When is a Joke Not a Joke? When it's a Threat To Commit a Terrorist Act, Apparently.

I woke up this morning cheered by the sunshine; after the recent sunlight drought we've been having these last few weeks, it was refreshing to see crisp, golden light slanting between my curtains and decorating the walls with a cheery glow. Then I went online after breakfast and the taking of the children to school and read a news article in the Independant that just had to be a joke. Surely not. Really? Here goes; a chap called Paul Chambers was getting mightily pissed at the snow constantly messing with flights over the Xmas period, as were a great many people. However, what marks Paul out as a terrorist (compared to all of the other people who just vented their frustrations to other folk around them) was that he dared post his ire on Twitter; the tweet in question said, "Robin Hood airport is closed.You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" Clearly to you and me this was a man being pissed off and expressing it in humorous form to the world at large. Some humourless cunt however saw this and actually thought it merited wasting the police's time with, and reported it. The police, being naturally on the bleeding edge of the information age and tech-crime, leapt into action and arrested Mr Chambers under the Terrorism Act. For posting a humorous message. On Twitter. The most public of all social networking sites. Yes, officers, because THAT'S clearly where Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are most likely to announce their plans for their next 9/11, after all. Where better than where millions of other Tweeters can read it? Graham Linehan, co-writer of Father Ted and Black Books, tweeted "I don't care if the joke was unwise. If the police are looking for terrorists on Twitter, they need to go to 'modern life' school for a bit."

The ultimate responsibility for this farce comes from a government vastly overreacting to the perceived terrorist threat and drafting a law that allows civil liberties to be curtailed in the interests of national security, but the police need to take some of the blame here; firstly, Mr Chambers actually had to explain to the police questioning him what Twitter was. Do the police not know how to use Google? Are they really that tech-savvy that the biggest social networking craze of the last year has passed them by without even one tiny bit of information lodging in their consciousnesses? Secondly, the police ultimately are the arbiters of what constitutes a crime and what does not; a simple application of common sense here would have told them that addressing this as a threat to national security would be a bit stupid, and would then by association make them look a bit stupid - which it did - and what should have happened was to send an officer to pop round and see Mr Chambers, let him know that someone had complained about his tweet, and find out why he had posted it - no pressure, something that could be done round at his house over a cup of tea as the policeman realised that this was a normal guy living in a normal house living a normal life, and not some yodelling fundamentalist suicide bomber or skinheaded, swastika-loving home bombmaker.

Now Paul Chambers' life has been turned upside down; he has been bailed until February - until then he doesn't know if they will be charging him with 'conspiring to make a bomb hoax'; he has had his PC, laptop and iPhone confiscated; he has been suspended from work pending an internal investigation; and Doncaster Airport have banned him for life.

According to Mr Chambers, the police interviewing him told him repeatedly during his questioning that "It is the world we live in" as some kind of mantra as to why they were doing this. Well, guess what? It isn't the world we live in. It's the world that's been puilled over everybody's eyes to allow governments to steal a little bit more of your civil liberties, to erode a bit more of your personal freedoms away. Freedom of speech? As long as you don't say anything that could be vaguely construed as a terrorist threat, that is. 

In 1984 Orwell predicted a dystopian society where 'Big Brother' watched everyone 'for their own safety' - cameras were installed in every home to record and monitor what everyone was talking about, and anyone who uttered dissension was arrested for thoughtcrime - not an actual crime, but the mere suggestion that the idea of one had passed through someone's head. Most of the people taken thus were taken away and either never seen again, or returned brainwashed and chastened. The government justified this level of oppression by being constantly involved in a (manufactured and fake) never-ending war, and where national security was paramount, and thus all citizens had to be stalwart and firmly behind their Bloc. Any dissension was dangerous and had to be stamped out in order to keep the Bloc strong.

In 2010, we have a dystopian society where there are cameras on every street corner, where people like the aforementioned humourless prick sit on the internet and report vague jokes to the police and where people get arrested for the mere suggestion that the idea of a crime might have passed through their heads. Most people taken this way have their possessions confiscated without explanation, their lives ruined, and could face prison simply for having committed a thoughtcrime. After all, we are involved in a never ending (and some might say, largely manufactured and certainly wildly exaggerated) war on terror, where the enemy is within us, and so they are eroding our liberties in order to better protect us. But we need to be strong, we can't dissent from this by cracking jokes about terrorism.

Over the top comparison? I think not. Let's talk statistics, which I know are more boring than having to stare at a blank wall for three years, but bear with me, I'll try hard to keep it short and interesting. In the ten years from 2000 to 2010, there have been 56 deaths from terrorist attacks in the UK, all of which happened during the dreadful 7th July London bombings in 2005. This was a terrible attack, and nobody is saying that it wasn't, or trying to belittle it. However. In the UK, on average, 79 children are murdered every single year, and a fair number of them have been placed on the Social Services' 'at-risk' register - and yet nothing was done, and children, arguably the most innocent and helpless victims of violent crime, have died. Where are the huge inquiries into Social Services misconduct and incompetence? In ten years, 790 children have been murdered in this country, over ten times the number of people who have died from terrorist attacks in the same country in the same period, but where the children get a vague mention in 'tightening up' Social Services procedures, the terrorist threat catalysed a movement that all too quickly skullfucked us out of some of our fundamental rights as free human beings. 

Here's an even scarier statistic. In the year 2007-2008, almost a million violent attacks in the UK  were deemed to have been committed under the influence of alcohol. A million. Rest your mind a bit, because frankly a million is a bloody big number. As you can imagine, a fair number of those involved murders. And that's just one year. If that was an average, then there have been around ten million violent attacks in this country in the last decade all of which were fuelled by booze. Do we see a national crackdown on alcohol drinking? Nope, this last decade has in fact seen ithe introduction of 24 hour opening times for pubs, one of the wonderful side effects of which is the sight of people throwing up at half past three in the afternoon on Bank Holidays outside your local Sainsbury's before threatening to kick you in and then falling over into their own waste when you're out with your kids for a nice afternoon walk. Lovely. But no, despite this being a genuine menace to our society, the best the government can do is to make the police stop a few more drivers to randomly breathalise, and send out the riot vans if a fight breaks out. No preventative measures to stop violence before it starts there at all. Not one. All they've done is make it even easier to get pissed up any time of the day.

But you joke about blowing up an airport and they'll arrest you, screw up your life, and keep on telling you that "It's not my fault guv, this is just the world we live in today."

What other prices have we paid for our 'protection' from these dubious terrorist threats? Well, Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian plumber, was shot in the head seven times for daring to run for a tube train because he was late; a few days later a man was arrested for wearing a jacket that was deemed 'too warm for the season' and carrying a backpack - it took the police over a month to drop the terrorist charges; despite this being the only reason they had arrested him in the first place; a chap called Abu Bakr Mansha was accused of plotting to murder a British soldier and was sentenced to 6 years for possessing a document that was "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism"; the raid and non-fatal shooting of a man in Forest Gate on suspicion of preparing a chemical weapon - they found absolutely no evidence whatsoever to substantiate this (after pulling his home apart) and dropped all charges; in 2008 a student and friend who were writing a PhD on counterterrorism were arrested for being in possession of an Al Qaeda training document - it turned out later to have been downloaded from the US Department of Justice website for research purposes for the PhD, but the police, not wanting to be let down yet again by yet another bumbling cock-up (and after all the effort they allegedly put into psychologically tormenting the young men, according to the student in question, Rizwaan Sabir), let them off the hook for the terrorist charges, but then rearrested the friend on immigration grounds because they found an irregularity with his work visa...; the same year (2008) an Oxford graduate was arrested after someone claimed they saw him taking photographs of a sealed manhole cover near a library - he was detained for 36 hours whilst his home and computer were ransacked by the police - no photos of manhole covers were found and, for fuck's sake, even if they were, SO FUCKING WHAT? What the screaming fuck is wrong with a society when a guy can't take a photo of a bloody fucking manhole cover without having his life turned upside down by the Thought Police?

So, for the sake of 56 people who died one year, the entire country now has to watch what it says, what it downloads, what it might accidentally get emailed by someone, because otherwise they might get you, lock you up and rub their shitty, unwashed arses all over your innocent life. Who gives a flying fuck about doing something to stop child murders and drunken thugs when you can arrest people who make jokes about blowing up airports and shoot people in the head for running for a train? Not our politicians or police forces, that's for sure.