised this is the chapter on "the Yagoona case". The suppression of the tapes was a process involving: special branch police wanting the same secrecy privileges as ASIO, a legal bureaucrat mindlessly supporting the police claim and a judge mindlessly supporting the tradition of state secrecy. In the end, no one was really held responsible for this debacle, because following Nagle's assurance, our lawyers had not subpoenaed the tape at the second trial. Based on this technical distinction, Justice James Wood at the Yagoona case inquiry, while finding that the tapes were very important, also found that there had not been a miscarriage in the trial process. No-one was to blame.

Several other examples of the dangerous implications of state secrecy can be found in selective use of special branch files.

At the 1984 Inquiry into the Yagoona case, 28 proof sheets were produced of Special Branch covert photography of margiis in late 1977 and 1978. Federal Police covert photos were also produced. The Special Branch photos contained at least 394 photographs with 63 identifiable persons in them. While none of these photos were used in criminal proceedings, some of them would have helped discount two police Hilton bomb theories that otherwise kept their currency for many years. But the photos were not created for use in anyone's defence.

In February 1978, special branch officer Krawczyk developed a Hilton bomb theory in which some significance was placed on my apparently carrying a shoulder-bag at a demonstration outside the Hilton hotel, but allegedly not carrying the bag at a later demonstration at Sydney airport. Krawczyk's statement to this effect was even used my 1990 Hilton bomb trial. The implication was that the bag may have contained a bomb, which may have been left behind in the bin. However special branch photos also showed me in Newtown several days after the Hilton bombing, carrying the same shoulder-bag.

These series of photos also strongly suggested the absence of Paul Alister from Sydney in the February period: a fact which police were soon to privately accept, despite their public support for the Seary story, implicating Paul in the Hilton bombing.

At the Hilton bombing inquest in 1982, a decision was taken by Coroner Norman Walsh and counsel assisting Roger Court, then the Crown Advocate, to only reveal as many of the police Hilton bomb running sheets as they considered relevant. This decision to withhold the police records was criticised by the barrister for the Police Association, Barry Hall, who warned of the danger of the inquest being regarded as a "cover-up". In fact, at the 1984 Yagoona inquiry, a fuller disclosure of these records showed two prior inconsistent statements from two important witnesses at the inquest: Manfred Von Gries and Patricia Hill. I've described their stories in the chapter titled "The Multiple Choice Bombing". The evidence of these two was already substantially inconsistent and was discredited at the inquest; but the additional statements, suppressed at the inquest and only revealed two years later, ensured that they were never used as witnesses at my 1990 trial.

Finally on this point, an ASIO phone tap which disassociated me from Evan Pederick's Hilton bomb story was not disclosed to me, once I had been charged. I quote from this phone tap in my chapter on the trial. There followed a process of subpoenaing documents, where my lawyers guessed what might be of relevance in the ASIO files. Had it not been for the High Court judgement in the Yagoona case (we lost the appeal, but one precedent from it was that ASIO files were at least theoretically accessible in a serious criminal trial), this document would most probably never have been disclosed. After some general subpoenas, searching for any evidence of Pederick's location in Sydney, my lawyers were finally tipped off to its existence by prosecutor Mark Tedeschi. He saw that we would eventually find it, so tipped us off. He had apparently been shown the phone tap by ASIO some time before; indicating that ASIO has a relationship with lawyers representing the state which does not extend to lawyers representing the state's citizens.

For people working in community-based organisations, trade unions or left-wing groups, spies really have to be accepted as an unpleasant fact of life. Unpleasant because of the betrayal of trust involved in a fellow worker taking money from hostile police or ASIO agents, for reporting conversations, prying and stealing documents. Unpleasant also because spies can sometimes contribute to fear and suspicion in the community groups.

The argument put by political police to the informers runs along these lines: if they've got nothing to hide, they've got nothing to fear. As a target of spies over many years, I can assure the reader that this is rubbish. Spies are often unpleasant and can sometimes be dangerous; and as I attempted to describe above, the fruits of spies' labours are only made available to interests hostile to the spies' targets.

The best tactic, however, seems to be to leave the spies where they are: better the spies you know than the ones you don't. This of course supposes you know at least some of the spies, not always a sure thing, by any means. In some cases you may have only a suspicion, in other cases you may be only 70% sure. While it's not pleasant to be spied on, it's also unpleasant and unfair to wrongly accuse or disadvantage someone on the basis of suspicion. This is another reason to tolerate and leave spies to their grubby business.

But it is useful to know what to look for. Most informers are amateurs who spy for political police for a small fee, perhaps only $50 per meeting. They most often do not penetrate very "deeply" into a target organisation, for obvious reasons: lack of motivation, lack of deep affinity with the group. While some may spy on a group for several years, most associate with the group for just a few months. Some of the more dangerous ones, in my experience, talk up their "subversive" or fringe-criminal skills, in an effort to impress or attract and gain the confidence of adventurists within the target group. These can also be provocateurs: people who try to incite a criminal act, so as to then "solve" it. Some will also make blatantly intrusive moves in an attempt to gain peoples' confidence rapidly: they'll be unusually ingratiating and inexplicably familiar. And any worthwhile spy will be constantly seeking access to written records of the group. CEFTA had several of its files stolen, presumably by informers. These included a folder of bank statements and a file on a police officer.

Some spies are blatantly obnoxious interferers, while some others move from group to group, possibly in search of a living wage from their payment-per-meeting.

Sometimes police themselves do the spying. On one occasion two police called Rochester and Gibbs, later described as "undercover officers" in a DPP memo, came to the CEFTA office seeking CEFTA material. They claimed to be students from Wollongong University wanting to help the campaign, and took a quantity of publicly available newsletters, books and posters. Attempts were then made to (a) impose censorship of me as a condition of bail, (b) to lay some charge against the publishers of the newsletter, and (c) to lay a charge of criminal defamation against some person for what was revealed about police officers in the newsletters. These attempts made use of the material the two police had obtained; they all failed.

In the Sydney anti-apartheid movement in the mid-1980s, women members were repeatedly approached by one special branch officer, who apparently believed he was particularly charming. He hoped to make them informers, and who knows what else; but he became more notorious than successful.

Electronic spying, for instance through phone taps or bugs, is becoming cheaper and more common these days. Many lawyers use a rule of thumb that they don't reveal confidential information on the phone; this makes good sense, and is also a rule I follow. However I find it impossible to avoid using the phone for communications about a whole range of political and legal matters, as well as personal conversations. No doubt phone tapping will remain popular.

But when targeting community groups the old-fashioned spy or informer is still the simplest, easiest and cheapest form of "intelligence" gathering around. The body of gossip, slander and half-truth obtained in this way, often laughingly termed "intelligence", is then used to confirm to the ranks of those with privileged access that which they always knew: that they alone have the full picture and they alone can be trusted to control the subversive elements that constantly threaten society as we know it.