The UK’s Spanish-owned airports monopoly, BAA, has declared The Register an “unsuitable site”, meaning that later on today we can tell you what Terminal 5 looks like, but can’t actually show you.

The shock decision was revealed to the Reg this morning, when we asked BAA for some photographs of its shiny new passenger barn flagship terminal.

We had asked for the pics to accompany an article to be published later today detailing a recent press day at what was formerly the biggest building site in Europe and is now the UK’s gateway to a bright, shining, soft-surveillance future. However, BAA’s press office told us that “we are unable to process your request as we feel the website is unsuitable”. However, they did offer to sell us some pictures.

It just shows how good the monitoring systems are at Terminal 5. Just a couple of weeks ago El Reg was clearly persona grata, with BAA coming to us to see if we fancied a shufti around the £4.3bn cattleshed of the future terminal of dreams.

Clearly the systems designed to command and control facilitate an estimated 30 million passengers a year are even more sophisticated than we thought, and quickly identified our correspondent as the sort of troublemaker who might, oh, comment on the lack of smoking areas or point out that the nicest parts of the terminal are only for first class passengers.

So, if you want to know what it looks like, you’ll have to get down there yourself. Just don’t tell ‘em Reg sent you - they might not let you out. ®

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