Continuing our interest in the emergence of a distinctive European security regime, EU Commissioner Frattini has proposed measures that include electronic fingerprinting for border management. No doubt the data will get pooled for use in the future – see our earlier comments on the surveillance society.

In this case, the measure relates solely to incoming non-Europeans, although historians of German legislation of the 1930s might note that whatever information is stored will be primarily focused on the new migrant groups who will be forming communities in Europe in the coming decades.

The scale of linkage between international agencies in the ‘defence of the West’ is often not fully appreciated. Such border management arrangements are the thin end of a very large wedge designed to 'protect' us from 'them' and are probably popular. 

Extradition treaties are, of course, one tool that has been controversial, especially in a British business context, but our main interest should lie in the constant negotiation and re-negotiation of trans-national standard-setting in security that is driven by the US and the EU security communities, in conflict and in tandem. 

Much of this is currently targeted at the transatlantic routes which the US sees as most threatening in terms of any 'terrorist infection’ from the East. The EU is merely following US practice post-9/11 on fingerprinting visitors and we can expect an eventual compromise (mindful of European privacy concerns) on data-swaps if only to ensure that trade can continue.

The Frattini proposals are expected to be in place by 2015 so there is no urgency amongst the EU counter-terror brigade - the drivers are migration and organised crime. They want to get it certain and right - and not necessarily fast to meet some alleged urgent threat. 

There is little hysteria about this particular steady and deliberate process. The measures are about state formation and will be much easier to impose once the European citizenry has been inveigled into accepting the 'Constitution that is not a Constitution'.

Just as with the shenanigans that brought Scotland into the Union in the early eighteenth century, business-led considerations are allowing a fairly secretive elite to construct a unified state out of stealth and the security and intelligence apparat is playing a major role in that process.

But it is not all going the way of the security apparat. Other processes have owed far more to hysteria than the slow construction of a federal super-state and a tranatlantic regulatory regime. Within the UK, recent executive blundering and even a degree of low-level malice are being exposed in blow after blow from the judicial process.

The first strike this week by the judiciary against executive populism saw the Court of Appeal quash the conviction of five students who had been given hefty jail sentences simply for downloading extremist material and of being suspected of taking an interest in getting involved in Jihad.

The Court could find no evidence that the students actually intended to engage in terrorist acts and we see in this judgement a wonderful vindication of the British principle that men may not be condemned for their thoughts. It is truly amazing that the case was brought in the first case until we realise that its purpose was to instil fear in the young Muslim population.

The Court of Appeal also allowed poor Lotfi Raissi, the Algerian pilot falsely accused by the FBI, imprisoned in Belmarsh in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, almost extradited into the US Gulag yet innocent of all crimes, to seek compensation for the destruction of his life and career and that of his family.

Although a jury had convicted the students and the secret state is apparently horrified at the irresponsibility in its eyes of the judges, these two cases have demonstrated that the executive is not merely prone to hysteria but has been operating dangerously close to quasi-totalitarian intent and has been less than competent in its evidential assessments.

The judiciary (for the moment) thus continues to protect the innocent. The most important judicial ruling is that viewing extremist material is not, in itself, a criminal offence and, to be criminal, has to be directly linked to an intention to commit a criminal act.

This ruling has had a devastating effect on the manipulative NATO-led attempt to police our intellectual infrastructure in order to stiffen spines against an insurgency that is of far more institutional concern to them than it is to us. Above all, it wipes out a serious executive attempt to punish ‘thought crime’.

The Executive may appeal but it is now more likely to shift its emphasis from direct methods of policing to ones based on making IP providers and business intermediaries responsible for political content.

New draconian proposals on punishments for downloading content on the internet to protect intellectual property rights, using the fear of removal of internet access (equivalent to a citizen of removing the water or energy supply), look increasingly like a cover for a future security measure cloaked as a measure to protect business.

The suspicion of linkage arises from the use of same social management technique - changing public behaviour through fear. Fear is a potent weapon that only governments and criminals can employ.

It is a case (it would appear) of one problem - one related to property rights in the creative industry and, if you are a Gramscian, the hegemonic cultural infrastructure (sorry for that!) - being used as cover to solve another, a collapse in state authority.

But an end to the intellectual clap-trap! This is just about a governing and fearful political elite using devious means to police the conditions of our popular and political culture. End of story.

We can expect similar shenanigans from an increasingly dangerous security establishment in the months and years to come.

There is another aspect to the students case which links to experience in Europe. These young men talked not of terror acts in the UK but of going to Pakistan to train in the insurgency.

This is similar to the counter-terror focus in Europe when it direct itself not so much at breaking up cells engaged in threats within Europe as at cells creating supply lines for the insurgency in Iraq. In other words, despite the moans about the US, we are talking about Euro-collaboration in the US war effort.

It could be argued that the brief adolescent passion of the Muslim students at that tense time in history was analogous to that of those who fought against the fascists in Spain (only, in their eyes, we, of course, are the fascists). The same elements who felt more comfortable with Franco tend to be those who have the most extreme attitudes to Political Islam today.

The security fear was and is (especially in relation to Pakistan) that these students might go overseas and then return radicalized possibly to undertake terrorist acts in the UK in the future, but this reasonable concern (again, analogous to coming back from Spain and organising a Communist cell) seems to be confused with an entirely different assessment.

This different aim was to stop a flow of people with some legitimate anger at Western foreign policy entering into a fight in which a good proportion of the British people shared their analysis, if not approval of their methods.

In other words, putting the fear of God into the Muslims was a political as much as a security strategy in defiance of the fairly well established opinion of the public at large. Cases have had to be cloaked as immediate terror threats to the domestic population when they are really about threats to a State in which the public has limited trust.

These students and others, regarded as criminal for their opinions, were being punished not so much because they posed a clear and present danger to the community but because they had taken to extremes in their opinions a wider anger at British foreign policy decision-making.

This anger was shared widely in their community and  was found in much of mainstream, including conservative, British political thinking at that time. Adolescents and young males were vulnerable because the Government had showed utter contempt for any broader democratic criticism of its actions overseas.

The attack on them was designed to deter by creating a climate of fear in their community so that the cry of a-moral pragmatists of every country and generation should be heard - the sacrifice of a few is necessary in the interests of the many.

In retrospect, the response of counter terror police appears to have been confused, not very sophisticated and heavy-handed, more concerned with meeting the combined national security assessment of the intelligence services than with the short term and actual protection of the domestic population.

This is not the only case (nor Lotfi Raissi’s) where the suspicion is that international security co-operation and needs (based on often appalling intelligence taken on trust by our increasingly lack-lustre media) have been driving the domestic policing agenda.

Petty injustice has been tolerated and dangerous precedents have been set by a panicked and not particularly competent security community constantly looking over their shoulders. So why do they do this? 

There is no reason to believe that they were born evil so why are they slowly slipping into the sort of minor acts of evil that may one day accumulate into something far more grievous.

Everything changes with a major incident because our culture is based on emotional reactions and not reasoned analysis. If such an incident happens (and it could be 'big'), the population will get vicious and turn on the security community and politicians for having ‘failed’ when, if truth be told, a determined enemy, like the aerial bomber in the 1930s, ‘will always get through’.

In fear of political consequences, the security and political communities merge their interest increasingly so that a ‘glamour’ is thrown over real domestic national security imperatives. Innocent citizens are dealt with draconically in order to ‘encourager les autres’ and the  consequent fear caused in the community is considered to be a useful tool for political management. 

Then the whole thing backfires because of those pesky judges. "Oh, how we could serve our country if we did not have to work within the law. For we are patriots and have all the information ..." And so we could slide down the path to Hell.

There really is no point in mincing words. The conduct of the Blair Government and of the security services immediately after 9/11 really did represent the first faltering steps towards tyranny - but only out of political panic and because of some damn fool decision-making at the macro-level.

This and so many other cases represented the sort of thing for which our security and political establishment will condemn their counterparts in Russia at the drop of a hat (but then conveniently fail to note when performed by some neurotic homeland security operation in the US or by compadres in Europe).

Fortunately, a free British judiciary (although how long that can last is a moot point as European ‘standardisation’ continues) has turned back the tide on the current round of post-9/11 petty injustices.

It told us this week that a) there can be no 'thought crime' in a civilised society and b) if the State behaves high-handedly to destroy the life and prospects of an individual on false information, then the state should stop squirming and compensate the person for their error.

Now, of course, the House of Lords might be asked to over-turn the Appeal judgements and there may be new evidence in fact or law, but it seems hard to see how these two principles can be pushed aside by the security state except through a conscious act of Parliament engineered by the Party Whip.

If this takes place, then please take time to study German legislation against the Jews in the 1930s and ask what a packed whipped government was once prepared to do and where it led. The time to be vigilant is when our Reichstag is burned down ...

Of course, bad acts on the German scale are not the intention of frightened politicians or their security staffs by any means, but they are going to be disinclined to back off from seeking to control the population at large for fundamental reasons.

The scale of the difficulties under globalisation are immense - terrorism is a pin-prick compared to organised crime, uncontrolled migration, the black economy and a radically collapsing tax base.

And so we must wait for the next round of state initiatives designed to create the infrastructure for social management and these initiatives are likely to be more widespread, more subtle and perhaps more worrying to the degree that you might want to hold on to old freedoms.

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