UK "Security" Search

If you want to see the stupidity of "security" searches that the UK police force random people to submit to as part of their "terrorist" security operations, then view this video.

This poor guy puts up with all his possessions gone through in a "search" that he is forced to undergo. This includes having to stand with arms spread while the cops go through his pockets.

In a normal and sensible world, it would be utterly obvious that this guy isn't a "terrorist" suspect. A cursory glance at him & his stuff should convince any reasonable person he is not a "terrorist" nor involved in any "terrorist" activities. But the police carry out a twenty minute shakedown in which they meticulously take apart everything he owns, empties his pockets, and generally abuse him as part of an idiotic "security" operation. As you watch this video you see hundreds of other "random" people wander by this area unsearched. What kind of "security" is this? A random search of one out of hundreds? What does that claim to "catch"?

The whole scene presented by this video is absolutely mindboggling in its insanity. At one point the police carefully go through his stack of business cards supposedly "looking for" terrorist connections -- on business cards! Nutty!

This is a waste of valuable resources and a harassment of citizens by a police bureaucracy that has gone beserk. But this police state mentality has spread throughout the whole world the and the public at large accepts it as "serious" when in fact it is a great waste of time and is at best a Keystone Kops approach to security. Sad.

To show how shoddy this "security search" was, there is a section of the videotape where the cop calls in the "identity" of the detainee and gets it wrong. The poor guy has to struggle to get the cop to pay attention when he points out that the call the cop is making to "check" his ID is in fact based on wrong data. The cop misread the date-of-birth and was doing some centralized UK police "terrorist" database search using the wrong date of birth. Just has "secure" can such a system be if in fact the biggest crack in the system is the inability of the cops to read documents correctly into the phone so that a database can be checked?

I suspect the reason why they gave this one guy such a hard time is that he insisted on his rights: he videotaped the search, he asked for identification of the officers, etc. They begrudged every one of his requests. It is very clear that their "meticulous thoroughness" was simply a way to detain him an unreasonable time as punishment for his demanding his rights as a citizen.