It seems Blair wants to add a new dimension to the Big Brother campaign to "protect" the people.
"Stop and question" powers for the police without cause to suspect any crime has taken place.
With these kinds of trends in our modern first world societies how hard is it to imagine the world of the global police state of say...2030?
Regards,
Sun
Blair wants to give UK police more anti-terror muscle LONDON, England (Reuters) -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair plans to push through a new anti-terrorism law before he steps down next month giving "wartime" powers to police to stop and question people, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
Blair, who is due to resign June 27 after a decade in office, wrote in an article in The Sunday Times that his government planned to publish new anti-terrorism proposals "within the next few weeks".
An interior ministry spokeswoman confirmed the government was looking at including a "stop and question" power in the new legislation. "We are considering a range of powers for the bill and 'stop and question' is one of them," she said.
The "stop and question" power would enable police to interrogate people about who they are, where they have been and where they were going, The Sunday Times said. Police would not need to suspect a crime had taken place.
If suspects failed to stop or refused to answer questions, they could be charged with a crime and fined, The Sunday Times said. Police already have the power to stop and search people but have no right to ask them their identity and movements.
The Sunday Times said the powers already existed in Northern Ireland. Civil rights groups viewed the plan to extend them to the rest of Britain as an attack on civil liberties, it said......
Full Article:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/05/26/britain.security.reut/index.html
