What do you think of when you hear the words ‘anti-terrorist operation’ and ‘stop and search’?

Are you reassured? Do you think that it’s all targeted and intelligence driven, out to halt specific threats in the course of securing democracy?

Or do you think that it’s all a bunch of horseshit, and not a million miles away from Belfast back in the good old days of turnstiles and iron bars at every access point?

If you subscribe to the first point of view, I wish you all the best. If it’s the latter, then you could do worse than read el Reg‘s take on it.

Feeling unsafe in your life? Looking for reassurance? The Metropolitan Police Service can help you with a touchy-feely new innovation. It’s called stop and search.

A new document hints at a shift of emphasis in the Met’s strategic vision for counter terrorism stop and search powers. It’s going to be a public relations tool.

How’s this for a stat: of over thirty thousand supposedly terror related searches between 2003 abd 2007, less than eighty resulted in anyone being charged with a terrorist related offence. Given recent happenings in the courts, that’s probably less than forty being convicted of anything, and less than fifteen being convicted of any terror related charge. Oh, and less than a single device being found or plot being foiled.

So, my question is this: is it worth creating records on thirty thousand innocent people to charge 79 with offences that they’re highly unlikely to be guilty of?

Is it worth making thousands of people victims of state aggression in the name of reassuring the rest of us? Because here’s a little factoid that I think is interesting: if you grant that Red Ken was able to count, and that there are seven million Londoners, then 0.429% of Londoners were stopped and searched, as opposed to 0.248% of those stopped being eventually charged with a terror related offence.

Personally, I’m not exactly thrilled with those odds…

When large parts of the UK populace is concerned about their data being shared across government departments, most of whom have no need to see it and even fewer of whom have any right to see it, what does Her Majesty’s Government do?

Yes, you guessed it: they hold a review.

And then they use that review to give themselves the power to ride roughshod over the few protections in place. Because, y’know, sometimes just popping everyone’s details onto a CD and throwing them in the post because a different department asked nicely isn’t sharing enough.

Good job we don’t trust the government with any sensitive data, isn’t it? Oh wait, that would be a lie. Because we’re told many times that if we don’t share all with the government, then we’re liable to be punished. Nice.

Not that I’m a tad annoyed. No, not I…

So far this week, I’ve mused about police states, dictators, UK government over-reaching and UK government ineptitude.

So, what to write about this morning, eh? I dunno, how about UK government censorship. That should do the trick…

Britain’s security agencies and police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall.

The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national security.

The committee also wants to censor reporting of police operations that are deemed to have implications for national security. The ISC is to recommend in its next report, out at the end of the year, that a commission be set up to look into its plans, according to senior Whitehall sources.

Now, you might expect that I’d go off on a foul mouth rant about this. Legalised censorship, I might say, at the whim of a nameless, faceless bureaucrat; I might ask why justice would need to be done in secret; almost by definition justice carried out secretly is less just than that carried out in the open. Hell, I might even ponder the possibility of abuse by people wanting to cover up mistakes.

However, I don’t think I’ll do that.

Instead, I think I’ll mention the simple fact that all the above is happening now anyway; nameless and faceless bureaucrats are ‘asking’ newspapers and TV stations not to cover certain things, and those certain things aren’t covered. There’s no oversight, and there’s no accountability. There’s little in the way of consistency either; I suspect the application of a DA-notice is as dependent on who is manning a certain shift as it is on any official guidance.

Given that, you might expect that I’d actually be for this proposed commission¹. It could possibly tighten up the rules, and make the system less open to abuse.

However, you’d be wrong on that front. If I had any faith at all that any change would could be for the better, then I might support it. But every law that this government has brought in to tighten up rules, lessen opportunities for abuse and all that, it’s actually made more loopholes, more generalisations, and more opportunities for abuse.

So we’re being let down by the current system. But I fear that any new system would be much worse, and much harder to get rid of…

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¹ – How very New Labour – when in doubt as to how something will be received by the public, instigate a commission to look into it. And the slip a law doing exactly what you wanted to do in the first place through parliament, if precedent is anything to go by…