Safe in Our Cages
August 27th, 2008Via: Guardian:
In the Queen’s speech this autumn Gordon Brown’s government will announce a scheme to institute a database of every telephone call, email, and act of online usage by every resident of the UK. It will propose that this information will be gathered, stored, and “made accessible” to the security and law enforcement agencies, local councils, and “other public bodies”.
This fact should be in equal parts incredible and nauseating. It is certainly enraging and despicable. Not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised. Our words and web searches, our messages and intimacies, are to be stored and made available to the police, the spooks, the local council – the local council! – and “other public bodies”.
This Orwellian nightmare, additionally, is proposed for a world in which leading soi-disant liberal democracies run, and/or permit rendition flights to, Guantanamo Bay. How many steps separate an innocent British citizen from some misinterpretation or interference or error in the collected and ‘made accessible’ data of text messages and emails, and a forthcoming home-grown version of Guantanamo Bay for people whose pattern of phone calls does not fit the police definition of acceptable?
Well. I suppose we’ll nver hear from anothe Brit again on Cryptogon given this article.
What the hell did you Brit’s do to “deserve” the super invasion of your privacy?
Well for one, I think you “came out” big time against the Iraq war, for all the good its doing you now, but thank you for doing so.
And Tony Blair is not dead yet, but I hope you will make him hope he has a capsule ready and waiting to shoot himself and his loved ones off to Mars to join George and Laura and all the other lovely people who have been so BAD for this world.
The sequel to V for Vendatta is in your hands.
Goddess bless you, I hope you succeed.
The local council thing is seriously scary from a privacy viewpoint, given that almost everyone here knows someone who works for their local council and / or other government bodies, like the planning office, the police (of the “filth”, as I call them), roads service, etc. That means many of our personal friends / acquaintances / enemies will be able to snoop on us to an extent hitherto unknown, with a whole pandora’s box of potential repercussions.
What happens in terms of Orwellian horror here in the UK will inevitably be exported elsewhere in the Anglosphere and Euroland too. We really are living in the last days of liberty, but only a few people notice it and even fewer care.