... we have to ask the following questions:

Are you, or have you been at any time, a member of the following organisations:

[] Al Qaida

[] Islamic Jihad

[] Hisb'Allah

[] Fatah

[] The Conservative Party

Are you, or have you at any time, had association with the following:

[] Osama Bin Laden

[] Ahmed Mubarak

[] Barak Obama

[] Tony Blair

What rights do you claim under the act? Please pick no more than two.

[] Freedom of speech

[] Freedom of movement

[] Freedom to refuse membership of The Party*

[] Freedom of Silence

[] Freedom from interrogation under the Crime and Criminal Responses Act 2010

[] Freedom to claim you see four lights

If you have anything else to add to these questions, please make a note here. Your responses will be recorded and stored with your name and other identifying details on the Citizens Universal National Tracking System.

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* Please note that membership of The Party is a legal requirement for employment under the Citizens Responsibilities Act 2009

Till they say what they really mean...

Surely the actual number of potential terrorists is 60 million, why else would they insist on monitoring every single person in the country from the day they're born until the day they die?

Shahid Malik. Besides being an MP, his qualifications for inclusion include twice being stopped and questioned by the US Dept. of Homeland Security and a keen advocate of making biometric ID compulsory. If that isn't terrorism I don't know what is.

If he's good enough for their list, I feel he should get nothing less than top spot on ours.

Maybe they could send us a comma delimited text file of their list, that way we can be sure only a few 10s of thousands of completely innocent people will be registered as terrorists over here.

Names two and three would be the extremist 'Bottled Water' and terrifying 'Marmite Jar'.

Funny, but I wonder how we made it through both World Wars and the wonderful Cold War without needing terror watch lists, biometric ids and banning bottles of water from boarding airplanes. If a few hundred clowns posing as jihadists can scare governments on both sides of the Atlantic into giving up human rights in an effort to pacify terrorists, I'm continually amazed that actual World Wars didn't scare our leadership into similar decisions.

Better heads than mine will no doubt explain it all. After all, what's more important, giving into terror and getting rid of human rights, or growing a backbone and sticking with a few things that several million people died to protect? We should definitely go with the coward thing, makes perfect sense.. even if being frightened of marmite and water leaves me a touch puzzled.

I think a slight adjustment to your math is in order. You say that:

S = XT

while the rules of bureaucracy require that the total number of staff be based on the highest estimate [Hi] of staff necessary to handle a terrorist. So, with bureaucracy figured in:

S = HiT

I think you'll find this brings your equations in line with the actual results of the War on Terror(tm).

Water, I agree, but Marmite? That stuff is more toxic than mustard gas!

"the bio update is intended to rule this out, and the paper reports that although security sources confirm he worked on Irish counter-terrorism, he has "never lived or served in Northern Ireland."

That would go a long way to explaining the c*** they were servering, if true.

Joining up the dots to make the bigger picture, has you creating a Third Party Picture and how dumb is that, if you are supposed to be a Leading Intelligence Service.

They need to Lift their Game out of the Gutter and set it out in HyperRadioProActive CyberSpace....... to Cover all Communications Channels. ....Give them a Good Rogering and put a smile on their F faces.