Some news and stats from Britain:
At last count there were 4,285,000 security cameras on British streets. British home secretary Jacqui Smith is trying to quell a revolt within her ministry against her proposed ‘super database‘ which will record the private emails, browsing history, and Facebook accounts of every resident in the UK. You will soon need to produce your passport before buying a mobile phone – this will be used to build a database of mobile phone owners. The UK will begin issuing National ID cards next month, starting with immigrants, they’ll soon become mandatory for all citizens… etc … etc … etc …
Enter Britain’s outgoing chief prosecutor, Sir Ken Macdonald. In a speech on Monday he talked about the threat to liberty posed by the “Security State”:
We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security State.
Over the last thirty years technology has given each of us, as individual citizens, enormous gifts of access to information and knowledge. Sometimes it seems as if everything in the world is at our fingertips and this doubtless has made our lives immeasurably richer.
But technology also gives the State enormous powers of access to knowledge and information about each one of us. And the ability to collect and store it at will. Every second of every day, in everything we do.
Of course modern technology is of critical importance to the struggle against serious crime and, used wisely, it can and will protect us.
But we need to understand that it is in the nature of State power that decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the State may use these powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible. They will be with us forever. And they in turn will be built upon.
So we should take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can’t bear.
So we have been absolutely right to resist, whenever they have been suggested, special courts, vetted judges and all the other paraphernalia of paranoia.
Of course, you can have the Guantanamo model.
You can have the model which says that we cannot afford to give people their rights, that rights are too expensive because of the nature of the threats we are facing.
Or you can say, as I prefer to, that our rights are priceless. That the best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions rather than to degrade them.
This is quite a quigmire….
However, I cannot help but come out on the side of protection of privacy….because that lies at the root of the freedom of speech!
Yes, security is essential. Yes, internal enemies are abusing our freedoms in order to subjugate us and our freedoms. But – letting the state take our freedoms away ‘pre-emptively’, so-to-speak, is not the answer I am willing to live with.
And, make no mistake: surveilance is a pre-cursor of ‘control’ = ’state approved access only’ = ‘thought control’.
i don’t know whats worse, the invasion of privacy or the tax burden that will be passed on to britains to pay for all of this
The news that the UK government now wants to track our mobile phone calls, texts, emails and internet browsing habits has got me enraged. For the past 11 years, the UK government has sought more and more control over its citizens, from installing 4.2m CCTV cameras, to the suggestion that we must respond to more and more intrusive questions when they complete the next census. It has simply got to stop.
On this occasion, I have done something about it, in my own small way. I have written an article outlining what the government is seeking to do and my views. But, I have also produced a ‘draft’ letter that can be personalised and sent to local MP’s. I am urging other likeminded people in the UK to reproduce the article, to include their own comments, after all, not everyone will agree with all my comments and then publicise it. Maybe we citizens can start a programme where people start to bombard their MP’s with a demand that they do not support the latest data communication bill. The link is here if you would care to take a look.
http://www.power-to-the-people.co.uk/2008/10/public-call-time-big-brother-britain/
[...] DEFEATING OURSELVES– “Britain’s chief prosecutor warns that liberty is endangered by the “Security [...]
The UK was always the test model for the social engineering schemes of the ruling elite…always has been… from Rhodesian establishment imperialism, to the brief freedom of Lockean Liberal democracy, to the velvet glove despotism of Fabian socialism and now the Malthusian-technocratic ant hill dystopia that Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley did their predictive programming about.
UK’s ruling class elite never delagated their patrician control to populist democratic institutions. They simply consolidated it in exclusive influential policy cliques and NGOs which usurped parliamentary process and became the largest unelected shadow government in western democracy…until the EU council arrived to provide a vehicle for total top down social control.
I suspect this latest rash of obliterating public anonymity and privacy is just the start of the micro management of indigenous European society, when we factor in the political influence of eco-statism into that mix with its distilled objective of total state control of life-sustaining resources (food water fuel) and their depopulation orthodoxies, we will see this control freak trend adopt the Malthusian ethic and the elite-guided shift to austere ordered totalism will be complete.
As a North American this gives us the sardonic advantage of seeing what is in store for us if we don’t put a leash on powerful NGOs and policy cliques pressuring our week kneed opportunist leadership into enacting their agendas over our popular will. What is happening in the UK can only happen in a diseased democratic and civil system..it’s what happens when the public gives up their democratic franchise (voter participation) to be ruled by agenda-driven partisans.
“it’s what happens when the public gives up their democratic franchise (voter participation) to be ruled by agenda-driven partisans.”
Whoa WLMR you mean it might not be better to trust the courts than to be subject to the tyrrany of the majority.
I also read that to get a cell phone in the UK you have to provide your passport as ID.
Much easier than shooting terrorists or stopping immigration.
Dino sez:
“Whoa WLMR you mean it might not be better to trust the courts than to be subject to the tyrrany of the majority.”
No! Don’t confuse the prime directive of a constitutional democracy to carry out the popular will of the majority (framed within constitutional justice) NOT agendas of collusive special interest cliques, NGOs, partisan influece brokerages or a rogue Jurocracy…your dystopian example presumes the Jurocracy will never go rogue. The population must always be in control of the democratic process or it will be hyjacked by elitist ruling class cliques.
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