All the London newspapers today are full of a new but familiar “report on strange people to the wonderful and efficient experts in the police” anti-terrorism advertisement.
I am a foreigner. I have five mobile phones. Readers are invited to speculate as to why this is (although it could just be that “I need communication”, or perhaps that I find that sitting in a bar sending text messages to myself relieves the monotony of life). I swap their SIMs around all the time, often in public places and for sinister reasons like “The battery ran out on my main phone and I still want to receive calls on that number”..
Also, I like to wander around London and other cities photographing things like bridges, container ports and other critical infrastructure.
When am I going to be reported? Will I be sent to Guantanamo? Will Brian be there too? Why the fuck are these people wasting my taxes like this?
Also, where did the “thousands” come from? If we are talking the whole world, it would be “billions”. If we are talking the UK it would be “tens of millions”. Statistics actually suggest that there are around seventy million active mobile phones in the UK. Given that that is ten million more than there are people in the national population, and given that there must be at least ten million people who realistically are too young to have one, there are at least twenty million suspicious phones in the UK.
Who knew the terrorism problem was this big?
Michael.
Remember those seven people who all bumped into each other when you turned around suddenly out side
Starbucks yesterday?…
I was actually followed for a week by the transport Police…
A weird experience, but not a bad anecdote.
I’ll save it for later.
(Oh and the Us Secret Service too!)
What have you got against idiots? They need jobs! I’ll bet you’re an elitist who only wants to give jobs to people who’ll be good at them! Shame on you!
This is an age of compulsory equality. Democracy starts of by assuming we’re all equal, and then tries to guarantee it! And really, if we weren’t all different, we wouldn’t have differences, would we?
Do you really think that Obama would be a US Democrat contender if it weren’t his turn? Oh, the joys of affirmative action!
Don’t think about it too much or your head will explode.
Either that or you will move to Montana.
Readers are invited to speculate as to why this is
You’re running some kind of obscure gambling racket based on which one will ring next?
When did the lolcats get added to the smite page?
nick g. what on earth did your screed have to do with the above? Compulsory equality? Terrorists and phones? I don’t see the connection.
You poor victimised innocent thingy you.
We can not allow our libertarian tendencies to overcome our common sense.
If a big fat red-haired middle aged woman throws a brick through the window of the jewellers shop and steals a string of pearls, then being a big fat red-haired woman is a valid discriminant.
If someone gets bitten by an alsatian, would you expect the police to investigate every french poodle in town?
Like it or not, we all have characteristics. They may occasionally coincide with those of a criminal. Our National Insurance numbers may be similar, or the registration plates on the car. Or we may look like Peter Sutcliffe.
So what? We all have to live with that. So you have 5 phones. Good for you. That you might fleetingly drift into the attention of the police, is nothing unusual. I have led a very sheltered kind of life, but I would be amazed if my profile had never coincided with someone they were looking for.
No-one crashes your civil liberties like the bloke who just stole all five of your phones. I trust you would refrain from giving the police a description, in order to protect the civil liberties of those who match his description.
BEN!
The link was the word ‘Idiotic’ in the comment heading. since idiots are idiotic, an idiotic campaign must have been done by an idiot.
Therefore, Michael must be picking on the poor idiot who came up with this campaign. The idiot probably got the job through affirmative action. If not, then the campaigner might actually be the brightest person in the office!
I wonder which is more worrying?
I know quite a few people with 3 phones. 1 personal, 1 for regular or high priority clients and 1 for new or low priority clients.
I only have one mobile I don’t use a lot, but last year I was detained by police for a couple of hours when I was out photographing industrial facilities.
They eventually let me go when someone confirmed to them that only a hobbyist would be using a pinhole camera, but it was rather strange.
Getting people to inform the police of anything they think suspicious is I am afraid a part and parcel of living in a country that has been attacked by terrorists. Yes, a lot of the stuff that will come up will be a nuisance, but that is part of the price we pay. I hate to say it, but I think Monty has a point. If a person uses five or more phones, or spends a lot of time photographing critical infrastructure, then it will trigger enquiries. It is a bit naive to think otherwise, however daft some of the suspicions might prove to be.
“Thousands of kittehs hab can openers. What if a kitteh wif lots seems suspishus?”
Jonathan: I once read an interview with the manager of operations at one of London’s main airports (either Heathrow or Gatwick – I can’t remember which). There were a couple of questions about so called “plane-spotters” – people who like so show up at airports and watch and photograph aircraft taking off and landing. He gave a very interesting answer, which was that makes a point of being friendly with them and helping them find a clear place to watch from and things like this. A reason for this was that these are on the whole decent people who are familiar with normal airport operations and who will inform him and the authorities at once if something is genuinely wrong. That is, the curious people with cameras are part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Of course we want people to report on likely terrorist activity, but there is subtlety involved. This particular campaign has no subtlety whatsoever, and rather inanely suggests activities that are carried out by vast numbers of people every day as “suspicious”. It just looks like rather pointless political posturing to me, and makes me wonder if there is an election or passage of an anti-terrorism bill through parliament, or something like this happening soon.
I swear to God I thought this advert was a spoof. This country is not the one I grew up in.
“They eventually let me go when someone confirmed to them that only a hobbyist would be using a pinhole camera”
Dammit jb! Now shoe boxes are going to be re-classified as terrorist paraphernalia or something!
More than just subtlety. There’s the whole matter of remembering who is supposed to be on whose side.
Like Peel said: “The police are the public and the public are the police, and that Sunfish guy is just cashing checks for doing stuff that’s everyone’s job.” It doesn’t work so well, however, when the guys in blue wool-poly clown suits start treating everyone like suspects. Once that happens, the plane-spotters say ‘screw it’ and either don’t say anything because they’re tired of being treated like the bad guy, or they’ve gone someplace else entirely which means they don’t even see anything.
Encouraging everyone to call, every time anything happens, results in police being overwhelmed. If you read Stu Davidson’s excellent blog or anything else in his blogroll, you’ll see that’s exactly what happened to policing in the UK: Idiotic management practices turned too many of the cops into house mouses, and the few who are left spend too much time dealing with playground fights and text messages and other things that should never have been a police matter. Not to mention, nobody in their right mind will call 999 anymore because if they do, they’ll be waiting for three days for a cop who will not accomplish anything and may end up being a HO stat-chaser besides.
While that’s going on, the real crimes and real threats fell through the cracks. At least a decade’s worth of chief cons and home secretaries have an awful lot of bad karma to live down now.
This is a perfect opportunity.
Help the ad campaign by adding your own, with appropriate changes to the text of course.
There are thousands of bureaucrats…
What if they seem suspicious?
(Seriously, there is real opportunity here.)
Is this for real?
Bonkers. Just bonkers.
They are running a radio advertising campaign along similar lines.
The question is how do you prevent terrorist attacks in a free society? I suspect there is no easy answer to this but I don’t believe trying to create a society of the suspicious is the answer.