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DONCASTER, England — The troubles of Paul J. Chambers began on a cold night in January, when his attempt to visit a woman from Northern Ireland he had met online was thwarted by a snowstorm that grounded flights at his local airport. Mr. Chambers’s first reaction, as in many things in his life, was to address the issue on Twitter. Enlarge This Image Jonathan Pow/Rossparry.co.uk Paul J. Chambers failed to overturn his conviction in Doncaster, England, for his joke on Twitter about blowing up an airport. “Robin Hood Airport is closed,” Mr. Chambers, then 26 and a financial supervisor, said to his 690 followers, who included the woman, known on Twitter as @crazycolours. “You’ve got a week to get your [expletive] together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” That would have been the end of it. But Mr. Chambers’s impulsive outburst led him down a long and unexpected path, turning him into both a convicted criminal and a cause célèbre for Twitter users and free-speech advocates in Britain and beyond. On Thursday, after a judge in this South Yorkshire town refused to overturn Mr. Chambers’s previous conviction for causing a “menace,” ordered him to pay about $4,800 in costs and fines, and icily lectured the courtroom about the impropriety of sending Twitter updates during the case, Mr. Chambers’s outraged supporters let loose. The actor and Twitter enthusiast Stephen Fry offered to pay his court bills. Other users began raising money for a new appeal. And on a new and wildly popular trending topic, #IAmSpartacus, people began defiantly expressing their solidarity with Mr. Chambers by reposting his offending Twitter message or by threatening to blow up other, random, things. These included Downing Street, the courtroom, the town of Doncaster, Gatwick Airport, Robin Hood the person, the White House, the Basingstoke Hockey Club, “everyone,” “my garage,” some balloons, and NBC (if it canceled “The Event”). “I think I’ll blow up Parliament,” one person wrote. “Oh, wait, that was a JOKE.” That none of these people appear yet to have been arrested for doing the exact same thing that Mr. Chambers did shows how hard it has become for law enforcement officials to know how to respond to the anarchic culture of social media sites, especially Twitter, with its rapid-fire, off-the-cuff, often satirical exchanges. “Whenever you get a new media coming in, the law is always slow to adjust,” said Rupert Grey, a media lawyer at Swan Turton in London. “In some respects, the reaction of the tweeters is irresponsible, but the authorities have to understand that this is the world we live in and people are going to say these things.” While the judge who rejected Mr. Chambers’s appeal, Judge Jacqueline Davies, declared that “any ordinary person” would be alarmed by Mr. Chambers’s message, free-speech advocates said that they were not alarmed at all and that her conclusion represented the failure of traditional law to grasp the changing conventions of new media. “The authorities don’t seem to understand the way Twitter works,” said Padraig Reidy, news editor of Index on Censorship, a London magazine that covers free-speech issues. “There’s no provision in the law for people being hyperbolic, sarcastic or ironic. For a country that prides itself on its sense of irony, that is unfortunate.” It was a fluke, really, that brought Mr. Chambers’s stray Twitter message to the attention of the authorities. An airport manager doing a search on Twitter for Robin Hood Airport-related items on his home computer saw the message a few days later and reported it. A few days after that, five police officers arrested Mr. Chambers at work, interrogated him for eight hours and seized his computers and phones. “Do you have any weapons in your car?” they asked, Mr. Chambers told The Guardian this fall. “I said I had some golf clubs in the boot,” or trunk, he responded, “but they didn’t think it was funny.” He was convicted of sending a “menacing message” over a public telecommunications network under the Communications Act of 2003. He was fired from his job as an administrative and financial supervisor at a car-parts company. He moved to Northern Ireland to live with @crazycolours and was fired from a subsequent job after his employers discovered his criminal record. He is now unemployed. Judge Davies said she found him an “unimpressive” witness. “Anyone in this country in the present climate of terrorist threats, especially at airports, could not be unaware of the possible consequences” of his Twitter message, she said. It is unclear how people on Twitter would have responded had Mr. Chambers been, say, a Muslim living near Manchester. Though many users seem consistently to argue for the unfettered right to say anything on the site, reaction has been less uniform in a second case. On Thursday, a local official in Birmingham was questioned by the police after responding to the comments of a newspaper columnist who is a Muslim woman by posting on Twitter: “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death?” (He quickly apologized and removed the message; he has not been charged with a crime.) But Mr. Chambers is an ideal Twitter hero, so immersed in life on the site that, he said, he sent 14,000 tweets in the 11 months before his offending message. In testimony on Thursday, he tried to explain that speaking on Twitter is often like bantering facetiously with friends. “People who know me and work with me make these comments all the time — ‘I’m going to kill you if you don’t get me a coffee in a minute,’*” he said. Of his message, he said: “To me, it was clear that it was hyperbole.” The high-profile case lured a band of angry tweeters and bloggers to the courtroom on Thursday, where they spent breaks tweeting, blogging and railing about what they saw as the erosion of civil liberties in Britain. “It could be any one of us,” Steve Page, 39, a graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Hull, said in the hallway outside the courtroom. “Every single person I know has said something on the Internet that could be classified as criminal if someone took it like that.” Mr. Chambers said he did not know whether he would seek to appeal further. But the pro-Chambers momentum was snowballing on Twitter, where #IAmSpartacus — a homage to the Kirk Douglas movie in which rebel slaves in ancient Rome refuse to betray their leader, Spartacus, confusing the enemy by claiming that they are all Spartacus — was the top trending topic on the site Friday. “I am Paul Chambers!” one person posted on Twitter. “I am going to blow up the entire universe with my giant spaghetti bomb,” another said. Someone else asked, referring to the abbreviation for “laughing out loud,” “If I put ‘lol’ at the end of every tweet, will that protect me from prosecution?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/wo...tter.html?_r=3

how on earth did he lose =/

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Originally Posted by Noir

how on earth did he lose...

Yep. That one judge might be an idiot is unlucky but, you know, it can happen and that's why you got appeals.

That two judges manage to be such idiots, despite everyone else's opinion, defies belief!

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Perhaps you underestimate the level of mass hysterial that has affected officialdom in Britain and the US. At an increasong number of US airports, if you object to a full body scan, some pervert will enjoy groping your genitals in a probably ineffective effort to determine whether you have explosives in your underwear.

Airline pilot Patrick Smith reports on a new level of absurdity:

I was at the airport yesterday, on duty, headed through a TSA checkpoint in my full uniform and with all of my applicable credentials. I hoisted my bags onto the belt, deposited my MacBook in a plastic tray, and approached the metal detector.

"Sir," said a guard.

And I knew. I just knew this was going to be something stupid.

"I need you to remove your belt."

"Huh? My belt? Why?"

"All passengers need to remove their belts."

"I'm not a passenger."

"All pilots have to remove their belts."

"We do? Why?"

"Sir, remove your belt."

"Why?"

"Because that's the rule."

"What rule? I never have to remove my belt. The buckle is nonmetallic."

"It's the new rule. All belts have to come off."

"What new rule? I don't understand."

"Sir, you need to take it off."

"But ... What if I don't?"

"Then you'll have to go through secondary screening and a full pat-down."

And so I opted for the secondary screening. Not that a pat-down is reasonable, either, but I did not want to submit to something that I felt was excessive and ridiculous without a reason or explanation.

I was asked to stand in a cordoned-off area, where I waited for several minutes as guards stood around looking at me. Finally a supervisor came over, wearing disposable blue gloves, to administer my secondary screening.

"Sir," he said, "um, you still need to remove your belt."

"What do you mean? I chose this so I could leave the belt on."

"No, either way the belt has to come off."

"What? And if it doesn't come off?"

"Then I cannot let you through."

So, it would seem, secondary screening isn't really "secondary" at all. Instead of simply taking off my belt, I get a full, blue-glove groping and I have to take off my belt. Either that or I'm not allowed to fly the plane.

"Really?" I asked.

"Really."

And with that I started laughing.

Much to his credit, the supervisor also laughed. He smiled, nodded and proceeded to explain this "new rule." [...]

Belts, it has been determined, can interfere with the images procured by the new full-body scanners being deployed at checkpoints around the country. And so, from now on, passengers need to remove them.

Now, although we can debate the body scanners from an effectiveness point of view, or from a privacy-rights point of view, separately, this at least makes sense.

Fair enough, except for one thing. As I looked around me, I noticed that there weren't any body scanners anywhere at the checkpoint.

"But sir," I said, motioning to the left and right, "there are no scanners here."

"I know," he replied. "I know. But to keep things consistent, across the board, everybody has to do it."

"Really?"

"Really."

He looked at me. He shrugged and sighed.

It's not his fault, I know.

I took off my belt.

Somebody, somewhere, needs to shake us from this stupor of blind policy and blind obedience. I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't some test -- a test of just how stupid Americans are. If TSA said that from now on we had to hop on one foot while humming "God Bless America," would we do that too?

That'd be ludicrous, certainly, but how much more ludicrous is it, really, than asking people to remove their belts for purposes of walking through a nonexistent body scanner?

He also reminds us that this mass insanity is a recent phenomenon. It didn't used to be like this:

Here's a scenario:

Middle Eastern terrorists hijack a U.S. jetliner bound for Italy. A two-week drama ensues in which the plane's occupants are split into groups and held hostage in secret locations in Lebanon and Syria.

While this drama is unfolding, another group of terrorists detonates a bomb in the luggage hold of a 747 over the North Atlantic, killing more than 300 people.

Not long afterward, terrorists kill 19 people and wound more than a hundred others in coordinated attacks at European airport ticket counters.

A few months later, a U.S. airliner is bombed over Greece, killing four passengers.

Five months after that, another U.S. airliner is stormed by heavily armed terrorists at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, killing at least 20 people and wounding 150 more.

Things are quiet for a while, until two years later when a 747 bound for New York is blown up over Europe killing 270 passengers and crew.

Nine months from then, a French airliner en route to Paris is bombed over Africa, killing 170 people from 17 countries.

That's a pretty macabre fantasy, no? A worst-case war-game scenario for the CIA? A script for the End Times? Except, of course, that everything above actually happened, in a four-year span between 1985 and 1989. The culprits were the al-Qaidas of their time: groups like the Abu Nidal Organization and the Arab Revolutionary Cells, and even the government of Libya.

First on that list was the spectacular saga of TWA Flight 847, a Boeing 727 commandeered by Shiite militiamen in June of '85. Even before that crisis ended, Sikh extremists would blow up Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland -- the deadliest civil aviation bombing in history. The Abu Nidal group then murdered 20 people at the airports in Rome and Vienna, followed in short order by the bombing of TWA Flight 840 as it descended toward Athens. Abu Nidal struck again in Karachi, attacking a Pan Am 747 with machine guns and grenades. Then, in December 1988, Libyan operatives planted the luggage bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in what would stand until 2001 as the worst-ever terror attack against a U.S. target. The Libyans later used another luggage bomb to take out UTA Flight 772 over Niger in September 1989.

Also occurring in that same span were the non-terrorist bombing of a Korean Air Lines 707 and the downing of a San Francisco-bound Pacific Southwest Airlines flight by a recently fired employee who burst into the cockpit and shot both pilots.

I bring all of this up for a couple of reasons.

If nothing else, it demonstrates how quickly we forget the past. Our memories are short, and growing shorter, it seems, all the time. Our collective consciousness seems to reinvent itself daily, cobbled from a media blitz of short-order blurbs and 30-second segments. There will be a heavy price to pay, potentially, for having developed such a shallow and fragile mind-set.

With respect to airport security, it is remarkable how we have come to place Sept. 11, 2001, as the fulcrum upon which we balance almost all of our decisions. As if deadly terrorism didn't exist prior to that day, when really we've been dealing with the same old threats for decades. What have we learned? What have we done?

Well, have a look at the debased state of airport security today. We continue enacting the wrong policies, wasting our security resources and manpower. We have implemented many important changes since Lockerbie, it's true (actually, many of the new protocols are post-9/11), but much of our approach remains incoherent. Cargo and packages go uninspected while passengers are groped and harassed over umbrellas and harmless hobby knives. Uniformed pilots are forced to remove their belts and endure embarrassing pat-downs.

And what of our rights as citizens? Body scanners are in the news this week. If a decade ago people were told that a day was coming when passengers would need to be looked at naked before getting on a plane, nobody would have believed it. Yet here we are, and what might be next? [...]

Mass hysteria can be an awesome spectacle, especially when it infects your government.

so the pilot put his belt back on and proceeded to fly the plane directly into a building.....

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....attached to sanity by a bungee cord.....

Originally Posted by PostmodernProphet

so the pilot put his belt back on and proceeded to fly the plane directly into a building.....

Indeed.

But I would still challenge RK's second article. It's not like people saw the attacks of the 80s and said "oh well, you know, it's just one of these things". They saw and they adopted all the measures we had even prior to 9/11. It's ridiculous and dishonest to claim we didn't have security measures prior to officialdom getting crazy...

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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

But I would still challenge RK's second article. It's not like people saw the attacks of the 80s and said "oh well, you know, it's just one of these things". They saw and they adopted all the measures we had even prior to 9/11. It's ridiculous and dishonest to claim we didn't have security measures prior to officialdom getting crazy...

I'm pretty sure that during the IRA's 80s bombing campaign they took the bins out of Whitehall and that was about it. I don't think you had to take your shoes off and be searched before going into a pub.

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Noir would know better than me but didn't NI undergo curfews, military checkpoints and indeed bag search prior to entering public places?

As to the bins, they didn't remove just the ones in Whitehall... In France, during the FIS "campaign", for example, all the bins in the subway were closed... And i did have to show my bags' content prior to entering the FNAC in Les Halles...

Look, I am not defending today's extremes, especially when the measure is obviously flawed, like the one designed to check pilots. I pointed this out first in another thread. At the same time, the alternative to "flawed security methods" isn't "no security measures". It's adapted security measures.

The body scan, imho, is not necessarily a bad security measure. Better than having half hearted, non invasive pat-downs (i.e. inefficient ones) when metal detectors ring...

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NI did, but the mainland UK didn't.

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At the same time, the alternative to "flawed security methods" isn't "no security measures". It's adapted security measures. The body scan, imho, is not necessarily a bad security measure. Better than having half hearted, non invasive pat-downs (i.e. inefficient ones) when metal detectors ring...

Until the terrorists start sticking explosives up their arses.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

NI did, but the mainland UK didn't.

i.e. they carried out a cost-benefit analysis.

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Until the terrorists start sticking explosives up their arses.

Well, yes. If I wanted to be thorough on the issue, I guess I'd try to estimate how much my security measures raise the threshold of 'professionalism'/dedication required. i.e. I know for a fact that Jason Bourne will always beat my counter-measures, no matter what I throw his way. OTOH, most terrorists aren't exactly in Jason Bourne-territory. They're idiots and loonies, for the most part. So I want something that dissuade/catch those. Again one of RK article, designed to mock airport surveillance, was making that point. When the journalist said to his friend bypassing security measures, "yeah but what happens if I am a stupid terrorist?" Answer: "Then you get caught".

I want something that catches the maximum/all of 'idiots' up to, ideally, the 'semi-competents', knowing that I cannot stop 'super-smart criminal masterminds' with the minimum of fuss/annoyance/delays for normal travelers.

If you remember, there is a moment in Total Recall when, chased by some baddies, Schwarzenegger run into the subway - His weapon is detected by an x-ray kind of stuff.

So - Yeah, I think fast x-ray machines that would scan you as you walk by and without inflicting any medical side-effects no matter how often you get exposed would be the ideal. If that's not technologically feasible, what's the next best thing?

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Exposed: leaked body scans published online ? The Register

Quote:

Casting doubt on government assurances that full-body scanners don't violate air travelers' privacy, Gizmodo has published 100 photographs saved in violation of stated policy, taken by one such machine deployed in a federal courthouse in Florida. Fortunately for the people photographed, the Gen 2 millimeter wave scanner used in Orlando delivers low-resolution images that don't reveal much. Gizmodo's point is that something similar could happen in airports, which use backscatter X-ray scanners whose health effects are poorly understood and also deliver images that leave little to the imagination. “According to the TSA — and of course other agencies — images from the scanners are 'automatically deleted from the system after it is cleared by the remotely located security officer,'” Gizmodo states. “Whatever the stated policy, it's clear that it is trivial for operators to save images and remove them for distribution if they choose not to follow guidelines or that other employees could remove images that are inappropriately if accidentally stored.” The report is here. ®

Sure, you might have naked photos of you published on the internet, but no planes have been blown up since the technology was brought in.

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