It is difficult, if not impossible, to argue that laws written in the 1970s are adequate for today's intelligence challenges.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't deny that there are problems in the intelligence world, but I would argue that in the UK we try to uphold the highest standards in the world.
After an existence of nearly 20 years of almost innocuous desuetude, these laws are brought forth.
The hardest problems of all in law enforcement are those involving a conflict of law and local customs. History has recorded many occasions when the moral sense of a nation produced judicial decisions, such as the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which required difficult local adjustments.
Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.
Throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s, federal mandatory minimum laws were implemented that forced judges to deliver sentences far lengthier than they would have if allowed to use their own discretion. The result has been decades of damage, particularly to young people.
History is just littered with problems that were solved that were supposed to be impossible.
We shouldn't have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.
Nothing is more difficult than trying to correct history.
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
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