That seems to be the message from the London Police with these lovely new counter-terrorism posters they’ve been putting up.
Don’t rely on others. If you supect it report it.
Yes, let’s not rely on others. That’s how we bind and protect and nurture a society.
Londoners are being asked to trust their instincts and report suspicious behaviour to help combat terrorist activity.
Just one piece of information could be vital in helping disrupt terrorist planning and, in turn, save lives.
This national publicity campaign across England and Wales raises awareness of the Anti-Terrorist Hotline and gives the public examples of suspicious activity and behaviour. The public are encouraged to trust their instincts and report anything confidentially to the Anti-Terrorist Hotline, where specialist officers will take their call.
The link above show the posters, juxtaposing neighborhood scenes with DARK RED TEXT BOXES, including one of some trash cans with various bottles and boxes, near which a woman pushes a tot in a pram …
These chemicals won’t be used in a bomb because a neighbor reported the dumped containers.
… and one of some families with kids on a busy urban street …
A bomb won’t go off here because weeks before a shopper reported someone studying the CCTV cameras.
So the lesson is clear — the only way to be safe from bombings (which, as we know, are happening in the UK on an hourly basis, right?) is to snoop in your neighbor’s trash for unexplained chemical bottles, or take notes as to who is glancing at the closed circuit TV cameras the police have set up to monitor passersby. And, if you’re not sure, call the police.
It’s hard to imagine a worse, more socially corrosive campaign. Telling people to rummage in one another’s trash and report on anything they don’t understand is a recipe for flooding the police with bad reports from ignorant people who end up bringing down anti-terror cops on their neighbors who keep tropical fish, paint in oils, are amateur chemists, or who just do something outside of the narrow experience of the least adventurous person on their street. Essentially, this redefines “suspicious” as anything outside of the direct experience of the most frightened, ignorant and foolish people in any neighborhood.
Even worse, though, is the idea that you should report your neighbors to the police for looking at the creepy surveillance technology around them. This is the first step in making it illegal to debate whether the surveillance state is a good or bad thing. It’s the extension of the ridiculous airport rule that prohibits discussing the security measures (“Exactly how does 101 ml of liquid endanger a plane?”), conflating it with “making jokes about bombs.”
The British authorities are bent on driving fear into the hearts of Britons: fear of terrorists, immigrants, pedophiles, children, knives… And once people are afraid enough, they’ll write government a blank check to expand its authority without sense or limit.
What an embarrassment from the country whose level-headed response to the Blitz was “Keep Calm and Carry On” — how has that sensible motto been replaced with “When in trouble or in doubt/Run in circles scream and shout”?
Very, very sad. And scary (though not in the way that it’s intended to be scary).
“Don’t rely on others. If you suspect it report it.”
That is a lesson learned from the ’70s and ’80s, when US citizens were giving money to terrorists to help them attack British citizens.
If you see something suspicious do you really NOT report it to the police? “I saw someone hanging around your car, but I didn’t want to be thought a Nazi, so I didn’t phone the police.”
So, you work in a garden centre, and someone comes in and buys lots and LOTS of fertilizer. But you don’t report it, because thats wrong. Yeah, I know that that much fertilizer looks suspiciously like bomb making equipment, but hey, you’re not ‘The Man’.
It is remarkably easy to make a large bomb, with timer and anti tamper devices from items that you can buy in an average shopping centre. The only difficult thing is the ‘Det Cord’ to set the thing off- but hey, just so happens the CIA used to hand the stuff out like candy TO THE PEOPLE WE ARE NOW FIGHTING.
Where precisely does it say “Rummage through your neighbours bins”. Oh. It doesn’t.
Quite small qualtities of some chemicals go ‘Bang’. The hole you need in a Jumbo jet at 30,000 feet to severly ruin it’s flight is actually quite small (800g of semtex will be enough).
“What an embarrassment from the country whose level-headed response to the Blitz was “Keep Calm and Carry On” ”
But hey we still had an Airforce, AA guns and barrage balloons to try and stop it, and a fire brigade to try to limit the damage. People still acted like there was a war on.
Yes, the security services can over-react. Probably because they don’t want people asking difficult questions when they under-react. Like “Why were you not interested in the report of the men who wanted to learn to fly, but not how to take off and land?”
This post is suspicious…
LH, I do see your point. It’s the job of a society to protect itself and its members, and seeing something suspicious should be acted upon, not just ignored in the hopes that it will go away or someone else will deal with it.
On the other hand, there’s being reasonably protective and there’s paranoia. There’s banding together, then there’s setting people against each other.
If there were regular bombings going on in the UK, I would think encouraging people to take a look to see if large numbers of chemical bottles were sitting in an open rubbish bin might be justified. But that’s not the case here. Not that I would expect actual terrorists to leave such evidence out in the open, and in any case, I *would* expect such reports of suspicion are a lot more likely to net a massive number of false positives rather than nabbing terrorists.
It’s like saying, “Someone didn’t set off a shoe bomb here because a neighbor noticed someone wearing shoes and called the police about it.”
If bombs are so easy to make, and the likelihood of bombing so high, I would expect to see a lot of them. Rather than buying massive amounts of fertilizer from shop X today, terrorists would buy a smaller amount from several shops over consecutive weekends. The only reasonable thing to do would seem to be either to have a national register of how much fertilizer people are buying, or ban its sale altogether.
My problem with this campaign is that it basically saying, “Watch what everyone around you is doing, and if you have any suspicions about it, call the cops.” That seems to be a more destructive policy than a helpful one.
The point is not that people shouldn’t report things that are obviously suspicious (for instance in the US things like fertilizer that can be used as explosives are now a controlled substance that purchases of overa certain threshhold require reporting to DHS by the merchant), the issue is that this campaign creates an intentionally paranoid and socially cancerous attitude. Particularly in a country that has a very real and significant religious/racial issue causing social strife.
The British public is well aware of the kinds of things to look out for after years of dealing with a bombing campaign from the IRA. Giving the white supremists more fuel to turn in their Islamic/Middle Eastern neighbors for ‘being suspicious’ is not useful.
England has some very real social engineering issues and excessive invasion of privacy problems as well. Fostering a culture of paranoia is very useful to those elements who want to curtail civil liberties, but will simply foment more problemns in a country that is already on the edge of a social revolution.
I’d also point out that our Founding Fathers noted that: “The price of Liberty is blood.” This is usually quoted as supporting the armed services, but it applies just as much to our society as a whole. While we need to make realistic safeguards, we also have to risk shedding some of our blood if we are to be the free society that our Constitution and Bill of Rights sets forth we should be.
/Gets off soapbox and slowly backs away . . . .
Wow, sorry about that spacing . .. I guess I need to hit return more. Reposted in readable format:
The point is not that people shouldn’t report things that are obviously suspicious (for instance in the US things like fertilizer that can be used as explosives are now a controlled substance that purchases of over a certain threshhold require reporting to DHS by the merchant), the issue is that this campaign creates an intentionally paranoid and socially cancerous attitude. Particularly in a country that has a very real and significant religious/racial issue causing social strife.
The British public is well aware of the kinds of things to look out for after years of dealing with a bombing campaign from the IRA. Giving the white supremists more fuel to turn in their Islamic/Middle Eastern neighbors for ‘being suspicious’ is not useful.
England has some very real social engineering issues and excessive invasion of privacy problems as well. Fostering a culture of paranoia is very useful to those elements who want to curtail civil liberties, but will simply foment more problemns in a country that is already on the edge of a social revolution.
I’d also point out that our Founding Fathers noted that: “The price of Liberty is blood.” This is usually quoted as supporting the armed services, but it applies just as much to our society as a whole. While we need to make realistic safeguards, we also have to risk shedding some of our blood if we are to be the free society that our Constitution and Bill of Rights sets forth we should be.
/Gets off soapbox and slowly backs away . . . .
Some very fun remixes of the police posters here: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/26/remixes-of-the-paran.html
I will not take lectures from a country whose secret services monitor as much worldwide phone trafic- including yours and mine- as they can. And I’m sick of the whiny “We’ve got the Bill of Rights so we’re free, you’re not” when private business’ from the US export their freedom-restricting practices over the world with teh connivance of the politicians they have bought.
You may wish to consider which country gave us McCarthyism.
Sorry- got a little excised. When you start a new country you need to kick start the law-book. We’ve got documents going back 800 years. Its just that they are not all in one document.
LH, I will not for a moment hold up the governmental practices and security theater of my own country up as an example of How Things Should Be, as a cursory reading of this very blog (look under the category of “Homeland Security” for examples). And when this country’s government has attempted to control the populace via fear, I’ve spoken against such practices.
My observation, though, despite problems we’ve had (esp. over the past eight years), is that Britain’s security apparatus has gone still further (though not that much further) than the worst recent excesses in this country — in part because it’s a smaller nation with a more centralized government, in part because our constitution and judicial oversight provided venues for blunting such efforts here. The pervasiveness of CCTV security in the UK is an example.
In speaking of private businesses, my observation (both as a lay person and as an IT professional) is that in the US we tend to resist government control of personal data while allowing private businesses to get away with murder; in Europe (including the UK), the opposite is true. Neither is desirable, though I’d rather have the data diffused through corporations than centralized under governmental control.
I have a great deal of admiration for the UK, and am well aware of the debt we owe you culturally and legally. I do worry, though, that you’re losing your freedoms faster than we are.
I can not imaagine that even the ‘older’ countries have all their laws up to date.
Do they have all the laws saying you can not spit on the sidewalk and not get a citation repealed? Or that a man needs to tip your hat to a lady each time he passes one on the street or he will be similarly in trouble? What about the many laws about scooping horse poop? Oh — the list of similar laws goes on!
If your law books are 800 yeards old, I would be amazed if they have been purged for things like that. And it would be NICE to have INDIVIDUALS correct their Own Little Problems before they correct someone saying that EVERYONE should look out for the Problems of Everyone.
When I read the blurb about the fertilizer, I read that we ALL need to look for unusual actions. It does not matter if it is fertilizer or someone poking around someones car or house or person. Would YOU want someone Bothering your Wife or Daughter in an unseemly manner? Or would you Prefer than a stranger walk over and interfer in a KINDLY manner and interrupt it since YOU were NOT there to do so?
Whether it be your Family member or your car or fertilizer, I feel we need to be aware of unusual actions of other people.
I disliked Hillary, but one phrase she made popular–that our local Domestic Violence agency had used Years before Hillary ran–was that it takes a Village to raise a Child. I think it takes a Village to make a World Complete. It takes Everyone Working Together to make the World Work Together correctly.
LH, my point is that BOTh of our countries are teetering on the edge of an Orwellian nightmare. It’s frankly WORSE for the US because our nation was intended to specifically stand against these kinds of abuses and we are obviously not doing so.
That said, the English people have a long histroy of standing up against interanl tyranny. I hope we see that there again, soon.
Frankly, the entire Western world (hate that term, but what else do we have to use that’s not worse?) has taken the real threat of terrorism, and turned it into a justification to control their populace in ways that would have been completely unacceptible before the terrorism threat became real.
McCarthyism is, in fact, one of the worst episodes in our nation’s history (as an American from Wisconsin the shame is doubled!), and the current Terror hunts are just as bad. Worse, actually since we should have learned from the Commie hunts.
Lets look at the data in business/government control debate.
As a government employee, who has been through a number of areas, the data tends to be just that: data, the stuff tends to build up like blown leaves in autumn. It seems to me it takes aggressive capitalism to make it into information- why the fuck do cashiers keep asking for my address?
Lets look at the difference between Government and private business. More to the point, lets apply the questions that Tony Benn thinks anyone who has control should answer.
“Who picked you?”
“Who controls you?”
“How can I get rid of you?”
With private business the answer is “We can do anything we like, and you have no control. Sure you can have the illusion of moving your business, but we will make it so damned inconvenient that the majority won’t. And even if they do, hey guess what- we own that company too, or at least, they are no different”.
Cue lots of Yank bleating about how free their society is. Yeah right. Thats why nopn-drivers carry driving licences in the US- because the need the official Photo ID. You don’t NEED ID cards. Its just bloody inconvenient to live with out.
Dave has blogged about the CCTV in the UK. Most of that is in private hands (shops), or in secure critical places- prisons, army bases etc. Much of the rest is in the control of local councils, and often placed there at the request of the populance- CCTV outside schools, playgrounds or shopping areas.
But then, in many cases the US population doesn’t need to be controlled. They do it themselves then smugly believe that it is freedom. Janet Jackson’s nipple anybody?
To send you adverts by mail. Irksome, annoying, and (unless it’s an online credit card order), not something I tend to give.
For private business, the (theoretical) answers are, “I chose you (by giving you my custom), you’re controlled by my elected government, and I can get rid of you by going to a competitor.”
Those answers aren’t always completely valid, esp. when the government is corrupted by industry and/or when a company has a monopoly. But there’s some basis for hope. If Amazon ticks me off enough, I have alternatives.
From a governmental standpoint, though, it’s not quite as simple. In a representative democracy, of course, “I” pick ’em, “I” control ’em, and “I” can get rid of them. But there are a lot of folks who I don’t directly control or who don’t get elected (police, for example). And if the government becomes too powerful or unresponsive or too big, the inconvenience of “switching countries” is a lot bigger than switching companies (usually).
Yes, we can (as has been demonstrated) elect a new set of leaders. But government rarely lets loose of powers once gained. I like a lot of the policy directions of the Obama administration, a lot. I wouldn’t trade back for a plug nickel. But I haven’t seen a lot of rollback of the governmental policies on privacy or “anti-terror” so far, just some measure of lip service.
I agree. On the other hand, how much of that drive for official photo IDs has been from private industry and how much from the government? It’s been largely the latter. (Ironically, on the other hand, there’s been interesting push-back from the state governments, which issue the DLs, against the federal government’s desire for a national DL.)
We have CCTV inside private businesses. And we have them in “secure critical places.” What we don’t have much of is CCTV in public areas, request of “populace” or no. Indeed, while there are many who would welcome it, for the most part it meets a large amount of resistance from the populace as a whole.
Generalizations are difficult (and probably unfair), and one can find lots of exceptions.
Societal “herd” control is the most pernicious of all. I don’t think the US has a monopoly on that. 🙂 But it’s also most amenable to change … over time. And, ultimately, that’s the only framework in which personal liberties can flourish.
The issue I have with CCTV is that the Government has a LOT more of it than people seem to think. Every major road has CCTV and the Government is, often, pushing to use that for enforcement issues (i.e. traffic enforcement now, what later?). Most of the cameras were installed for non-enforcement issues (traffic pattern modelling, boat launch usage, etc.), but the realities of an electronic society inevitably twist how those cameras get used.
As it stands right now, at least in Wisconsin, the Attorney General requires that all surveillance video be kept for at least 120-days to protect the State from lawsuits. That’s CRAZY long.