Today was a good day for lovers of freedom.

Firstly, the police are asking the government for special powers to punish troublemakers without needing to go to court. Cool. Can anyone do that? Is there someone I can write to get these powers? And then there will be old argument: "the police have asked for these powers to help them protect our security". Yeah, I like my job to be made easier for me as well. Of course, I'm filling boxes in a warehouse. We want to bypass the courts, we want longer to question suspected terrorists. The job of the police would be dead easy if we were all made to wear shackles every day, but I guess that probably would cause a fuss.

Then, there's the proposal of profiling in airport, which is a lovely euphemistic term for a less media friendly word: discrimination. You know, acting differently to a person based on their physical charachteristics or ethnic background. Terrorists are a subset of all the people, not a subset of a subset of all the people. When they say the measures will be singling out those who statistically pose the greatest risk to the public, I guess that means "Muslims", or possibly more usefully, "the Brown". They could specialise the image more, but that's going to cause problems. No-one suspected the bombers from last July until their heads popped off, so maybe a criteria slightly more advanced than "I've got a funny feeling in my waters" might be necessary. I could be being hysterical of course. They may just mean, "people who have bombs in their pockets", in which case I'm totally on board. I'm a big fan of people with bombs in their pockets being searched more carefully before boarding an aircraft.

Anyone in Oxford on Thursday?