I from Eastern Europe(Bulgaria), 20 years ago people used to go to jail for jokes, people used to get reported in by friends and family too, i see history repeating itself. Feel free to repeat our mistakes.
What I really seriously wonder about is if these authorities have nothing better to do than to follow up on ridiculous leads like these. Apparently you are no longer allowed to write works of fiction either.
The next attack that will succeed will do so in part because apparently the people that are in charge of sifting the stream of intelligence for actionable clues are completely without ability to analyze this kind of information in a way that would lead to a safer society.
All that happens is they waste tons of money and man-hours chasing nonsense.
A remark was made on a social networking site, boohoo. Disaster. Meanwhile the bad guys are having a field day and are going to slip through the cracks left by the thoughtcrime police being occupied elsewhere.
I have no doubt that the intelligence people involved are fully aware that the comment was a joke. I imagine the theory is that by harassing all the people who purposely add noise to their intelligence stream they will get a higher signal stream in the long run. This is essentially the same reasoning they use to crack down hard on anyone who jokes around at various physical security checks at places like airports.
Well, I think it works in the exact opposite way because I'm sorely tempted to go and make a bunch of blog posts about all kinds of terrorist acts that I've just dreamed up to show how ridiculous this particular tactic is.
The big question is, will your temptation lead to action, or will the fear of prosecution stay your hand. If enough people go with the latter then this particular tactic would seem to work.
I think the concern was probably less about foiling a terrorist attack as worry that he was a cross person who might take extreme action.
The questions about his life to me indicate that was their main worry. You know; of he just lost his job or something and life was spiralling out of control etc etc.
In a way I can see why they investigated. Arresting him was too much clearly but you can't just ignore an explicit threat entirely - ESP if it is reported.
Right... that's pretty arbitrary though, given that not that long ago the father (instead of some random stranger) of an individual warned authorities that his son was being radicalized and might be used to stage an attack.
And nothing was done with that information.
That was specific, actionable and nothing was done with it, this is just a guy with a sense of humour that finds that everyday manners of speech are no longer tolerated.
There is this movie called 12 angry men, which deals with exactly that subject. What people say when they're pissed off should be taken with a grain of salt. If someone tells you they'd like to blow up the house of commons we expect you to be sharp enough to see the difference between something said tongue-in-cheek or whether you're serious.
If you haven't seen it then I suggest you do. It's quite an old movie (1957).
It's a fair comment. The only thing I would say is that a terrorist usually acts out of anger too
and additionally we are getting hung up on non-existent terrorist parallels; probably cos of the laws used to arrest him. Forget them; the tweet sounded like a threat as much as a joke. There was even a timeframe :-) i think it's fair to say you don't ignore the possibility of a crazy carrying it through :-)
The problem here is that whilst it's long been accepted that you can't joke about having a bomb in your bags when checking in, we have novel real-time services such as Twitter, and the authorities and general population at large have to work out what the middle ground is.
Personally, I think the man's a fool, but can understand why the authorities investigated him. Otherwise, what's the alternative? Make a joke about bombing a place and so avoid being searched when you turn up there?
What is Twitter's obligation to the UK to disclose the IP addresses of posters, anyway? It sounds like this is a very flimsy case; they have to prove the guy posted the tweet, and to do that, they need to get a company with no staff in the UK to turn over IP address information. I am surprised they even managed to get an arrest warrant.
The impression I got was that the offending post was reported by someone who knew him; presumably that person also provided his name and other details to the authorities.
