Bush Causes Cell Phone Ban

An anonymous reader writes "When President George Bush visits Sydney, Australia for the APEC Summit in September, all cell phone calls within the radius of a football field will be suppressed. The president's motorcade will be shadowed by a helicopter equipped with signal-jamming equipment. Terrorists have used mobile phones to detonate remote-controlled bombs in Iraq and elsewhere in the world." There are other ways to detonate explosives remotely. Doesn't seem like the smartest thing to let potential enemies know of such plans in advance.

Comments

But seriously

[Magada]

Security theater at its very best, folks... Only there may be an ulterior motive here. The Seattle WTO riots were co-ordinated via cellphone. Someone has taken the lesson to heart. Oh well, it's back to walkie-talkies for the concerned activists.

Re:Should read...

[radtea]

That said, doing something is better than doing nothing. A lot of the complaints here seem to be along the lines of "why lock my car door when someone can steal my stereo by breaking the window anyway?"

There are at least two legitimate concerns:

1) Various fairly obvious terrorist responses to these counter-measures will greatly increase the danger to bystanders without materially reducing the risk to the President.

2) There is some suspicion that this has more to do with making it harder for legitimate democratic protesters to co-ordinate their actions than it does with preventing terrorism.

Whether either of those things is sufficient to trump the needs of presidential security is a matter for debate, unlike the nearly-zero-cost behaviour of locking your car doors to protect your stereo. There is a point where people are going to say, "Enough! We've had it with all the intrusions into our daily lives in the name of counter-terrorist activity. I come from a society that has always valued liberty over security, and this is more than I am willing to give up."

While the particular policy of jamming cell phones is relatively minor, it is symbolic of many other more significant intrusions.