The UK has arrested 379 people for supposedly promoting terrorism in
July 2016 to June 2017. Only 105 of them were subsequently charged
with "terrorism offenses".
Some of these 105 were charged for preparing (or even carrying out) a
real terrorist act, or trying to persuade others to do so. The state
would like us to assume that all 105 were found doing those things,
but we have every reason to doubt that. This is because the laws
against "terrorism" are so broad that many sorts of other activities
can be prosecuted as "terrorism".
Nonviolent support for various progressive causes has been labeled
"terrorism" in the UK.
So has studying or working on the information Snowden gave us.
The FBI has often prosecuted feckless fantasy terrorists, who dreamed
of carrying out an attack but would never have tried anything outside
their fantasies (and lacked the competence to try).
I suspect the UK
does likewise. Surely some of those charged in the UK are in the same
category.
Surely some are being prosecuted for having a copy of a book that the
state disparages. That is included in the laws against "terrorism".
Even being suspected of preparing terrorism has been defined as a
crime in the UK. People can literally be prosecuted for the crime
of being suspected.
By lumping these people together under a vague heading, the state
directs attention away from the question of what these people were
really accused of doing. This enables the state to magnify the danger
(thus scaring people into parting with their freedom), make itself
look efficient, and disguise whether those people are real terrorists
or not.