Odd Security Court Cases in 2 Parts

Part I: Letter-bombing caretaker jailed. End of the paper trail for Miles Cooper (covered in the previous post) who apparently wanted to bring awareness to the surveillance state after his Dad couldn't get his DNA off the database. This bit what the judge said caught my eye:

"Anyone who tries through violence or threat of violence to change the political will is a terrorist and that is precisely what you did."

Now, is it just me, or does claiming that "The Terrorists [tm] are among us!" also amount to a "threat of violence"? Maybe Bin Laden threatening to blow stuff up if stuff don't happen is on a similar line to a politician claiming that if we don't have certain changes in law, then we'll get blown up. Either way, fear of being blown up is a strong emotive argument. Resorting to fear seems to be not just a course for terrorists though. They're the party that carry out the violence, but resorting to perception of this violence is a powerful rhetoric tool.

Part II: Hoax calls made to get time off. Seems a pretty extreme way to take a sicky, but hey, if it works... Just goes to show though that it's not just terrorists and protesters that can bring a city to a standstill. (People going on strike and people flinging themselves on the rail should also probably be made illegal, for threatening the economic and emotional wellbeing of commuters.)

Amusingly, a recent bomb call saw my partner's train go straight through the affected station, speeding the journey up. Yay! Of course, engineering delays further down the line meant they got put back, so there's a certain sick justice in the world...