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

[redcountess]

Hey, look on the bright side - it gave Hank some material for his spoken word ;-)

[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 :(

[tephramancy]

Linkage? :)

[drreagan]

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,18163970-13762,00.html

Ring the Ministry today.

[hairyears]

Don't suspect your friends - inform on them!

It's an interesting time to be a noncomformist with anarchist leanings. But I suspect that I have nothing new to say on the matter; so try a couple of tired and trite observations from the recent past:

Meanwhile, we have a new kind of life: living with fear. Fear of terrorists, fear of our own police force, fear of little men with notebooks under far too much pressure from their superiors to get results.

And I recall blogging this little gem a couple of weeks ago: not all informers work for the government, and some of them are paid a great deal of money for what they do.

It's not like we have a secret police, listening at the walls and keeping tens of thousands of informers, waiting for that chance remark about Comrade Stalin to come to light. But if the papers are applying thousands of man-hours, compiling vast databases, and paying tens of thousands of pounds for information, how is that different?

Wake up and smell the coffee. We don't have free elections in this country any

Re: Ring the Ministry today.

[chiselwright]

> Don't suspect your friends - inform on them!

The current wave of irritating station announcements seem to be " . If you suspect it, report it."

I wonder how much fun I could have by suspecting something and reporting it ... something random each day perhaps. I'm sure I don't need actual evidence to suspect something.

Re: Ring the Ministry today.

[feanelwa]

I suspect that this man farted in the lift! I suspect that stain on the wall is semen! I suspect the person who dropped that kebab was very drunk indeed! I suspect that was a tube mouse! I suspect this gentleman here is thinking about penguins!

I'm so glad I don't travel by tube very much. Everybody would throw me out in a matter of minutes.

Re: Ring the Ministry today.

[chiselwright]

Some great ideas there ... I wonder how the lobotomised station staff would cope.

I'm glad I don't travel by the tube either. Shame I have to use Thameslink though.