Informers

In the 1970s, the leader of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and future Prime Minister of Australia, Robert J. Hawke, was an informer of the United States of America. Using diplomatic cables from official archives, this article shows that Hawke gifted information about the Australian Government, the Australian Labor Party and the labour movement, fueling the intelligence gathering efforts of the foreign power. In turn, the relationship influenced the development of Australian policy, including the abandonment of Keynesianism and embrace of neoliberalism. His discreet actions – discussed in detail for the first time – were not unusual among elites in the post-war period. However, he was especially entrenched in the practice. Many people in politics, the bureaucracy and news media were similarly providing useful information. This paper will also show through historiography and memoir that the act of informing by elites began in the 1940s, when the United States became Australia’s key strategic ally.

Spanish Abstract: En su teoría sobre la interacción estratégica, Erving Goffman muestra cómo las dinámicas de control de la información y de la infiltración de informantes en las líneas enemigas no son únicamente una cuestión de espionaje internacional o de servicios secretos. La vida cotidiana, tal como nos la desvela el análisis de Goffman, es una especie de guerra fría, y nuestras parejas, familiares, amigos y allegados son objeto de nuestra infiltración — como nosotros los somos de la suya. La autoinfiltración, el espionaje a uno mismo, es la culminación lógica y corolario de esta perspectiva sobre la interacción estratégica. Extraemos asimismo algunos aspectos útiles para la teorización del dominio perspectivístico en una narratología cognitiva.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

English Abstract: Goffman's theory of strategic interaction shows how the dynamics of information control and the infiltration of informants behind the enemy lines are not solely a matter of international espionage or secret services. Everyday life, as unveiled by Goffman's analysis, is akin to cold war, and our partners in a couple, our next of kin, friends and neighbours are the object of our infiltration — as we are, likewise, of theirs. Self-infiltration, espionage on oneself, is the logical culmination and corollary of this perspective on strategic interaction. Some aspects which may be useful for the theorization of topsight and perspectival dominion within a cognitivist narratology are also emphasized.

This article challenges the adequacy of the existing legal and regulatory framework governing informant recruitment and coercion practices to protect fundamental rights, informed by the Muslim-American experience. It looks at the growing law enforcement practice of recruiting informants among Muslim-American communities for intelligence gathering purposes. Although the coercion of law-abiding individuals to provide information to federal law enforcement agencies for intelligence gathering purposes implicates significant rights, it is left unregulated. Existing, albeit limited, restraints on the government agents’ ability to coerce individuals to provide information either assume a criminal context, or are driven by historical concerns over FBI corruption. As the U.S. government engages in widespread surveillance of Muslim-American communities, it relies heavily on recruiting members of those communities as informants. These individuals are targeted for their community ties, or their religious or linguistic knowledge — and not because of any nexus they might have to criminal activity. This has led FBI agents to search for coercive levers outside of the criminal process and that have far fewer procedural protections — namely, immigration and watch-listing authorities. Thus, existing protections that have evolved to prevent civil rights violations in the criminal informant context — limited as those protections may be — do not apply. In light of these expanding authorities and the significant rights at stake, this article makes several proposals that would regulate the recruitment of intelligence informants.

Based on research in the archives of the Soviet penal camp system, this article addresses the phenomenon of corruption among officials of the Gulag in the period between 1945 and 1953. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversaw the camp system, treated corruption as a harmful and dangerous phenomenon that was unacceptably pervasive. The article investigates the varieties and frequency of corrupt activities among camp officials, including bribery, theft of state property, participation in illegal markets and speculation, and embezzlement. Gulag authorities’ anti-corruption efforts included inspections, audits, and a large network of prisoner–informants. These anti-corruption campaigns were largely ineffective. The article concludes that corruption existed in significant quantities inside the camp system, and that the forms it took were largely the same as those pervasive in the wider Soviet society.

This article addresses whether there are sufficient constraints on legal professionals acting as police informants, following the controversial ‘Lawyer X’ case. It examines key observations of the High Court of Australia in AB v CD; EF v CD [2018] HCA 58 relating to lawyers’ and barristers’ duties to their clients and to the court. It argues that existing professional rules and common law duties are insufficient to prevent legal advocates from acting as human sources. The author also suggests implications arising from the decision for the application of public interest immunity to human sources.

Recently, attention has been given to the question as to whether children should be used as covert human intelligence sources (CHIS), aka informers. Being a CHIS is a risky endeavour, particularly when the person is deployed against serious crime, for example, gang violence. Questions arise over the propriety of using adolescents as CHIS, and whether the regulation of covert sources serves to minimise the risk to them. This article considers the regulatory environment. It concludes that the use of juveniles as CHIS can be justified, but that additional safeguards must be put in place to ensure their safety.

As has been well documented, the printed word was an essential vehicle for the transmission of reformed theology, and one that has left a tangible record for historians to explore. Yet as contemporaries well recognized, books were only a part of the process. It was the spoken word – and especially preaching – that created the demand for printed works. Sermons were the plough that prepared the ground for Lutheran literature to flourish. In order to better understand the relationship between oral sermons and the spread of protestant ideas, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy draws upon the records of the Roman Inquisition to see how that institution confronted the challenges of reform on the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth century. At the heart of its subject matter is the increasingly sophisticated rhetorical skill of heterodox preachers at the time, who achieved their ends by silence and omission rather than positive affirmations of Lutheran tenets. All interested in the history of Renaissance and in the History of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. All scholars of Religious History and History of the Church. Anyone concerned with the history of orality and the history of the Inquisition. READERSHIP: For more information see

The communist secret police services of Central and Eastern Europe kept detailed records not only of their victims but also of the vast networks of informants and collaborators upon whom their totalitarian systems depended. These records, now open to the public in many former Eastern Bloc countries, reflect a textually mediated reality that has defined and shaped the lives of former victims and informers, creating a tension between official records and personal memories. Exploring this tension between a textually and technically mediated past and the subject/victim's reclaiming and retrospective interpretation of that past in biography is the goal of this volume. While victims' secret police files have often been examined as a type of unauthorized archival life writing, the contributors to this volume are among the first to analyze the fragmentary and sometimes remedial nature of these biographies and to examine the subject/victims' rewriting and remediation of them in v...

El emergente contexto web 2.0 se caracteriza, entre otras circunstancias, por el creciente peso específico de los internautas quienes, de meros consumidores de contenidos se han erigido adicionalmente en productores de los mismos, dando lugar a la noción de prosumidores. Las redes sociales constituyen un entorno particularmente propicio para el surgimiento de nue- vas modalidades comunicativas. Este artículo centra su atención en el fenómeno de los informers, un tipo de plataformas anónimas surgidas a comienzos de 2013 en España e inicialmente sustentadas por la red social Facebook. Se examinan sus orígenes y causas explicativas, así como las potenciales responsabilidades jurídicas que alcanzan tanto a los administrado- res de las webs como a los generadores de contenidos de las mismas o a quienes participan en ellas a través del botón Me gusta o con sus comentarios adicionales, teniendo en consideración la actual legislación sobre el tema a escala nacional e internacional.
Palabras clave
Informer, Web 2.0, Prosumidor, Responsabilidad legal, Facebook, Internet social, Redes sociales, Ley orgánica de protección de datos (1999), Código penal (1995).

Tarkastelen tässä artikkelissa ilmiantamista sosiaalisena käytäntönä Suomen suuriruhtinaskunnassa vuosina 1899-1917. Kohdistan huomion ilmiantajiksi ryhtyneiden kansalaisten vuorovaikutukseen venäläisen virkavallan kanssa sekä tämän vuorovaikutuksen herättämiin reaktioihin julkisuudessa ja yleisemmin yhteiskunnassa. Esitän, että venäläisviranomaiset ja etenkin santarmihallinto osoittivat huomattavaa vastaanottavaisuutta suomalaisten tekemille ilmiannoille Nikolai Bobrikovin kenraalikuvernöörikaudesta lähtien. Santarmit käyttivät ilmiantoja tukemaan tiettyihin kansalaisiin kohdistuvia epäilyksiään ja varsinkin 1910-luvulla myös rekrytoivat ilmiantajia rahapalkkioin vakituisempiin palvelussuhteisiin. Ilmiantajille itselleen informaation välittäminen venäläisviranomaisille saattoi olla paitsi lisätulojen lähde myös väline sosiaalisen aseman vahvistamiseen ja kiusantekoon henkilökohtaisille vihamiehille. Pohdin myös viranomaisten harjoittaman painostuksen ja kiristyksen roolia ilmiantajaksi ryhtymisessä.

The communist secret police services of Central and Eastern Europe kept detailed records not only of their victims but also of the vast networks of informants and collaborators upon whom their totalitarian systems depended. These records, now open to the public in many former Eastern Bloc countries, reflect a textually mediated reality that has defined and shaped the lives of former victims and informers, creating a tension between official records and personal memories. Exploring this tension between a textually and technically mediated past and the subject/victim's reclaiming and retrospective interpretation of that past in biography is the goal of this volume. While victims' secret police files have often been examined as a type of unauthorized archival life writing, the contributors to this volume are among the first to analyze the fragmentary and sometimes remedial nature of these biographies and to examine the subject/victims' rewriting and remediation of them in v...