Do you belong to a suspicious group? It’s hard not to...

So far-fetched have been recent grounds for arrest, or for flagging yourself up as a terrorist suspect, that people keep asking me if Lib Dem Voice is running a series of hoax posts. (We've had lingering near street ironworks, ordering vegetarian airline meals, handing in lost property, scaring ducks, putting your bin out on the wrong day, looking at things and - easily the most heinous, in my opinion - going equipped with balloons.)

I thought I was joking (albeit darkly) when I said on LibDig that people might one day be singled out for their taste in music, but even that now appears to have happened. Home Office Watch features the terrifying ordeal of a jazz musician arrested by anti-terror police who had taken his soundproofed studio, replete with wires, as a sign of bomb-making.

We read everywhere of the bewildering array of groups whom the Government has decided should carry ID cards, from Mancunians to pilots, or in a happy Venn-style coincidence, both.

Then there's people travelling outside the UK... people travelling inside the UK...

(Are you remembering all these vital clues? Tricky when there doesn't seem to be any particular pattern behind them.)

So who should we be wary of? What we need is a handy guide in pictures. Never mind Keeping Calm and Carrying On nor indeed not keeping calm and carrying on. At last, I've found just the thing:

[caption id="attachment_13355" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Met poster about terrorism"][/caption]


Seems the key is to look for people who use these rare objects, and then watch them avidly (with or without the aid of your own cameras, mobile phones, computers, etc).

Anyone here who can still claim not to fit into one of the categories above?

Crossposted from Liberal Democrat Voice, an independent, collaborative website run by Liberal Democrat activists. Helen is a contributing editor at the site.