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

I'm curious as to how you came to know enough people in the intelligence community to come to this conclusion. I don't see any public evidence of any of what you are talking about, even in cases like this or the nastiest of the Snowden revelations. I could easily see these actions as those that are not power hungry, and who do not spend their time sitting in leather chairs and petting cats menacingly.

People rarely cast themselves as the villains of their life story, and I could definitely imagine this resulting in people in the security services following this logic:

1. We are the good guys. 2. More information always means we can better do our job.

∴ grab the laptop, mass wiretapping, etc.

Now, I don't agree with second premise at all, and I think the first premise overextends "we" to all the people in your organization, now and in the future. But I do think that it is possible many of the people at the NSA, GCHQ, CIA, etc. are actually good people, even the one calling the shots in situations such as this.

If your plan for opposing their actions is to assume that they are twirling their mustaches as we speak, and they are not in fact twirling said mustaches, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. In this case, putting Polonium-210 in strategically placed jars of mustache wax will not work, and neither will trying to expose them as evil power brokers.

Vilifying your enemy may help if you're planning on military warfare against them, but if your plan is more reasoned understanding those you oppose is likely more useful.

I really balk at these fatalistic one-liners. Voters vote for packages of politicians and views. Particularly in the UK with its silly voting system there are very few options for voters to tell the politicians what they feel with any acceptable degree of nuance.

Politicians do stuff the majority disagree with all the time. That alone shows your statement to be false.

A common issue is, of course, that the solutions politicians come up with for problems we want solved, doesn't always agree with us.

E.g. the fact that we do not want paedophiles in our lives doesn't mean that we want the politicians to cover up scandals like Jimmy Savile. It is a perversion of intent. Or would you claim that that is what the voters demand?

It's always strange to me to compare the response to Islamic terrorism with the response to IRA terrorism. The latter was more deadly in the UK, but the illiberal response was mostly contained within Northern Ireland itself. Yet people seem far more scared about Islamic terrorism and far more willing to encourage a brutal response. Is this simply down to racism?

(Censorship has long been an issue though. See: Spycatcher, the Zircon affair, Matrix-Churchill, and "Gerry Adams' words are read by an actor")

I obviously didn't mean to imply that the security services are "spending their time sitting in leather chairs and petting cats menacingly".

They are busy people. They have somewhat a limited number resources at their disposal (unless Downing Street have a crisis on their hands that makes them look bad in the eyes of the public) and they are required to maintain a control on the country's security.

When you work day-in day-out on actual, but mostly perceived threats, you have a tendency to evaluate people quickly and then categorize using learned and automatic cognitive processing methodology. I.e. "Threat, no threat, suspicious, flagged, threat, no threat" etc.

As an example: 20-30 years ago all people entering the UK from Eire or (especially) Catholic northern Irish were considered potential threats. It didn't matter if you had intel on a person or not, the suspicion was still there based on their passport. You still had real Irish intel came from paid informants, so we would know who the problem people were and would watch them from the moment they landed. Ideally we didn't lose them whilst they were here otherwise we have scenarios like lorry bombs going off in Canary Wharf. Now we've moved on from "the Irish problem", and the Irish intel desks are almost all disbanded. All the resource has been moved onto Islamic fundamentalism and a bit is maintained on watching the Russians. In between the Irish Peace Accord and 9/11, when we ran out of things to do, there was some focus on internal radicals like the Animal Welfare groups. It sounds clichéd, but you need to have a target group, or where are you going to spend next year's budget?

I'm not taking away that they are good people in the security services, but their insular jobs lead them to be an insular group of people. Much of what they do is never seen by the public. When you hear of a group of people arrested under the Anti-terrorism legislation, more than likely there was a credible threat. How they do their job is often sailing close to the wind. When it comes to the blanket surveillance, there are obvious benefits to the security services and maintaining the security of the country. It is a very very useful tool. It is unfortunately not beneficial for any other purpose, and is contrary to our beliefs concerning privacy and a right to live without being persistently monitored when innocent.

I also forgot to note earlier, but there is somewhat a difference between desk officers (intel analysts) and operational officers. Operational officers are even worse, but they are constantly dealing with people that are dangerous and real threats to the public and the officers. They have to compartmentalise in order to save their own lives. Any law enforcement officer that carries a gun will tell you that.

http://xkcd.com/1589/