Thu, 17 Aug 2006
The Police claim that they proceeded with the arrests related to the recent airplane terror plot following a long intelligence work. If this claim is proven during the trial of some of the suspects, this would be good news as this is exactly the kind of work we should expect from our Police forces. However the propaganda surrounding these arrests is at the very least suspicious. Inconsistent security measures, no-one charged yet...
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Added a pointer to Glenda Jackson analysis of the latest profiling: Travelling while Asian.
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Sun, 13 Aug 2006
Sorry for all the old posts that are likely to have appeared in your aggregators. I realised having links in titles was a bad idea.
From the
Times:
Paul Stephenson, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said: ‘We are confident that we have disrupted a plan by terrorists to cause untold death and destruction and commit mass murder. This was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.’
John Reid, the Home Secretary, said that ‘loss of life would have been on an unprecedented scale’.
What are they trying to achieve with this
unprecedented scale terminology? Isn't one supposed to be a professional presenting dispassionate facts and risk assessment, and the other a politician offering a measured reaction with a way forward? Instead all we get is propaganda.
Go read or re-read Orwell's short essay
Politics and the English Language. This should be compulsory reading for anyone writing in English.
You may also be interested in an analysis of why the Metropolitan Police arresting innocents may be motivated by a propaganda strategy. If so, read
A pawn in their propaganda machine.
(This w/e, I made some minor updates to the pages
Is the UK a police state? and
A pawn in their propaganda machine.)
Tue, 08 Aug 2006
I got too many emails from persons stopped and searched, and some even arrested just for taking pics of buildings. This is apparently considered 'hostile reconnaissance'. This is utterly ridiculous and reminds me of the recent time when the
BT Tower (visible from a large part of London) was not on any AtoZ map so it couldn't be found by (then IRA) terrorists. A friend sent me a link to BBC
story published today about an Iraqi man charged with filming Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye.
I've practically stopped taking pics of buildings (in London) and have updated the web page listing some new interesting aspects of English law and Police behaviour with an entry on hostile reconnaissance. This is one of the very few changes of behaviour, with avoiding the tube even more than I used to, that I've adopted.
More needs to be done to expose this further infringements of our civil liberties, however this is not a fight I have the time or energy to take on at the moment (remember that my idle
doodles were once considered by the Police to be a plan of Southwark station).
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The Information Commissioner's Office explains that LGC may be a data processor processing personal data under instructions from the MPS acting as the data controller. I fill in (yet another) a complaint form.
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