BBC: (UK) Terror police 'monitor thousands'

[Eugene]

Last Updated: Friday, 1 September 2006, 22:39 GMT 23:39 UK

Terror police 'monitor thousands'

Police in the UK are keeping tabs on "thousands of people" who may be
involved in terrorism, Scotland Yard's head of counter-terrorism says.

Peter Clarke told a BBC Two documentary Al-Qaeda: Time To Talk?
that his officers had to be focused on a "whole range of people".

"Not just terrorists not just attackers but the people who might be tempted
to support or encourage," he said.

He recently described the intelligence picture in the UK as "very disturbing".

-snip-

Full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5306580.stm

[jilln]

1. Perhaps its their definition

of who needs to be under surveillance that's very disturbing.

[orpupilofnature57]

2. This

[CJCRANE]

3. The usual absurd denial:

"He said: "Has Iraq contributed to the radicalisation of Islamic youth? I honestly don't know - but it doesn't need Iraq to do that. There are enough examples of similar situations in the world. It could be Palestine, it could be Kashmir, it could be the longer term emasculation of Islamic societies."

Except that 30,000 to 100,000 civilains have been killed in Iraq. Of course muslims are going to get angry over that, just like Americans were angry when 3,000 people died on 9/11...

[intaglio]

4. They always have done

Remember Telexes and Telegrams? All were monitored worldwide for years. All international calls were recorded. There were monitoring programmes working on speech recognition back in the 80's to track IRA sympathisers.

Truth is they do not know who to watch so they watch as many people as possible.

I am probably monitored. I've talked on this board about explosives. I have Googled about explosives. I post on "left wing" message boards. I am critical of my government and the US government. I knew people in the security services. I was positive vetting referee for a member of a sigint regiment later involved in scandal. I knew American servicemen and women.

The difficulty is that there are too many leads and the people who are really dangerous will avoid insecure systems and know how to appear "normal". The security services will have caught references to them but will think of them as peripheral or exploitable