[vidarh]

Over the last five years, the UK has had more well publicized incidents of people having their laptops seized (2) or destroyed at the insistence of GCHQ (1) than terror attacks causing bodily harm (2).

Both of the terror attacks in question were stabbings of individual victims (Mohammed Saleem and Lee Rigby). Both were killed.

So in fact, assuming conditions remain as they've been for the last five years (and for several years before that), one appears to be at least as likely to have ones laptop seized than getting harmed in a terror attack. On the other hand, the harm of the latter is still clearly worse, given that both victims were murdered.

There were also 3 bombing attempts (all by the same far right extremist - Pavlo Lapshyn - trying to kill muslims, but spectacularly failing because nobody were present when his bombs went off).

A further two planned attacks never happend (one involved a plan to bomb an EDL rally, but the would-be terrorists arrived to late and left without doing anything; one involved plans that were never attempted set into life at the time the people in question were arrested). The calibre of would-be terrorists in the UK thankfully seem to be rather low.

[notahacker]

As of last year ten people in total had been subjected to the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures that was used to confiscate Kermani's laptop[1]. I guess that's now up to at least eleven, but it's a number low enough to believe the majority of people subjected to them actually were very closely linked with planned acts of terrorism. British would-be terrorists are as you point out, not spectacularly effective, but did manage to kill fifty people in a single set of rather more indiscriminate attacks a decade ago plus some relatively minor attempts since then. So we have two extremely infrequent occurrences, but on the whole I'd consider the police - however unwise their actions were in this instance - to be somewhat less likely to target me than bombers, as well as my fate at the hands of the former more likely to be favourable even if I was operating at the cutting edge of journalism.

[1]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/terrorism-prevent...