Turning on each other in the throes of paranoia

[wintrmute]

This has probably already hit other peoples' journals by now, but anyway:
A passenger sitting next to Henry Rollins on a flight (from New Zealand to Australia) reported Rollins to the Australian anti-terror police as a potential terrorist, because Rollins was reading Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. Rollins received a letter

Comments

[tbrd]

The worrying thing here is not the secret police itself, it's the fact that people are actually turning on their fellow citizens because they are -reading- about it. I'm not sure if it's the same here, or just in the States

[wintrmute]

Yeah, I think I got the emphasis wrong when I said "The thing that scares me here is that people are dobbing in each other to a secret police who then have sufficient grounds to spy on you." (Emphasis added this time)

But hey.. we already knew that the average person on the street doesn't trust anyone else. Everyone has been twice bitten before.

[tbrd]

Have you read the actual letter?

http://21361.com/site_2004/main_dispatches.html

It's... well... Rollins is a complete ass, isn't he?

[wintrmute]

I hadn't seen the copy for the actual letter he received - reading it there (under 01/30/06, bloody american dates), I see the letter from the government is more of an apology, and says that they would actually like to call the "lunatic" who reported Rollins, to discuss his "idiocy".

To that, I think that Rollins' response (go fuck yourself) is a bit misguided :(

[drreagan]

"If you're not doing anything wrong, you won't have anything to worry about." ... "CCTV" ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/4510786.stm

Obviously, nothing to worry about.

Assuming that there are checks in place to stop the watchers abusing the system. Problem is, most of the time there isn't. Particularly when these measures get rushed in quickly as a knee-jerk response to some incident.

[tbrd]

It's an abuse of the system, but everyone abuses every system on a personal level. The law seems to be working in this case, which is a good sign. When the government as a body abuses the system, then I would start to worry.

There are a lot of knee-jerk responses, but I believe in a lot of cases the incidents are used as a reason, rather than being the cause. ID cards are a good idea, IMO, if done right (the fact that the implementation will probably suck is by the by). The 'terrorist threat' was an excuse to get them pushed through.

I don't believe that the government wants to control us, or that they will use this sort of thing to hurt us. I don't believe that it is the first step towards a police state. I -think- that Britain is a pretty liberal place and is likely to stay that way.