Oxdeadbeef, I am firmly left wing. I don't know how I can prove this to you... does it help that I am an active, meeting-attending, money donating, pamphlet-distibuting member of a left wing party?

I suspect nothing I say will convince you now that I have broken the cardinal rule of actually questioning an idealogical party line. Oh no, we lefties are not allowed to debate, look at both sides of an issue or think for ourselves. Everything was written in stone by Marx years ago and all we have to do is turn up at civil disobedience events and follow the leader.

It's pretty disturbing that such a simple question of where do you draw the line gets me accused of being a right-winger playing dumb to start an argument. Even if someone did that, I would say fine, bring it, I'm up for a debate and can defend my position. If you feel strongly enough about your views then no right-wing baiter is going to bother you.

Domster made a good point, that it comes down to the checks and balances and it can be a force for good. But this leads to the question of what is good. We all have our own ideas about that. When people like the above idiots and pedophiles get caught through their IPs we are cool with that, but in other cases e.g. if someone got caught arranging a drug deal, say selling weed, over the net, and they were caught by tracing their IP address, I think I and a lot of others who think weed should be legal, would not feel so easy about it. We would probably be up in arms saying tracing IP addresses is a breach of civil liberties. Wouldn't we? Or not?

What if the net was around in the time of McCarthy and he was using IPs to trace communist activity?

I'm curious...

Boing Boing folks are usually emphatically against surveillance, civil liberty/privacy violations of any kind.

And yet when idiots like this get caught thanks to a traceable IP address, does this bother you? Or is it okay because they're idiots?

I'm just curious about where people draw the line ethically. Is surveillance/privacy invasion empirically bad, or does it depend on the circumstances?

Takuan, why do you want to live in a society with no prison, no law, no police, no government?

There are plenty of places like this in the world and I dare you to go and live in one, since you find it so absolutely abominable to cope with the poster. I'd give you about five minutes.

Do you lock your door at night? Do you lock your car? Wow... why do you want to live in a prison?

By the way, you are welcome to try to actually engage with the points I made. It would be a lot more interesting than using the tired old "why do you (insert thing person obviously doesn't want to do)" technique.

It would be nice to have like, a grown-up discussion, with like, a little bit of nuance on this topic.

So far all I hear is four legs good two legs baaaaaaaad...

Am I really the only person who thinks the original/real poster is not that bad?

See someone acting suspiciously, report it. Seems fairly common sense.

I don't see the bit where it says shoot all photographers on sight, denounce your neighbours, or anything remotely comparable to goings-on in North Korea or any other totalitarian fascist state, as comments have suggested.

I also find it a quite weird for people to call the poster "fearmongering".

Fearmongering is based on paranoia and conjecture; it creates and exploits people's fears for an ulterior motive,

Conversely this poster campaign:

1. Refers to a real danger. It seems retarded to even have to say this, but terrorists do plant bombs in London on a pretty regular basis, killing and maiming random, innocent people. It's weird that none of the comments on this thread so far have countenanced that fact.

2. Is not creating fear out of nothing - fear already exists from the above mentioned reality. In fact the poster may actually make people feel less fearful, in the knowledge something is being done to prevent further bombings.

3. I'm probably completely wasting my time trying to convince anyone on this thread that there may not be an ulterior motive, but just imagine; there may not actually be an ulterior motive! They may actually just be trying really hard to think of possible ways to prevent random innocent people getting blown up. Crazy thought isn't it?

Yes, fearmongering is bad, but why not "stay calm and carry on" while also using some common sense and taking reasonable precautions. That's the message I take from the poster.

Londoners have been told to report unaccompanied baggage for decades and no-one ever called that fascist fearmongering. As bombs being left all over the place in sports bags was a pretty regular occurence, it always seemed like a fairly sensible idea, and it has been effective in preventing people getting killed.

I also actually like the idea of involving the whole community in taking ownership/responsibility for the safety of the community, rather than giving the government and the police all the control and responsibility.

It also seems to me a fairly common sense approach compared to say, invading other countries to supposedly prevent terrorism.

I'm not sure what alternative ideas people on this thread have for preventing terrorist bombings in London. Strangely no-one has mentioned any yet. Let's hear them.