Chilling weather in UK

Ewan links to this chilling story from the UK - apparently just wearing the wrong clothes can cause you to be arrested, handcuffed, your house searched, and your property confiscated and not returned.

So, basically the Police have decided that wearing a rain jacket, carrying a rucksack with a laptop inside, looking down at the steps while going in a tube station and checking your phone for messages just tick too many checkmarks on their checklist and make you a terrorist suspect. How many other people are not only wrongly detained but wrongly arrested every week in similar circumstances as myself? And how many of them are also computer and telecoms enthusiasts that fit the Police's terrorist behavioural profile so well? I accept and understand spot checks can be useful, but profiling... this would be a joke if it didn't affect many ‘innocent bystanders’.

The Police eventually decided to take No Further Action (NFA): ‘a decision not to proceed with a prosecution’. In a democratic country such as the UK, one would be forgiven for naively thinking that this is the end of the matter. Under the current laws the Police are not only entitled to keep my fingerprints and DNA samples, but apparently, according to my solicitor, they are also entitled to hold on to what they gathered during their investigation: notepads of the arresting officers, photographs, interviewing tapes and any other documents they collected and entered in the Police National Computer (PNC). (Also, at the time of this writing, I still have no letter stating that I'm effectively off the hook and I still haven't been given any of my possessions back.)

Scary shit. Read the whole story.

(I am returning to English now. We lost the fight on copyright, and the right to copy. People have already called for boycotts on copy-protected Finnish music, and I will join them. Even if I pay money to Apple for hardware, I have not bought a single song from iTunes Music Store, just because of the copy protection. I will, however, continue to give money to companies such as Magnatunes which treat music lovers as customers, not as the enemy.)



Comments

Don't give up before the game ends! We are now effectively where we were before the masses surprised the MPs. If we could do it once, why cannot we do it twice?

--Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, 22-Sep-2005


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"Main_blogentry_220905_1" last changed on 22-Sep-2005 13:07:42 EEST by JanneJalkanen.
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