UK police use terror powers to seize BBC Newsnight journalist's laptop

The illusion of choice. These papers do run many stories that are anti-government true.

But for certain issues they line up behind the government. The Snowden files story was initially fully covered only by the Guardian -- who have since had a change of Editor after their offices were raided by the security services and equipment smashed. There has been (until now) almost no coverage that the government wants to pass the snoopers charter soon. There is no coverage that the 'emergency' DRIP bill from last year is due for renewal before Christmas. Due to the way that DRIP was rammed through Parliament last year in defiance of normal procedure my MP promised me a robust debate before the renewal. It looks like it will go through without so much as whisper.

EDITED as the telegraph currently has a front page article on the snoopers charter on its website. I hope that there is time for people to lobby their MPs (which is what killed it off last time).

As of last year ten people in total had been subjected to the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures that was used to confiscate Kermani's laptop[1]. I guess that's now up to at least eleven, but it's a number low enough to believe the majority of people subjected to them actually were very closely linked with planned acts of terrorism. British would-be terrorists are as you point out, not spectacularly effective, but did manage to kill fifty people in a single set of rather more indiscriminate attacks a decade ago plus some relatively minor attempts since then. So we have two extremely infrequent occurrences, but on the whole I'd consider the police - however unwise their actions were in this instance - to be somewhat less likely to target me than bombers, as well as my fate at the hands of the former more likely to be favourable even if I was operating at the cutting edge of journalism.

[1]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/terrorism-prevent...

Can anyone explain how and why British society moved from "Mind the gap" and "Keep calm and .." to this permanent state of fear?

> One needs to understand the psyche of people who work in the security services and special branch. They are very polarised in their beliefs and their opinions. They tend to be racist, xenophobic and have a tendency to group people in tidy mental boxes. They see the world in black and white. There is no grey. They are massively insular and have very much an "us and them mentality". They have comparatively a large amount of power, and enjoy using it.

Are there any experiments and research on this subject that I can read about? Preferably published in a peer-reviewed journal. Anything that could be reproduced. Because if we want to make an informed decision about policies, we need more than personal anecdotes.

Let's see how an example research would look like. Ideally, we would have a control group consisting of a random sample of the general population. Then we would compare them with the members of the security services and see if there are any differences in behavior. We could give both groups a questionnaire with dozens of statements and a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree) or observe them in an interactive situation. If their answers have more 1s and 4s than the control group, then maybe they are more polarized. It's not perfect; there's a risk of self-reporting bias and the observer effect, but it's a start. Maybe there's public data like aggregated reports that would help eliminate said biases.

If there's a difference in behavior between the security personnel and the public, we will have new questions. Is this behavior consistent across all representatives of the security industry? Are they equally racist, xenophobic, and insular in both private and public sector? What if we compare members of the security services in different countries? Are they just as racist in Canada as in the UK, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore, or Brazil? What if we compare it with the experience? Are people who work for over 10 years in the security services more insular than those who worked there less than a year? Do they become more insular as they work longer or is just the industry that attracts such individuals? Do they share similar characteristics with other groups who enjoy comparatively a large amount of power, like CEOs, politicians, or judges?

The only experiment that comes to mind is the Stanford prison experiment. But that was more about authority than security services per se. And if my memory serves me right, there was nothing particular about racism or xenophobia. Plus, it has a fair share of controversy.

The mostly foreign-owned UK press exists to sell newspapers, not to conspire against the public on purported issues of national security. There's almost no coverage of the Draft Communications Bill or DRIP because the average UK citizen doesn't find some legislation that might be debated which might compel ISPs to hold the same sort of data they already hold for a bit longer to be particularly intelligible, never mind interesting when compared with tax credit cuts, migrants, people being blown up in Syria and the latest celebrity gossip. Or as Charlie Brooker, hardly the most technophobic or pro-government of commentators put it, it's the "the most tedious outrage ever". There was rather more noise made (on both sides of the debate) about the more emotive issue of Cameron's attempt to censor internet porn. It's not as if the media is seeking to hide the fact that private messages people have sent, websites they've visited or triangulated locations from mobile phones are regularly used in prosecutions and have been long before this legislation hit the drafting table. Or indeed as if proposed legislative measures are not being discussed at all: here's the far-from-supportive angle of the newspaper closest to being the informal mouthpiece of the Conservative government: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11964655/Police...

As for Snowden, even on this website where people actually understand the potential of surveillance techniques it's the stories about his personal situation and options, as widely run in all UK newspapers from all angles, that seem to have captured the imagination more than the details of what was revealed. And I'm not sure he and his allies, who sought to carefully control how PRISM was reported, even offered the files to other UK newspapers...