Recently in Anti-terrorism Category

The NO2ID Campaign organised Mayoral hustings meeting yesterday 8th April 2008 at the Friends Meeting House opposite Euston Station was interesting.

Candidates_8Apr08_NO2ID_London_Mayoral_hustings_300.jpg

From left to right:

Jenny Jones (Green - deputising for Siân Berry), Lyndsey German (Left List / Respect), Boris Johnson (Conservative) NO2ID moderator Christina Zaba - brian Paddick (Liberal Democrat), Gerard Batten (UK Independence Party).

The arrogant authoritarian incumbent Labour candidate Ken Livingstone, refused to turn up to this hustings meeting. Neither did he send a deputy, nor did he or his spin doctors dare to send any Answers to the 4 Questions which NO2ID had sent to each of th invited Candidates beforehand.

His malign "database state" influence was represented by a Cardboard Cut Out Ken, to much amusement from the audience.

Cardboard_Ken_08Apr08_NO2ID_London_Mayoral_husting_300.jpg

Boris Johnson said that this absence confirmed Ken's identity as a chicken.

If, as reported in the media, a car bomb is defused in Haymarket, at 2 am in the morning, why on earth have the idiotic jobsworths shut access to Leicester Square and to Piccadilly Tube station ?

Why are they letting the terrorists win a victory by causing so much unnecessary disruption ?

Reuters reports:

Forest Gate operation cost police 2 million pounds Tue Oct 3, 2006 1:13 PM BST164

LONDON (Reuters) - An anti-terrorism raid in east London sparked by flawed reports of a chemical bomb plot cost London's police force more than 2 million pounds, Scotland Yard said on Tuesday.

More than 250 officers were involved in the operation at two houses in Forest Gate in June, including 15 wearing chemical, biological and radiological protection suits who stormed the house.

One of the occupants, Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, was shot and arrested with his brother by police acting on faulty intelligence that there was a chemical bomb in their home.

They were released without charge, and police said they had been wrong although the information about the suspected bomb had come from a credible source.

The bulk of the 2,211,600 pound cost of the operation came from the salaries of the officers involved including 864,300 pounds in overtime pay, Scotland Yard said.

Other costs totalling 368,200 were incurred from repairs to the houses and hotel accommodation for the families.

[...]

Technically, the normal cost of the Police salaries would have been incurred anyway, so the headline figure of £2.2 million should really "only" be 864,300 + 368,200 = £ 1,212,500

Even so, this seems to be a staggering waste of public money !

How much crime was not addressed properly, whilst all these policemen were wasting their time in Forest Gate ?

The cost to community relations and the the damage done to trust in the Police and Intelligence Agencies and the NuLabour government is also substantial.

Today marks a year since the evil terrorist attacks on the Tube and Bus system in London. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of the atrocity, and to their families.

We also have sympathy with everyone else who has been stressed or terrorised by those futile attacks which can never achieve what the misguided terrorists hoped for.

However there are still a large number of unanswered questions, yet the Government is still resisting calls for an Independent Public Inquiry.

No doubt we will hear Sir Ian Blair and Ken Livingstone and the Labour Government spin doctors claiming that three or is it four major terrorist attacks have somehow magically been foiled since last July, but without any producing any actual details to back up these claims.

We would like to know just how many such attacks have been foiled by the abuse of the Terrorism Act section 44 stop and search reasonable cause powers by the Metropolitan Police and British Transport Police etc.. We suspect that the answer is zero.

We wonder how may innocent people will be hassled today by the extra armed Police on the streets and the public transport system, who will be on duty simply as a gesture which will not make us any safer.

We can do without any more incidents like what happened to David Mery last year, or even the incident involving a metal detector at Highgate and Islington Tube station last Friday.

We can certainly do without another Police shooting and killing of an innocent man like Jean Charles Menezes.

We are no safer from terrorists as a reult of the Designated Area around Parliament Square, which restricts our freedom of assembly and of free speech, and in which it now seems that even simply reading the wrong newspaper can put you under suspicion.

What has our useless Mayor of London Ken Livingstone done for us in the last year ?

How is it possible for the Metropolitan Police Anti-terrorism Branch SO13 to manage to lose a rucksack full of papers relating to current terrorism investigations ?

A laptop computer protected by UK Government approved Cryptography like Kilgetty or other hard disk encryption, would have been less of a risk, even if lost or stolen, than a rucksack full of papers.

Bag holding police anti-terror files lost in street
  • Rucksack had details of suspects and plots
  • Met imposes strict new rules on sensitive material

Hugh Muir, Sandra Laville and Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday June 26, 2006
The Guardian

Anti-terrorist police have been ordered to revamp security procedures after a bag containing details of bomb plots and suspects identified for surveillance was lost in the street.

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, has imposed strict new rules on the carrying of sensitive material after files were accidentally lost in a rucksack in south-east London. Sources yesterday told the Guardian the files held important information and that anti-terrorist officers were desperate to get them back before they fell into the wrong hands.

[...]

It is all very well for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to claim that strict new procedures for handling secret documents have now been ordered, but these should already have been routine, following the incident only 2 years ago, when sensitive security documents relating to Heathrow Airport and the surrounding areas, were left at a petrol station,

About this blog

This website comments on the policies of the Mayor of London, the London Assembly and the Greater London Authority and actually pre-dates even the referendum which took place before these public bodies were set up.

Email Contact

Please feel free to email us your views about this website or news about the issues it tries to comment on:

blog @mayor-of-london.co.uk

If you need to contact us in confidence, use our our PGP public encryption key or an email account based overseas e.g. Hushmail

Please do not confuse this website with the tax payer funded Mayor of London, the London Assembly and the Greater London Authority website.

Do not confuse that lot with the ancient office of the Lord Mayor of London either.

Hints and Tips for Whistleblowers

There are many good people trapped in the bureaucracies which run London. If you are thinking about blowing the whistle on shadowy and powerful people in Government or commerce, and their dubious policies then you need be very careful these days. The mainstream media and bloggers also need to take simple precautions to help preserve the anonymity of their sources e.g.

Links

Wikipedia article on the Mayor of London

Wikipedia article on the London Assembly

The Evening Standard newspaper - fulfills its role by scrutinising the Mayor and the GLA etc. rather more effectively than the politicians and bureaucrats do.

Mayor of London press releases

London Assembly press releases

MayorWatch - commercial news site about the Mayor of London etc.

Campaign Button Links

Watching Them, Watching Us, UK Public CCTV Surveillance Regulation Campaign
UK Public CCTV Surveillance Regulation Campaign

NO2ID - opposition to the NuLabour Compulsory Biometric ID Card
NO2ID - opposition to NuLabour's plans for Compulsory Biometric ID Card and National Identity Register centralised database.

asboconcern logo
ASBO Concern - alliance of organisations and individuals who are concerned about the abuse of NuLabour's Anti Social Behaviour Orders.

MI5 encrypted contact web form use 999 or 112 to report immediate threats
Encrypted MI5 web response form NuLabour's "Climate of Fear" is not the same as the real fight against terror.

gamesmonitor_logo_150.gif Games Monitor - "Games Monitor is a network of people raising awareness about issues within the London Olympic development processes. We want to highlight the local, London and international implications of the Olympic industry. We seek to deconstruct the 'fantastic' hype of Olympic boosterism and the eager complicity of the 'urban elites' in politics, business, the media, sport, academia and local institutional 'community stakeholders'. "

Peaceful resistance to the curtailment of our rights to Free Assembly and Free Speech in the SOCPA Designated Area around Parliament Square and beyond
Parliament Protest blog - resistance to the Designated Area resticting peaceful demonstrations or lobbying in the vicinity of Parliament.

Save Parliament: Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill (and other issues)
Save Parliament - Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill Act

Ken Livingstone Links

Syndicate this site (XML):

November 2018

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30