Lies, surveillance and the arrest of Damian Green

Chris Williams of The Register certainly has been working hard, and this in a week that's absolutely stuffed with stories relating to Phorm's violation of internet privacy!  Today, he reports (Tory 'terror' affair shows danger of ubiquitous surveillance) on the circumstances surrounding the arrest a few months ago of Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green:

The "national security" justification offered by Jacqui Smith for the warrantless counter-terror police raid on a fellow member of Parliament's offices was trumped up by officials embarrassed by a series of leaks, we've now learned. The information about immigration failures fed to the Tories was politically damaging to the Labour government, but arguably in the public interest, and certainly no threat to national security.

The Committee concluded: "There is a clear mismatch between Sir David's [Sir David Normington, the most senior civil servant in the Home Office] description of the sort of material that he suspected had been leaked from the Home Office and the Cabinet Office's letter to the police stating "there has been considerable damage to national security already as a result of some of these leaks".

Williams concludes