Two Latvian men wandered into an RAF base. Britain decided that was a national emergency.

Thursday morning, two Latvian nationals, 36 and 32, both living here in the U.K., walked onto RAF Molesworth. Molesworth sits about seventy miles north of London and is shared between the Royal Air Force, the United States Joint Intelligence Operations Center for Europe, and NATO’s Intelligence Fusion Center. In plain terms it is one of the most important intelligence nodes on the European continent, and two men in a car got onto it. A vehicle was found abandoned near the perimeter. Bomb disposal teams came out before the road could be reopened.

What followed was military police, metropolitan police, counter-terrorism police, road closures on a main highway, and a visit to two addresses in the Peterborough area. The Ministry of Defence said it remained “highly vigilant,” protected by a “multi-layered approach” of “physical barriers, patrols, surveillance, monitoring, and counter-drone capabilities.” Counter Terrorism Policing head Helen Flanagan asked the public to keep an “open mind,” stay “vigilant,” and ring in if they saw “anything of concern.”

The original charge was trespass and criminal damage. That would have been a tidy, boring case, and it would have been over. Instead the men were handed from military police to local police and then rearrested under the National Security Act, for entering a restricted facility for a purpose “prejudicial to the United Kingdom.” That is not a trespass charge. That is the Crown telling two residents of this country that walking onto a base is now an act against the state.

Now, I’ve run a repair shop for a long time, and I know what it looks like when a boss rewrites the handbook. A man misses a punch-in. That’s a missed punch-in, and you deal with it like one. But if the boss rewrites the rules so that a missed punch-in becomes theft of time, he hasn’t caught a thief. He’s bought himself a bigger stick, and every man on the floor knows it by the end of the week. That is exactly what has happened here. The menu of things that justify the full weight of Britain’s counter-terrorism apparatus now includes walking onto a base. Once the menu is that long, the apparatus never has to explain itself again, because there is always something on the list.

A few things the spokespeople did not volunteer. Molesworth’s American tenant does not service CENTCOM — the Middle East and Iran portfolio, including the active U.S. war with Iran, runs somewhere else. This is a European and NATO intelligence hub, not a Middle East one. Counter-terrorism police say explicitly that they are not linking this to the September 27 incident at RAF Fairford, in Gloucestershire, which the United States uses to fly missions against Iran. So the people living around Molesworth are being asked to imagine a threat, told there is no public evidence tying it to the most obvious candidate, and then asked to keep an eye out. The U.S. had already been raising threat levels at three U.K. bases in late September, after five London men in their twenties were picked up on a Fairford runway. An earlier arrest of two Latvian men at Molesworth had already gone the same way. Britain is collecting these episodes, and in every one of them the same working people pay for the day’s excitement.

Somebody has to close that highway. Somebody has to sit in the car at an address in Peterborough while it is turned over. Those are constables who are not working a burglary in the town next door, and the hours come out of a council budget that will not be short anywhere else. And the people who actually live along that road — the ones who heard the sirens at an hour sirens don’t usually come, who saw the road shut and the bomb truck in the lane and got no answer when they asked what for — they are not told anything. They are asked to remain vigilant. Being asked to be frightened on behalf of an operation nobody will describe is not a public safety measure. It is a bill, and it lands on the same people every time.

The U.S. European Command would not discuss intelligence matters or “specific force protection measures.” None of that tells a single person in Molesworth or Peterborough what two men with U.K. addresses thought they were doing on a runway access road. It does not have to. The arrests are the message, and the message is that the menu just got longer.

Searches are still underway at the two Peterborough addresses. Helen Flanagan asked anyone who saw “anything of concern” to contact the police. The men whose doors were opened this week would presumably agree. They have certainly encountered the authorities now.