back to article How just thinking about terrorism became illegal

"A proposal to scan suspect hard drives causes unease in [Germany]," read a recent frontpage story in the Los Angeles Times. Positioned boldly above the fold, the reporter and editors recognized the potential keen interest in anything having to do with the implementation of snooping in "My Documents". In the United Kingdom it's …

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  1. Alien8n
    Flame

    Student terrorists

    Assuming that any document that might be used to create a weapon of terrorism is enough to now convict you of being one does this mean that A level chemistry is now outlawed?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Finally we know the man from Mars' identity

    Could someone please run this article past an Editor so that I can read it.

  3. Andrew Barratt
    Stop

    Its only a matter of time.

    I find nothing more frustrating than those who continually spout...Its just a matter of time.

    Sure, given an infinite length of time anything is just a matter of time!

    The terrorists are winning the battle with every single degree of civil liberty that we lose.

    In the UK we have been used to terrorists for a long time, surely nobody has forgotten about the IRA. Why this crazy irrational fear of some other terrorist group? Maybe if we stopped trashing their countries in search of "stuff" they may be a little less pissed off at us.

    Does anyone actually know *why* we are in afganistan?

    Before we know it all our chemistry graduates will be seen as "potential" terrorist threats! So much for Great Britain.

    I remember the old anarchist cook book way back when, Jolly Rogers cook book was just a huge big text file being circulated on BBS. Happy times trying to scam a change machine with a tenner some scotch tape and a bit of paper (that incidentally I lost!) Does that make me a terrorist, er no.

    Is there a version of firefox that can run storing all its data in a truecrypt volume... is that what its going to come to..

    Lets start thinking about who we are trying to catch.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I for one

    Tshh

    I for one would rather live in a country where thousands died at the hands of terrorists then a state that watches its citizenry as though the citizens were the risk.

    The more people are watched, oppressed, troden down, the more rights given to the police, the less freedom we have.

    And what is the point of life in a cage?

    There is a two fold problem with the current situation.

    First we are losing ever more freedom for what realistically is no added safety (the people so far caught have been incompetent idiots.) If a person or group of people really wanted to kill a large number of people they could. That is just a fact of life, people are weak when hit by bullets, pipes, machettes. No amount of spying, no amount of oppresion will remove this fact. A single determined person could easily kill a great number for their cause. (Simple examples - crash a truck on the m25, take a pair of machettes to the local shopping centre or hospital and start hacking away or take a can of petrol pour the petrol through the letter boxes of a number of houses and light them up.) Killing people is easy.

    Secondly the more people are suppressed by our governments the more people will hate us. The more people will want to kill us for no more reason then we allow our governments to abandon the principles of freedom.

    The hardest, but only real solution is to show resolve, to stick to our ideals of freedom. If we show kindness to a wounded animal and it bites us do we simply kill it or do we try again, and again, until it finally sees that we mean it no harm?

    Our only weapon against terror is freedom and justice. Anything else simply proves we are weak and feeble. That for all our technology and our civilisation and our democracy we are nothing more but cavemen with toys.

    So many may die, but in the end we would win, where as the way we are going, out only solution will be to crush freedom and kill everything that opposes us at a great loss of life, freedom and principles.

    pshh but it's all wasted. So bollocks to it

    Now, this is a story all about how

    My life got flipped-turned upside down

    And I liked to take a minute

    Just sit right there

    I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air

    In west Philadelphia born and raised

    On the playground was where I spent most of my days

    Chillin' out maxin' relaxin' all cool

    And all shootin some b-ball outside of the school

    When a couple of guys

    Who were up to no good

    Startin makin trouble in my neighborhood

    I got in one lil fight and my mom got scared

    She said 'You're movin' with your auntie and uncle in bel Air'

    I begged and pleaded with her day after day

    But she packed my suite case and send me on my way

    She gave me a kiss and then she gave me my ticket.

    I put my walkman on and said, 'I might as well kick it'.

    First class, yo this is bad

    Drinking orang juice out of a champagne glass.

    Is this what the people of Bel-Air Living like?

    Hmmmmm this might be alright.

    But wait I hear the pricey booze, wine all that

    Is Bel-Air the type of place they send this cool cat?

    I don't think sow

    I'll see when I get there

    I hope they're prepared for the prince of Bel-Air

    Well, the plane landed and when I came out

    There was a dude who looked like a cop and yelled my name out

    I ain't trying to get arrested

    I just got here

    I sprang with the quickness like lightening, disappeared

    I whistled for a cab and when it came near

    The license plate said fresh and it had dice in the mirror

    If anything I can say this cab is rare

    But I thought 'Now forget it' - 'Yo homes to Bel Air'

    I pulled up to the house about 7 or 8

    And I yelled to the cabbie 'Yo homes smell ya later'

    I looked at my kingdom

    I was finally there

    To sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel Air

  5. Bob Jones

    Western Digital

    A warning to all, if Germany goes ahead with this then I urge you to stop buying Western Digital drives ... if you did anyway.

    I know when mine broke I had to send it to a factory in Germany ... where Fuhrer Merkel could probably install whatever she wants ... I'm not sure wether new drives come from there but its too great a risk.

    I wonder if they will be scanning the hard drives looking for signs of Islam? Sounds nothing like the 1930s ...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Research

    And don't forget, gentlemen, that innocent research on child pornography for legitimate academic purposes can get you into just as much trouble as your investigations into the causes of terrorism.

    I know that you're quite the renaissance man and are boldly pushing back the boundaries of human knowledge, but police forces around the world tend not to employ intellectuals of my calibre and sophistication, and they may well just assume you are a violent pervert.

    'Nuff said. (Posting anonymously because I fear the black helicopters)

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    Terrifying

    I'm a gamer. I have played in any number of roleplaying games set in the near future, several of which have been set in the real world, with maps and serious amounts of research into the locales to increase immersion in the world, and for simple curiosity. I have the Koran as an e-book and some books on Islam.

    If I go looking for bomb recipes to add verisimilitude to my portrayal of an IED/Demolitions expert, am I breaking the law, and will these supertrojans snitch on me? Of course I could conceal the files, so no one gets the wrong idea, but if I mess up, that just makes me look guilty in their eyes doesn't it?

    Tought crime is here and the terrorists have assisted the victory of Big Brother. D'y' think they'd let me into the North West Frontier; they might actually be freer human beings than we are, those Taleban, even shackled as they are by their medieval superstitions.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Incorrect article title

    ‘How just thinking about terrorism became illegal’??

    No its worse, like stated at the end of the article.

    Your a terrorist even if the state assumes you are thinking about terrorism.

    Imagine this being applied to rape. Men looking at children while having a morning boner could be arrested for assumed future child rape. And aren't child rapists even worse then terrorists?

    Think of the children!

  9. David S
    Black Helicopters

    Thoughtcrime

    Golly. It's like we slipped back nearly twenty-four years and sideways into a fictional world.

    Thoughtcrime doubleplusbad.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    OK maybe I'm naive

    But how many peopel accidently go looking for "how to make ricin?"

    Thats like saying I accidentally search for pictures of women with huge breasts, while in fact I was researching the laws of football.

    No matter whthere you hate the police or not. They got this one bang to rights, and trying to make up straw man arguments as to why he had a website filled with links to jahdi material, makes you look plain silly.

    Sometimes mate, they do get the right ones! and relying on the bombers to be as incompetent as the idiots that attacked glasgow airport, won't always keep you safe.

  11. Karl Lattimer
    Joke

    Well then, that settles it

    /me runs off home to begin concocting heinous schemes to murder thousands of people, purely as research for my upcomming book. How the British police became the thought police.

    /me thinks externally "Oops I forgot to post that anonymously, I wonder if they'll come knocking my door down looking for the aforementioned plans."

    --

    I used the joke alert image but really I'm deadly serious. I can think of at least 3 books I've read where the authors would have had to do extensive research into manufacture of WMD, and in writing the book would have had to put a plan together in massive detail, the first that springs to mind, which wasn't a particularly good read but I remember a good couple of scenes around erm... page 165 IIRC was Plague of Angels. In the book the author had the plot running that a nut case christian albino (sound familiar? Dan is soooo derivative) plots to murder members of the UN using Spanish Influenza.

    So who's with me, lets overthrow the government!!! To help in this quest we have a face book group called "evil geniuses for a better tomorrow".

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    He's a witch burn her

    Witches, Communists and now terrorists. Whatever next for the powers that be?

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    just imagine

    you bookmark a site with interesting but benign stuff (politics, philosophy, sociology...) and forget about it. After some time, the site radicalizes and the mere existence of the link on your computer gets you in trouble.

    By the way, are the police trojans Windows-only?

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    So what?

    Real terrorists use Plan 9.

    http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/

  15. amanfromMars Silver badge

    Banana Republic ..... Dumb Game Play

    Of course, sign up to be paid and trained to kill and the rules about dreaming up ever more exotic Death and Destruction are strangely different. In fact they then may not even exist...... making a complete Ass of the Law and Common Justice and it is hard not to conclude that it also makes them Culpable and Instrumental by Reason of Professional Ethical Negligence in the Perversion of the Course of Justice and therefore Members of the Bar of Criminals.

    Perhaps we could send all such Criminals to Iraq where apparently both random and routine acts of death and destruction are immune from investigation and/or prosecution and therefore presumably considered normal. It is certainly no place for Innocent civilians to be living in.

    Hmmm .... I wonder if that is the Master Pentagon Plan..... Raze to the Ground. It certainly doesn't require any Thinking which appears to be the Commander-in-Chiefs style.

    Hey, if the cap fits, wear it and don't whinge and whine and gurn if it helps everyone see the idiot. You deserve it.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    Must be

    time for IT budgets with the german police

    Anybody that knows how public bodies work, know that all this hype of terrorism (or the levels of crime in general) is just there to ensure the largest possible budget for the relevant departments.

  17. Ferry Boat

    Fruit Shortcake

    I for one would welcome the government and police checking my computer to see if I've done anything bad. As long as they don't tell my wife about my special 'monkey/nun action' interest.

  18. Cameron Colley
    Black Helicopters

    She, erm _He_, said Jehova!

    Surely the "security services" all over the world should be arrested for possesion of terrorist propaganda?

    "'... only own it because of an ongoing investigation'?, pull the other one!"

  19. James Pickett

    If links are evidence..

    ..where does that put Google?

    BTW, can we have some political heads with horns? I guess halos won't be necessary.

  20. E

    @So what?

    I alledge that real terrorists also prefer emacs to vi.

    This is because vi is blessed by God.

  21. Dan
    Thumb Down

    @just imagine

    How about you link to a news site which consistently rallies against infringements of civil liberties, the 'war on terror', and other such nonsense, and this is deemed possession of illegal material?

    Oh, hang on, you have already got that link, as have I and (probably) everyone else who frequents The Reg.

    Don't think this is beyond possibility - the copyright lot deem the possession of links to infringing material as possession of the material itself. Why not the anti-terror lot as well?

    Suddenly, we are all political activists. How the hell did that happen?

  22. Harry Stottle
    Gates Horns

    That's me stuffed then

    Not only have I researched and written extensively about terrorism, I've even made the case that it can be ethical.

    I'll get my coat on the way down...

  23. laird cummings
    Thumb Up

    By God, sir!

    You're back on proper form again, George!

    Well said, and say it again, louder!

  24. suspiciousMinds
    Boffin

    TrueCrypt and Firefox @Andrew Barratt

    Yes, you can run Firefox from a TrueCrypt volume. I do this on a USB drive as the TrueCrypt volume loads into memory so Firefox runs quickly and without any r/w to the disk. I'm not quite at the stage of paranoia where I'd run it through Tor from a hidden volume within TrueCrypt but soon ...

  25. Andrew Bolton

    Any Muslims out there who own Tom Clancy books...

    ...throw them away now. If the police catch you with them, they've got you on:

    1. Instructions to manufacture a 3 stage nuclear fusion bomb in a cave

    2. Instructions to crash your 747 into the Capitol building

    3. Instructions to create and disseminate Ebola (twice)

    and various other minor things including instructions on how to mount a terrorist assault on a large theme park and one on shopping malls (except for this last one, you should have thrown Teeth of the Tiger away already, because it's shite).

    You don't need the web at all to get convicted!

  26. Ross

    Implausible?

    They could only use this against ppl they are already spending LOTS of money monitoring.

    How do you get the trojan on the relevant box? House breaking is the only guaranteed way. How do they get the info out of the trojan? Many ppl have a router+firewall sitting between the computer and the network.

    The people you need to be worried about won't be visiting www.jihad101.com (apologies if that actually exists!) They'll be very well trained already thank you very much thanks to the CIA.

  27. masterpikey

    TO ANDREW BARRATT

    The reason the us and uk are in afganistan?....

    Well the answer is 2 fold, oil and poppies. The taliban for years has been a thorn in the side of th U.S. for 2 main reasons, 1st for years the the taliban has impeaded Americian efforts to lay down a pipe-line from 1 of the other "stan" countries through Afganastan to Pakistan to finally end up at the Ariabian Gulf for worldwide distrobution. 2nd reason is poppies, or mainly the revenue from global heroin sales and its use by sercert services to fund "black ops". Since the collapse of the Taliban the production of opium and eventually heroin has gone up about 15 times (if you look at 2002-2003 alone it doubled) this is a major revenue stream of the C.I.A. which for years has been used to raise money without the involvement or go-ahead of the U.S. congress.

    There you go, again your governments pledge for freedom is just anothe shallow grab for money and power

  28. Lee
    Flame

    @He's a witch burn her

    VILLAGER #1: If... she.. weighs the same as a duck, she's made of wood.

    BEDEMIR: And therefore--?

    VILLAGER #1: A witch!

    CROWD: A witch!

    BEDEMIR: We shall use my larger scales!

    [yelling]

    BEDEMIR: Right, remove the supports!

    [whop]

    [creak]

    CROWD: A witch! A witch!

    WITCH: It's a fair cop.

    CROWD: Burn her! Burn! [yelling]

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Ferry Boat

    >> I for one would welcome the government and police checking my computer to see if I've done anything bad.

    I see someone whose hobby is police truncheons. If I were you I'd be careful about not wasting police time.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oops - my script

    Occasionally I wonder if this idiocy will ever stop, but then I remember that it's all about control and money and I know it won't.

    Let's, for arguments' sake, assume someone manages to get McNab onto the search list. Anyone getting into his computer will find seriously detailed novels about warfare - it's in his books. Following this reasoning we MUST arrest him.

    Ah, no, he's Andy McNab. So sometimes we don't use this approach? No, he's McNab. OK, what criteria do we follow? Ah, well, he's [STOP]. Let me first appraise you of the laws of racism, then continue. Ah, silence.

    What's that you're mumbling? Oh, I'm helping the terrorists?

    BS. By the way they screwed up in Iraq and by the way they bend every conceivable law associated, Bush couldn't have given that creed a better Middle Eastern marketing campaign than if he had Saddam running for president in the US.

    I repeat what someone said on Slashdot: can someone give him a blowjob so he can be indicted?

  31. laird cummings
    Flame

    @AC; My Script

    << "I repeat what someone said on Slashdot: can someone give him a blowjob so he can be indicted?" >>

    Y'all are still missing the point: It wasn't the BJ, it was the stupid lies under oath to a Federal Grand Jury. Bush ain't as nearly as smart as he thinks he is, but he's still far too smart to be caught *anywhere* under oath, unlike the previous mental-midget in the office.

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Yes, you are naive...

    > But how many peopel accidently go looking for "how to make ricin?"

    Nobody looks for "how to make ricin" by accident, but that's not the point: the point is that almost every single one of those people is just curious about the subject, having heard lots about it in the news, and not about to actually *make* any. So busting everyone who looks for "how to make ricin" is guaranteed to be an vast waste of time and precious police resources and not actually catch any terrorists. That's why it should not be taken as evidence of guilt: it isn't evidence of that at all.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Thoughtcrime

    >Thoughtcrime doubleplusbad.

    Oh come on David, you memory is clearly doubleplusungood.

  34. Alien8n
    Alien

    That's me f*cked then!

    Suddenly remembered, my internet usage includes the homepage of choice of the discerning terrorist, al Jazeera. I don't suppose they'll believe that I have a legitimate use to read an international news site despite my cousin (who forwards me links to stories on there) living in Qatar at the moment....

    As has already been stated plenty of times, for detailed instructions on chemical, biological and psychological warfare you don't need the internet. You just need your local fiction section in the library and a set of A level revision notes.

    Want to create a "terrorist attack"? Take 2 liquids, one a concentrated acid, the other a concentrated alkali and mix them together. The result will be a big cloud of noxious fumes that has the potential to kill. Hell, we used to do it for laughs in our chemistry lab every week...

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    "evil geniuses for a better tomorrow".

    Are they controlling the Robot Sea Monsters or the Congressional wives these days? I lose track.

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Title

    In the eyes of government you ARE a terrorist until proven otherwise! Bush is so dumb he couldn't find his ass in the dark with a flashlight and his hands tied behind his back.

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