To put it another way, in terms of computers, the police have never justified why any extension would have any impact on decryption.

Well I don’t know Kulvinder. Where do you draw the line?

With extensions granted the police can hold you without charge for a maximum of 96 hours.

The terrorism act of 2000 gave the police the possibility – with extensions granted – to hold you for seven days without charge. In 2003 the Criminal Justice act increased that period to a fortnight. The Terrorism Act of 2006 further increased that to 28 days. The government and police are now pushing for something in the order of 56-58 days detention without charge.

I take it you don’t live in the UK anymore so perhaps you aren’t as alarmed by that trend as i am. Suffice it to say the police have never given adequate justification of why they need these escalating periods of detention. The police seem to want a system in place whereby they arrest people more or less at will and hold them indefinitely. The only issue they continually seem to bring up is ‘encryption’ but as far as i can tell they’ve never demonstrated what percentage of computers seized are actually encrypted. The percentage of people charged, let alone convicted under the terrorism act is quite low in relation to the total number arrested.

The police redrew the ‘line’ from hours, to days, to weeks and now to months.

Well I don’t know Kulvinder. Where do you draw the line? Is 28 days detention really that much better than 29, 30?
Once you get to this stage, the argument becomes more utilitarian — what will give the biggest counterterrorism bang for the smallest civil liberties buck.

All I do know is that holing people up indefinitely without charge is unacceptable and I remember some top plod saying that recently (maybe he was preparing the ground for this 56 days campaign, softening up opinion, the little tinker).

I don’t figure but I do agree. We are being suckered and played and the prize at the end of the long con is kissing goodbye to our civil liberties.

Hell mend us.

I agree with you. However, I would assume one could extend from 28 days to 58 days if the police found some evidence that, although not enough to convict, could justify the extension.

I honestly fail to understand why ID cards are so bad. They pretty much exist in a lot of European countries, and it is a convinient way to identify yourself, specially if you don’t have a driver’s license. And 24 hour CCTV makes me feel secure, and I believe a lot of cases (including the failed bombers) have been solved by inspecting hours of footage.

This is not the case here, where the whole point of detention is to find whether there is evidence of wrongdoing, and if there is, to bring suspects to trial.

Yes well done, but the police haven’t adequately justified why they need an extension. Even David Davis hasn’t seen any justification for extending the limit.

…and that the very last people to say where the balance should be struck are civil liberties campaigners.

Yeah freedom’s a bit like heroin innit; very moreish.

It is troubling, true.
However, just wondering whether liberal attitudes would have been different if those recent bombs HAD gone off.

Fairly excellent reasoning. I assume because the bombs failed to go off you agree the extension isn’t needed.

It is surely a sign of our progress over the last 40 years that we have not got anything like that internment?

Depends on your definition of ‘our’. I’d say the active participation of some governments in such behaviour as well as others simply looking the other way as their facilities are used (as is the case with Ireland) on a worldwide scale is if anything a regression; thats without even considering the de facto reclassification of torture as ‘intensive interrogation’.

As for extending the time limit, as Katy has already asked; what did you expect?

The erosion of liberty always occurs first amongst the untermensch. The loss of a real right to silence was brought in on the back of irish terrorism. Biometric ID cards will first be used amongst the those evil asylum seekers and immigrants. The use of equipment that has always been considered insufficiently trustworthy in britain (such as polygraphs) has suddenly, apparently, been deemed ok for those damned sex offenders on every street corner. When the recent case of Robert Torto firebombing asian stores was on the news an ever so sincere policeman explained just how important CCTV was in catching him. Because obviously we need to be monitored 24 hours a day incase the hordes of paranoid schizophrenics go…insane.

The police want their jobs to be easier, the government listens to the police because everyone else hates the government. Every PM will try to protect you from harm by taking away your rights.

or the police.

The common reason why internment failed in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and in the UK during the Second World War was that the information used to justify it was out of date and inaccurate. This is not the case here, where the whole point of detention is to find whether there is evidence of wrongdoing, and if there is, to bring suspects to trial.

There was a very good article in ‘Contemporary Review’ last year which pointed out that there is an inevitable balance between absolute civil liberty and the security of the state, and that the very last people to say where the balance should be struck are civil liberties campaigners.