Very clever, British Transport Police.

Not only does your newspaper advert induce total, irrational paranoia (“BABIES and OLD MEN WITH HATS will be EXPLODED into THOUSANDS of SHAMI CHAKRABARTI SHAPED PIECES if we don’t SPY ON EACH OTHER!”).

It also encourages people to be defensive about CCTV cameras. Because as we all know, CCTV is SO incredibly effective. In using electricity.

Come to think of it, what’s that woman in the brown woolen jumper doing? She’s only keeping up the pretence of chatting to the mother sat next to her. She’s actually STUDYING the CCTV camera. STUDYING it! STUDYING IT! Her hands are obscured because she has a NOTE PAD there. Here’s what it probably says (for the avoidance of doubt, she happens to be a Rastafarian jihadist):

10:53am, 26th February 2009. Crummytown high street. Lat: 50.130304004 N Long 4.3384943 E.

In the service of Ja, I have begun investigations of Crummytown High Street. My reconnaissance suggests that optimal hat-wearing-man destructive density may be achieved by placing the explosives next to the broken-down bubblegum machine outside Boots. They may be disguised as a discarded chip-wrapper, stack of Socialist Workers’ Party leaflets or given to a tramp as a sort of ironic present.

Our secondary objective – the slight de-alignment of the childrens’ merry-go-round – would be best achieved by placing an everlasting gobstopper below the rotating mechanism.

It is suggested that we leave the letter of responsibility attached high up a lamp-post, so as to avoid dogs peeing on it.

11:02am

I have just noticed that there is a CCTV camera on the street, which did not come up during my initial scans. Better cancel our plans for world domination. Les from the council, who watches the cameras,  will surely stop our attack.

I must go, the woman I’m ‘talking to’ is starting to think I’m not listening. Also, I just saw her dial.. Shit. ABORT!

Report your swarthy-looking neighbour today! Being a Good Citizen demands it!

(Note: Yes, I do know that some people genuinely do want to cause harm to others in nasty ways which we might describe as ‘terrorism’. It happened in my city already, and Scotland is very well used to dealing with extremists. But it’s also true that people are very bad at assessing risk, and since the risk of terrorism affecting any given person is extremely low, countless orders of magnitude lower than being hit by a car on the street or dying in an air crash, we probably shouldn’t get carried away, particularly when the advice given is completely pie in the sky and counterproductive. Adverts like this BTP one play on our fears to encourage an illiberal, fearful attitude that makes the abuse of state power, and the persecution of ‘others’, much more feasible, whether we start out with those intentions or not. It’s also a total distraction from the real questions we should be addressing as a society.)

–Update:

To give, um… ‘credit’ where it’s due, this campaign seems to have originated at the Metropolitan Police, though the true source is probably Jacqui Smith, working from her underground bunker beneath Harrods. The resemblance in tone to her latest hair-brained scheme is unmistakable.

So an MA student at Nottingham University doing research into political Islam downloads a 1,500 page ‘terrorism manual’ from a U.S. government website, and asks his friend who works as a PA at the University to print it for him (he doesn’t have enough print credits himself).

The University then informs the police that this communterrorist literature has been trafficked, and the police arrest the MA student (Rizwaan Sabir) and detain him for six days without charge, after which they release him after confirming that the document was ‘illegal’. Then, they arrest the PA friend (Hicham Yezza) on immigration charges, set a date for an immigration hearing, then drop the charges in favour of a summary process involving no hearing (he’s set to be deported to Algeria on 1st June).

Starters for 10:

• How was Nottingham made aware that the material had been downloaded? Network snooping? Informants?
• How has Nottingham shown its commitment to academic freedom?
• As the prevailing leader in the discourse of security theatre, is a document available on a US government public website likely to be so dangerous it shouldn’t be seen by academic researchers, of all people?
• Should the UK government be judging what is and is not dangerous material?
• Why no fair hearing for Yezza?
• Should I securely erase my copies of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, von Clausewitz’ On War, my copies of Al-Qaeda ’statements’ and other materials I collected for my Security Studies class?
• When will the book burnings commence, and will they be carbon-neutral?

Incidentally, the offending document was on the US Department of Justice’ website…

If you know more about this story, please leave a comment.

More: Free Hicham Yezza blog, The Guardian, International Herald Tribune

Update: Here’s the offending material itself.

Update 2: More coverage at The Independent, ThisIsNottingham.co.uk and The Canadian Press. Still nothing from BBC News.

Interesting times ahead in civil liberties in the post-Lisbon treaty era? An interesting analysis from the Centre for European Reform:

The new politics of EU internal security:

This is area of international co-operation that has long been the exclusive domain of national governments. For over 20 years, interior ministries – meeting in the EU, UN and Council of Europe – have quietly agreed and implemented inter-governmental agreements on internal security and judicial co-operation between themselves. There was little need to accommodate outside views and concerns. Now officials look nervously to 2009 when euro-parliamentarians should begin to use their new authority.

The ministries are right to be anxious. The European Parliament’s civil liberties and justice and home affairs (JHA) body – known as the LIBE committee – has made no secret of its intention to exercise the new powers to the full. The committee wants to reverse a trend in EU decision-making on terrorism, crime and immigration that many parliamentarians feel is wrongly skewed towards state security at the expense of civil liberties. For example, MEPs have been wary of the member-states’ eagerness to create databases and new information-sharing arrangements for terrorism and other cross-border crimes. They complain that the member-states are conspicuously less interested in reaching an agreement on data protection legislation needed to ensure such data is not mis-used.

That is, of course, after Ireland is coaxed into a ‘yes’ vote on the Lisbon treaty itself.

There has not been much debate on the costs of intergovernmentalism, and Council dominance in these areas of European integration. In Britain particularly, justice and home affairs is the area where national governments have been most keen to be seen to preserve national vetoes.

Perhaps as Lisbon rolls out, the parameters of the debate will change as the benefits of European Parliament involvement become clear.

This is a story I wrote for publication in my University’s student newspaper. It went out in the 9th November edition of the Strathclyde Telegraph (which went out today, due to late printing). It was edited for publication somewhat but I’ve chosen to publish the version which went to press here in the interests of consistency…

And no, the title/headline is nothing to do with me – so send your groans/complaints elsewhere!

A leaked draft memorandum has revealed the UK government gave serious consideration to asking senior university staff to pass on information regarding Muslim or “Asian-looking” students to the security services. This approach appears to be the latest in a series of faltering efforts aimed at tackling ‘extremism’ in Muslim communities, for which the government believes campuses are “fertile recruiting grounds”.

The memo, which is not publicly available but was obtained by The Guardian, calls for university staff to cede information to Special Branch units of regional police forces regarding the activities of Muslim societies on campus.

It has provoked outrage among students, university staff and among Muslim communities.

Ousman Sadiq, a Masters student on Strathclyde’s Computer and Electronic Systems course described the measures as “a largely unhelpful bit of guidance that will end up only making Muslims feel more oppressed, while still not being a deterrent to those who tend towards an extremist viewpoint”.

NUS National President Gemma Tumelty criticised the plans as likely to introduce a “McCarthy-like atmosphere of suspicion between students and lecturers”, and the Universities and Colleges Union joint secretary Paul Mackney warned that the memo had the implication of “blurring the boundaries of what is illegal and what is possibly undesirable”. “UCU members have a pivotal role in building trust – these proposals, if implemented, would make it all but impossible”. The Australian Vice Chancellors Committee (AVCC) even went so far as to issue a press release to reassure students studying in Australia that such measures would never be implemented there.

While plans to distribute the memo itself among senior university staff appear to have been shelved, its essentially ill-founded premises, unhelpful tone and ham-fisted terminology are further evidence of the Government’s increasingly desperate attempts to foster better community relations from the top down.

The memo is ostensibly aimed at averting acts of terrorism, but confuses terrorism on the one hand, and radicalisation on the other. To say that universities sometimes radicalise people in their religious and political views is hardly controversial, but to consider this radicalisation in the context of Muslim communities a stepping stone to committing acts of violence implies a very dim view of students’ morality. Tumelty suggests that “indiscriminate monitoring of groups on campus assumes collective guilt”.

The accusatory tone of the document also has implications for student recruitment and retention. The numbers of Muslim students on many university courses is already unrepresentative of the wider social mix in many British cities – and Mackney fears that proposals like those in the memo, mixed with unhelpful comments from government ministers in recent weeks regarding issues such as the veil, could undermine the “enormous strides” made in recent years in university diversity and race relations.

The government’s approach of ethnic profiling, as evidenced by the ‘Asian-looking’ reference in the memo, has also come in for sharp criticism. Labony Choudhury, a student at Sheffield University interviewed by The Guardian, pointed out that “being Muslim has nothing to do with the colour of your skin, nor terrorism of any description. It’s like trying to define what a rapist looks like. Far too simplistic.”

By Graeme West

29th October 2006

This story’s about the CIA’s policy of clandestine ‘renditions’, that of transferring terrorist suspects to outwith the USA, where constitutional and legal protections don’t apply, and someone else can do the ‘dirty work’, i.e. aggressive interrogation or torture. We already know that a lot of this goes on, with Egypt being a favoured destination for suspects, but this story is unique in that it identifies one of the particular planes used in these forced transportations, even down to the plane’s tail number.

Interrogation under torture is one of those things which is very easy to condemn but equally hard to present alternatives to, especially in situations where ’suspects’ may be prepared to die to hide what they know. Yet while I can see the dilemma facing the CIA and the Bush Administration, it is truly a shame to see a free nation going to these lengths to circumvent the legal protections Americans and others have worked hard to preserve.

Jet Is an Open Secret in Terror War (washingtonpost.com):

“The airplane is a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and celebrities. But since 2001 it has been seen at military airports from Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and handcuffed passengers.

The plane’s owner of record, Premier Executive Transport Services Inc., lists directors and officers who appear to exist only on paper. And each one of those directors and officers has a recently issued Social Security number and an address consisting only of a post office box, according to an extensive search of state, federal and commercial records.”

(Via The Washington Post. Registration required)