Ahhhhhhh

[james_davis_nicoll]

An 18-year-old university student accused of having explosives that could be used in bombs is a chemistry buff who had no interest in blowing things up, his lawyer says.

Pointed out to me by mrteufel

Comments

[nunnehi.livejournal.com]

The escalating suspicion and paranoia with which the modern world views youthful attempts to explore scientific principles greatly dismays me. When I was a kid (in the 70s), I experimented with electronics and chemistry sets like many other curious children of the day, and some of the sorts of projects I undertook - without malice and incurring no harm to myself or others - would nonetheless be viewed darkly by the police in this more authoritarian age.

Governments which treat their citizenry as presumptive criminals only succeed in engendering a growing sense of mistrust and animosity between all the subsets of their own society... which of course serves as reinforcing feedback to justify further restrictions on what is acceptable and licit, under some misguided notion that perfect social control can ever be achieved (or is desirable even were it possible).

Of course, nowadays 'preventing terrorism' is the popular catch-all justification for many such police overreaches, as it paints anyone disagreeing with the latest abrogation of civil liberties as being in support of terrorists. I wish the kid and his family all the best in the court case, since I thoroughly expect such language to weasel its way into the prosecution's tactics.