"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime" - the authoritarian basis for speech and behaviour laws

We've rather lost sight of this in the UK with our ever expanding surveillance state, PSPOs, ASBOs and hate speech laws:

"History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak with-out risking arrest is "one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation." Houston v. Hill, 482 U. S. 451, 463 (1987).

 This is a dissenting opinion in the case - and here we're reminded of the chilling reality of these laws, a quote from Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria:

  "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

 I've said for a while that we've set the police in a position where they can arrest anyone at any time on a host of pretexts - from covering your face through having a can of lager to singing a song.

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