Ed Miliband, the beneficiary of that underhand tactic in 2010, needs to make it clear that this should not happen again.
"The underhand and undemocratic manner in which the government is seeking to make lawful GCHQ's hacking operations is disgraceful," Eric King, the organisation's deputy director said after the hearing.
But if that information is in the open, then at least it can no longer be used to influence the political process in underhand fashion.
But wouldn't it make sense, if not to cut taxes, at least to end underhand tax rises?Bracket creep, or what the Germans call "cold progression", results when pay rises only compensate for inflation but still push their recipients into a higher tax bracket.
This sort of underhand behaviour by all parties, which is common knowledge, was now suddenly out in the open and could no longer be ignored.
Faced with sometimes underhand attacks from Ms Rousseff, Ms Silva wobbled.
Executives from IBM, Apple and Intel testified that Microsoft employed underhand tactics to encourage them to kill software products that competed with Microsoft's own; e-mails between Microsoft and Compaq, a computer maker, revealed that Microsoft had threatened to stop supplying it with Windows if Compaq chose to support a rival browser offered by Netscape.
Microsoft claims the companies resorted to underhand practices, such as disguising pornographic e-mails with a benign subject line, or making e-mails appear as if from a recognised sender.
Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukIN DIPLOMATIC affairs the French are often viewed from America and Britain with exasperation, as arrogant, unreliable and underhand.
Governments need to be sure that standards are not just an underhand way of keeping the data business within their own borders.
The inquiry into the suicide of David Kelly, an expert on Iraqi arms at Britain's defence ministry also dismissed accusations that Mr Blair's government had contributed to Kelly's death by running an underhand campaign to expose him as the source of an allegation that the dossier was "sexed up".
