Advance of the Police State in Europe?

Saturday, June 3rd, 2006

Dave “Freeman” Fleck Indymedia

Police State in Europe encroached one more time on our lives when www.thepiratebay.org was taken out by raids pressured by the USA. What about the hundreds of innocent businesses that were also taken out? Another shooting by UK cops, and music festivals = tear gas?.

Most of us have heard of the loss of freedom happening daily in the USA. Almost all of us feel better that we still have a good press in the UK and our police don’t have guns and oppress us with sound weapons on the streets (yet?).

But this last few months we have seen (reported here) attacks by police on music festivals in the Czech republic, another shooting of a ‘terrorist’ by the increasingly militant British police, and 300 innocent web servers taken out along with one site when a whole data centre was confiscated by the Swedish police.

I won’t focus too much on that well reported story, and Slyck has done a great job of covering the ‘file sharing’ aspects of it in any case. The truth is that now the police in Europe serve corporate American interests ahead of the dozens of businesses which have been done immeasureable harm by sometimes their longest ‘downtime’ ever.

One might agree that such a site damages the economy in some way and should be targeted. Even if one supports that view, it hardly seems fair that an unnaccountable police force can take the easy option and shut down hundreds of sites to attack one.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels our rights being taken away one by one. Laws intended to make it easier for the police to operate against ‘terrorists’ are being used to weaken us all and our ability to criticise them in all areas. How many more shootings will we have in the UK before lessons from our infamous Jean Charles de Menezes situation?

Who knows, but in every story you read in the press about ‘clampdowns’ and arrests, just ask, is that another step towards our own US style police state?