…and although I can’t find a link to the story, it seems that a German journalist recently managed to smuggle explosives on a plane from Frankfurt bound for London. This comes hot on the heels of the British reporters who were able to smuggle weapons onto a domestic flight a matter of weeks ago.

You know what this means, don’t you?

It means that

a) journalists are more intelligent/devious than terrorists (scary concept)
b) journalists have access to weapons and explosives (scary concept)
c) journalists have got our planes and
d) every time we get on a plane we now need to worry about journalists going nuts and blowing it up “just to show how easy it is” as well as terrorists.

I think the world is a scary enough place without having to worry about journos buying nuclear weapons (because they can) or getting jobs in schools without screening and then kicking the children in the shins (to prove how shoddy the screening process is) or bluffing their way into an operating theatre and performing open-heart-surgery on an elderly patient (in order to demonstrate the lax security checks in most hospitals).

If someone commits a crime (like smuggling explosives onto an aircraft), do they get charged under anti-terrorism laws even if they said they were doing it just to prove a point, or for a story, and even if they were a card carrying member of the NUJ? If you bring explosives onto a plane, story or no, you’re endagering people’s lives.

In a similar mode, if I ram my pockets full of sweets at the local grocery store counter because I can tell that I’m out of the sightline of the proprietor, CCTV and security mirrors, if I get caught at the door, can I plead that I was just doing it to show them how easy it was to do, that I was going to write an exposé on my site, and that actually I was doing them a favour? Would that wash, do you think?