How Security makes us stupid

Via the Yorkshire Ranter comes this lovely story of how easy it is in security conscious Britain to be arrested for nothing more than downloading and printing out the wrong document:

A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the “psychological torture” he endured in custody.

Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.

But wait! It gets worse. Sabir, being a typically broke student asked a mate a university staff member to print it out for him, and this guy was arrested too and is now under threat of deportion back to Algeria:

Sabir was arrested on May 14 after the document was found by a university staff member on an administrator’s computer. The administrator, Hisham Yezza, an acquaintance of Sabir, had been asked by the student to print the 1,500-page document because Sabir could not afford the printing fees. The pair were arrested under the Terrorism Act, Sabir’s family home was searched and their computer and mobile phones seized. They were released uncharged six days later but Yezza, who is Algerian, was immediately rearrested on unrelated immigration charges and now faces deportation.

Dr Alf Nilsen, a research fellow at the university’s school of politics and international relations, said that Yezza is being held at Colnbrook immigration removal centre, due to be deported on Tuesday.

“If he is taken to Algeria, he may be subjected to severe human rights violations after his involvement in this case. He has been in the UK for 13 years. His work is here, his friends are here, his life is here.”

The cherry on the top of this rancid sundae must be the following:

A spokesman for Nottingham University said it had a duty to inform police of “material of this nature”. The spokesman said it was “not legitimate research material”, but later amended that view, saying: “If you’re an academic or a registered student then you have very good cause to access whatever material your scholarship requires. But there is an expectation that you will act sensibly within current UK law and wouldn’t send it on to any Tom, Dick or Harry.”

Is this what we’ve come to now, that an university spokesperson of all people can argue that the police is right to harass people for what they read? That the university not only cannot be depended on to defend its student and staff against police intrusion, but will actively help them? Should “security concerns” now determine what is and isn’t legitimate research?

The worst danger of terrorism isn’t the damage a terrorist attack does to us, but the damage we ourselves can do to our societies under the guise of combatting it. Since the September 11 attacks we’ve been subjected to ever increasing restrictions on our freedom to travel, freedom of association, to have a private life, to go through our lives without having to worry about whether something innocent we did yesterday might just attract the attention from the security services. Now as a middle class white fella myself the dangers are still slight, though bad enough that I won’t risk travelling to the US anytime soon, but as this story shows, if you have a Middle Eastern name, you could end up being deported to a country well known for its torture practices for nothing more than printing out the wrong document…