Quote:
Originally Posted by robski
If you believe that you believe anything. This country has become too much of a police state for my liking and it has little to do with terrorism.
|
I sympathise with Stephens point of view, but we have seen far too many cases of the prevention of terrorism act being used to harass someone. The old man who was ejected from the Labour Party conference when he heckled a speaker is a prime example. And at the same conference an MP (Austin Mitchell?) had his camera taken from him by a police officer, and the images wiped, under the same act. Then there was the case of an Anglo Asian man arrested for taking happy snaps. The police later apologised.
In any case I am not convinced a terrorist would take pictures so openly. Using a camera in a mobile phone while pretending to make a call would be so easy to do.
On balance I would say that it was harassment. To politely ask someone to stop taking pictures because it is not allowed on the property is fine IMO. But to threaten someone with the prevention of terrorism act is petty harassment. But to be fair, they might be edgy given that there have been so many near misses in recent weeks, and a few years ago many people died in multiple explosions. I guess I would choose minor harassment rather than sleepy security staff.
The real problem IMO is that there are said to be thousands of Muslim extremists with violent intentions currently at large in this country and the security services do not have the resources to monitor them all. I suspect they do not even have enough Arabic and Urdu speakers to monitor calls. And of course for many years we allowed no end of nutty mad men to congregate and preach hatred throughout London and elsewhere. We knew they were violent but assumed the violence was directed overseas.