malaysiakini Shows How BAD LAWS May Affect National Security

There are two aspects of any law :

1. How the laws have been drafted or the actual words used in the law.
2. The person authorised to enforce the law.

If you consider the ISA, you will notice that there is one major flaw with the law. It gives unlimited powers to the person in charge.
At present, the Home Minister can place anyone under the ISA and then come up with any justification and no one is answerable for any weakness in the exercise of those powers.

Put this in an analogy of a company bank account. Would you sign blank cheques and pass them to your accountant to use as and when needed? With the ISA, basically we have given blank cheques to the Home Minister for our freedom.

According to this malaysiakini article Minister: Journalist to be blamed too the fuzzy logic is that the journalist started the chain of events as

“The whole thing was started by her, (so) it was best that we talked to her,” Syed Hamid said in reply to a question during a press conference at the federal police headquarters in Bukit Aman today.

You have all heard the expression
"Shoot yourself in the foot" when someone makes a blunder. In the case of the reporter, maybe the expression can be "Shoot yourself in the mouth" as far as the ISA is concerned.

If you watch the video, at 02:05 the Minister says "....when the lifting of your hand touches the nose of another person, that's when your freedom ends."
Unfortunately the interviewer was too mild and should have asked if a bar-room brawl would warrant the use of ISA.

One other aspect of the ISA as it stands is that the law is just a tool and no doubt a very powerful tool. Now if you give a teenager the keys to a BMW Sports car, are you not going to ensure that person is properly trained and free from the effects of any drugs?

On a darker note, the wrong use of the ISA can even create more instability than it claims to prevent. Thus it is imperative that the ISA should be subject to some judicial review within say 2 weeks.

Thanks to You Tube. Al Jazeera reports on the ISA. Learn how your life can be dramatically affected by the ISA.