Word: acted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...worked on the design of communications and surveillance systems that were built for NATO by a larger Canadian firm. In 1974 Mounties raided Treu's home and carted away 500 Ibs. of documents. In 1976, after a long investigation, he was charged under the Official Secrets Act with holding on to classified documents without official authorization and failing to take "reasonable care" of them...
While Treu was being secretly tried this spring, the Canadian government used the Official Secrets Act for the first time against a newspaper, prosecuting the Toronto Sun for disclosing a top-secret Mountie report on Soviet espionage. Critics complain that the Sun, a persistent right-wing gadfly to the Trudeau government, is being charged not with spilling secrets but with revealing government ineptness at dealing with Soviet spies...
...Colonel B affair underlines the curious history of the Official Secrets Act, which dates from 1896 in Britain and 1939 in Canada. Although, as one former British Attorney General put it, The Act can make it a crime "to report the number of cups of tea consumed per week in a government department," in fact there have been few prosecutions. That is explained partly by intimidation, partly by government restraint and partly by the British and Canadian press's deference to the need for government secrecy...
Lately, segments of press and Parliament in both countries have been less docile and more inclined to see The Act as a cover-up tool. Says Canadian M.P. Gerald Baldwin: "What was conceived of as a weapon of defense against enemies without has become an offensive weapon for governments and bureaucrats to deal with embarrassments within...
Britain's Labor government last month released a White Paper proposing a streamlined Official Secrets Act. But civil libertarians fear that under the reforms, official prosecutions will go up, not down. "The new act," says a Civil Liberties Advocate, "will convert an inaccurate blunderbuss into a highly accurate rifle...