Danny, While I'm pretty sure I appreciate where you're coming from, I must say I think you're on very dodgy ground. Unless you're a mind reader, it's impossible to be completely sure of another person's intent. I believe you support profiling and treating people differently based on their profile -- banning some ... based on what? Their faith? Their race? Whether they've attended political rallies? What Web sites they've visited? Whether they were more outraged by the murder of Nick Berg or the U.S. bombing of that Iraqi wedding?
Find it a bit hard to imagine exactly what you're suggesting. That you profile people when they buy their tickets? Or when they arrive at the airport? Enormously time- and resource-consuming, expensive and necessarily inconveniencing a whole bunch of people that are not terrorists. Whatever you say, this will be perceived as racist harrassment when innocent Muslims are questioned and delayed or kept off their flights on suspicion, and this will make more aggrieved yougsters sympathetic to the extremist cause. Or do you think it's better -- certainly more egalitarian -- if your local authorities prepare profiles of everybody, regardless of race, etc?
You cannot have a free society that tries to police intent, or inclination. Societies that have tried -- like, say, the Soviet Union or Communist China, especially during the Cultural Revolution -- are pretty horrible places to live. If you want freedom of speech and thought, then you have to accept that some are going to say and think and believe things you violently disagree with.
You might think it's a relatively minor sacrifice to guarantee safety. Well, I disagree. Firstly, once terrorists get to grips with how profiling works, they will find ways to sidestep it. Recruit covertly from among people that don't fit the typical profile. Then the profiling and scrutiny of the authorities has to get more rigorous and intrusive, and then eventually you no longer have any kind of a society worth fighting for -- all you've got is Orwell's 1984. That's not acceptable to me. Living in a totalitarian state is, for me and many others, too high a price to pay for security.
So the alternative is that you have to police the concrete things as rigorously as possible. You make sure no weapons get on the aeroplanes. You make damn sure that airport security is tight as a gnat's chuff and everyone's on their toes. And one of the ways of doing this is by making sure the guards know they could be tested, independently, at any moment. And if they fail to do their job properly, then people are going to be reading about it over their Corn Flakes the next day and their career prospects will suddenly be much more limited.
As to whether I believe this reporter should be prosecuted -- well, if he broke the law and this can be proved in a court of law, then yes. The media are supposed to be a rogue element, but they're not outlaws. As a journalist myself, I believe that there are times when it's justified to break the law in the interests of the public. Then you publish and be damned, face the consequences and you've done your job. I don't think this guy will be prosecuted, though. Bad publicity ...
Equally, to be completely fair, I think TDK Mk2 (see post on page 1 of this thread) should face the consequences of habitually smuggling nail scissors through BAA security. After all, it's against the rules -- and frankly, I think that's much harder to justify.
Last edited by DocManhattan; 19th Jul 2004 at 07:23.