But there will always be something of a chilling effect anyway because of the nature of the acts being committed - either criminal (as with Stansted) or civil-legal (as Ryanair were threatening to do) and the likely consequences of that will (and should) cause people to think first. Are you really claiming that any "chilling effect" is wrong for a democracy?
Obviously, if a group is not doing these things then it is not really justifiable to have the state use paid informants against them, but in this case those acts had been committed and Police interest (including this, which looks very low-level) was to be expected, and should be understood in the context of those acts.
No what I'm arguing is that the 'chilling effect' should be taken into account when judging to what degree this behaviour by the police serves the public interest. In the US, free speech and hence to some degree, political dissent has constitutional protection. In the UK, it does not and as far as I can tell both the government and the various coercive organisations it employs, do not recognise that there is any issue whatsoever with suppressing dissent.
That's a big problem in my view, and I'd argue its dimensions are wider than this one case.
My initial aim here was to see if I could get you, as a representative of one of those coercive organisations who was easily available and known for being at least somewhat reasonable, to even acknowledge that any chilling effect exists. It seems that you do (by page 4 anyway), but that you think that this group's impact on business and inconvenience to air travellers outweighs the negative impact of any chilling effect and perhaps even that it's got a positive effect for the preservation of law and order through deterrence, or something like that.
Please feel free to correct me if I'm misrepresenting you.
I think the balance of harm in the individual case is arguable, but I also think that the implications of this sort of stuff go a lot wider than this individual case. We have a government and various 'authorities' who apparently see nothing wrong with a whole collection of behaviours which have a chilling effect on dissent. We've seen them beating the snot out of non-violent protesters and people who just wandered into their general vicinity, we've seen FIT teams photographing and ID'ing non-violent protesters, we've seen conspiracy charges (no doubt aided by suborned informants) used against people on the premise that they may have been thinking about some NVDA, we've seen a whole bunch of highly dodgy anti-terror laws introduced to paint what was formerly seen as legitimate protest as terrorism, they're collecting data on anyone vaguely associated with political activity and building a centralised database to store it in for easy access and so on ... all of that stuff has a cumulative effect on anyone when they are debating whether they can afford to get involved in protest of any kind or whether the negative consequences are going to be too scary.
All of this stuff therefore adds up to quite a substantial chilling effect on dissent and suborning informants among a bunch of vaguely irritating posh eco-hippies has to be seen in that context in my view. Whether you can justify it in law'n'order terms or not, it's still yet another nail among many in the coffin of our political freedoms.
