AL JAZEERA: Cage activist faces charges for not giving up passwords

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Tanzil Chowdhury of the University of Manchester's School of Law told Al Jazeera, the legislation was being used to "villify" communities.

"Schedule 7 ... has been used disproportionately against Muslim, Asian and Black communities," he said.

"In recent Home Office statistics, drops in the use of Schedule 7 power were noted among all ethnic groups except for Asians which saw a 2 percent increase in the year ending September 2015.

"This has the effect of vilifying an entire community who have to continually answer the charge of its imagined criminality."

Chowdhury also warned of of the negative message the police's handling of Rabbani's case sent to Muslims, and condemned the core infringement of a person's privacy.

"The symbolical power of compelling one to hand over of passwords, the figurative boundary between the personal and the private sphere, is also a nascent frontier in the government’s ill-informed counter-terrorism strategy."