From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 19:43:06 +0800
To: hallam@ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: SPL -- Suspicious Persons List
Message-ID: <199609170721.AAA22857@dfw-ix12.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 11:19 AM 9/16/96 -0400, you wrote:
>The Tories put an exclusion into the act deliberately to cover the
>Ecconomic League. Only record which are kept on computer are covered.
>The Ecconomic League deliberately keeps all its records on paper to
>avoid the act.
....
>This is the same government which used MI5 to monitor the activities of 
>the peace movement and which used 5000 crack troops to evict 50 elderly
>women from land they wanted to turn into a missile base. Whether you
>agree or disagree with the policies the methods sound very much like those
>of Hoover at the FBI with a strong dose of Nixon thrown in.

Yeah.  The Los Angeles Police Department, and to some extent many
police departments that once had "Red Squads" chasing "Communists",
doesn't have any records of who's a commie and who's been caught in 
bed with whom or what or caught stealing what from whom,
and very few records of who's been shoving what else up their nose.
However, there are a number of cops who have file cabinets in
their garages at home, or who these days have personal computers,
often with BBSs.  And they talk to their friends, and maybe share
the material in their file cabinets and PCs.  None of the City's business.

I've met four gentlemen from the Philadelphia Red Squad - I went out
and offered them coffee after they'd spent the day lurking in a car
outside an anarchist convention I was at a couple years back.
They'd brought their own, and were set for the next couple hours :-)

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> 	
# You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto