Thursday, April 2, 2009
Another Big Brother
This story about counter-terrorism measures in the UK makes my stomach hurt, and not just because I’m a mother. Could you imagine being a school media specialist in a community with a program like this one? In the name of fighting terrorism (everyone knows it’s the new communism), children are turned over to the feds by their teachers and school administrators. When my brother was a teenager, my mom had to go talk to the guidance counselor at his school because he was drawing skulls on his notebooks. The counselor didn’t recognize that skulls and such were part of the skater culture with which my brother identified, but thought that the skulls meant that he was suicidal. If he was a kid in England today, would his teacher have skipped his mother and gone straight to the police? I’m not sure that I have the words to say how wrong this feels to me. School is supposed to be a place where children can learn and explore. The UK’s current wave of anti-terrorism measures include encouraging people to go through their neighbor’s garbage, ratting on people for looking for too long at the security cameras that are set up at bus stops and the like, and now turning in children who have aroused the hair-triggered suspicion of some under-trained, over-empowered person. There is no reason to think that this couldn’t happen here. National Security Letters to libraries and wiretaps on citizen’s phones are considered perfectly legitimate security measures. It’s only a very short leap to the kind of campaign being waged across the Atlantic.
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5 comments:
Wow, and I thought everything that Americans had to do because of the Patriot Act was bad. I hope that the UK has some legitimate ways of researching "suspicious" people. I am afraid a lot of minorities could be reported simply because of ignorance.
The other thing that this reminds me of is the student who was taken into a police station and had to state where all the guns he owned and had registered to him were located. This came from a professor who was scared about the student posing a threat after he and a group of other students gave a presentation arguing that had students been allowed to carry weapons on campus, they could have helped stop the tragedies at VA Tech and NIU. Your brother being suicidal based on drawing skulls, this student being a risk for a school shooting because he advocates his second amendment rights, and the identified impressionable students from Muslim communities being potential terrorists to me are all on the same lines. This just shows how ridiculous the world seems to be getting, at least in the US and the UK-the two western societies that rank the lowest along with China and Russia in Privacy International's 2007 International Privacy Rankings. (Found here: http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-559597)
(I cannot find more recent years than this.)
I think this also shows how intolerant people are of views, and the people who hold them, that do not agree with their own.
I agree that this is ridiculous. I mean, they're KIDS...not that children can't partake in terrorist activities, but it makes more sense to me for the school authorities to judge each case on its own, and use a little common sense instead of fear in their decision-making.
Sounds like the Maoist reeducation camp is not far off... Fear is such a sick emotion to play upon. It seems like every generation is guilty of falling prey to one fear or another.
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