So the police manage to foil an alleged terrorist plot, but they still decide to enforce draconian security restrictions on all air travellers. Now you couldn’t even take a book on board a plane, let alone an iPod or laptop. All this was dropped on the airlines with two hours notice, sending the airports into total meltdown.
I wonder how many people will attempt to stave off the boredom of a long-haul flight with no reading material by getting blind drunk? And that will improve safety exactly how?
I can’t help feeling that a lot of this is pointless ‘security theatre’ which does nothing to reduce any real threat, but gives a facade that Something Is Being Done. The brutal fact is that if a bunch of terrorists are determined to kill large numbers of people, there’s virtually no way of stopping them in a free society other than infiltrating their networks and capturing them before they strike (which is exactly what the British police appear to have done). Ever more cumbersome and disruptive security measures against last week’s preferred terrorist targets will just divert them to attack softer targets. Keep them off planes and they’ll just blow up something else, like nightclubs and sporting events.
Of course, the timing is wonderfully convenient for Tony Blair. Up until this blew up there was the feeling that he was in the final days of his premiership, like the last days of Thatcher. The British people have by and large completely lost confidence in him, large parts of his own party now realise he’s an electoral liability. But all of this is now forgotten. Look over there! Evil terrorists!
While all this paranoia-driven security theatre is in place, there’s no way I’m going to be flying anywhere. I travelled by air to Switzerland a few weeks ago; If I travel there again next year I will be travelling by train, even though the journey may take twelve hours. If people just shrug, and put up with all this, like all the sheep-like individuals interviews by the media, this nonsense will get worse and worse. People must vote with their feet and their wallets.
Cory Doctorow also thinks the whole thing is completely ridiculous.
The point of terrorism is to make us afraid. The UK response to a foiled plot is to create an unspecified period during which fliers are arbitrarily deprived of iPods, novels and dignity.
If this is a good idea now, then why won’t it still be a good idea in a year? A decade? After all, terrorist plots will always exist in potentia (can you prove that no terrorist plots are hatching at this moment?) Until they handcuff us all nude to our seats and dart us with tranquilizers, there will always be the possibility that a passenger will do something naughty on a plane (even then, who knows how much semtex and roofing nails a bad guy could hide in his colon?).
I flew from the UK to the US about fifty times in the past 36 months. Speaking as someone who’s neck would be on the line if a terrorist got onto a plane, I’d take my chances with the iPods and novels and dignity.
Charlie Stross wonders what the real motivation for all this security theatre might be.
It used to be said that patriotism was the first resort of the scoundrel. Now terror-mongering is giving it a close run for its money. When someone tries to scare you, the first question you should ask is “who benefits?” Al Qaida and their friends carry out terrorist acts in order to terrorise you, with a specific political agenda in mind. Why are the US and UK governments trying to do the terrorists jobs for them? And what is their fear-facilitated agenda?
Jonathan Calder looks at the recent speech by Home Secretary John Reid, and thinks he has the answer to Charlie’s Question
So the problems we face are the existence of politicians who disagree with the government, an independent judiciary and a free press. In short, the central institutions of a liberal democracy.
Faced with this it is hard to forget that John Reid received his political education in the Communist Party of Great Britain in the early 1970s. That is after Hungary, after Czechoslovakia, after all but the most deluded had seen through the nature of the Soviet system.
It is usual, while observing that many central figures in New Labour came from the hard left, to remark that they left all their ideological baggage behind, retaining only their talent for organisation and belief in party discipline.
Yet reading the report of Reid’s speech, the marxist echoes sound clearly
In other words, what we have is a real live 1970s East German-style Communist, using the exaggerated threat of terrorism as a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.
We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
