My father, an East German now living in the UK, was saying the other day that he sees parallels between the rise of the Stasi in the 1950's onwards and the UK government's behaviour over the last two decades. I'm inclined to believe him.

The legal system was pretty much the first thing to fall there as well as the criminalisation of literally everything. We have so much legislation now that deals with criminalising people that people don't have a chance if they get in trouble even for something trivial.

To be honest though, the UK has been beyond laughable for a few years on this now.

During the great Icelandic banking crisis, the UK government used anti-terrorism laws to seize assets held by Icelandic banks. I quipped at the time that maybe they were worried about the assets being used to buy lumber for longships from Norway and wealthy bankers going a-Viking again. They might furthermore give the folks up in Orkney ideas and what then? Lose Caithness and Sutherland? That's an existential threat there....

If it was legal to use anti-terrorism laws in that case against a foreign entity far removed from any real terrorist activity (moreso than, say, the British-owned HSBC), then it is hard to see how antiterrorism laws wouldn't be perfectly legal here or anywhere else. Maybe they can start arresting people for drinking tea suspiciously.

>> "According to documents made public during Miranda’s civil suit, police determined that he was subject to the anti-terror law because he was[...] promoting a “political or ideological cause.”"

I understand they had other 'terrorism' related reasons for detaining him (which I don't agree with), but the fact that someone can be detained simply for promoting a political or ideological cause is a disgrace. I'm sure it's there to stop extremist preachers but it's way to broad and sounds like it could be used to stop a hell of a lot of non-terrorists.

The full text of the judgement is at [1]. An interesting read.

Apart from the political and human-rights implications, what I find most interesting is how the police knew what Miranda was actually carrying. Paragraph 11 of the judgement quotes a police document (written before Minranda was stopped) justifying his detention:

"We strongly assess that MIRANDA is carrying items which will assist in GREENWALD releasing more of the NSA and GCHQ material we judge to be in GREENWALD’s possession. Open source research details the relationship between POITRAS, GREENWALD and SNOWDEN which corroborates our assessment as to the likelihood that GREENWALD has access to the protectively marked material SNOWDEN possesses. Our main objectives against David MIRANDA are to understand the nature of any material he is carrying, mitigate the risks to national security that this material poses..."

Which reads like supposition to me. Based on open source research? Please.

Later, in paragraph 13:

"The claimant’s hand luggage was examined, and items retained which as I have said included encrypted storage devices. Mr Oliver Robbins, Deputy National Security Adviser for Intelligence, Security and Resilience in the Cabinet Office, indicates in his first witness statement (paragraph 6) that the encrypted data contained in the external hard drive taken from the claimant contains approximately 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents."

Which is a very definite statement. Either it's based on guesswork, in which case the best that could be said is that it is merely an opinion, or else they broke the encryption (TrueCrypt?). I can't find anything in the facts section of the judgement to indicate that Miranda disclosed what he was carrying, or surrendered passwords.

[1] http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Judgment... [PDF]

What depresses me is the court's acceptance that this involved "'very pressing' issues of national security". The US courts are also far too cowed by executive assertions of "national security". As if there were a clear, bright line of demarcation between everyday ho-hum government data and secrets so critical that their revelation poses an existential danger to civilization itself.

In fact, none of the data released by Snowden is a danger to national security in any sense. The identity of spies has not been released. No passcodes to nuclear weapons have been revealed.

The courts ought to take responsibility to assess the legitimacy of executive privilege claims and make judgments based on the actual content being protected. But for whatever reason, they are afraid to do so.

Basically the anti-terrorism laws are the contemporary inquisition. You can use for anything in order to obtain any outcome.

Colour me unsurprised - the courts have long shown that if political embarrassment is an issue, they are completely supine.

Chips are down. Western nations have realised democracy is expensive. Instead of China turning more democratic, to compete, they have turned into China.

the UK has historically been an outlier when it comes to both press freedoms and anti-terror policies.

Yup. Don't forget Northern Ireland. They went heavy handed there. Did it work? Nope.

Well, this is pretty good proof that the "terrorism law" is wrongly formulated then, isn't it?

Does anybody know why they didn't just use PGP over the internet like Snowden supposedly did? He could have been caught holding onto a piece of paper with a 40 character fingerprint instead.

Oh, well if it was legal, then it's all okay, right? I mean, of course the law is always right. The law is always right, right? Right?!

Oh god, the world is coming apart at the seams.

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> David Miranda Detention Legal Under Terrorism Law

Nowadays, everything is "terrorism". It's funny, because before Bush, nobody knew that word. Nobody ever talked about such a thing. It was something that was talked about maybe once in every 5 years. Nowadays, you can't read the news 1 single day without something being labeled "terrorism". Yesterday, it was the Ukrainian gov't calling the people in the tents "terrorists".

It's become really easy to strike people down.

We have form on this. We also used terror laws against the Icelandic government during the banking crash - http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aXjIA...