Haft of the Spear

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.

I’m mean, WTF?!

This actually piggy backs off an earlier discussion I had with Jack Wiley: what in the world happened to patience? Where is the need to validate your information? You would think that bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong person or illegally detaining children would make people in investigative and intelligence positions just a smidge wary about the data they act on. In fact in some cases, one has to wonder if any serious investigating or analytic rigor is applied at all. Is there sometimes a need for immediate action? Sure, but exigent circumstances is supposed to be rare.

Even if there is a reasonable suspicion that merits attention, there is this thing called “context” that so many people fail to take into consideration. I’ll bet any money that any G-town security studies student has enough reading material and browser bookmarks to merit arrest and detection under the aforementioned circumstances. It goes beyond information though, to things like tools and materials. Time was dynamite was not an unheard of thing to have on a farm; now too much fetilizer or propane gets people in a tizy.

The most common, likely explanation is usually the most accurate. If you want to dig deeper, do it quietly so that - if Occam’s razor happens to be dull in a given case - you gain enough intelligence to act intelligently. Perpetuate the fly-off-the-handle approach and not only with no one believe you, no one will trust you. Not exactly the kind of sentiment a national security establishment wants to perpetuate.