A man was arrested under the Terrorism Act and issued with a life ban from Doncaster’s airport after joking on Twitter that he would blow it “sky high” if his flight was delayed.
Now, excuse me for being rational here for a second, but is that not the most absurd thing to have happened in years? Actually, it strikes me as being pretty equal on the scale of Batshit Insane as the guy who wasn’t allowed on a flight due to his t-shirt having a print of a Transformer on it.
There’s a write up on the Telegraph.
The gist of it is that he posted the following due to being concerned about missing a flight because of a snow-related airport closure (I’d link to the tweet itself, but it’s been deleted):
Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!
A hearty “Well done!” to whichever Daily Mail-reading shitpipe phoned that into the police. Really, it’s making me fear for my life even reading it now, after I knowingly pasted it in to this box myself, it’s just so obviously threatening. Oh wait: no it isn’t.
Part of me is thinking;
If you don’t want to get arrested for hoax bomb plots, don’t post things like that anywhere in the first place
and that’s all well and good. Sure, he was a bit silly, or perhaps, a tad careless, given that we should all be familiar with how encroached upon our civil liberties have become in recent years. To focus on that, though, is to miss a much more crucial part of this story, which is what another part of me is thinking about;
If things keep going along this sort of track, am I going to end up with the fuzz at my door for calling whoever phoned this in a shitpipe? Or even for posting about how dumb I think the police’s actions were? Or for calling them ‘the fuzz’? Where’s the line? Does one even exist?
A guy has been arrested for, essentially, a thought crime. It’s pretty major. Or at least, one step away from pretty major. Indicative of potential pretty major-ness, for certain.
As far as doing things on the Internets goes, I tend to take a view along the lines of that taken by Internet-famous Internet-funny Internet-guy David Thorne, to wit;
The Internet is a playground
yet here we have a stark warning that, hey, it’s actually not. It’s actually pretty serious business, and you need to think pretty carefully about what you say, lest the government decide to use anti-terror laws to teach you a lesson.
Anti-terror laws. Actually used to actually arrest a guy over something which was clearly harmless.
Doesn’t that concern you?
A man was arrested under the Terrorism Act and issued with a life ban from Doncaster’s airport after joking on Twitter that he would blow it “sky high” if his flight was delayed.
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