UK Group Fights Arrest Over Refusing To Surrender Passwords At The Border (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes The Guardian: The human rights group Cage is preparing to mount a legal challenge to UK anti-terrorism legislation over a refusal to hand over mobile and laptop passwords to border control officials at air terminals, ports and international rail stations... The move comes after its international director, Muhammad Rabbani, a UK citizen, was arrested at Heathrow airport in November for refusing to hand over passwords. Rabbani, 35, has been detained at least 20 times over the past decade when entering the UK, under schedule 7 of terrorism legislation that provides broad search powers, but this was the first time he had been arrested... On previous occasions, when asked for his passwords, he said he had refused and eventually his devices were returned to him and he was allowed to go. But there was a new twist this time: when he refused to reveal his passwords, he was arrested under schedule 7 provisions of the terrorism act and held overnight at Heathrow Polar Park police station before being released on bail. He expects to be charged on Wednesday.
Rabbani "argues that the real objective...is not stopping terrorists entering the UK, but as a tool to build up a huge data bank on thousands of UK citizens." And his position drew support from Jim Killock, executive director of the UK-based Open Rights Group. "Investigations should take place when there is actual suspicion, and the police should be able to justify their actions on that basis, rather than using wide-ranging powers designed for border searches."

Comments

He speaks muslim

[Anonymous Coward]

It's well known that Muslims all speak about terrorism in their muslim language, and all frequent secret muslim forums where they espouse hated against the west. It's the muslim food that does it, it brain washes them, ISIS is really a pork deficiency. They should rub pork in their faces and see if they explode, as terrorists have a habit of doing.

Look, you were obviously trolling, but it comes down to people of the troll character you portray making random choices based on their prejudices not any kind of logic or reason. They stop using the anti terror legislation because that's the hammer they have, so everyone is a claimed terrorist in order to be able to get passwords to search for erm, terrorist plans, and terrorist spreadsheets and terrorist power point slides.

And he's refused before so he's flagged, and they'll keep trying till a suitable time, and that will establish their right to search EVERYONE's laptop at the border as 'terrorist prevention'.

But this is now how laws are made, it's how they're made in the UK. The police decide they want some power, they have mass surveillance, arbitrary arrest powers, search without warrant, and nobody really tackles them. The City of London police expand laws in IP beyond any Parliament created laws, the anti terror police arrest random brown people and hire foreign hackers. Only a terrorist would stop them... right?

Re: He's managing director of anti-torture charity

[Anonymous Coward]

Cute. Just cute. I mean, the Torygraph and the Evening Drunkard. What paragons of unbiased professionalism.

Re: His name gives it away

[Entrope]

And you didn't read the article's source. The numbers they compared came from two unrelated studies that did not use the same methodology. Neither one actually cited terror attacks by right-wingers, only "attacks".

If you look at actually comparable numbers, you find that jihadist attacks accounted for 26 of 65 fatalities -- before the San Bernardino and Orlando attacks. Oops, maybe Trump was right if you look at the number of times someone (excerpting the attacker) got killed.