Tim Newburn, the director of the Mannheim Centre for the study of criminology at the London School of Economics, wonders how different the new threats are from those we faced before. 'I do think there is an issue about the extent to which we assume the world has changed. I'm not convinced by the arguments that we now face something that we might regard as super-terrorism with a reach and a power and a likelihood of inflicting damage that is completely different from the things we faced before 11 September. Neither do I agree with the even more dystopian picture of entire nation states now under threat from the new terrorist activities. One of the reasons I feel sceptical about those arguments, apart from the lack of evidence, is the relatively recent history of terrorism. What tends to happen is that we are presented with the idea that we face a new and terrible threat, which necessitates the introduction of emergency powers and the expenditure of vast amounts of money, and then in time we face a normalisation of those powers.'

This process of normalisation, which concentrates power in the hands of law enforcement agencies, has several distinct features. First, a law introduced as a temporary measure is transformed in due course into a permanent piece of legislation. Second, a symbiotic relationship develops between the ordinary criminal law and emerging legislation as elements of one are incorporated into the other - and the effect is a general tightening up of the statutory criminal law. Finally, emergency powers are used to deal with ordinary crime.