To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

Yes­ter­day's rev­e­la­tion in Par­lia­ment by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar that a state or­gan­i­sa­tion named the Se­cu­ri­ty In­tel­li­gence Agency (SIA) had been in­ter­cept­ing the tele­phone and elec­tron­ic mail com­mu­ni­ca­tions of pub­lic and pri­vate cit­i­zens of T&T be­tween March 2005 and Oc­to­ber 2010 would have shocked many peo­ple in this coun­try. The main is­sue for the coun­try is not the ex­is­tence of a shad­owy agency whose sole pur­pose was es­pi­onage or that the agency con­duct­ed ap­par­ent­ly ex­ten­sive wire-tap­ping of cit­i­zens of the coun­try–ex­tend­ing as far as the Pres­i­dent of the Re­pub­lic. It needs to be clear­ly stat­ed that es­pi­onage is, and has been for mil­len­nia, an im­por­tant part of the preser­va­tion of the State and is even more im­por­tant now in the post 9-11 era.

No coun­try that went through what T&T ex­pe­ri­enced in Ju­ly 1990 when the na­tion's Par­lia­ment, po­lice head­quar­ters and its then sole tele­vi­sion sta­tion came un­der at­tack from armed in­sur­rec­tion­ists should be squea­mish about the es­tab­lish­ment of a su­per-se­cret or­gan­i­sa­tion like the Se­cu­ri­ty In­tel­li­gence Agency. Even more so than the is­sue of the in­va­sion of pri­va­cy, the ex­treme­ly trou­bling rev­e­la­tion in the Prime Min­is­ter's ad­dress was the fact that this in­tel­li­gence-gath­er­ing agency op­er­at­ed for more than five years with­out a scin­til­la of le­gal sanc­tion or con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tion. The le­gal sanc­tion would have been nec­es­sary in the event that in­tel­li­gence gath­ered by the agency was need­ed by the State in bring­ing a case against some­one–as Ja­maica found out ear­li­er this year when a court there grant­ed an ex­tra­di­tion or­der that led to Dudus Coke be­ing brought to jus­tice in New York.

Not even for­mer US Pres­i­dent George W Bush would have un­leashed the fright­en­ing pow­ers of an in­tel­li­gence-gath­er­ing agency on the Amer­i­can peo­ple with­out the pro­tec­tion of the US Con­sti­tu­tion. The USA Pa­tri­ot Act, signed in­to law by Bush less than two months af­ter 9-11, made it much eas­i­er for in­tel­li­gence agen­cies in the US to search tele­phone, e-mail com­mu­ni­ca­tions, med­ical, fi­nan­cial, to the de­light of co­me­di­ans the world over, and li­brary records. Speak­ing at a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning made the point that the SIA was "not au­tho­rised to mon­i­tor any­body who is a law-abid­ing cit­i­zen" but was au­tho­rised to in­ves­ti­gate in­di­vid­u­als who might as­so­ciate with those on the agency's watch list. The point that seems to have com­plete­ly evad­ed Mr Man­ning is that any agency that is es­tab­lished with­out ref­er­ence to a bind­ing set of rules and reg­u­la­tions, penal­ties and pre­scrip­tions is a recipe for abuse. The ex­am­ple of this is the abuse that a mi­nor­i­ty of lo­cal po­lice­men have been ca­pa­ble of, and the fact that the lo­cal Po­lice Ser­vice is an en­ti­ty ful­ly en­shrined in the law and the Con­sti­tu­tion.

It bog­gles the imag­i­na­tion what might have been pos­si­ble in an or­gan­i­sa­tion re­plete with in­tel­li­gence-gath­er­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties but with­out the in­ter­nal pro­tec­tions avail­able in the Po­lice Ser­vice. The Prime Min­is­ter has said that the Gov­ern­ment in­tends to con­duct an au­dit in­to the coun­try's in­tel­li­gence-gath­er­ing in­sti­tu­tions. This is ap­pro­pri­ate and nec­es­sary. That such in­sti­tu­tions should fo­cus much more of their at­ten­tion on the task of col­lect­ing ev­i­dence of ter­ror­ism and crim­i­nal in­tel­li­gence–re­lat­ed to mur­ders, gang ac­tiv­i­ty, drug traf­fick­ing and kid­nap­ping–goes with­out say­ing. It is al­so ob­vi­ous that these agen­cies should on­ly pro­ceed with their work if they have been pro­vid­ed with the ap­pro­pri­ate le­gal and con­sti­tu­tion­al man­date and mech­a­nisms that would en­sure su­per­vi­sion and over­sight. What re­mains an unan­swered ques­tion is what has be­come of all of the in­tel­li­gence that the SIA has col­lect­ed and is there now a risk that the record­ings and tran­scripts col­lect­ed over the last five years may "leak" in­to the hands of un­de­sir­ables who may seek to use the in­for­ma­tion against pri­vate cit­i­zens.