Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

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As was pointed out at the time these laws were drafted, possession of an A to Z could aid terrorism, not to mention possession of the Anarchists Cookbook. Then we get the usual nonsense of people who like to smoke a joint are accused of funding terrorism.

We are all terrorists now. Hence why we are all spied on. Get used to it, as no one seems to care.

BTW, the solicitors dealing with this, they are same firm who embarrassed Teresa May over Abu Qatada, when she got her dates wrong and couldn't kick him out. If there is anything unlawful about this, (morality and decency well aside as they simply don't count,) they will find and prove it. For reasons I cannot go in to, I have experience of how good they are. It should also be remembered that the law in general is under attack from this government, and although it is strangely under reported, the legal profession is deeply unhappy, to say the least, with this government. For those who don't know, legal aid is being slaughtered and that will wipe out a lot of solicitors firms who defend and protect the poor from blatant abuse and injustice, who make up the vast majority of criminal cases. For some reason this government wants to sell contracts to people like haulage firms to provide legal aid to people who cant afford solicitors for a little money as possible. Legal aid is currently bad, this government want it worse. Legal defense will be based on price, conviction will end up being based on police say so, with out question. So, if you are poor you will never be able to get impartial advice, since the contracted solicitors will be working to the bare minimum clock. So, essentially, they are trying to deny justice to the majority of defendants, while relying on the lie that the majority of solicitors are rolling in unearned unjustified cash, which I assume you is a lie. So, any chance of exposing, even damaging, this government will be thoroughly pursued. In short, to me, this firm being involved is the best news so far.

Why do they want to do all this? I don't get it. It's so plainly wrong, what's their MO behind the scenes? Surely it's not just all a thinly-veiled pulling up of the draw bridge between 'us' and 'them'? I mean, what do the politicians talk about between themselves when they decide to do this shit.

Why do they want to do all this?

The cynical view is that they're all cowards, so deathly afraid of the next big one happening on their watch that they won't risk anything that might look like they were soft on national security. One of the difficulties of this issue politically is that it's all too easy to ignore someone whose civil liberties have been infringed as long as it's not someone you know personally, but no-one misses an event like 9/11 or 7/7.

A more dispassionate view might be that right now the British public does collectively favour having intrusive measures available to fight the bad guys and trust that the authorities will use them acceptably. For example, see this recent YouGov poll:

http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/08/21/public-divided-over-mira...

It's worth reading the PDF linked from that page, which shows the actual questions they asked, so you can decide for yourself how neutrally phrased you think they were. The PDF also gives a more detailed breakdown of voting by demographic.

Notice that in the breakdown, even Lib Dem supporters somewhat support having having Schedule 7 on the books (54/37), while Tory supporters overwhelmingly favour it (80/12). It's also striking how the picture changes with age, with 18-24s supporting moderately (49/30) but 60+s overwhelmingly (76/18).

Of course, you can argue that the current public sentiment is/isn't based on a sound understanding of the issues, as you can with any political polling, but those are the real numbers they found over the past couple of days.

What is perhaps more striking is that despite the general support for authoritarian laws being available, public sentiment was much more hostile to the specific application of the law in this case. Tories and UKIP were still in favour but by smaller margins (58/27 and 52/40 respectively) but Labour and Lib Dem supporters were quite strongly against (54/29 and 62/29), and the overall opinion was against (44/37). This suggests to me that much of the sentiment in favour of these laws is based on trust that they won't be abused in practice, and therefore that the degree to which public support for such measures continues will probably be based on the government being seen to be using them responsibly.

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