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UK Academics Arrested For Researching al-Qaida
D Afifi writes "Two political researchers at the University of Nottingham, in the UK, have been arrested under the Terrorism Act for downloading Al-Qaida material from a US government website. The material was to be used for research in terrorist tactics. There has been a huge public outcry, with university staff planning a march to demonstrate against the attack on academic freedom. Yet, one of the students, an Algerian, is still held in custody under immigration charges and is being fast-tracked for deportation."
The UK is the country furthest along the road to 1984.
Sweet, now there are even more kinds of "illegal data" out there.
Under-age porn, "terrorist" material, DRM removing software, MAFIAA products, etc...
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
in order to control the masses.
Fear is a common tactic used since the begging of civilization to manipulate people.
- Zeus will destroy you all!
- The devil will come for you and burn you for all eternity!
- Terrorists! omg! seek shelter at once!
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
Anyone have a link to the material in question? (Is it in English?)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
All this means is ...... WTF????
Information hosted on a US government website? That is forbidden material? Entrapment anyone? How about err... uhhh... holy fuck!
So the UK government noticed this material being downloaded and never looked at where it came from? WTF? Is the US Government now hosting terrorism inciting materials for the internets?
This, I truly hope, leaves buckets full of egg and chicken shit on the faces of some government employee types.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
They were reading material from a US government website. These are the same idiot agencies who attacked Iraq to "get rid of Weapons of Mass Destruction". Clearly if anyone is less able to produce proper intelligence and material - it's these gaffs.
It's like reading an article on how to improve your country's economy written by George Bush.
No offense to any American's reading btw - it's the agencies I have no respect for.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I mean.. Information doesn't kill people; people kill people!!! It's what you do with the information that counts!
I got curious once and looked up how to make a hydrogen bomb. Does that make me a terrorist? NO. Because I only use my hydrogen bomb for personal self-defense!
--- We need more Ron Paul!
There are 2 issues here that I can tell.
;) ) therefore should not be treated as a terrorist.
:p
#1 Arrest under Terrorism act for having al-Qaida-related material.
#2 Immigration charges and subsequent deportation.
The two are related insofar as discovering 1 resulted in 2.
#2, the illegal immigration, *should* result in deportation - he is perfectly able to make a claim on humanitarian grounds or claim asylum. The fact remains that illegal immigrants should be deported.
#1 should be approached as:
a) person found with dodgy material
b) person was investigated
c) things happen
Now, the main objection is vs c). he was engaging in legitimate academic research (you COULD argue he is a terrorist and this is a clever coverup, but I wont go there
The fact that "An illegal immigrate faces deportation" is no surprise and should not impact your judgement here.
This probably comes acros as a bit confused - its been a long day.
à_à
You shall lose both, and deserve neither.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Fear drives so much in the form of bad governmental behavior. I feel for my British friends, as they must feel for Americans. Blair and Bush (now Brown), leading their countries down the path to an oil war-- not terrorism-- oil. Not religious self-righteousness-- war for oil and to destabilize governments not marching in-step with them.
The quotations of American and British patriots that warn that liberty at the cost of security is folly are now sadly worn out. My British friends have less hope because they believe that Tory and Labor, just like Democrats and Republicans, are largely the same. This is a dangerous time in the world for people not to believe in the integrity and veracity of their governments; more is at stake in interdependency than ever before. I hope, no pray, they listen to their constituents.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
As I RTFA I realized that this looks like standard jobsworth cops at large and could happen any day here in the U.S. Too much responsibility too little brains.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Information should never be illegal unless it is a matter of (real) national security. Terrorist tactics are not a matter of national security, therefore the information should not be illegal. With the suppression of information comes the suppression of our freedoms. Read 1984 and see how close we are to becoming a similar society. In all dictatorships, it was first the information that was "dangerous to the state" then it became "dangerous to the state's morals" until all you can get is government propaganda.
Knowing terrorist tactics neither makes you a threat nor makes you a terrorist.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
1984 assumes the government is competent and really out to get everyone. In reality its more like the movie Brazil. Everyone mindlessly doing their job without any critical thought. Watching Brazil and comparing it to current events is truly horrifying.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
No one else seems to have covered this angle, so I'll bring it up. WTF is wrong with the University of Nottingham? I cannot believe a supposed institution of higher learning would sell its scholars down the river like that. This whole thing flies in the face of what a University is suppose to stand for. Perhaps I'm just naive.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
BUt now maybe people who think there is nothing to worry about with this fascism creep that has been going on in thUK and the US wull start to wake up.
You can view video clips of Tony Blair and CIA officials basically stating that Al Qaeda doesn't exist on You Tube (IIRC from the BBC originally).
http://polidics.com/cia/top-ranking-cia-operatives-admit-al-qaeda-is-a-complete-fabrication.html
Maybe they are trying to stop people from researching this stuff.
Two details should be considered before judging the situation and blaming random people:
This is a gross mistake anyway, but it's a quite a bit less 1984-ish than one might think from the summary.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
This sounds very similar to a recent episode of numb3rs (not the greatest show in the world, but better than average). Charlie's colleague was arrested for working on genetically modified foods and sending the results to Pakistan where it could save people from famine. The government considered it bio-terrorism research material.
I have little doubt that this episode was inspired by the whole national security climate which silences research all the time.
In TFA, the student was researching (broadly) Islamic Politics. Which seems reasonable enough; it's regrettably a large part of perceived western views on Islamic politics. Additionally, it wasn't the student who originally downloaded the material who is now being threatened with deportation. Hisham Yezza was asked to print the document in question, and there's no evidence that he even read it.
By my estimates there are many government and other activities which could be considered 'terrorist' by some definitions of the word. Back in South Africa Nelson Mandela was considered a 'terrorist'. So how do we define 'terrorism' without implicating the so-called 'good guys'?
http://projectleader.wordpress.com
Just wanted to clarify why he's being deported. The brits' reaction to the downloading of the document was a bit extreme, but if ya want to live in a country then ya gotta play by their(sometimes idiotic) rules
But there is something fundamentally wrong with the government if you're an academic and visiting a web site brings you to the attention of the immigration departmnet in the first place.
I think it is pretty obvious that the government decision and policy makers are useless without the people to execute their orders.
Why aren't we actively protesting to those people? These people are responsible for their actions and are responsible for acting on their own conscience. It's easy to show that various campaigns to influence government policy and direction even in small degrees.
How possible might it be to influence the arms and legs of bad government to refuse to act against its conscience?
Tagged: 1984 (of course)
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
was studying passenger jets, not Al Qaida literature. The real terrorists plotting a crime have already been recruited, and don't need to read any more Al Qaida stuff. Arresting someone for reading Al Qaida stuff is at best a "pre-crime": they might be converted and decide to commit crimes in the future so we have to stop them now. More likely, this is another case of panicked stupidity causing the innocent to suffer.
Just wanted to clarify that the UK still has due process. Being *charged* with an immigration crime is not the same as being guilty of said crime. Your reaction to the arrest was a bit extreme, but if ya want to have free speech then ya gotta put up with reactionary (sometimes total bullshit) posts on message boards.
Thank you Dave Raggett
To quote David Letterman, when interviewing Bill O'Reilly ... "I'm not smart enough to debate you, but I have a feeling that 90% of everything you say is crap"
http://projectleader.wordpress.com
So, let me get this straight. In order to uphold peace, freedom, civilization and whatnot, we clamp down hard on the academics. So far, so familiar. Now, just for the masterstroke, We focus out little witch hunt on pro-UK moderates, from middle eastern cultural and ethnic backgrounds, with an academic interest in terrorism. Y'know, because it isn't like those sorts of people might prove useful or anything? WTF. Cracking down on academic researchers under some sort of all-encompassing "state's power to do whatever, to whomever" act is bad enough; but not even doing it pragmatically? If 10 Downing Street were to enter the twilight zone, would anybody notice?
Careful reading the link from the UK, I hear you can get arrested and/or deported for reading certain websites over there.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
In some jurisdictions you'd be put on a list just for reading this post on slashdot.
Come to think of it, imagine what they'd do to you if you actually bothered to type a response and pressed sub...
First of all, that's a bit convenient a definition.
But the fact is, the western world too has a long and funny history of targetting civilians explicitly. The terror bombings of WW2 (started, duly noted by Germany, but continued by the Allies just as well) were probably the best example, though more recent examples do exist. The theory was explictly to kill enough civilians, as to (A) cause a huge morale drop and make them beg their government for peace, and (B) cripple the economy by killing enough of the workforrce.
The industrial cities of Germany for example have not been colateral damage in trying to bomb the factories, they have been the targets themselves. That was the actual target: bombing the city and terrorizing the population. (But again, so did Germany with UK cities, so I'm not trying to make it sound like only one side was doing it.)
The whole doctrine and technique of firebombing them didn't even work against factories. How it worked was dropping a big bomb with an otherwise thin shell, so the blast would blow the shingles off house roofs, followed by lots of little fire bombs that would then fall in the house and set it ablaze. The houses of civilians were _the_ target.
Against factories that particular mix had little to no effect. Against troops or military targets that mix would have been outright stupid, and noone used it for that.
Again, the whole doctrine was to kill as many civilians as your can, and scare the seven shades of shit out of the survivors. That's a terror tactic by any other name.
Want another example: the USA has actively researched biological warfare and had stockpiles of nasty germs until the 70's. I do believe that the doctrine wasn't to drop them just on enemy troops.
The west only gave up on that shit, when we finally figured out that nukes are enough of a deterrent anyway, and killing 3% of a city's population with modified Brucellosis is peanuts compared to nuking it. And again, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction isn't about nuking enemy troops. If you look at any country with nukes, right as we write this, the nukes are aimed at the (potential) enemies' civilian cities. The threat is, very much, "if you dare attack us, we'll wipe out your population and turn your country into a radioactive wasteland."
The neutron bomb was developed for the explicit reason of killing or injuring as many humans as possible, while causing as little damage as possible to everything else. It's not a bomb you'd use to disable a military factory, it's a bomb which would kill its workers (and the whole city nearby) and at most blow the windows off that factory.
Etc.
So, you know, freakin' _please_. I'm even willing to swallow _some_ "us vs them" dehumanizing arguments, but "we wouldn't ever target civilians" is so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yo renounce your citizenship you clown, it happens all the time.
Oh please shut the fuck up. You don't want "personal freedom" as it really exists, because if you did you could just move to one of the many near lawless locations ALL OVER THE FUCKING WORLD where you could have all the freedom you like.
But that's REAL freedom, i.e., the unsafe, unclean, unruly, uncivilized kind. The kind of freedom people talk about wanting until they have it.
You want the safe, clean, happy freedom that so many people idealize, without appreciating that it's artificial and never lasts.
Long story short, move to Africa. You can get "freedom" out the ass, just don't be a crybaby when you realize the true cost.
The problem is your definition of "freedom" is unworkable. If you feel you only have freedom when you can do whatever you want, well then you can never be free. The reason is that if we let you do whatever you want, we are going to be infringing on someone else's freedom. You see situations like that in dictatorships, like say North Korea. Kim Jong-il has essentially total personal freedom. He can do whatever he wants. However, the price his country pays is that they are all extremely oppressed for that. While the one man may be free, the rest of them aren't.
So, in actual free nations, we have to work towards a balance of freedoms. You have to make sure that one person's freedoms don't infringe on another person's freedoms. That way everyone can be free to do pretty much what they want, and not have to worry about others forcing their will on them.
If you can't accept that kind of freedom, well, then you are a very selfish individual.