For some reason, the thought popped into my mind that we don't need vigilantes, What we need is to be vigilance to protect our-and other's human rights.

This article is related to that thought:

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/ccjs/security-cjm-2007.html

"Security and Surveillance - calls for vigilance
Embargo: 00.01 hours, Tuesday 24th July 2007

Leading academics and practitioners raise a number of concerns about the extension of surveillance and security measures in the latest edition of Criminal Justice Matters, the quarterly magazine of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College, London.

The information commissioner, Richard Thomas, says 'we need to be more discriminating, more focused as to the purposes, the benefits, the raison d'etre for every piece of surveillance, whether its in the street or in shopping centres, cameras in stations and so on, before its actually deployed'. He says the 'jury is still out' on the role of CCTV cameras in the prevention of crime and also calls for the 'very tightest control framework' for techniques that attempt to predict the criminals of the future.

Professor David Lyon of Queen's University Ontario, one of the world's leading academics in the study of surveillance, warns that 'fear and suspicion' are being reinforced by new surveillance technologies and calls for 'alternatives that promote trust, inclusion, recognition and respect'.

Reporting on a study of children and young people's views of the government's new information sharing database 'ContactPoint' which will contain records of every child, researchers Zoe Hilton and Chris Mills highlight how concerns about the quality of data and how it might be used. The study concludes that the government needs to 'devise information sharing initiatives which will win the support of children and young people'.

Dr Basia Spalek of the University of Birmingham and Bob Lambert examine Muslim communities under surveillance arguing that anti-terrorism policies and increased police activity have alienated Muslims and failed to improve national security. They call for 'a more enlightened counter-terrorism policy that empowers all sections of Muslim communities, rather than one that empowers one section against another'.

Professor Mike Nellis of the University of Strathclyde, a leading expert on electronic monitoring assesses the effect of satellite technology on the supervision of offenders. He highlights its limitations noting that electronic monitoring 'merely facilitates data gathering about someone rather than knowledge of someone, and it entails a dyadic link between a single authority and a subject, rather than multiple links within a network'.

Professor Richard Ericson of the University of Toronto reviews the changing face of the law relating to security and surveillance. He concludes that 'when law and other democratic institutions are most threatened by seemingly intractable problems, the response is to devise new forms of counter-law that further threaten those institutions ... Security trumps justice, and insecurity prove itself'."

-snip-

I get the impression that Professor Ericson was not saying that "Security trumping justice, and insecurity proving itself" is an a condition or an outcome that he supported. Rather he was warning us about this.

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Btw: According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigilante a "vigilante is a person or persons who ignore due process of law after a crime has been committed, instead enacting their own form of justice when they deem the response of the authorities to be insufficient."

This term actually doesn't fit the men in black who work for ICE [in the incident that is the focus of this thread, and probably other incidents} as 1} they weren't certain that a crime had been committed by all of those persons who they detained and treated so inhumanly and 2} these ICE officers were working as part of our USA government when they committed those heinous acts.

For shame!!!