Q – How does the Christian religion hope to respond to the problem posed by greater and greater company and government surveillance of phones now and formerly of computers – is there any rest for the just?

Well do I recall the eruption of drama surrounding the sudden disappearance of an NSA operative from the hallowed halls of the big NSA building in Virginia and his quick flight to a seedy downtown hotel in Hong Kong, buzzing secret phone calls urgent like to his missus and his agent celebre of the movement in Wikileaks, secreted away from Washington by his aide de camp Sarah Harrison who then kept him out of the clutches of the authorities, and then all but followed by FBI agents who arrived into Hong Kong on the next flight from Washington the very next day to begin searching the city with a view to a kill if they did not bring in an SRT or Snatch Rendition Team from the black ops side of the Pompeii CIA, only to disappear again the next morning until he ended up surprise surprise in Moscow Airport, seeking asylum from the Russian secret service – Sarah had done her job and she escorted him to Moscow. After a day or so of pondering and thinking about the NSA, the Russians decided to grant the young boy asylum, and so he was absorbed by the Muscovites from that point on – and given permanent home there. The rest is history, since that day he has occasionally appeared at various conferences and venues by video link or 3-D Hologram to warn of the internal workings of such government bodies, especially on the general subject of invasion of the legitimate privacy of citizens, through the powerful net programmes called Pegasus and Nerus and Prism. Anyway added to this the hoovering up of many emails on the basis of a keyword search for words such as “Mohammed” or “Isis” or “Iran” or “Al-Nusra”, and so on. FBI likes to action these searches on those keywords there. This search has now been extended to domestic terror worries in the USA ever since the Epiphany Riots of 6th Jan 2021. The new words in the FBI keyword searches include words like “USA” or “Patriot” or “Trump” or “KKK” or “NRA” or “Pride” or “Proudboys” or “Boogaloo Boys” or “Kyle” or and so on. Another page has been turned in USA history and now the shoe is on the other foot and the fat is in the fire as they used to say in “Another Country”. The Hunters have now become the Hunted in the new Woke Democrat America – a considerable achievement if one is a Democrat and a sudden turning of the tables if one is a traditionalist republican, American kind.    

But anyway, if hackers are out there and major labels in the money world are paying young geeks to intercept them and spot them on line then, the Argumentum ab Gubernatione goes, the civil government also has a right of interception, especially of anarchists, grande-scale criminals, evil megalomaniacs, and enemies of the state, thus goes the Argumentum Ab, and di per se, this is quite a powerful argument for intercept duties on the part of government operatives. Since 2016 a series of young men from the allies of the British side too have been caught in FBI and CIA stings hacking into Pentagon computers, one possible scenario for car accidents in Britain near CIA bases and rendition centers, and one reason for the occasional freezing of relations between the two old allies.

Christians generally divide their loyalties to government and church and so are in a reasonable position to cooperate with such programmes of intercepts. Whilst youth chaplains to youth groups throughout the 1990s defended the notion of a general right to privacy on the part of the general citizenry, then then in the 2010s moved to defending the church as an underground alternative society, but this idea of a parallel society, parallel economy, parallel currency, did not gain ground until only recently fresh off the press, like literally this last year of 2021, when other companies and other internet providers and social media outlets began to pioneer and popularise parallel concepts and constructs such as the cryptocurrencies of Bit and Doge and so on. So the church as alternative society was very popular there for a while. Right into 2022, until smash, bang, whallop, then the Covid virus came along, and swept away all such hidden alternative societies with one stroke of an all seeing and all caring government pen. Covid changed everything, for civil society yes, but even also in some small part for some churches, those churches chiefly that did not feature an involved and elaborate right to privacy internal legal framework, and helas so many churches and house evangelical churches do not have a legal framework at all except the one fatally borrowed from the surrounding civil state context, fatally. Slowly the genie fell out of the bottle – gone was the entire alternative society project, it was overnight all swept away like a snowman in a snow drift, with nothing much remaining but a few carrots in the drifts, all gone mum, except for isolated pockets in faraway tiny villages in the dim and distant snowy countryside up north on the slopes of the wooded steppes of Rutland like Tansor, Oundle, Aldwincle, and such places as well as Bulwick, Harringworth, Uppingham. Tiny places largely overlooked by the powers that be of both church and state, but here in these isolated, remote, and beautiful locations, the alternative society still survived bravely and singularly soldiering on, and largely unobserved, it all sounded most nights like an Allegri Miserere in distant wooded dales and hills like the countryside around Barnwell Castle. Somehow, despite all assurances given by GDR style bishops to their civil superiors as per the German bishops to their MPs in their Landers, Novak and others showed that there were still little reservoirs of privacy, and so the privacy project if not the alternative society project survived to live another day, albeit in isolated secret societies of one kind or another, such as per the CRF and ROSL and SPQR.  

Back in the 1920s a strange and disturbing series of rumours began to engulf some civil secret societies in Europe, in a number of ordinary non-descript nations, such as Belgium and Holland and Britain and Germany among others, and that was a series of state intercepts of the whole movement to find and track and trace dissident liberal modernist theologians after the Document Pascendi Gregis of Pius X. A concerted effort was undertaken quite spontaneously and privately by right wing seminarians to conduct and track and trace the telephone calls and lectures and conversations of liberal theologians, many theologians, and such was the effect that a number of state civil secret services began to notice a lot of discreet traffic going on around Europe in the search for such theologians, many of whom were largely innocent of any misdemeanour – merely the right wing pressing buttons on the part of the authorities, as right wing catholics delated theologians to civil authorities and church authorities if they did not get their way. The result was a considerable shock wave coursing through the churches and the secret societies. Right wingers persecuting innocent theologians. The result was a discreet and silent bedlam if not mayhem – a shoah a holocaust - the suffering of the many, many lambs of those unhappy times in the 1920s and 1930s, rendering the churches and the synagogues blind to a dangerous subterranean secret enemy slowly surfacing its ambitious programmes against the one true old faith - right up to the Advent of the Nazis and their taking over of the Central European Republics in one Anschluss after another. Once again state actors or right wing theologians and seminarians had embarrassed the Faith, plunging the old apostolic Faith into the vortexes of comments and vituperations and general ridicule among secular secret services who for some unaccountable reason allied to a very secret branch of the old style Soviet style government called MI3 were very suspicious of religious groups and movements and churches. From that time, those civil secret services have occasionally complained about the churches clogging up the power lines – one of their euphemisms down the phones lines is the ubiquitous – there is a cow sitting on the railway lines. Anyway, since that time, the churches have endeavoured to be less visible, and have tried hard to discover a way of being that is hidden and discreet if not totally invisible. And so to our own day, when many churches and temples and mandirs have quite resignedly come round to something invented by a Polish priest called The Theology of Invisibility which he had practised assiduously himself by always avoiding group photos and large gatherings and first in the row seats. First originally pioneered by young v young Irish seminarians from Maynooth, then the young Irish theologian Paul Tighe, he was rewarded himself with the care of the new pope’s Twitter account, a prestigious and very important job of first encounter with the modern global plasma world. A new Irish theology of invisibility was then worked out over our new time frame beginning around 2013. By 2019 it was all but formulated and established around the old Leonine City.  

So anyway, the movement for privacy faltered in the 1980s and 1990s as more and more structures of either state or church found the time to monitor the goings and froings of small time clerics and laity, though much of the observation was conducted on isolated clerics and clergy by specially pre-selected laity of a middle-class and upper-class nature, as time began to progress and to move on in those decades, pushing small parishes and small town religious movements into the heart of surveillance city. By the time that GDPR was formulated under pressure from all the poor clerics and altar boys of the churches in the Western nations, it was almost too late, too little too late it would seem, because many church structures and state structures had already been taking liberties with civil liberties for some time. Thus when 2018 came around, the game was almost up and the shell of the body politik was exhausted and jaded after a series of much monitorings. Eventually the Eurozone lawyers and lawmakers were put under pressure to come up with something in the age of the internet. Thus was born the GDPR – first past the post. Then after this watershed in lawmaking, the whole Covid pandemic occurred and reality turned into a nightmare. The valley of the curtain twitchers became a wholesale epidemic on its own turf – privacy slipped under the waves, as American barristers such as Nancy Hollander barked out their objections in courts and said that this all amounted to a return back to 1600s Britain. New men filled the halls and pillars and podiums of government with new concepts. The various churches bowed under the blows of the new stateside regimes. First, Alistair’s Half-Hour, then Dominic Cummings, then others, all contributing to a jolly good battering of those now quaint and older concepts of privacy. Soon the churches began to wilt under the ocean of new rules and norms and regulations backed by the forces of opposition and also of occupation. It was now harder and harder to survive in the valleys and troughs of the world of squinting windows. Services too, all but gone in the stateside Church of England. So, there we are. Some increased surveillance was noted, but it was more a generalised social phenomenon rather than a stateside agency kind of thing. Apart from the Sage style disciples of MI3, it seemed few were interested in what the churches were doing. Eventually though, those churches and faiths and mandirs struck back with a launch of an Application for Judicial Review in order to query Govt restrictions and endless Sage planned lockdowns, who knows maybe designed for the closure of religion nationally. They forced a climbdown from government. This was before the 2022 Partygate Exposees of parties at Downing Street which killed off any remaining enthusiasm on the part of the general public for the safety valves of national lockdowns, while only one or two journalists at GBNews defended the Prime Minister in the hailstorm of complaints about the parties, notably the woke journalist Rebecca Reid who argued that during times of national crisis, like Churchill during the War, those in government are often regarded de facto as solutus legibus, absolved of the minor and detailed obligations of the general law, just so that the government can function at full throttle. Jesus responded similarly to a general question about the minor regulations of the Sabbath, when he reminded the apostles that the priests often break the Sabbath in the necessary performance of their duties, “The Sabbath is made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath,” concluded Jesus. So some precedent there in the Bible for the legal maxim of solutus legibus. Something of this legal principle is found in the debates about the gardens at No Ten which are royal property hence the invocation of solutus legibus, but also in the civil lawsuit against the associates of Epstein such as the princes and the queen, it is regarded as a legal maxim, aside from the fact that such figures as princes usually have bodyguards with them to monitor unlawful transactions and the like, they are designed plusminusve to intercept and block gainful and busybody and vexatious litigants such as the 17 year olds of the world, especially those with troubling agendas emanating from ex-colonial republics. A fair trial in such republics is simply out of the question for a member of a royal household, period, so solutus legibus can apply here too. But overall, the salient principle is the principle of Jesus – “Have you not heard how the soldiers of David also broke the Sabbath when they went into the tabernacle and ate the bread of the presence which is normally reserved to priests alone, so the Son of Man – here he alludes to the fact that he is a warrior king like David - is master even over the Sabbath.”  Some sovereigns and their leading echelons are exempt from the ordinary rules and regulations of things like lockdowns precisely to keep government working and duty flowing during times of crisis.