Police spotter card P: Pennie Quinton

Journalist and human rights campaigner,

Police spotter card P Pennie Quinton Photograph: Public Domain

"I was almost certainly on the card because I had been stopped and searched under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 while reporting on the DSEi arms fair in Docklands on 9 September 2003. As a result of being detained I was unable to film a key part of the protest.

"With Liberty, I took the Metropolitan police to the European court of human rights. The case was heard on 12 May this year after a six-year trek through the British justice system. I am still waiting to hear the Strasbourg finding.

"And now I am on a database as a domestic extremist. So what is that? Is it like extreme ironing?

"As a result of reporting on protest, my face is now stored on a series of overlapping IT systems for police eyes only. I am not happy. And, yes, this is a possible breach of my right to a private life, Section 8A of the European Convention on Human Rights.

"The cost of policing DSEi in 2005 was £4m, but the arms trade is worth billions in income to the British economy, arms are one of 'our' most important exports.

"For all 'our' liberal chatter about a 'right to protest', elsewhere in the world we are selling advanced technologies to melt and stir fry 'other' people who exist a long way away from the Palace of Westminster.

"There's the rub: if as ordinary people we dislike what our decision makers are doing, we hit the street to make our displeasure felt, can we wait for the media to hold the powerful to account?

"So the decision makers then organise a database of those who question the status quo, decision makers in general do not like to be criticised or challenged. See the work carried out by the International Federation of Journalists on press freedom.

So who really gets to benefit from the information stored on these databases, and is there any process for properly assessing the truth of police officers' carefully entered observations?

"Standing around protesting, or disrupting an arms dealers' corporate dinner in such a context is hardly extremism – merely inconvenient. I suppose budget allocation would not be so promising if the chiefs of police referred to protesters as 'domestic inconveniences'."