Your PIN, Please

My phone knows more about me than my mother ever did, and she read my diaries. It holds the photographs of the goats that wander past the cave most mornings, the half-finished drafts I swear I’ll get back to, the messages from friends scattered across three continents, the bank app, the medical letters, the late-night searches I’d rather not explain to a vicar. Out here, in the rock and the dust of rural Spain, that small glass rectangle is the umbilical cord to the rest of the world. It is, for all practical purposes, a copy of my life that fits in a back pocket… and at a British airport, a police officer can ask for it without needing a single reason to suspect I’ve done anything wrong.

That’s not hyperbole, and it’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s the law, and it has been for a quarter of a century. Most people have never heard of it, which is precisely how these things tend to survive.

This week the powers crept back into the headlines, courtesy of Tommy Robinson. I’ll be honest with you from the start, because I’d rather not pretend to a neutrality I don’t feel: I think the man is a nutter, a professional grievance merchant who has built a career out of setting fires and then filming himself standing near the smoke. His camp announced on social media that he’d been detained again at an airport by counter-terrorism officers, under Schedule 3 powers, and posted what they say is the paperwork. At the time of writing the police haven’t confirmed a thing. Back in June they did confirm stopping a man matching his description at Heathrow, fresh off a trip home from Russia via Turkey, having spent the week posing for videos in Moscow with Elon Musk’s father. I’ll leave you to decide how astonished you are that a chap who holidays in Moscow gets a second look at the border.

And yet. Last November a district judge ruled that an earlier stop of Robinson, at the Channel Tunnel in 2024, was unlawful, and concluded that it was what he stood for, his beliefs, that had been the principal reason he was pulled over. The officers involved, the judge noted, had no real recollection of what they’d even asked him. So the nutter, on at least one occasion, was right. That’s the uncomfortable thing about principles… they don’t check the character reference of whoever happens to be standing behind them.

The room with no reason required

Let me explain what we’re actually talking about, because the detail matters more than the drama. Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows officers at ports and airports to stop, question and detain anyone passing through, for up to six hours, to determine whether they are involved in terrorism. The crucial bit is that they need no reasonable suspicion to do it. None. You’re not being detained because they think you’ve done something; you’re being detained so they can find out whether you have. You’re legally obliged to answer their questions, and you must hand over the passwords and PINs to your devices. Refuse, and you’ve committed a criminal offence. Not a suspected one… an actual one, right there at the desk.

In 2019 Parliament bolted on a sibling, Schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act, which does much the same job for what it calls hostile state activity: spying, foreign interference, that sort of thing. Same model, same absence of suspicion, same obligation to cooperate, and the same power to copy and keep what’s on your phone.

I spent a career in the RAF Police and later in senior security management, so I’m not writing this from the comfortable seat of someone who has never had to think about threat. I understand the logic better than most. Suspicion-based stops tip your hand; if you only pull aside the people you already suspect, the people you’re genuinely worried about learn quickly how not to look suspicious. Randomness, or the appearance of it, is a deterrent in its own right. On a whiteboard in a briefing room, a no-suspicion power looks elegant, sensible, even responsible.

What the whiteboard never shows you is what discretion looks like on a wet Tuesday at a busy terminal, when an officer is tired and behind on targets and has six hours of legal authority in his pocket. Anyone who has worn a uniform knows that “no reasonable suspicion required” doesn’t mean the stops are random. It means the reasons are never written down. The famous copper’s nose has a habit of turning out to be the copper’s assumptions, and assumptions are rarely evenly distributed.

Who’s been sitting in the chair?

Here’s the part that the people outraged this week have mostly skipped over. For the best part of two decades, the overwhelming weight of these powers fell on British Muslims. Families coming back from weddings, students returning from term abroad, grandmothers asked how often they prayed, while the rest of the queue shuffled past them to baggage reclaim. At the peak, in the early 2010s, stops ran into the tens of thousands a year, and the complaints from Muslim communities were long, consistent and largely ignored. In 2017, the director of the campaign group CAGE, Muhammad Rabbani, was convicted for refusing to hand over his passwords, arguing he was protecting confidential material from a torture victim. The country shrugged.

Then in 2013 came David Miranda, partner of the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was held at Heathrow for nearly nine hours while carrying material connected to the Snowden leaks. That one did make the papers, particularly the liberal ones, and in 2016 the Court of Appeal ruled that the power, as it applied to journalistic material, was incompatible with freedom of expression because it lacked adequate safeguards. The Guardian was apoplectic. Much of the right, at the time, was not.

Fast forward a decade and the positions have neatly swapped seats, like a political game of musical chairs. The voices now crying “state harassment” and “lawfare” are largely on the right, and some of the voices who once championed Miranda have discovered a sudden serenity about border officers rummaging through a rival’s phone. Robinson himself, having spent years suggesting Muslims ought to be looked at harder, now finds himself in the same chair, protesting the same power, making the same arguments about journalistic sources that CAGE made in 2017. I’d find it funny if it weren’t quite so revealing.

The power doesn’t care who you voted for

This is the whole point, really, and it’s the one that nobody seems to want to hold for longer than a news cycle. A power you would happily hand to people you trust is a power you are also handing to people you don’t, because governments change and the powers stay put. Every Home Secretary inherits the toolbox of the last one. The law that stops the man you think is a nutter today will be sitting in the drawer when a government you loathe decides who it thinks the nutters are tomorrow. Maybe that’s a climate protester with a camera. Maybe it’s a union organiser, a whistleblower, a journalist, or a retired bloke in a cave who writes rude things about the establishment on the internet and flies home for a funeral.

Nobody sensible is arguing that the state should have no ability to question people at its borders. Borders are where threats arrive, and anyone who has done security work knows that. The question is narrower and much more awkward. Should that ability come without any requirement for a reason? Should refusing to unlock a device that contains your entire existence be a crime in itself? Should the safeguards for journalists, lawyers and confidential material be so thin that a judge has already had to step in once, and a court has already found a stop was driven by politics? If your answer depends on whose phone it is, then you don’t actually have a position on civil liberties. You have a position on your enemies.

The Home Office will tell you these powers save lives, and occasionally they will be right, although they have never been especially keen to show their workings. What they rarely acknowledge is the cost that doesn’t show up in any statistic: the quiet lesson learned by thousands of people who were held, questioned and downloaded without reason, that the border is a place where the ordinary rules are suspended, and that some citizens will always find them more suspended than others.

Next time I land

The next time I fly back to the UK, I’ll walk through the terminal with my phone in my pocket, the goats and the drafts and the late-night searches all zipped up inside it. If an officer asks, I’ll unlock it. I’m not a hero, and I’m certainly not Tommy Robinson, and I’ve got a lift waiting. But I’ll be aware, standing there, that the only thing between my life and a forensic copy of it is an officer’s judgement on the day, recorded nowhere and explained to no one.

It’s always been that way for somebody. It’s just that for years it was somebody else, and most of us were perfectly happy to walk past them to baggage reclaim. Whether we mind now, when it’s someone whose politics we either love or loathe, tells you less about the law than it does about us… and I’m not entirely sure I like what it says.

Until Next Time