Dear Mr ……

You may be aware that Boris Johnson is the Chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, and as your letter concerns a policing matter the Greater London Authority (GLA) have passed it to us to arrange a response.

The Terrorism Act 2000 does not prohibit people from taking photographs or digital images in an area where an authority under section 44 is in place.

At the Authority meeting held on 30 April 2009, Tim Godwin (Temporary Deputy Commissioner, MPS) stated that he would reiterate to all police officers the policy dealing with this legislation, which is that there will be no use of that power unless there is a direct link to terrorism and there is evidence to support that.

Yvonne Peart

Information Officer

I see the formation of a big brother state, this will rsult in bigger issues for you than Islamic extremists, those conditions will breed spawning grounds for your own internal white anglo saxin terrorists fighting the controls of a paranoid state

Anthony
Dublin Ireland

The terrorists don’t hate us for our freedoms; they hate us for our cheap-ass compact cameras.

That comment doesn’t mean it is worse to be stopped from taking a photo than to be blown up by a bomb. It means, simply, that the average person is more at risk from bacon than from terrorism. I lived in London during some of the years when the IRA was bombing things. The average Londoner shrugged it off as part of the price for living free. Anthony Wedgewood-Benn said it all-too-clearly: The greatest risk to democracy comes from fear. That is all to evident now in Britain and, increasingly so, in the late-great-USA.

There, fixed that for you.

Is the photographer, the victim? He is the one being attacked. Is the cops the victims, they are the ones doing the attacking. Do you mean Our Society, attacking itself? Surely that would be a singular, not a plural. Or is the population the victim of an increasingly repressive government, who are doing exactly what the terrorists want them to.

Very powerful messages fall down and lose weight when poorly delivered. Put Obama’s words into Biden’s mouth, and do our ears not bleed?

It isn’t the one person being stopped, it’s the thousands being stopped and searched and abused who have lost their civil rights because of one bomb. Yes, 4,000 dead at the WTC is bad. But what’s worse is the 5,000 dead and 35,000 wounded fighting a pointless war in Iraq. They were killed and wounded because we hand over to government whatever our elected leaders want because of mindless fear. Terrorists have been blowing up bombs in the US since dynamite was invented but until they put a crescent and star on those bombs the US treated it as a criminal event and moved on. As Ben Franklin said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

So, it looks like pretty much everyone has lost.

The terrorists don’t attain their goals. We have spun into the cultural equivalent of an auto-immune disease. The extremists on all sides have been energized by the problems on every side.

Pretty much, the only “win” is for the “everything’s going to hell in a handbasket” demographic :(

In Australia as long as you don’t look like a tewwawist you can do whatever you want.

God Bless Australia

I have to agree with MrWeeble on this one. I’m pretty sure Cory prides himself on accuracy and attention to detail (and rightly so).

Inaccurate use of the word “fake”, and quotemarks around phrases he doesn’t like to emphasize a sarcastic political point — this kind of rhetoric isn’t up to his best standard.

Nope. Not a terrorist. But you *do* realize thatSt. Paul’s is copyrighted, and you committed an illegal download? You only got 2 strikes left before you’re banned from the intarwebs…

Pretty much, the only “win” is for the “everything’s going to hell in a handbasket” demographic :(

Maybe it actually helps, in a way?

If you consider the overreaction to terrorism as just another symptom of what’s really wrong with the way we organise ourselves, then perhaps its ridiculous scale is alerting some folks to the invalidity of their ‘democracies’, who otherwise may not have noticed it, thanks to the work of marketing departments, spin merchants and executive producers…

Without this terrorism furphy we would still all be forsaken by our governments to vile corporate influence… but fewer of us would be pissed off at our governments.

Still, I guess this angle can’t be too correct given I would’ve thought Gordon Brown’s moves to a police state were too incautiously rapid to avoid widespread dissatisfaction verging on the beginnings of revolt…

Instead he’s demonstrating just how quickly the transition can be rammed through without a peep from John Citizen. I only hope there’s a glaring miscalculation on this score in the works which serves to seriously piss off more than the small numbers of politically aware…

Between September 1940 and May 1941 German bombing raids killed almost 40,000 civilians. That was a war with an end yet we did not surrender our freedoms to the extent we have in the last decade.

The so called war against terror has no end. We will never entirely stop disgruntled groups from trying to kill or main to publicise their causes or further their ends. We only win by refusing to give in and that means refusing to give up those things we hold dear.

The state of New Hampshire’s motto is Live Free or Die, taken from a toast by the Revolutionary War commander General John Stark which was; “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.” We might well remember his words.

“The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn’t come from the explosion.”

…is one of the most ridiculous things written on this site. Without a doubt, attacks on civil liberties post-attack are serious issues, and need to be discussed. After all, the purpose of terror attacks is to instill terror. But are you seriously saying someone being stopped from taking a picture of St. Paul’s (as stupid as that is) is worse than being blown up in a subway bombing???

116 photos of St Pauls giving a highly detailed view all around the site. And that’s just the photos from one user.

I can’t believe that we lived through the IRA bombings and never thought twice about Irish tourists, but now we treat every Union-Jack-T-shirted tourist with a camera around their neck for being a secret muslim terrorist.

Not quite, at least one country, Greece, stopped Goolag from spying on them. I think Switzerland, too.

There were two al Quaeda operatives at St Paul’s that day: the cop and her volunteer sidekick, who were about Osama bin Laden’s business in London all day long.

Word.

Only governments can drive organised idiocy to greater heights than religion manages.

Western governments are far more prolific terrorists than Al-Quaeda. All that opportunistic button-pushing makes my blood boil; we’re destroying our own societies.

The only way to respond to Al-Quaeda’s efforts that makes any sense to me is to allow society to ignore them as much as possible. Let the g-men tackle em behind the scenes, and leave the rest of us alone.

After all, it’s not like all that extra ‘security’ is worth a pinch of shit; it’s so obviously all posture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAPLpHyBrlg

One could be forgiven for forming the opinion that our increasingly tyrannical governments actually welcome terrorism… they’re not doing very much that’ll actually avoid it, and plenty to provoke it, all the while writing new powers and more impunity for themselves.

Yes. That would be the same politician who censored the press and routinely engaged in incredibly broad wartime domestic spying. Which, in retrospect, was a probably a pretty smart set of strategies.

The reaction of these police officers was simply stupid. Stupid and officious police officers are not the result of terrorism.

There’s an important difference between fear and prudence. Every policy we don’t agree with, even ones which are arguably counterproductive, are not necessarily a product of cringing sheep-like cowardice. That’s just lazy thinking.

The REAL problem is people allowing the police to do this.

How many lives are affected by a given government’s completely inappropriate and disproportionate response, and for how long?

And how do you preserve liberty by eliminating it?

And I have seldom read words more true than that. “Terrorism” has lately been turned into a magic word that fearmongers use as an entrance card for a political all-you-can-eat-buffet, especially when it comes to restricting freedoms.